Competitive Kids

June Kronholz (“Competition Makes a Comeback,” features, Summer 2010) writes that the self-esteem movement in the 1990s made many educators squeamish about competition. In fact, American educators have had a love/hate relationship with it over the past century. For example, in the 1930s and the 1960s there were conscious moves away from competition in schools.

What we have seen is that as schools move away from promoting competition, those parents who think schools are not providing enough competitive outlets go outside of the traditional education system. Often these parents tend to be middle class or upper middle class, and they create or join extracurricular organizations that charge participation fees. This development has led to increased inequality, as children who cannot pay to play are excluded.

Not only is there growing inequality associated with afterschool competition, but increasingly younger and younger students are diving into competitive tournaments on sports fields, in dance and music studios, and in other venues, such as academic bees. Kronholz focused on middle schoolers (which is also a shift—it used to be only high school students who engaged in competitive tournaments), but elementary school–age children also now participate in a variety of highly competitive and organized afterschool activities. Formal competition, tryouts, and practices are part of the everyday grind, as ever-increasing numbers of American children are being raised to play to win both inside and outside of the classroom.

We do not know the long-term consequences of being engaged in competition from an early age, either psychologically or in terms of educational outcomes (e.g., Do competitive kids attend “better” colleges and universities or pursue more advanced degrees?). Education scholars should consider how to incorporate these types of extracurricular activities into existing theories, frameworks, and models.

Hilary Levey
Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy
Harvard University

NCLB and Achievement

Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob tackle with sophistication the pivotal question of whether No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has sparked gains in student achievement since its enactment in 2002 (“Evaluating NCLB,” research, Summer 2010). We have known that math scores among 4th and 8th graders continued to grow under NCLB, a trend that began a quarter century ago. Reading scores have largely failed to budge nationwide since the late 1990s, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Achievement gaps have widened slightly in recent years.

Dee and Jacob convincingly show that certain subgroups of children attending schools in states with weak accountability regimes prior to NCLB partially caught up with children in states with stronger programs. This good news applies to students of color, primarily Latino kids, but only for progress in mathematics. Effects were larger for girls in the 8th grade than for boys, and few benefits were observed for reading (not surprising, since reading scores have hit a flat, dusty plateau nationally).

By focusing on states that displayed weak state-led accountability, Dee and Jacob give us a highly innovative analysis. But it remains slippery to infer that NCLB per se has driven this catch-up in weak accountability states. Well over a century ago, states with lagging enrollment rates displayed accelerating attendance after passage of compulsory attendance laws. But was it the legal intervention that drove local behavior, or the pervasive spread of expectations and more-demanding norms, seeping out to states that lagged behind (in this case, urban states where demand for young workers had long suppressed school enrollment)?

There’s now little doubt that NCLB advanced more-demanding expectations for state officials and local educators, creating stiffer expectations for, and material policies enforcing, tighter accountability among the laggard states. But was it the federal policy bundle or specific policy elements that moved these new norms out into the accountability hinterlands?

Bill Clinton likes to say, “If you find a turtle on the fencepost, he probably didn’t get there by himself.” The Dee-Jacob findings offer good news, confirming with sound analysis that a federal presence in the accountability push has reinforced state efforts. Going forward, though, how a more robust federal partnership might yield the next generation of benefits, especially to raise students’ capacity to read and reason, is the pressing question.

Bruce Fuller
Professor of Education and Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley

Measuring Public Benefit

Rick Hess’s discussion of for-profit and nonprofit funding models (“Fueling the Engine,” features, Summer 2010) raises more interesting questions than it answers. There is indeed a fascination about finding points of overlap between business and philanthropic investment strategies, but in most fields this remains more of an aspiration than a reality.

From the start, attempts to turn philanthropy into social investing and to apply principles of venture capital to grantmaking have run into a single enormous obstacle: the absence of performance metrics that would allow one to determine anything remotely close to “social return on investment.” Nonprofit entrepreneurs across the sector would dearly love to be able to show that charitable gifts are actually producing valuable public benefits. The tools and techniques to nail down claims of “returns” remain blunt, however, and nowhere near as sharp as performance metrics in the business world, where profit and loss are revealed on a bottom line. In many fields of activity, legions of imprecise and incommensurable performance standards do not inspire confidence about claims of comparative performance advantages of one organization over another.

The foundations and donors supporting the education reform movement do have one enormous advantage over their philanthropic counterparts in the arts, health, the environment, human services, and any number of other fields, namely, the presence of measures of student achievement that allow real comparisons of school performance.

Hess is correct that there is an impulse to be more rigorous in the school reform movement. For this to happen, real student-achievement data must drive funding decisions and be at the center of fateful choices about which school models are to be scaled and which are not. The funders in the charter space are doing this tough work. They are in some ways the vanguard of the so-called venture philanthropy movement, mainly because they actually have quality and commensurable data to work with. So many other funders working in areas from housing to immigration to historical preservation do not have the kind of data that could drive decisionmaking.

In the end, Hess is right to draw our attention to growing parallels between business and philanthropic investments. He just needs to be more grateful for how lucky the school reform movement is to have quality, meaningful performance data to drive funding decisions.

Peter Frumkin
Professor of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin

Charter School Segregation

In “A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation” (check the facts, Summer 2010), Gary Ritter and several colleagues offer a reanalysis of our February 2010 charter-school report. On the Education Next blog, we responded to the team’s claims. Below we recount our primary argument.

The major empirical distinction between our analysis and the Ritter team’s reanalysis is that we aggregated school-level charter enrollment data to the national, state, and metropolitan-area levels. The use of metropolitan areas stemmed from a deliberate methodological decision. As the U.S. Department of Education has noted, “charter schools often draw students from outside their home district’s attendance boundaries.”

The Ritter team reanalysis instead compared the racial enrollment of charter schools to that of central-city schools, describing it as “the best available unit of comparison,” and argued that the geographic concentration of charter schools in urban areas merits a comparison of schools located only within urban districts.

We disagree. The urban concentration of charter schools is irrelevant if charter schools are drawing students from across boundary lines. In many of the metropolitan areas containing at least 20 charter schools, minority segregation was higher in charter schools than in the metro’s regular public schools.

We did, in fact, examine the segregation of students in charter and traditional public schools by geography—comparing students in these school sectors within cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Significantly, we found that the geographical skew of charter schools mitigates very little of the differences in minority segregation. Fifty-two percent of city charter-school students were in 90 to 100 percent minority schools, compared to 34 percent of traditional public-school students.

Our study does not stand in isolation from the growing research consensus concerning segregation in charter schools. Further, it is extremely important to emphasize that our report focused on a number of other civil rights dimensions in charter schools, none of which have been addressed in this critique. We urge the government to improve data about charter schools and to monitor the civil rights of all students who attend or wish to attend charters, in addition to further examining the effects charter schools have on surrounding public schools.

Erica Frankenberg
Genevieve Siegel-Hawley
Gary Orfield
The Civil Rights Project, UCLA

Ritter, Jensen, Kisida, and McGee respond:

While Metropolitan areas (CBSAs) are very large, most charters are concentrated in very small areas within them. In Washington, D.C., 93 percent of the charter schools in the 5,000-square-mile metro area are located in inner-city D.C. Since the evidence shows that most charter students do not travel more than 10 miles to attend school, it is not likely that students are crossing state and city boundaries to attend inner-city schools.

While the CRP authors do present a city-based analysis, it is off-base because it includes small cities with fewer than 100,000 people; these are not places in which charters predominately locate. Finally, the authors overlook a fundamental fact: because charter students choose these schools, their civil rights are enhanced rather than limited.

Most of America’s 5,000 public charter schools are located in cities, many in tough neighborhoods with failed public schools. Consequently, charters proudly enroll higher percentages of black and Hispanic children than other public schools, and a growing body of research underscores their success.

Yet the Civil Rights Project (CRP) sees only a geographic concentration “that skews the charter school enrollment toward having higher percentages of poor and minority students.” This misses the point. By putting low-income students of color on the path to college, charters are attacking the real civil rights problem of our day: negligent schooling that shatters the life prospects of our most vulnerable students.

The CRP makes inappropriate comparisons of inner-city charter-school demographics with those of entire metropolitan areas, as if the charters were evenly distributed among Chicago, Joliet, and Naperville, in one example. The University of Arkansas research team dismantles this fallacy with solid data, realistic analysis, and plain common sense.

What remains puzzling is why the CRP seems so driven to go after charter schools, even to the point of contorting evidence.

Their report repeatedly refers to federal data showing only 7 English Language Learners (ELL) enrolled in California charter schools. We agree that this illustrates a troubling gap in federal record keeping, but a quick check of the California Department of Education web site would show that, in fact, more than 47,000 ELL students were enrolled during the 2008–09 school year, about 18 percent of the state’s charter-school population.

And again: “Between 20 and 25 percent of charter schools show no evidence of offering the National School Lunch Program, thus calling into question whether they are enrolling low-income students.” True, some charters don’t participate, not because they bar low-income students but because the program can be burdensome. It requires that lunches come from a USDA-approved “School Food Authority” that can dictate menus and meal-delivery times that may be at odds with the schools’ tastes and timetables.

The pursuit of equal educational opportunity is a serious matter, and good people can differ on the right strategies. It’s distressing that the Civil Rights Project is so wedded to formulas and methods that predate charter schools by decades and that they are expending such effort to discredit a movement that is bringing new hope to students who need it most.

Nelson Smith
Senior Advisor
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

Finance Lawsuits

In their article “School-Finance Reform in Red and Blue” (research, Summer 2010), Christopher Berry and Charles Wysong not surprisingly find that partisan politics affect how much a state spends on K–12 education and how such money is allocated. However, my own experience suggests that it is more politics as usual, rather than the particular terms or even fact of a court judgment, that leads to the outcomes found by the authors. I am therefore concerned that the article may overstate the effects of school-finance judgments (SFJs).

There are several reasons for my concerns. First, some of the court decisions on which they rely are not decisions holding the state’s school-financing system unconstitutional, but are preliminary decisions in cases not actually decided on their merits until years later. For example, the 1995 decision in New York’s Campaign for Fiscal Equality case cited by the authors simply permitted the adequacy case to proceed to trial. It was not until early 2001 that the state’s school-finance system was first declared unconstitutional. Similarly, in South Carolina, it was in 2005, not 1999, that the courts declared the state’s system of school finance unconstitutional.

The impact of relying on these preliminary decisions could be significant. In New York, for example, some of the largest increases in education aid in the state’s history took place between 1995 and 2001, well before the first court decision declaring the system unconstitutional. It is also interesting to note that the huge increases in New York in 2006 were enacted despite a decision by the state’s highest court several months earlier that a significantly lower appropriation was needed to meet constitutional requirements, indicating that something other than the court decision was behind the unprecedented increases.

Second, as the authors themselves point out, the small number (three) of Republican states with an SFJ gives one pause. Wyoming runs counter to their findings, with dramatic increases in school spending due mainly to budget surpluses and an ability to tax mineral interests in the state without significant political retribution. The decisions in the other two Republican states were also unusual. In 2003, the Ohio Supreme Court decided it had no jurisdiction to enforce its earlier 1997 ruling, removing any threat to the legislature’s authority that the court order posed. In New Hampshire, the adequacy aspects of the court decrees were very limited, with the court merely ordering the legislature to define an “adequate” education.

