The post Same Old, Same Old appeared first on Education Next.

EDUCATION NEXT: How likely is it that technology will make advances in education in the next decade that go far beyond any changes that have taken place in the past?

John Chubb and Terry Moe: The worldwide revolution in information technology has globalized the international economy, made communication virtually instantaneous and costless, put vast storehouses of information within reach of everyone on the planet, and in countless other ways transformed how life is lived. Technology is destined to transform American education as well. The driver of change is simple enough: technology has enormous benefits for the learning process, and they promise to change the nature of schooling and heighten its productivity. Curricula, teaching methods, and schedules can all be customized to meet the learning styles and life situations of individual students; education can be freed from the geographic constraints of districts and brick-and-mortar buildings; coursework from the most remedial to the most advanced can be made available to everyone; students can have more interaction with teachers and one another; parents can readily be included in the education process; sophisticated data systems can measure and guide performance; and schools can be operated at lower cost with technology (which is relatively cheap) substituted for labor (which is relatively expensive).

But the advance of technology is also threatening to powerful education groups, and they will resist it in the political process. Precisely because technology promises to transform the core components of schooling, it is inevitably disruptive to the jobs, routines, and resources of the people whose livelihoods derive from the existing system. And these people are represented by organizations—most prominently, the teachers unions—that are extraordinarily powerful in politics, and are even now taking action to prevent technology from transforming American education.

Such resistance is not new. Technology is just the latest target of their politics of blocking. The key question is whether this resistance can be overcome. And the answer, as we will later explain, is yes. Technology is going to have transformative effects not only on education, but also on politics—effects that will weaken the opponents of change and open the political gates. This is the real crux of the story. In the years ahead, it is the political transformation that will make the educational transformation possible.

Larry Cuban: Technology is linked to progress in the American mind and has a rich history in the culture. Because both public and private schooling have been deeply embedded in society for the past three centuries, educational technology (by which I mean the various communication and information devices and processes that administrators and teachers use to make schooling efficient and effective) also has a rich history (e.g., textbooks, chalkboard, film, radio, computers).

U.S. school reformers have a tradition of overselling and underusing technological innovations. Thus the chances of widespread adoption in schools of new classroom technologies in the next decade are in the 70 to 90 percent probability range, but the probability of routine use in most schools for instruction is much lower, in the 10 to 20 percent range. Through social networks of policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and tech promoters, pace-setting urban and suburban districts adopt innovations and then adapt them to fit the local context and goals. Over time, laggards go through the same process, retaining parts of the innovation, and then move on to the next one. In public schools, changes occur piecemeal and incrementally. Regardless of what technological enthusiasts predict, no “revolutions” in technology use have occurred in U.S. schools and classrooms. But evolution does.

EN: What can we learn from technological adoption in education in the past?

LC: In tracking such technological innovations as film, radio, television, videocassettes, and desktop computers over the past half century, I found a common cycle. First, the promoters’ exhilaration splashes over decisionmakers as they purchase and deploy equipment in schools and classrooms. Then academics conduct studies to determine the effectiveness of the innovation as compared to standard practice; they survey teachers and occasionally visit classrooms to see student and teacher use of the innovation. Academics often find that the technological innovation is just as good as—seldom superior to—conventional instruction in conveying information and teaching skills. They also find that classroom use is less than expected. Formal adoption of high-tech innovations does not mean teachers have total access to devices or use them on a daily basis. Such studies often unleash stinging rebukes of administrators and teachers for spending scarce dollars on expensive machinery that fails to display superiority over existing techniques of instruction and, even worse, is only occasionally used.

Few earnest champions of classroom technology understand the multiple and complicated roles teachers perform, address the realities of classrooms within age-graded schools, respect teacher expertise, or consider the practical questions teachers ask about any technological innovation that a school board and superintendent decide to adopt, buy, and deploy. Is the new technology simple to use? Versatile? Reliable? Durable? How much energy and time will I as a teacher have to expend to use the new technology for what net return in enhanced student learning? Will the innovation help me solve problems that I face in the classroom? Providing teachers with economic or organizational incentives to use technology won’t answer these practical questions. Were policymakers, researchers, designers of the innovation, and business-inspired reformers to ask and then consider answers to these questions, perhaps the predictable cycle might be interrupted.