Finally, in selecting states with SFJs, the authors apparently made no attempt to distinguish between “equity” cases, which focus on equalizing funding, and “adequacy” cases, which have as their goal increased funding. An example is Kansas, where the authors relied on an equity case (the 1991 Mock case) instead of the much later 2005 adequacy decision in Montoy, which expressly required significant appropriation increases.

Alfred A. Lindseth
Of Counsel
Sutherland Asbill & Brennan

Defending Edutopia

I am dismayed that Education Next would publish Robert Pondiscio’s article on the George Lucas Education Foundation (GLEF) and its Edutopia initiatives (“Edutopian Vision,” features, Summer 2010). I have served for years as a member of GLEF’s National Advisory Board (as a labor of love; advisory board members are unpaid) because I believe in the value of this enterprise.

Pondiscio charges that the Edutopia principles are ungrounded in research. For example, he attacks the principle of comprehensive assessment, citing a 1995 RAND report on a single statewide program. He should instead examine the extensive 2006 National Research Council report on “Systems for State Science Assessment” or the excellent assessment section in the draft “National Educational Technology Plan 2010,” from the U.S. Department of Education, which describes multiple ways of making alternative assessments practical. Similarly, instead of quoting a single cognitive scientist about the deficiencies of project-based learning, Pondiscio should examine the National Research Council’s 2005 volume on “How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom” or the excellent research synthesis on project-based learning in the 2006 Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. The deficits in having research evidence to support one’s position are Pondiscio’s problem, not Edutopia’s.

Chris Dede
Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies
Harvard Graduate School of Education

L.A. Charters

Bruce Fuller’s article (“Palace Revolt in Los Angeles?” features, Summer 2010) accurately captured Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s history with the city’s unions and outlined the schism that arose when the mayor pushed for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to open 36 schools to operators including charters.

What Fuller did not explore is what transpired behind the scenes. That story reveals the limit to the mayor’s pushback on behalf of charters and the fact that there is no limit to what United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) will do to prevent the growth of the charter movement.

UTLA quietly and feverishly worked to ensure that no or few schools were awarded to charter school operators. In addition to pumping money in, UTLA called in the help of all the local unions. The L.A. Times reported that Maria Elena Durazo, leader of the 800,000-strong L.A. County AFL-CIO, met with every LAUSD board member the day before the vote. The day of the vote, the mayor was in Washington, D.C.

The voice of the South L.A. community—a community underserved for decades by the public school system—was ignored. The overwhelming majority supported ICEF Public Schools as the operator of the new Barack Obama Global Leadership Academy, as did the superintendent and his panel of experts. Sadly, Los Angeles Unified bowed to pressure from union leadership rather than allow successful charters access to this facility and other district campuses.

In a neighborhood where more than 50 percent of students drop out of high school, ICEF Public Schools—with 15 high-achieving schools that serve students who live in the area surrounded by the four major South L.A. freeways—has graduated 100 percent of the seniors in all four graduating classes. All have been accepted to college. We have also narrowed the achievement gap in performance on standardized tests between African American and white students to single-digit numbers.

While progressive unions throughout the country are working with charter schools, having concluded that charter schools are bettering public education, local L.A. teachers union head A. J. Duffy told the L.A. Daily News, “We’re never happy when a charter school opens up.”

Here at ICEF Public Schools, we won’t be thwarted from achieving our ultimate goal. We will continue to fight for the students in our neighborhood and their right to a high-quality public education.

Michael Piscal
Founder and CEO
ICEF Public Schools

Citizens like their local schools much better than they like the nation’s public schools in general. According to the 2009 Education Next survey, 60 percent give their local elementary school an A or B, while only 18 percent give the nation’s schools one of those two grades.

How do people evaluate their local schools? Are their ratings based on reliable measures of effectiveness? Or do they base their evaluations on other kinds of information? With this issue of Education Next, we can now answer this question. Using an innovative technique made possible by Internet surveys and geo-coding technology, Martin West and his colleagues at Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (“Grading Schools,” research) were able to match each member of a nationally representative sample of adults to the specific elementary and middle schools that serve his or her neighborhood. As a result, respondents’ grades for their local schools could be compared to the actual performance of those schools on state math and reading tests. The analysts also collected publicly available information on the school’s average class size, racial and ethnic composition, and the percentage of students who were of low income.

From their findings, we learn that American citizens know quite a bit about the local schools. Indeed, schools that score high on statewide tests receive high evaluations from those surveyed. Within the larger population, parents turn out to be particularly adept at determining which schools are good and which are not—welcome news, indeed. And despite all the hoopla over class size, citizens’ judgments about a school’s quality are unrelated to how large or small its classes are.

Critics of school choice often claim that parents ignore quality when evaluating schools and draw their conclusions on the basis of the school’s racial or ethnic composition. But this study shows that parents are indifferent to student race as long as a school’s pupils perform well. (They do, however, give higher marks to schools with fewer low-income children.)

Citizens are less impressed with their local middle schools. Only 49 percent were willing to give them an A or B, and they were almost twice as likely to assign middle schools a D or F than they were elementary schools (12 percent vs. 7 percent). In the second research study in this issue (“Stuck in the Middle,” research), Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood show that judgment is also right on target. Their analysis of student achievement in New York City middle schools confirms parents’ conclusion that children learn more if they stay in an elementary-school setting through grade 8 than if they move to a stand-alone middle school.

That finding called to mind what it was like when I was introduced to junior high school in 7th grade many years ago. Suddenly, bells rang, kids ran around, teachers shouted, lockers banged, and no one learned a thing. Not at all like the tranquil elementary school I had previously attended.

A final caveat. Parents tend to compare their local school to others within their own state. Those living in parts of the country with lower-quality schools apparently have little idea that schools in other states are, on average, a lot better. Could such provincialism be corrected by grading all schools on a common, nationwide scale, such as national standards advocates propose? Or are all school judgments inevitably just as local as streetwise politician Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill said of all politics?

In February 2010, for the first time, a state judge overturned a school district’s choice of a high-school math curriculum. In May 2009, the Seattle school board in a 4–3 vote adopted the “Discovering” math curriculum. The Discovering series, which the Seattle district already used in elementary and middle schools, allegedly allows students to learn math principles on their own through “inquiry-based learning.” The texts and methods discourage “direct” instruction in which teachers teach students the best method for solving problems. Instead, students “discover” mathematical principles on their own through “cooperative learning groups” and by playing with objects. Students, no doubt to their delight, also begin using calculators early in elementary school as part of the series’ emphasis on using “technology to build conceptual mastery.”

When considering the curriculum, the board received conflicting evidence about the effectiveness of the Discovering series. The Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranked the series second out of four competing curricula, while a report from the Washington State Board of Education called the series “mathematically unsound.” The board also heard criticism from parents and expert reports about the series.

In response to the board’s decision, three plaintiffs—a retired high-school math teacher, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, and a mother of a high-school student—filed suit, calling the Discovering series deficient and dumbed down. The plaintiffs argued that the curriculum would widen rather than narrow Seattle’s achievement gap between minority and white children. One of the plaintiffs, Professor Cliff Mass, wrote in his blog, “Seattle Public Schools picked high school math books that are not only bad for everyone, but they are PARTICULARLY bad for the disadvantaged who don’t have extra cash for tutoring or whose parents don’t have the time or backgrounds to help their kids.”

In February 2010, Judge Julie Spector agreed with the plaintiffs in a terse three-page opinion devoid of any analysis. She simply asserted that the district behaved arbitrarily and capriciously and that there was “insufficient evidence for any reasonable member of the board to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.” The decision surprised both plaintiffs and the Washington education community. During the litigation, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Keith Scully, said winning seemed unlikely since “no judge wants to second guess the school board.” After the decision, the executive director of the state board of education, Edie Harding, said the decision was a “surprise” and that in Washington “the local board is always the prime decision-maker on curriculum.” Likewise, David Stolier, an assistant state attorney general, said that “the courts ought not to be making decisions about curriculum,” noting the state supreme court had ruled “it’s not the role of courts to be micromanaging education.”

There might be very good reasons to reject the curriculum. One can easily understand why parents wouldn’t want to expose their children to the faddish ideas afflicting the Discovering series. But there should be no mistaking what happened. The judge substituted her educational judgment for that of the school board, and didn’t bother to give an explanation. Her ruling then was far more arbitrary and capricious than the school board’s decision, even if it might have salutary effects.

The dispute in Seattle is a small, but significant, skirmish, in a growing debate over the lucrative and controversial textbook market. The Seattle school district is appealing Judge Spector’s decision. Parents have filed a lawsuit against the wealthy Issaquah school district since its adoption of the Discovering series; the similarly wealthy Bellevue school district is also facing a possible lawsuit. No doubt other concerned parents around the country will be following Washington’s lead. Prior to the Seattle case there appears to have been only one unsuccessful Plano, Texas, lawsuit over a math curriculum.

Supporters of the Discovering series, including its publisher, are not immune to the temptations of litigation. When the Washington State superintendent of public instruction, Randy Dorn, dropped the Discovering series from the recommended list of textbooks, Key Curriculum Press, the publisher of the Discovering series, unsuccessfully sued the state claiming, naturally, that his decision was arbitrary and capricious.

Regardless of the efficacy of “direct instruction” or “inquiry-based learning,” such pedagogical disputes are beyond the courts’ proper constitutional role and institutional capacity.

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

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

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Middle school. The very words are enough to make many Americans shudder with memories of social anxiety, peer pressure, bad haircuts, and acne. But could middle schools also be bad for student learning? Could something as simple as changing the grade configuration of schools improve academic outcomes? That’s what some educators have come to believe.

States and school districts across the country are reevaluating the practice of educating young adolescents in stand-alone middle schools, which typically span grades 6 through 8 or 5 through 8, rather than keeping them in K–8 schools. The middle-school model began to be widely adopted almost 40 years ago. Now, reformers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland, and New York, and the large urban districts of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, are challenging the notion that grouping students in the middle grades in their own school buildings is the right approach.

Why the turn against middle schools? For more than three decades, American public education embraced this organizational model. Between 1970 and 2000, the number of public middle schools in the U.S. grew more than sevenfold, from just over 1,500 to 11,500. These new middle schools displaced both traditional K–8 primary schools and junior high schools (which first appeared a century  ago and served grades 7–8 or 7–9). From 1987 to 2007, the percentage of public-school 6th graders in K–6 schools fell from roughly 45 percent to 20 percent.

Neither the middle school nor the junior high has ever been popular among private schools, which educated only 2 percent of their 6th and 7th graders in these types of schools in 2007. And maybe the private schools have had it right all along. For the last two decades, education researchers and developmental psychologists have been documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence, changes that some hypothesize are exacerbated by middle-school curricula and practices.

These findings are cause for concern, but there is reason to doubt their conclusions. Because the studies use data from a single school year to contrast students in middle schools and K–8 schools, most of the available research cannot reject the possibility that differences between the groups of students, rather than in the grade configuration of their schools, are actually responsible for the differences in behavior and achievement.