JC and TM: It is a mistake to view previous technological innovations—television, say—as telling indicators of how information technology will affect the nation’s school system. Yes, television has done little to change public education. And yes, the failure to put it to more creative uses does highlight how weak the incentives are among educators for throwing off the chains of tradition.

But television is a simple, one-way conveyor of information that allows for no interaction or input. Its potential for education was limited from the outset. The fact is, television and other technological innovations of the past are in a different league—by many orders of magnitude—from the revolution in information technology. This revolution is not a reform. It is a new social reality.

Today’s public educators are part of society. They want to use computers and modernize their schools, and evidence suggests they have been moving in this direction. But absent competitive pressure, they have incentives to make only the most incremental of changes, those that don’t threaten anyone’s jobs or disrupt established routines. Their approach to information technology is rooted in the status quo: it is about making the existing system work better without really changing it. In the new social reality, however, this isn’t going to cut it. There will be competition. There will be pressure. There will be change.

EN:What, if anything, can we learn from the processes of technological change in other industries?

JC and TM: Dramatic advances in information technology have transformed the products we buy and the business firms that make them. An illuminating perspective on how these changes have come about in private industry can be found in Clayton Christensen’s work on “disruptive innovation.” Apple, for instance, successfully introduced its personal computer as a toy for children, thus not directly competing with DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and other established makers of mainframe and minicomputers. Its market was “nonconsumers”: people not being served by the big manufacturers, and for whom the alternative was nothing. In so doing, Apple did not provoke the opposition of the big boys,and personal computers soon flourished.

In Disrupting Class, Christensen and coauthors Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn argue that technology will triumph in public education in the same way. Virtual schools, for example, can offer AP physics or remedial math or Mandarin or whatever else local districts are not offering. And they can cater to constituencies—students who are gifted, live in rural or inner city areas, need extra credits for graduation, and so on—that are underserved by the current system. In so doing, virtual schools can compete against nothing (see “How Do We Transform Our Schools,” features, Summer 2008). And because of budget constraints and parent-student demand, districts and states will welcome these new suppliers and won’t see them as threats to be snuffed out (see Figure 1).

We agree that these forces will allow virtual schools to get a foothold in public education, and thus that there is something to learn from private industry. But public education is part of government, and is not subject to the competitive dynamics of the marketplace. The teachers unions and their allies will be wary of contracting out educational services, even to help groups that are currently underserved, because they know where it all leads. Their incentive is to resist. And they will try to use their power to keep the lid on, and maintain control over, the numbers and types of cyberschools that can move into the field. That’s why, in the end, it all comes down to politics—and whether the opponents can block.

LC: Manufacturing, banking, and communications are a few of the industries that have been transformed technologically. While public schools and such industries have common characteristics (e.g., leaders, headquarters staff who coordinate and control people, bureaucratic rules, planning for the future, building budgets, providing services), they differ in substantial and fundamental ways. First, their purposes differ. Industries seek profit while tax-supported schools are expected to convert children into adults who are literate, law abiding, engaged in their communities, informed about issues, economically independent, and respectful of differences among Americans. Schools are held publicly responsible for achieving those ends; industries are responsible to shareholders only. Second, in deciding policies, schools are accountable for democratic and public deliberations; even with recent revelations of corrupt practices among CEOs and boards of directors and meltdowns in the mortgage lending community, minimal public oversight of corporate governance currently exists. Finally, the criteria for success differ. Businesses have earning reports and stock prices as measures of success; schools seeking multiple purposes—see above—are expected to show immediate, midterm, and long-term results, many of whichare hardly reducible to numbers.