To provide more rigorous evidence on the effect of middle schools on student achievement, we turned to a richly detailed administrative dataset from New York City that allowed us to follow students from grade 3 through grade 8. Some of these children attended middle schools and some did not. Because we could follow the same children over a period of time, we could do a better job of ruling out the role of influences other than middle-school attendance on educational outcomes.

What we found bolsters the case for middle-school reform: in the specific year when students move to a middle school (or to a junior high), their academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, falls substantially in both math and English relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K–8 elementary school. What’s more, their achievement continues to decline throughout middle school. This negative effect persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.

We found that the middle-school achievement gap cannot be explained by a scarcity of financial resources for the schools. Instead, the cause is more likely to be related to other school characteristics, especially the fact that middle schools in New York City educate far more students in each grade. Although our conclusions about the reasons for the middle-school gap are tentative, we are quite confident that the evidence shows that middle schools are not the best way to educate students—at least in places like New York City.

Data and Methods

Our study was based on data for New York City school children who were in grades 3 though 8 during the 1998–99 through 2007–08 school years. We were able to follow students who entered 3rd grade between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2002 for six years, until most had completed the 8th grade. We have data about the grade configuration and other characteristics of their schools, individual academic achievement as measured by annual standardized test scores in math and English, and a variety of personal characteristics. In particular, we know each student’s gender, ethnicity, whether they received free or reduced-price lunch through the federal lunch program, whether they were English language learners or received special education services, and their record of suspensions and absences from school.

Elementary schools in New York City typically serve students until grade 5 or grade 6, while a smaller portion of elementary schools run through grade 8. This means that most students move to a middle school in either grade 6 or grade 7, while some never move to a middle school. Of the 3rd graders in our initial sample of students, 62 percent were in a K–5 school, 24 percent were in a K–6 school, and 7 percent were enrolled in a K–8 school. The small fraction of remaining students attended K–3, K–4, or K–7 schools and are excluded from our analysis.

To isolate the impact of attending a middle school from the many other factors that influence student achievement, we combined two basic strategies. Most importantly, we tracked the performance of individual students over time to see how their performance evolved relative to that of their peers as they progressed from grades 3 to 8, in essence, using each student as his or her own control group. This step alone provides much stronger grounds for conclusions about the effects of attending a middle school than previous research.

A lingering concern, however, is the possibility that different types of students choose to attend middle schools than choose to continue in a K–8 school. If students do sort themselves into middle schools because of some unobserved characteristic that causes changes in academic achievement over time, we would incorrectly attribute differences in achievement to the middle schools instead of to characteristics of the students themselves. We reduced the likelihood of making this mistake by using a statistical technique that effectively takes the choice to switch schools out of the students’ (or parents’) hands. Specifically, we ran a statistical model that used the last grade served by the school that a student attended in grade 3 to predict whether the student attended a middle school. We then used that prediction to place each student into one of the two groups we are comparing, that is, students who attend middle schools and those who do not. Our key assumption in taking this approach is that there are no unobservable factors that cause a drop in student achievement at precisely the same time as students must leave the elementary schools they attended in grade 3. While we cannot definitively rule out the existence of such factors, we do not know of any plausible alternatives that would explain our findings.

The Middle-School Disadvantage

What determines a student’s level of academic achievement is complex. But the simple fact is that students who enter public middle schools in New York City fall behind their peers in K–8 schools.  This is true both for math and English achievement. Even more troubling, the middle-school disadvantage grows larger over the course of the middle-school years. With the transition into a middle school, students set out on a trajectory of lower achievement gains.

The achievement gap between middle-school students and K–8 students is put in stark relief in Figure 1, which displays our estimates of the impact of attending a middle school on student achievement as measured by standardized tests in math and English Language Arts. The graphs show how well students who attend a middle school perform relative to how we would expect them to perform if they attended a K–8 school. We report those differences, in standard deviations of student achievement in math and reading, for the 3rd through 8th grades. We separate students who enter a middle school in grade 6 from those students who enter a year later, in grade 7.

No matter whether students enter a middle school in the 6th or the 7th grade, middle-school students experience, on average, a large initial drop in their test scores. Even after accounting for a host of other factors that influence student achievement, students who eventually attend middle schools go from scoring better than their counterparts in K–8 schools in the year prior to transitioning to middle school to scoring below where we would expect if they were not attending a middle school. Math achievement for 6th graders transitioning to middle school falls by 0.18 standard deviations, and English achievement falls by 0.16 standard deviations. Contrast that decline with the 6th-grade test scores for students who will enter middle school the following year, in the 7th grade. Their test scores in both subjects continue to improve relative to their peers in K–8 schools. When these 6th graders move to a middle school in the 7th grade, however, we see the same dramatic fall in academic achievement: math scores decline by 0.17 standard deviations and English achievement falls by 0.14 standard deviations. Just how large are these effects? Consider that decrease in achievement associated with middle school entry—between 0.14 and 0.18 standard deviations—is roughly 20 to 25 percent of the achievement gap between poor and non-poor students (as measured by free lunch receipt) in New York City (about 0.7 standard deviations).

Moreover, these are not temporary dips followed by rebounds in learning. Throughout the middle-school years, students fall further behind. After two years in a middle school, on average a student who entered in the 7th grade will score 0.10 standard deviations in math and 0.09 standard deviations in English below what we would expect if he had gone to a K–8 school. After three years in a middle school, a student who entered in the 6th grade will underperform on 8th-grade assessments by 0.17 standard deviations in math and by 0.14 standard deviations in English.

A particularly distressing finding from our study is that students with lower initial levels of academic achievement fare especially poorly in middle school. To investigate the possibility of different effects on students with higher and lower initial achievement levels, we separated students into two groups: one group had grade 3 test scores above the citywide median, the other group scored below the median. Although we found substantial drops in achievement during middle school for both groups of students, the first-year drop and cumulative deficit were, respectively, 50 percent and more than 200 percent greater for students who start at the lower end of the achievement distribution.

We also found evidence that student absence rates increased when students entered middle schools and were significantly higher in grade 8 than for students who never entered a middle school (see Figure 2). More specifically, our estimates indicate that students were missing almost two additional days of school per year than would have been the case had they attended a K–8 school. Thus, increased absences may be one mechanism through which middle schools lower student achievement. There is little chance, however, that absences could explain a large share of the overall effect of attending a middle school.

To be sure, the population of public school children in New York City is different from that of many other school districts around the country. These differences might mean that middle-school attendance would have smaller or larger effects on other students than we estimate it to have on New York City’s public school children. For example, students with fewer educational resources at home may be more strongly affected by changes in their school environment. If that is the case, studying New York City students, who arguably come from less advantaged backgrounds than, say, the students in New York City suburbs, may have led us to find a larger middle-school effect than had we followed a more-affluent student population. While we encourage readers to be cautious about applying our findings without qualification to all public schools, we also encourage school districts to support research that can identify middle-school effects in other settings, especially since we find the consequences of attending a middle school for student achievement to be substantial and troubling.

Explaining the Trouble with Middle Schools

Why might New York City’s middle schools be detrimental to academic achievement? We find little support for the notion that differences in resources, such as per-pupil expenditures and class size, could explain the middle-school achievement gap. In middle schools serving grades 6–8 and grades 7–8, average per-pupil expenditures were $10,094 and $11,082, respectively, while per-pupil expenditures in K–8 schools were roughly equivalent, at $10,950. Nor do students experience a large decline in per-pupil spending when they move to a middle school. Average per-pupil expenditure in K–5 schools was $10,144 (compared to the $10,094 for grade 6–8 middle schools) and $9,680 in K–6 schools (compared to $11,082 in grade 7–8 middle schools).

Nor can we attribute the disparity we see to differences in class size. The average class size is slightly smaller for 5th graders in K–5 schools than for 6th graders in 6–8 schools (24 vs. 25 students); students in K–8 schools see similar growth in class size between grades 5 and 6. Class size is actually larger for grade 6 students in K–6 schools than for grade 7 students in 7–8 schools (24 vs. 23 students).

What about the possibility that the relative age of students in a school, especially during adolescence, can influence how students learn? In other words, does being the youngest students in a school have negative effects on the educational experience of those students? We could not find evidence in our data to support this explanation for the initial drop in test scores upon transitioning to a middle school. In our study sample, about one-third of new 7th graders moved out of a school serving grades K–6 and entered a middle school for 7th and 8th graders, becoming the youngest cohort in the school, while roughly half of new 7th graders entered a grade 6–8 middle school as part of the school’s middle cohort of students. We find that the effect of entering a middle school was essentially the same for both of these groups.

At least part of the problem with middle schools may be that they usually combine students from multiple elementary schools. In the New York City schools we studied, the average cohort size was 75 students in K–8 schools, 100 students in K–5 and K–6 schools, and over 200 students in middle schools for grades 6–8 and 7–8 (see Figure 3). We went back to our data and analyzed the effect of these cohort size differences on test scores. What we found was that cohort size has a pronounced influence on student achievement during these school years. We estimate that an 8th grader who attends school with 200 other 8th-grade students will score 0.04 standard deviations lower in both math and English than he would if he attended a school with 75 other 8th graders, the average cohort size for a K–8 school. This 0.04 standard deviation deficit represents roughly one-quarter of the largest test-score declines we attribute to middle-school attendance.

Given the data we have, we can only speculate about why it is harder to educate middle school–aged students in large groups. Developmental psychologists have shown that adolescent children commonly exhibit traits such as negativity, low self-esteem, and an inability to judge the risks and consequences of their actions, which may make them especially difficult to educate in large groups. The combining of multiple elementary schools and their students also disrupts a student’s immediate peer group. And middle schools often serve a more diverse student population than many students encountered in elementary school. Yet while it seems plausible that these changes in environment would matter, we could not find any evidence in our data that any one hypothesis can explain the drop in learning among students moving to middle schools.

Even though a full explanation of the middle-school achievement gap eludes us, there does seem to be a consensus among New York City students and their parents that educational quality in the city’s public middle schools is lower than in the boroughs’ K–8 schools. We reached this conclusion after examining responses to a citywide survey of parents of children in grades K–8 and students in grades 6 and higher, which was conducted at the end of the 2006–07 and 2007–08 school years as a part of the city’s new school accountability system.

On average, New York City parents of students in middle schools gave their schools lower marks on measures related to education quality than parents whose children attend K–8 schools. Figure 4 shows that parent evaluations of school safety, academic rigor, and overall educational quality was much lower among those whose children attended middle schools than among parents with children in K–5, K–6, and K–8 schools. It is important to note that this is not simply a product of the challenges of educating adolescents. There is little perceptible decline in satisfaction among parents in K–8 schools as their children age, a consistency we would not expect if educational quality simply cannot withstand the onslaught of puberty.

The students’ opinions are consistent with their parents’ assessments, although the lack of data on students below grade 6 prohibits us from more direct measurement of the degradation of education quality in middle schools. The clearest pattern that emerges from student reports is that 6th and 7th graders in middle schools think their schools have less academic rigor, less mature social behavior among the students, are less safe, and provide lower-quality education than do 6th graders in K–6 or K–8 schools.