One industry that is outside of K–12 education yet similar to it in its multiple public purposes and has unreservedly embraced computer-based technologies is higher education (see Figure 2). Because higher education is not compulsory and adults enroll voluntarily in colleges and universities, market incentives come into play. Colleges and universities look for a competitive edge that will give them an advantage in their market niche. Both public and private institutions seek to attract students and faculty and increase their prestige among similarly situated schools. Moreover, higher education is largely nonunion.

Whereas some of these institutions go for the working adult market (e.g., University of Phoenix) with extensive online course offerings, most colleges and universities remain research and teaching organizations with online courses that are marginal to their core operations. Still, nearly every professor and student has at least one computer available daily (many have two or more). For universities and four-year colleges, computers have transformed academic research and analysis in the natural and social sciences, humanities, and professional schools.

The puzzle is teaching, which has not been transformed. Classroom instruction for large groups of students (25 or more) across community colleges, state universities, and elite institutions differs little from what occurs in secondary public schools. That fact suggests that even with abundant access to new technologies, competitive market pressures, no union interference, and enormous encouragement from institutional policymakers, constancy in patterns of teaching sets the education context apart from those industries that have experienced top-to-bottom technological transformation.

EN: Do you think that technological change is likely to increase significantly the amount of home schooling? Why or why not?

LC: Cyberschools and distance education have increasingly connected isolated rural students and home-schooled children to teachers and resources that were heretofore unavailable to them. Slight increases in home schooling may occur—say from 1.1 million students in 2003 to 2 or 3 million by the end of the decade. The slight uptick would be due to both the availability of technology and a far broader menu of choices for parents. Online college curricula and offerings from for-profit entrepreneurs give home-schooling, anxious college-driven, and rural parents new options. Even though cheerleaders for distance learning have predicted wholesale changes in conventional site-based schools for decades, such changes will occur at the periphery, not the center. Most parents will continue to send their children to brick-and-mortar public schools and expect those schools to achieve the many goals mentioned above. I do not predict that most high school students will enroll in online schools. Yes, many will take a course here and there, but the comprehensive high school in most suburban districts and proliferation of small high schools in urban systems will continue to enroll the vast majority of eligible teenagers.

JC and TM: With the advance of technology, home schooling is destined to increase—and decrease. It will increase because distance learning will offer a vast array of new opportunities, and learning from “home”—from anywhere but the school building—will gain dramatically in popularity. Many more students will take all their classes through virtual schools. But more important, the great majority of American students will ultimately choose to take some of their classes remotely and some through brick-and-mortar schools.

On the other hand, far fewer kids will be home schooled in the traditional sense. In the past, home schooling meant that parents taught their kids at home. But in the coming years, almost all the kids who study entirely “at home” actually will be “going to school”: schools that have well-developed curricula and bona fide teachers and administrators, but operate at a distance.

In the future, then, home schooling as we know it will largely cease to exist, and the boundaries between learning at home and public schooling will essentially break down. American education will become a blend of “home schooling”—differently construed—and brick-and-mortar public schooling. Most students will do some of their academic coursework outside the brick-and-mortar setting—making home schooling a very mainstream activity—and traditional home schoolers will be more fully integrated into the larger education system (see “Home Schooling Goes Mainstream,” features).

All of this will be resisted by the unions and their allies, because today’s home schoolers are not part of current education budgets, and as they join the system they are competitors for scarce resources. But long term, as technology changes the balance of political power, the resistance will fail.

EN: Are charter schools, private schools, or afterschool programs likely to adopt innovations more rapidly than traditional district schools?

JC and TM: The early adopters will arise from outside the traditional public school system. Most important are charter schools that deliver education entirely over the Internet. Nearly 200 of these virtual schools have already sprung up in 19 states, serving almost 200,000 students, and the trajectory is sharply upward. Some individual schools have grown spectacularly fast, such as PA Cyber, which enrolls 8,000 students only eight years after opening.