The Longer View

We don’t yet know whether the troubling slide in test scores for middle-school students persists through the end of high school, a question that is certainly worth studying. Unfortunately, our data do not allow us to follow the students in our study further than grade 8. If the decline does continue, middle schools not only hurt student achievement in the short term but set students up for unnecessary longer-term disadvantages.

Of course, it is possible that transitioning to high school could be more difficult for students who come from K–8 schools than for middle school students. If K–8 students experience a larger drop in achievement upon entering high school, that could bring the two groups of adolescents back into parity. But it is hard to recommend closing the middle-school achievement gap by bringing everybody down. The better option is to address the trouble with middle schools—or do away with them altogether.

Jonah E. Rockoff is associate professor of business at the Columbia Graduate School of Business. Benjamin B. Lockwood is research coordinator at the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at the Columbia Graduate School of Business.

Video: Nathan Glazer talks with Education Next.

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As Good As It Gets: What School Reform Brought to Austin
By Larry Cuban
Harvard University Press, 2010, $25.95; 288 pages.

 

 

Larry Cuban is a prolific and insightful chronicler and analyst of our efforts at urban school reform and improvement over the last few decades. In As Good As It Gets he adds the case of a successful school superintendency, that of Pat Forgione in Austin, Texas, from 1999 to 2009. When Forgione arrived the district was in turmoil, marked by micromanagement by the school board. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) had just rated the Austin Independent School District (AISD) “unacceptable” because the dropout data it had submitted were deemed “unreliable.” TEA was investigating charges of cheating on state tests, and national bond-rating agencies had placed AISD on a “negative watch” because of these troubles. When Forgione left, Cuban writes, “his performance matched that of big-city superintendents who have received national awards for their district’s improvements, such as Carl Cohn in Long Beach, Calif., Beverly Hall in Atlanta, and Tom Payzant in Boston.”

Forgione had to contend with the ever more intrusive state and national requirements (under No Child Left Behind) for testing and progress, the loss of confidence in school management, new budgetary problems under Texas’s efforts to equalize funding between prosperous districts (such as Austin) and impoverished ones, and the permanent problem of low-achieving minority schools at a time when efforts at integration had been abandoned (see “Is Desegregation Dead?” forum). After a long-running legal suit, Austin’s schools had been decreed “unitary” in 1986, and as was typical after such a release from desegregation requirements, a modest degree of integration had unraveled. Early in his tenure Forgione had to deal with the protests and threats of the Eastside Social Action Committee, which represented minority Austin. Forty-six years after Brown, it pointed out, “our schools are still separate and unequal.” The school committee rejected proposals to bring in the Edison Schools to manage some underperforming schools and the establishment of a Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) school. Forgione then poured resources into the schools with large minority enrollments. He replaced five of six principals in the lowest-performing schools, added math and reading coaches, introduced the Open Court reading curriculum, and mandated summer staff training.

Forgione’s superintendency was marked by a flurry, indeed a storm, of innovations. “AISD officials had to struggle with the competing agendas of numerous outside partners such as Austin’s business leaders, the ‘First Things First’ program of the Institute for Research and Reform in Education, the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Learning’s work in ‘Disciplined Literacy,’ the Dana Center for Mathematics at the University of Texas, the Gates and Dell Foundations, and other organizations… As one upset veteran high school teacher put it: ‘We’re getting this academy, and then…we’re going to do this and that…. When did that happen? It’s like ‘we’re the last to know.’”

By the standard measures of success, Forgione was a successful big-city school superintendent. The rating of “unacceptable” that the AISD had received was removed, and there were “higher district scores year after year in elementary schools, marginally higher graduation rates, lower dropout statistics, and increased college attendance for most secondary schools.” But Cuban does not leave it at that. He has seen these flurries and storms of innovations before. What interests him are the links down to the classroom level: Isn’t it there that we want to see change and improved practices leading to improved results? “The…policy logic of the decade-long reforms contains a fundamental assumption that creating new structures…will reshape teaching practices, and that those different classroom lessons will produce better student outcomes…”

This is the nub of Cuban’s examination of the Forgione superintendency and its achievements. When change as measured by test performance occurs, we don’t know what has led to it. Perhaps Cuban presses his skepticism about policies implemented from above and their effects too far. And yet he does have an important point, and one that is echoed by another major student of school reform, Richard Elmore, in a recent essay in the Harvard Education Letter. We battle over controversial matters such as school choice, school competition, charters and vouchers, and compensation linked to performance, but we rarely are able to connect these policies with teacher behavior and how it changes. “In [Austin], except for occasional stories told by administrators and teachers, few top officials know what kind of teaching occurs in the district’s nearly 6,000 classrooms. No systematically collected classroom data exist…”

Cuban is skeptical as to whether we know enough about the classroom effects of any major reform from above to embrace them wholeheartedly. So he raises cautions about a number of currently popular ideas, such as the need for the large high school to be broken into smaller learning communities, advocated by many reformers, including Forgione in Austin. Cuban’s position strikes a positive chord with me; I attended what then proudly called itself the largest high school in the world, in the Bronx, New York, without apparent ill effects to me and thousands of others.

Despite Cuban’s insistence that we don’t really know enough about what works, and why, he is willing to make some recommendations, most prominently, as we might expect, “systematically monitor whether new structures, programs, and materials aimed at improving academic achievement alter or perpetuate traditional classroom practice.” There are others, some surprising: “Raise the ceiling for schools in the uppermost tier of achievement.” “Lift the floor for the lowest performing schools.” “Expand school choice for middle- and high-school students.” Finally, he writes, we have to combine school improvement with the use of community resources to alleviate the effects of poverty and racial segregation. But there is no way of escaping the inevitable dilemmas of school reform: more choice means more variation, which reduces equity. Concentrating on test-score gains conflicts with efforts to build the capacity of school staffs.

Austin, he concludes, is “as good as it gets,” pronounced not triumphantly but with awareness of how difficult the effort is.

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

Every chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts must advocate for arts education. The arts need a voice in power, say people in the field, someone in the corridors of influence to argue the benefits of teaching the nation’s students about classical and jazz music, ballet, and sculpture. With No Child Left Behind (NCLB) emphasizing math and reading, business and manufacturing leaders calling for workplace readiness in our graduates, and politicians citing lagging international competitiveness in science and math, the Arts Endowment chairman must utilize the bully pulpit more than ever before. Dance, music, theater, and visual arts show up ever further down the priority ladder, and arts educators feel that they must fight to maintain even a toehold in the curriculum. The Arts Endowment chairman, they insist, must help.

It is no surprise, then, that in a November 2009 profile in the Wall Street Journal, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Rocco Landesman offers pointed remarks when arts education comes up. Examine closely what he singles out about the field:

When [Landesman] starts talking about his ideas for integrating the arts in education, his rhetoric becomes less bipartisan: “We’re going to try to move forward all the kids who were left behind by ‘No Child Left Behind’—the kids who have talent or a passion or an idiosyncratic perspective. Those kids are important too and they should have a place in society. It’s very often the arts that catches them.”

The emphasis falls on the unusual student, the difficult kid, not on the arts as a subject for study. Landesman doesn’t defend arts education as a rigorous discipline that builds concentration and requires practice, practice, practice. Nor does he say, We need arts education to keep alive the legacy of American art—Thomas Cole, Martha Graham, Duke Ellington… He doesn’t highlight the provocative stuff with something like, We need arts education to train young people to comprehend innovative, boundary-breaking art. Instead, the purpose is salvation. Some students don’t fit the NCLB regime and other subjects don’t inspire them. Talented but offbeat, they sulk through algebra, act up in the cafeteria, and drop out of school. The arts “catch” them and pull them back, turning a sinking ego on the margins into a creative citizen with “a place in society.”

Saving Kids with Art

To educators outside the arts field, it sounds like an odd approach to a school subject. If you want to advocate a field, you have to justify it as a discipline. It has to form a body of knowledge and skills that students study at least partly for its own sake. In the case of the arts, a graduated curriculum would incorporate technical skills and art history and theory, just as English language arts integrate literacy skills and the lineages of English, American, and world literatures. Yes, arts learning may have social and moral and professional benefits, but if people don’t value the materials of the fields themselves—if they can’t say that if High School X doesn’t acquaint students with Renaissance painting, classical music, and modern dance, its graduates will be undereducated—then arts educators lose in the competition for funds and hours in the day. Arts education remains an extracurricular, and school administrators focused on math and reading can push it aside: The arts are fine, so let kids who are interested in them study in an afterschool program like band practice.

The arts-saves-kids rationale crops up frequently near the centers of political power. I heard it repeated time and again while working on arts education policy at the Arts Endowment from 2003 to 2005. In gatherings such as the thrice-yearly meetings hosted by the Arts Education Partnership (AEP), a venture funded by the Arts Endowment and the U.S. Department of Education, arts education directors at state arts councils, officers at foundations, community arts school leaders, and various education-school professors outlined programs and research that related arts in classrooms directly to students in classrooms, especially to low-income, minority, at-risk, and underserved populations. Participants tended not to be classroom teachers, but to come from a network of public agencies, nonprofits, and academic centers, such as the Arts in Education Program at Harvard University. Their job was promotion, not instruction, their audience funders and politicians and school administrators, not students. They didn’t talk much about the arts canon (Shakespeare, Beethoven, etc.) or the interpretation of forms and contents (how to understand ancient tragedy, modern dance, etc.). Nor did they offer practical strategies for teachers and administrators who want to maintain the arts but face budget cuts and faceless bureaucracies. Instead, they talked about where to find money, how to build alliances, react to new policies, and firm up political support. And their preferred mode of vindication was to cast arts education as an agent of social change and individual transformation. As Dick Deasy, director of the Partnership (who retired in 2008), liked to say, “Teachers don’t teach a subject—they teach kids.”

In 2004, for instance, the Arts Endowment sponsored a summer institute organized by the Ohio Arts Council in Dayton. The stated aim was to bring educators from around the state together to hear about ways of strengthening arts curricula in schools. The headline speaker the first day was Harvard professor Jessica Hoffman Davis, who gave a rousing summary of what arts learning does for kids, stating at one point that the arts, among other things, allow schools to get away from letter grades. In the breakout sessions, participants had a common reply: “That was great, but we already believe in the arts. We need to find more classrooms, more resources, more money!”

In such discussions, the social dimension, the salvation purpose, overrode more mundane concerns. In a plenary session of the September 2003 AEP forum at Lincoln Center in New York, Kurt Wootton of Brown University offered a representative vignette in histrionic detail. After asking everybody in the room to say hello to people sitting nearby and to explain why they were there, he illustrated why the arts are “uniquely positioned to create social opportunities for learning.” (The address is reproduced on AEP’s web site in You Want to Be a Part of Everything: The Arts, Community, and Learning.) His proof came in the form of the story of Carlos, “a real gangster.” According to one of his teachers, Carlos was “the bad boy of the neighborhood,” a tough kid who “didn’t take s— from anyone.” He spent his first two years of high school on suspension, in detention, and now and then in class. Teachers dreaded his presence and administrators threw up their hands.

But in English class, something special happened. Carlos read at a 5th-grade level, but in discussions of Othello and Of Mice and Men, “he always had something interesting, and more often comical, to add to the class.” As the year progressed, his commitment did, too. With the help of a visiting theater artist, the students began to design and rehearse a pastiche of scenes from works they had read along with accounts from their own lives. The year would culminate in a schoolwide performance.

After three weeks of rehearsals, the teacher realized, Carlos had not missed a single session. Amazing, but even more so was what the teacher noticed later that day on the school’s daily attendance sheet. At the top of the “out of school suspension” list stood Carlos’s name! He had been kicked out of school for 10 days and had already served 7. And yet, his theater attendance was perfect. Carlos was sneaking back into school for theater.

When Wootten finished Carlos’s story, the room erupted in applause. It had all the ingredients of arts education advocacy and some enticing rebelliousness as well: a caring teacher who doesn’t give up on sliding students, a bad kid with a heart and a brain, a visiting artist in a tough school, and a minority group member defying administrative powers for love of theater.

One can appreciate the motivation that theater inspired in the young man, but the story had some dark undertones unrecognized in the speech. I asked one man who had to deal often with school administrators about what a principal would say. He shook his head and replied, “If a principal suspended a student, he did so for a pretty good reason, and if he knew that the kid was sneaking back onto the grounds, he’d be furious.”

One could hardly imagine the story stirring teachers in other fields, either, for it didn’t validate the arts as an academic discipline. A history teacher might respond, “You think the arts are more ‘motivational’ than history?” A math teacher might say, “Getting an ‘A’ on an algebra final raises self-esteem just as much as doing a self-portrait in art class.” If arts advocates instead emphasize the material—Shakespeare, major and minor chords, etc.—other teachers might show respect for their position, even if only to avoid appearing anti-art or anti-intellectual.

But such tactics don’t obtain at AEP or similar meetings. Turnaround tales and the like carry too much emotional freight to be displaced by talk of art history. Perhaps those engaged in arts ed lobbying believe that class- and race-based melodramas best sway elected officials and philanthropic organizations. Or perhaps they genuinely find the social and personal benefits of arts instruction more compelling than the arts themselves.

Arts as Discipline

When Dana Gioia took control of the Arts Endowment in January 2003, he didn’t share the arts-as-salvation outlook. One of the first things he told his education staff was of his preference for the Core Knowledge curriculum. While he believed that arts education enriches young people’s minds and transforms their lives, he felt that arts education had the strongest impact when students encountered lasting works of force and beauty. Students needed to experience great art—classic and contemporary—to acquire a solid foundation for their own general education and creativity. Otherwise, arts education would remain a sidelight in the curriculum, marginal and ineffective. How to impart the importance of artistic tradition without estranging arts ed advocates?

Gioia launched two reforms. First, he asked David Steiner, whom he hired to direct the Office of Arts Education, and me to review grant guidelines and suggest ways to strengthen their content requirements. We came up with a simple, but far-reaching stipulation: applicants for arts education grants had to align their programs with national or state standards and evaluate student learning by them. Awards to “Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth” must “apply national or state arts education standards,” we insisted, and “Students will be assessed according to national or state arts education standards.”

This created a challenge for arts organizations applying for Arts Endowment awards. Many of them had evaluation plans already in place, but those usually amounted to questionnaires issued to students at the end of the program that measured their attitudes and enjoyment. Or, they involved observations by evaluators who measured participation—for instance, how many kids talked in class. They did not focus on learning outcomes. From now on, they’d have to.

Arts advocates didn’t protest the change, in part because the field had already embraced outcome measures: the National Standards for Arts Education. The project was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; a consortium of arts teacher organizations developed comprehensive standards for dance, theater, music, and the visual arts. Significantly, the designers weren’t primarily engaged in advocacy and fundraising. The final version appeared in 1994, and ever since it has garnered solid esteem, even though its premises run against the child-centered dramaturgy described above. Above all, arts educators wanted to establish strong disciplinary standards for their respective fields, both to regularize arts instruction across the country and to win higher recognition for the fields in the overall curriculum. Wisely, the designers insisted on the fundamental place of art history in the document. “In this document,” they wrote, “art means two things: (1) creative works and the process of producing them, and (2) the whole body of work in the art forms that make up the entire human intellectual and cultural heritage.” They define a “good education in the arts” as including “a thorough grounding in a basic body of knowledge.”

Furthermore, the standards “help ensure that the study of the arts is disciplined and well focused,” and that “arts instruction has a point of reference for assessing its results.” Assessments in the document follow not from social and personal impact, but from knowledge and skills. For instance, dance standards for grades 9–12 include this skill test: “Students choreograph a duet demonstrating an understanding of choreographic principles, processes, and structures”; and this content test: “Students create and answer twenty-five questions about dance and dancers prior to the twentieth century.” Music 9–12 includes this one: “Students classify by genre or style and by historical period or culture unfamiliar but representative aural examples of music and explain the reasoning behind their classifications.”

Gioia’s other reform was to develop separate arts education initiatives based squarely on art historical content. These programs were a primary instrument for building congressional consensus on Arts Endowment funding overall:

•  Shakespeare in American Communities—tours by theatrical companies to smaller towns and thousands of schools across the United States to give performances of Shakespeare plays and run workshops for students. The program included a toolkit for English and theater teachers that contained educational materials; by 2008, the toolkit had been delivered to teachers of more than 24 million students.

•  American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius—a multidimensional program providing, among other things, educational materials to schools on the high-culture heritage of American art.

•  Poetry Out Loud—modeled on the National Spelling Bee, a competition at the school, state, and national levels for high-school students, who memorize and recite a poem selected from a list of works both contemporary and classic, John Donne to Allen Ginsberg. Winners receive college scholarships and cash prizes for their schools’ libraries. In 2008, 250,000 students participated, and media coverage included a front-page story in USA Today and a segment on CBS News Sunday Morning.

The content of art and artistic tradition was at the center of each initiative. When Gioia first unveiled Poetry Out Loud, some state arts officers protested because it didn’t allow students to present their own compositions. Gioia’s reply was, in effect, “That isn’t what the competition is about.” With this particular effort, he wanted to encourage more reading of great poems, not more writing of adolescent verse.

Other figures in the arts education network considered Gioia’s programs tame and conservative, a Bush administration retreat from edgy and provocative art. On PBS NewsHour, for instance, after Gioia cited the Shakespeare initiative, interviewer Jeffrey Brown remarked, “Of course, for some people, though, this is the essence of ‘safe.’ Shakespeare? Who’s against Shakespeare?”

Gioia’s sage reply hinted at the social benefits of art while still honoring the art itself: “I could come up with 100 adjectives for Shakespeare before ‘safe’ would be the one I would offer [Regan and Goneril safe? The climax of Hamlet?]…. I was in a production in New York and we had all these New York insider theater people as half the audience and then in came 50 kids from the South Bronx. They were seeing Richard III. This production alarmed, excited. It was provocative. It wasn’t safe. It opened up possibilities in life and imagination to these kids that they weren’t getting otherwise.”

It helped, too, that the initiative gave 2,000 actors in 77 theater companies employment, and that Gioia was able to fund the Shakespeare project without taking any funds away from existing theater grant categories. Moreover, the Arts Endowment’s allocation from Congress grew steadily, jumping $20 million from 2007 to 2008 alone. Even if they bristled at the high-art, standards-based nature of Gioia’s approach, arts education advocates had to appreciate the resources he steered their way.

Beyond the Divide

For all the talk about why the arts are important and how they must be funded, the most successful support tactic I have encountered came from an actor/director in Los Angeles, Pierson Blaetz, co-director of Greenway Arts Alliance. The Greenway Arts Alliance runs a theater on the grounds of Fairfax High School, a large public school in the middle of West Hollywood. Living in the neighborhood during the’90s, Blaetz and co-founder Whitney Weston became interested in bringing more arts to students, but had to figure a way to provide the two necessities, space and money.

The project was an ingenious act of entrepreneurship. Blaetz and Weston surveyed the Fairfax High School campus and saw hidden value. First, they spotted an unused, roomy student social hall that lay separate from the main buildings and could serve as a venue for practice and performances. Second, they noted that the campus had an asset that was not in use on weekends: land. Fairfax High sits on expensive real estate right next to the L.A. Farmers Market. On Saturdays, while locals and tourists flooded the market, Blaetz noticed, acres of Fairfax High sat quiet and empty. What if, they proposed to school administrators, they leased and renovated the student hall and ran a weekend flea market at the school? They would charge a small admission fee, have merchants pay for spaces, let students work it, and pass the proceeds to the school. In return, Fairfax High would integrate Greenway into the curriculum and support its professional activities.

Administrators agreed, and now the Melrose Trading Post opens every Sunday in the Fairfax High parking lot with as many as 4,000 customers browsing some 200 stalls filled with antiques and collectibles. Meanwhile, students take courses at Greenway in drama, dance, and film, including theater classes for low-skilled 9th- and 10th-grade readers. Students also join Greenway in various productions after school, and their weekly Poetry Lounge is one of the most popular slam events in the country. While Greenway’s curriculum emphasizes its work with “at-risk high school students” and the power of the arts to “motivate youth” and impart “essential life skills,” it also aims at “skills, knowledge, and/or understanding of the arts consistent with national and state arts education standards.” In other words, while nodding to the social benefits of the program, Greenway recognizes the bottom line: demonstrated learning of the art, history, and practice of theater itself.

The Greenway Arts Alliance is an obvious model for arts education. Greenway has received support from public agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the City of Los Angeles, but it has staked its continuance year-to-year on private enterprise. The program has thrived for years, and Fairfax High principal Ed Zubiate couldn’t be happier. Money comes in each week, affording the school needed resources, while the Fairfax curriculum expands nicely into the arts. In addition, 15 students have paid employment at the Melrose Trading Post each semester, and adults in the area with no connection to the school visit the grounds to attend performances (thus enhancing the school’s community profile). The relationship is symbiotic, not one of arts educators beseeching a few crumbs and class minutes.

Blaetz says that there are thousands of schools across the country ready for the same kind of creative economizing. A school might run a small farm that teaches students ecology and agriculture—and sells produce on weekends. The strategy transcends arts education and poses a logistical question about all schools. Why are they sitting on underused resources year after year, while scrambling to fund the arts and other programs?

When I shared Blaetz’s story with arts education advocates, not one of them followed up. I mentioned it to several attendees at AEP meetings and received blank glances in return. I’m not sure why, but I can guess. The people I encountered prosecute their mission by appealing directly to federal, state, and local governments and to nonprofit foundations for help. Blaetz went first to the free market. That approach is simply foreign to the network of arts ed folks hovering around public agencies and philanthropic groups.

That’s too bad, because what arts education needs in a time of fiscal crises are fewer advocates and more entrepreneurs.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Video: Marty West talks with Education Next.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

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Never before have Americans had greater access to information about school quality. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), all school districts are required to distribute annual report cards detailing student achievement levels at each of their schools. Local newspapers frequently cover the release of state test results, emphasizing the relative standing of their community’s schools. Meanwhile, new organizations like GreatSchools and SchoolMatters aggregate this information and make it readily available to parents online.

But do all these performance data inform perceptions of school quality? Or do citizens base their evaluations instead on such indicators as the racial or class makeup of schools, regardless of their relationship with actual school performance?

In discussions of parental choice in education, researchers have frequently speculated that parents would base their evaluations of schools primarily on the characteristics of their student bodies. Columbia University professor Amy Stuart Wells, for example, concluded that the decisions of St. Louis parents participating in a voluntary desegregation program were based “on a perception that county is better than city and white is better than black, not on factual information about the schools.” And even if some parents base their decisions on educational quality, many observers worry that low-income and minority parents will be less informed about or interested in school quality, placing their children at a disadvantage in the education marketplace.

The evidence on these questions available to date comes from small-scale studies of specific school districts, making it difficult to reach general conclusions about the degree to which parents and the public at large are well informed about the performance of local schools. We are now able to supplement that research with data from a nationally representative survey of parents and other adults conducted in 2009 under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University. Because we knew the addresses of respondents in advance of the survey, we were able to link individual respondents to specific public schools in their community and to obtain their subjective ratings of those schools. We also gathered publicly available data on student achievement in the same schools, making it possible to compare respondents’ subjective ratings to objective measures of school quality.

Our results indicate that citizens’ perceptions of the quality of their local schools do in fact reflect the schools’ performance as measured by student proficiency rates in core academic subjects. Although citizens also appear to take into account the share of a school’s students who are poor when evaluating its quality, those considerations do not overwhelm judgments based on information about academic achievement.

Public Perception and Objective Quality Measures

The 2009 Education Next–PEPG Survey was administered to a nationally representative sample of 3,251 American adults, including an oversample of 948 residents of the state of Florida. The Florida oversample was conducted in order to link perceptions of school quality to the unusually rich information about school performance available in that state. The survey was administered over the Internet by the polling firm Knowledge Networks in February and March of 2009. (For methodological details and complete survey results, see “The Persuadable Public,” features, Fall 2009.)

Before conducting the survey, we geo-coded the address of each respondent to latitude-longitude coordinates and a census block. We also obtained latitude-longitude coordinates for every U.S. public school from the National Center for Education Statistics. Using census blocks to place respondents within school districts, we then linked each respondent to the closest elementary, middle, and high schools (up to five schools of each type) operated by the local school district.

The survey asked all respondents this question: “Each of the following schools in your area serves elementary-school students. Which one, if any, do you consider your local elementary school?” It then offered each respondent a personalized list of the five closest elementary schools from which to pick; respondents were also allowed to specify a school that did not appear on the list. After a specific elementary school had been identified, the survey asked the respondent to grade this school on a scale from A to F. This same process was then repeated for middle and high schools.

We converted the A to F grades that respondents assigned to the schools into a standard grade-point-average (GPA) scale (A=4 and F=0). Of the elementary and middle schools our survey respondents rated, 41 percent received a B grade, while 36 percent received a C. In contrast, only 14 percent of schools received an A grade, 7 percent a D, and 2 percent an F. This distribution corresponds to an overall GPA of 2.57, or just below a B-minus average. Interestingly, respondents assigned their local middle schools grades that were, on average, one-quarter of a letter grade lower than the grades they assigned their local elementary schools (see Figure 1).

We measured actual school quality as the percentage of students in a school who achieved “proficiency” in math and reading on the state’s accountability exams (taking the average proficiency rate across the two subjects). School-level data on student proficiency were drawn from SchoolDataDirect.org for the 2007–08 school year, the most recent year for which test-score data would have been publicly available when the survey was conducted. Although the rigor of state content standards and definitions of math and reading proficiency vary widely (see “State Standards Rise in Reading, Fall in Math,” features), we are able to adjust for these differences by limiting our comparisons to respondents within the same state when examining the relationship between proficiency levels and school ratings.

To be sure, the percentage of students achieving proficiency in core academic subjects is an imperfect measure of quality, even when comparing schools in the same state. Given the strong influence of out-of-school factors on student achievement, any quality measure based on the level of student performance at a single point in time will be heavily influenced by characteristics of a school’s student body. At the same time, proficiency rates are the only quality measure available for a national sample of schools. They are determined in part by the amount students learn in school, and research suggests that moving to a school with higher proficiency rates does produce achievement gains.

Nor do we wish to claim that any judgment of school quality that does not correspond to test-score performance is uninformed or irrational. The ability to promote math and reading achievement is hardly the only dimension along which citizens are likely to evaluate their local schools. But we suspect that high test scores go along with other aspects of school quality that citizens value in their schools, so that evidence of a connection between student achievement and public opinion likely indicates that parents and other members of the public have the information they need to make reasonable judgments about their schools.

National Evidence

These data enable us to provide the first evidence on the extent to which citizens’ subjective ratings of specific schools correspond to publicly available information on their actual performance. Because other school characteristics may also influence perceptions of school quality, we incorporated into our analysis data from the National Center for Education Statistics on the racial/ethnic composition of each school, the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (an indicator of poverty), average cohort size (our preferred measure of school size), and pupil-teacher ratio (a proxy measure of class size) in the 2007–08 school year. We exclude high schools when analyzing the data for the nation as a whole because proficiency data are unavailable for many of them, and when available, typically reflect the performance of only a single cohort of students. We also adjust for whether the respondent was evaluating an elementary or a middle school to account for the fact that middle schools received systematically lower grades from survey respondents.

Figure 2 presents the strength of the relationship between citizen ratings of school quality and each of these school characteristics after taking into account the other key variables built into our analysis. The values of each variable except the one identifying elementary schools have been standardized to illustrate their relative importance. (In technical terms, the relationships presented for these variables reflect the effect of an increase of one standard deviation in the value of the characteristic in question.) The figure confirms that student proficiency rates are a significant predictor of citizen ratings of school quality. An increase of 18 percentage points in percent proficient (i.e., one standard deviation) is associated with a rating that is on average 0.16 grade points higher, or about one-sixth of a letter grade.

 

Examining the racial/ethnic and class makeup of a school’s student body in isolation would suggest that both are important predictors of citizen ratings, a fact that may explain the common perception that this is the case. In particular, schools with 25 percentage points more African American students received ratings that were 15 percent of a letter grade lower, while schools with 24 percentage points more Hispanic students received ratings that were 16 percent of a letter grade lower. Schools with 26 percentage points more poor students received ratings that were one-quarter of a letter grade lower.

However, when these variables are considered simultaneously and alongside school performance and resource measures, only the poverty indicator retains predictive power. Neither the percentage of students who are African American nor the percentage who are Hispanic is systematically related to perceptions of school quality. The percentage of students who are poor remains an important predictor of citizen ratings, with a relationship essentially as strong as that for proficiency rates.

Even after controlling for proficiency rates and other school characteristics, middle schools receive ratings that are, on average, 18 percent of a letter grade lower than comparable elementary schools. In other words, proficiency rates explain some, but by no means all, of the lower perceived quality of middle schools. This finding is of interest given recent research suggesting that middle schools have adverse consequences for student achievement (see “Stuck in the Middle,” research). In contrast, neither school size nor pupil-teacher ratio are important determinants of perceptions of school quality. In fact, the weak relationship between pupil-teacher ratio and school ratings is in the opposite of the expected direction: schools with larger classes receive somewhat higher grades, perhaps because effective schools attract more families to the neighborhood.

As noted above, it has often been speculated that disadvantaged groups are less informed about school quality than more-advantaged groups. But we find that the relationship between school performance and citizen ratings is as strong for African American and Hispanic respondents as it is for whites. The relationship between school quality and citizen ratings is also essentially the same for high-income and more-educated respondents as it is for low-income and less-educated respondents.

We also consider whether the relationship between school performance and citizen ratings is stronger for parents of school-age children, who are arguably the most connected to their local schools, or for homeowners, whose property values are influenced by school quality. Perhaps surprisingly, homeowners are no more sensitive to differences in school quality than are other citizens. However, the relationship between proficiency rates and school ratings is more than twice as strong for parents of school-age children than for other respondents (see Figure 2). An increase of one standard deviation in percent proficient is associated with a rating from parents that is one-third of a letter grade higher, as compared with 16 percent of a letter grade higher for the public as a whole. Parents also give low-scoring schools far lower ratings than do other local residents, but this difference narrows and eventually reverses direction as proficiency rates increase (see Figure 3). Like those of other citizens, parents’ ratings of local schools are not influenced by the schools’ racial/ethnic composition, school size, or pupil-teacher ratios. However, parents do appear to be somewhat more responsive than other citizens to school poverty rates and take an especially dim view of middle schools, assigning them grades that are 39 percent of a letter grade lower than otherwise similar elementary schools.

Finally, we consider the issue of differences in school quality across states. Because NCLB allows each state to set its own standards for proficiency, schools in different states with the same percentage of students achieving proficiency may be of markedly different quality if one state has high standards and the other low. The national sample allows us to examine the degree to which citizen ratings of school quality are responsive to performance levels relative to the nation or simply to differences in performance within specific states. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted every two years by the U.S. Department of Education provides evidence on the average performance of 4th- and 8th-grade students in each state in mathematics and reading. We use data from the 2007 NAEP to see whether respondents in states with higher-scoring students rate their schools higher, on average, than respondents in states with lower NAEP scores. That is, if we compare respondents whose local schools have the same proficiency rate as measured by their state test, do the respondents in states with better schools, as measured by student performance on the NAEP, assign their school higher grades? We find no evidence that respondents in general, or even parents, have information about school quality beyond the information provided on the state assessments. In other words, citizens appear to be taking cues about school quality from local comparisons or from information provided by their state testing system without taking into account the relative rigor of state standards.

Levels or Growth?

Our analysis yields strong evidence that citizens, and especially parents of school-age children, rate schools in a way that lines up with publicly available information about school quality. As discussed previously, however, the percentage of students scoring at the proficient level on state tests is an imperfect indicator of school quality, contaminated as it is by the fact that student achievement is influenced by a host of factors outside of a school’s control. A better, if still an imperfect, measure of school quality is the amount of growth in student achievement from one year to the next. To examine the correspondence of citizen perceptions of school quality and measures of test-score growth, we turn to our representative sample of residents of Florida, where the state accountability system evaluates schools based on both test-score levels and test-score growth. Because high-school performance data are widely available in Florida, we are able to include high schools in this portion of the analysis.

Florida assigns schools letter grades based on a point system with eight main components, which we divide into two categories: level-related points (percentage proficient in math, English, writing, and science) and growth-related points (percentage making learning gains in math and reading and the percentage of the lowest 25 percent of students making gains in math and reading). The level variable is highly correlated with the school quality measure (percent proficient) used in the national analysis, but the correlation between the growth variable and percent proficient is considerably weaker.

Our basic strategy is to compare the ratings Florida residents assigned to their schools both to test-score levels and to test-score growth at those schools. Because measures of test-score growth are less stable over time than measures of test-score levels, we average the points awarded to each school based on levels and growth over the previous three years. Adjustments are also made for the same demographic and school characteristics as in the national analysis. To make the results as comparable as possible to those reported for the national sample, we also scale the point variables so that a one-unit increase in each variable corresponds to a shift of one standard deviation in the performance distribution of Florida public schools.

The results indicate that Florida residents’ perceptions of school quality are even more responsive to differences in student achievement levels than are those of the national public. An increase of one standard deviation in the level variable is associated with ratings that are almost one-third of a letter grade higher after taking into account other school characteristics. We also find that perceptions of school quality in Florida are unrelated to student demographic characteristics, including the percentage of students who are poor, once we take into account levels of student achievement. Although we cannot be sure, both Floridians’ greater responsiveness to test performance and their lack of responsiveness to student demographic characteristics could reflect the transparency and salience of the state’s high-profile school accountability system.

When both the test-score level and growth variables are examined simultaneously, however, the relationship between level-related points and citizen evaluations of schools is almost twice as strong as for growth-related points. This suggests that citizen ratings do reflect differences in the growth in student achievement across schools, but that this is primarily because of the correlation between achievement levels and achievement growth.

The Role of Accountability Systems

So far we have shown that citizens’ assessments of schools are strongly related to objective measures of performance made available by state accountability systems. Yet it is difficult to determine whether respondents’ apparent sensitivity to actual quality is the result of publicly available information or simply direct experience with schools. The fact that parental perceptions track actual school quality more closely than those of other citizens, but the perceptions of homeowners do not, suggests that direct interactions with a school may be a more important factor than simply having a vested interest in acquiring information about local school quality. But do accountability systems also play a role in shaping citizen perceptions?

Again, Florida provides an ideal case for more detailed analysis. As noted above, the Florida Department of Education uses the total number of points received (i.e., the sum of level- and growth-related points) to assign each school a letter grade between A and F. These grades receive considerable media attention in Florida, so we might expect citizen ratings to be correlated with them. This expectation is confirmed in the data: a school grade that is one point higher (again measured on a standard GPA scale) is associated with a respondent rating that is 0.2 grades higher.

To test the hypothesis that publicly available information has an impact over and above direct observation of school performance, we can compare the ratings given by respondents whose schools were very close to the cutoffs in the point system used by Florida to assign school grades. We know that schools with more points received higher ratings on average, but might also expect to see a “jump” in the average rating at these cutoffs. Because schools on either side of the cutoff should be of essentially the same quality, we can interpret any jump in the rating observed at the cutoff as the pure effect of information provided by the school grade on citizen perceptions of school quality.

We focus our attention on the B/C cutoff, because that is the only one for which we have enough respondents assigned to schools near the cutoff to yield results with a reasonable degree of precision. Comparing respondents’ ratings of schools on either side of this cutoff suggests a large positive effect of receiving the higher (B) grade, with an increase in the grades assigned to schools in the range of of 36 to 57 percent of a letter grade. That the publicized school grades have a direct effect on respondent ratings over and above the relationship between ratings and the underlying point variables suggests that the signals provided by the state’s school accountability system do in fact affect citizen perceptions of their local schools.

Implications

The findings reported above represent the first systematic evidence that Americans’ perceptions of the quality of their local public schools reflect publicly available information about the academic achievement of the students who attend them. Importantly, disadvantaged segments of the population are no less informed about school quality than other citizens. Although the mechanisms explaining this responsiveness are not entirely clear, our evidence suggests that both direct experience with schools and the public dissemination of performance data may play a role.

It is worth emphasizing several limitations on this evidence of responsiveness. First, the relationship between actual and perceived quality is modest for citizens as a whole, although it is quite strong for parents, who have the most opportunities to observe schools and arguably have the strongest incentives to be informed. Second, both parents and the public appear to be more responsive to the level of student achievement at a school than to the amount students learn from one year to the next. Finally, citizens appear sensitive to relative differences in school quality within their state (as reflected in school performance on state tests) but insensitive to information on school quality in the state as a whole (as measured by statewide performance on a national assessment).

Even so, at least two policy implications emerge from our results. First, our finding that accountability ratings influence citizens’ assessments of their local schools coupled with the fact that citizen ratings are more strongly associated with achievement levels than with achievement growth suggest that featuring growth measures more prominently in school accountability ratings could cause citizens to pay more attention to this barometer of school quality. Second, our finding that citizen ratings are associated with student performance on state tests but not with performance on a national assessment suggests that a closer alignment of state standards (or a move toward common standards across states) might help citizens form more accurate perceptions of their schools. In particular, it could lower perceptions of school quality in states where many students perform poorly relative to national norms but are deemed proficient by the state.

Matthew M. Chingos is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Michael Henderson is a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s Department of Government. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and executive editor of Education Next.

Video: Susan Eaton talks with Education Next.
Video: Steven Rivkin talks with Education Next.

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The Supreme Court declared in 1954 that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Into the 1970s, urban education reform focused predominantly on making sure that African American students had the opportunity to attend school with their white peers. Now, however, most reformers take as a given that the typical low-income minority student will attend a racially isolated school, and the focus, under the banner of “No Excuses,” is to make high-poverty, high-minority schools effective. What role should racial desegregation play in 21st-century school improvement? In this Education Next forum, Susan Eaton, research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, makes the case for refocusing school reform on creating integrated schools. Steven Rivkin, professor of economics at Amherst College, questions whether desegregation efforts fulfilled their promise and points out complexities to the issue that researchers have barely begun to examine.

EN: In which ways did the school desegregation movement succeed? Fail?

Susan Eaton: The school desegregation movement improved educational opportunities for students of color, particularly for black students in the South. It also created a generation of people for whom diversity was the norm.

The movement did not fail. Rather, government failed to actively support desegregation and, during the Nixon and two Bush administrations, actively worked against it. Not long after Brown, the courts began backing away from desegregation as a means toward equal educational opportunity. The rollback started with the Milliken v. Bradley decision in 1974, which prohibited the incorporation of suburbs into urban desegregation plans. This meant that in the North and Midwest especially, exclusive white suburbs were exempted from desegregation, even if their zoning and other housing policies had contributed to segregation in the region.

Desegregation’s critics hold it to too high a standard, implying that unless desegregation solves all educational challenges, it is not worth the trouble. No policy could survive such a test. Desegregation was never meant to be a remedy for low test scores. Rather, it was and is one underlying condition with the potential to engender higher-quality schooling, improved race relations, and, in the long run, a more democratic, more equal society.

Diverse schools committed to equal opportunity hold vast, often untapped potential, but it is up to teachers, parents, administrators, and other sectors of society to harness it. When diverse schools institute rigid academic tracking that places students of color in low-level classes or employ harsh discipline policies that exclude students rather than providing support, they are not truly integrated. The success of today’s diversity movement hinges on our ability to move diverse schools closer to true integration.

Increasing linguistic and cultural diversity enriches our society. A modern integration movement must incorporate immigrant students and English language learners. The sharp segregation of these groups from mainstream opportunity limits their chances for social mobility and encourages prejudice against them.

Steven Rivkin: Desegregation efforts did improve the racial balance of public schools. Although demographic changes tempered the effects somewhat, school enrollment data show substantial changes in the racial makeup of schools after 1968. The South experienced the largest increase in school integration and the Northeast the smallest. Nationally, the share of African American students’ schoolmates who were white rose from 22 to 36 percent between 1968 and 1980 before falling to roughly 30 percent in 2000. The decline in this measure during the 1990s resulted from the continued decline in the white enrollment share.

The most striking changes occurred at the bottom of the distribution, as the share of African American students attending schools with fewer than 5 percent white students fell by more than 50 percent after 1968.

Other effects are difficult to identify with certainty. Desegregation programs in some cities prompted “white flight,” although over the long run it appears to have had only a small effect on housing patterns in most communities. The evidence on academic, labor market, and social outcomes is sparse.

What I believe can be said is that desegregation failed to be the panacea some believed it would be. The expectation that desegregation would dramatically reduce or eliminate racial achievement gaps was unrealistic given the myriad differences in family, school, and community circumstances. The persistent education and earnings gaps are all too visible, as are the higher rate of incarceration among young black men compared to white men and the much higher rate of teen childbearing for young black women compared to white women.

The key question is whether specific desegregation programs brought improved outcomes for African Americans. Unfortunately, there is little good evidence to bring to bear on this question. The persistent, large outcome gaps and waning support for desegregation do provide grounds for exploring other policies, including enriched early-childhood education and substantially different models for delivering elementary and secondary education.

EN: Is desegregation even politically and legally feasible in 2010? Why not focus on integrating schools by class rather than by race?

SR: The legal impediments to desegregation by race are formidable. Desegregation advocates may ask state courts to impose desegregation orders based on constitutional guarantees for an adequate education, as has been the case in Connecticut. But the extent to which state constitutions provide support for desegregation by race is unclear.

The political climate also shows declining support for race-based remedies. A number of states, including California, have passed referenda that prohibit the use of race by schools and other public institutions to distinguish among applicants. In addition, African American and Hispanic support for desegregation appears to be declining.

Many large cities and their systems of neighborhood public schools are extensively segregated by income. The expansion of charter and magnet schools, along with private school options, does provide some opportunities for children in high-poverty areas to attend schools that are more mixed in terms of class and income. Yet the decision by a small number of children to opt out of neighborhood schools may adversely affect the academic and social environment in those schools, as the remaining children are likely to have less-involved families on average. An income desegregation program that involves all students may avoid the concentration of children with fewer family resources in particular schools.

A number of districts across the country have moved to equalize across schools the share of poor students, as measured by eligibility for subsidized lunch. Although African American and Hispanic children are more likely than whites to be eligible for a subsidized lunch in most communities, poverty crosses racial and ethnic lines, and desegregation by income produces a very different result than would a policy of racial desegregation.

Evidence on the achievement effects of desegregation by income is limited by both an absence of detailed information on family income (including indicators for severe poverty or high income) and the difficulty in separating the effects of students’ own circumstances from the influences of peers. It is not surprising therefore that findings are mixed. The landmark 1966 Coleman Report highlighted the importance of peer environment along a number of dimensions, but work by Caroline Hoxby and Gretchen Weingarth in 2006 suggests that the share of poor students has only a modest effect on achievement once differences in the prior achievement of students have been accounted for. However, lower peer achievement is a potentially important channel through which a high poverty rate could affect the educational environment, and from a policy perspective what matters is the total effect of a high poverty rate. That includes any effect of student poverty on teacher quality; in a 2004 study, Eric Hanushek, John Kain, and I found that poverty contributes to teacher turnover and to schools having a higher share of teachers with little or no prior teaching experience.

In comparison to poverty rate, measures of socioeconomic status (SES) and parental education appear to be more closely related to achievement and other outcomes. In a 1991 study at the high-school level, Susan Mayer found that attendance at a high-SES high school reduces teen pregnancy and the probability of dropping out. And in a 2002 study that accounts for observed and unobserved school and family influences, Patrick McEwan found that achievement appears to be more strongly related to the average education level among the mothers of children in the school or classroom than to average income. It may be that parental education provides a better proxy for the level of parental support or student engagement than the available poverty measures.

Importantly, even if these or other studies succeed in isolating the causal effects of peer SES, they do not provide direct evidence on the effects of specific income desegregation efforts. Exposure to higher SES peers, accomplished through school busing, may produce very different effects than exposure through family choice of neighborhood. Just as is the case with racial integration, it is imperative to gather additional evidence as part of any efforts to desegregate by income or SES more generally defined.

SE: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently stood at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and said, “I think Dr. King would have been disheartened to see that 56 years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, many schools are still effectively segregated in America. Everywhere we go, people want to know how we can best help children. We often get asked, ‘How can we better integrate our schools, promote a healthy diversity, and reduce racial isolation?’”

In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed as compelling government interests both the attainment of racial diversity and the avoidance of segregation in schools (see “Affirmative Action Docketed,” legal beat, Winter 2007). In his controlling opinion, Justice Kennedy laid out several means through which educators could reach those goals. These included siting schools so that they might draw from demographically distinct neighborhoods and recruitment in neighborhoods of color or in white neighborhoods to create a diverse mix of students, among other possibilities.

If the goal is to provide truly equal educational opportunities to all children, then opportunity is what we should measure and lack of opportunity what we should seek to remedy. Each community needs an accurate assessment of who does and does not have access to high-quality education. Inequality in access goes far beyond socioeconomic status, and reliable measures would incorporate a more granular understanding of what limits educational opportunities. To this end, the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University has developed a system of “Opportunity Mapping” that assesses the access people have to conditions that either support or undermine economic and educational opportunity. They often find that people of color are still disproportionately locked out. Findings like this demonstrate the need to keep race and past and present racial discrimination an explicit part of conversations and policy efforts related to schools, transportation, health, and housing.

EN: In a world of limited resources, what’s the argument for trying to create racially or socioeconomically integrated schools, rather than making high-poverty, high-minority schools more effective?

SE: Educators have long testified and research has long demonstrated that schools with large shares of economically disadvantaged children become overwhelmed with challenges that interfere with education. Racially segregated high-poverty schools tend to be overrun with social problems, have a hard time finding and retaining good teachers, are associated with high dropout rates, and are less effective than diverse schools at intervening in problems outside of school that undermine learning. In a longitudinal study of dropout rates, researcher Argun Saatcioglu concluded, “desegregated schools likely played a more effective role in counterbalancing student-level nonschool problems than did segregated ones.” Generally, racially and economically diverse schools have been far more successful than segregated ones in improving achievement, graduating students of color, and sending kids to college. There are some successful high-poverty schools, certainly, but hardly enough to make “separate but equal” our education policy.

Not since the Johnson administration has the United States had a firm commitment, through rhetoric and action, to school integration. In 2007, 64 percent of African American and 63 percent of Latino students attended high-poverty schools. Only 21 percent of white children attended such schools. Government spends most of its education money trying to make “separate but equal” work. Separate but equal has never worked. Growing inequalities in the society are replicated in school hallways and classrooms.

We need to continue to spend money improving curriculum and conditions and providing teacher training and enrichment offerings in challenged high-poverty schools. A balanced, forward-looking education policy would also act on decades of research findings and the experience of educators on the ground, who know that children of all races and backgrounds tend to reap huge benefits from attending racially and economically diverse schools.

SR: This question posits a choice between two policies, when in fact a more nuanced approach that varies from place to place is likely to be more effective.

It is possible that assigning students to schools with an eye to equalizing the socioeconomic, rather than the racial, mix across schools may confer benefits on children that outweigh any additional transportation costs. Because educational needs are higher on average for children in low-income families, the concentration of poverty in particular schools tends to increase their financial and programmatic burden. There is also evidence that schools with a higher poverty rate experience more disruptive behavior among students. High-poverty schools may be at a disadvantage in hiring and retaining effective teachers as well.

Yet there may be education reforms such as expanded school choice that both increase segregation by income or race and improve the quality of education for minority and low-income children, particularly given the increasingly stringent limitations on government use of race or ethnicity in student assignment. The recent Supreme Court decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ruled unconstitutional the Seattle and Louisville school districts’ limited use of race in deciding which students got into overenrolled schools (Seattle) or which students could transfer schools (Louisville), limiting the scope of government intervention to preserve racial balance following the expansion of school choice. In the absence of race-based constraints, some reform efforts that aim to improve school quality, such as charter schools, open enrollment, magnet schools, and vouchers, may intensify segregation by income, race, or achievement (see “A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation,” check the facts, Summer 2010). However, if the concentration of minority or low-income students in a school results from the purposeful choices of parents rather than from neighborhood segregation, the adverse effects may be fewer.

EN: What’s the evidence that desegregation leads to academic benefits for poor or minority students? Are these benefits large enough to justify the expense?

SE: Evidence from a variety of fields—education, public health, and economics—supports attaining and maintaining diversity and avoiding racial and economic isolation in schools. In the last decade, research on these questions grew more robust. As data and statistical methods improved, researchers were able to disentangle the intertwined influences of school, home, and neighborhood.

The weight of social science evidence demonstrates that racially diverse schools are associated with achievement in math and reading, better critical thinking, and increased intellectual engagement for students from all racial groups. A 2006 study by Douglas Harris used data from 22,000 schools to find that the Latino and African American gains in math were far greater in diverse schools than in segregated ones. A 2010 study by Mark Berends and Roberto Penaloza of longitudinal data over 30 years demonstrates a relationship between increasing segregation of black and Latino students and growth in math achievement gaps between these groups and white students. As for reading, a 2006 study by Shelly Brown-Jeffy found that diverse high schools (25 to 54 percent students of color) have smaller racial gaps in reading than schools with either extremely high or extremely low proportions of students of color. A robust 2006 study, by Kathryn Borman and colleagues, showed that, independent of other factors, racial segregation of black students in Florida was negatively associated with reading test scores, as early as first grade.

Some desegregation plans do incur increased transportation costs. In a time of budget constraints, it is vital that we think creatively about how to create and sustain racial diversity. For example, many states allow for “open enrollment” through which students may attend schools outside of the community where they live. Such plans could become tools for diversity, through recruitment in neighborhoods of color. Charter school developers could do more to create racially and economically diverse schools by enrolling students from more than one municipality. Educators could also collaborate with public transportation officials to coordinate routes and schedules, allowing parents and students to commute together to school and work in new job centers.

Maintaining dozens of small school districts in a metropolitan area, each with its own highly paid administrators and transportation budgets, is also extremely costly. Consolidation and regionalizing several demographically distinct communities could save money in the long run and create diversity.

SR: One of the unfortunate legacies of the desegregation efforts that followed the Brown v. Board of Education decision is a lack of understanding of the impacts of various types of desegregation programs in different settings. There was no evaluation component built into the desegregation effort. Although there were some small-scale random-assignment experiments of the effects of desegregation on test scores, most of what we know today concerns the relationship between a school outcome such as achievement on the one hand, and racial composition on the other. Research, including 2008 and 2009 studies by Eric Hanushek, John Kain, and me, and a 2000 study by Caroline Hoxby that account for both observed and unobserved factors that could affect outcomes and contaminate the results, suggests that African Americans, particularly higher achievers, do benefit from attending schools with a higher proportion of white students. It is likely, though, that the benefit depends on how school integration was achieved. The relationship between achievement and the demographic composition of the classroom is not well understood. What drives higher achievement? Is it peer influences? Better teachers? Teacher behavior?

Clearly, both the student population and the quality of instruction affect student outcomes, and policies should take both factors into consideration.

EN: What are the nonacademic benefits of desegregation, particularly for poor and minority students?

SE: In his seminal 1972 study titled Inequality, the Harvard-based sociologist and statistician Christopher Jencks wrote, “The case for or against desegregation should not be argued in terms of academic achievement. If we want a segregated society, we should have segregated schools. If we want a desegregated society, we should have desegregated schools.” This basic, blunt statement would hold true through the decades, while researchers repeatedly examined statistics and conducted research reviews and in-depth interviews to test something sociologists call “perpetuation theory.” Perpetuation theory posits that people who attend desegregated schools will continue to opt for racially diverse settings later in life and will use skills learned in school to more successfully navigate such settings.

Research has consistently found support for this powerful idea. In 2007, the National Academy of Education concluded that “early experience in desegregated schools tends to reduce expectations of hostility, improve skills and comfort with interracial settings, and create a tolerance for—if not a preference for—subsequent desegregated educational settings.” Reviewing research spanning 25 years, the Academy found a consistent association between early desegregated schooling experience and later working in desegregated work places, living in desegregated neighborhoods, and people’s perception that they acquired skills that made them more effective and able to persist in racially diverse settings.

For students of color, in particular, this means that attendance at a desegregated school tends to make them more likely to enter and persist in white-dominated or racially diverse settings when they perceive opportunity there. This was a basic finding from my interviews with adult graduates of Boston’s voluntary city-suburban school desegregation program, METCO (recounted in The Other Boston Busing Story, Yale University Press, 2001). In 2008, Columbia University professor Amy Stuart Wells and her colleagues published interviews with adults from a variety of backgrounds who had attended desegregated schools across the country. They concluded, “desegregation made the vast majority of the students who attended these schools less racially prejudiced and more comfortable around people of different backgrounds.”

SR: Potential nonacademic benefits include expanded access to job networks, more interracial friendships, and enhanced access to educational networks, including private schools and colleges. Although some research finds that such benefits exist, the available data have not permitted researchers to confirm the causal effects of desegregation on nonacademic benefits for the same reasons that it is difficult to produce convincing findings on academic benefits: the nonrandom sorting of students among school environments and the real possibility that forced busing may produce effects very different from those of living in a racially or socioeconomically mixed community.

EN: Is school desegregation dead? Either way, what do you foresee in school racial makeup when you look out a generation?

SR: Although any new efforts based on federal law are likely to be limited, it may be premature to pronounce school desegregation dead. Districts will no doubt continue to monitor school enrollment patterns and enact rules and programs designed to foster racial integration, even if indirectly.

At the root of school segregation is extensive residential segregation. Transporting students long distances to reduce segregation in schools is costly, time-consuming for students, and likely to reduce parental participation in the schools. Targeting additional resources to early childhood education, extended day, summer programs, prudent class-size reduction, or enhanced accountability structures is likely to have a higher return in these communities than racial desegregation efforts.

Over time, a number of forces will combine to determine the school enrollment landscape. The dismissal of court-ordered plans will likely increase segregation, though modestly; the expansion of school choice will likely have a similar effect. Residential segregation may decline somewhat in most regions of the country, but residential segregation by race and income will almost certainly remain a defining feature of the U.S. and a sizable impediment to greater school integration. Given this housing pattern and the declining share of elementary and secondary school students who are white, African American students are likely to have fewer white and more Hispanic and Asian classmates in the years to come.

SE: School desegregation is vibrant, alive, and also vulnerable. Through my work, I’m lucky to meet and collaborate with educators and families who are creating, sustaining, and improving racially diverse schools. For example, in Hartford, Connecticut, a legal decision created a system of regional magnet schools that attract students of color from the impoverished city and students from the working-class towns and affluent suburbs that surround it. In Boston, Palo Alto, and St. Louis, students from the city voluntarily board buses to attend suburban schools. In Louisville, Kentucky, educators employed Opportunity Mapping and decided to retain a school choice system that achieves racial diversity. In Omaha, Nebraska, cities and suburbs created a joint tax-sharing program to fund schools that bring together students from across the region. In Montclair, New Jersey, a racially diverse group of parents works to strengthen magnet schools that bring together students from varying racial and economic groups. In Montgomery County, Maryland, community members develop action plans to improve opportunity for students of color and to build community in their diverse schools. The stories are endless, but not widely known.

Unless our policies begin to support diversity and true, stable integration, I foresee continuing segmentation of our residential and educational space along racial lines. Oddly, this will happen even as diversity in the larger society increases.