As students enroll in cybercharters, they stimulate a growing market for more and better online technologies and content. They also put competitive pressure on traditional public schools to innovate or lose students and revenue. These high-tech newcomers add to the competitive pressure already created by some 4,000 brick-and-mortar charters operating in 40 states, broadening the constituency for charter schools beyond families disaffected with inner-city public schools.

Competition from early adopters, coupled with performance pressures arising from accountability reforms, will force all schools—including private schools and low-tech charter schools resting on their laurels—to consider technological solutions. Change will not be even or uniform. It will occur faster and more consequentially in districts and states where unions are weak, where parent demand and involvement are high, where unmet needs are greatest, and where budgets are tightly constrained. But as the tide begins to rise, and as the balance of power in politics begins to shift with it, the other districts and states will eventually follow.

LC: Except for those public charter schools, magnets, and theme-driven schools that advertise themselves as using technology, including those operated by for-profit and nonprofit organizations such as High Tech High, Edison, and Mosaica, I have not found charter or private schools (a highly diverse sector made up of elite independents and sectarian and nonsectarian schools) more open (or closed) to technological innovations than public schools. Increased competition from charter schools may have modest to strong effects in urban districts (but not suburban or rural ones), where a critical mass (one-third or more) of students attend these schools full-time. The same rationale for adoption of computers (e.g., improve achievement, transform teaching and learning, and as preparation for an ever-changing labor market) prevails across public and private school sectors. The critical issues remain teacher involvement in decisions about buying and using devices and available funding, rather than openness to technological innovation. Afterschool programs are another category, since they are tangential to regular public schools and often use technology as an inducement to get students through the door once the last school-day bell rings.

EN: How much of schooling can technology really displace?

LC: It is a mistake to assume that if schools just adopt classroom technologies, academic achievement will improve, teaching will change dramatically, and students will be better prepared for the 21st-century workplace. Evidence for each reason to adopt technology is at best skimpy and at worst missing altogether.

Many administrative activities can be (and have been) computerized (e.g., purchasing, scheduling, accounting, personnel data). Collecting student performance data and making it easily and readily available to teachers and principals has potential for delivering lessons and individual help to students “just in time.” But to achieve the important purposes of tax-supported public schooling, especially in urban districts, the bedrock of schooling remains an organizational structure introduced in the mid-19th century: the age-graded school, where each teacher has her classroom and students of roughly the same age have to learn a chunk of the curriculum before being promoted to the next grade.

Advances in new technologies have hardly made a dent in this permanent structure. Charters, for-profit schools, cyberschools, and private schools embrace the same organizational format. All of the predictions for a technological Nirvana assume that the age-graded school will melt away. It hasn’t so far because strong social beliefs about schooling and deeply embedded political and economic structures keep it alive and kicking. It is within the age-graded school that the individual teacher’s knowledge, skill repertoire, and experience matter in connecting to her students. That relationship continues to be the moral, social, and cognitive centerpiece for teaching and learning to occur and cannot be replaced by machines, however cleverly constructed. Until the age-graded school and funding mechanisms change, the use of new technologies for classroom instruction will remain peripheral.

JC and TM: Technology will do more than bring high-quality information to bear on the education process. It will change the education process itself, transforming and sometimes replacing the role of the teacher, and altering the core means of instruction. Most schools of the future will be hybrids, with students still taught by teachers in classroom settings—for parts of the day. But students will spend much more time learning directly and often remotely through technology. Young students will require more personal attention. But as students grow up and gain the skills to work independently, the time with technology will increase and the time with teachers will decrease.

Technology will differentiate segments of the learning process. Teachers will often be the first source of instruction, helping kids master core concepts and skills. Then, technology will provide customized remediation for students not able to grasp the core and acceleration for students ready for specialized and enriching extensions. Programs to teach literacy skills, from the essentials of decoding on up, already exist. So, too, do programs to teach math skills, from basic to advanced. More effective differentiation means narrower gaps in achievement. It also means a far greater number and variety of course options—AP, IB, and even university-sponsored—available to all kids, regardless of the community in which they live: technology as equity.

For some students, particularly those who are older, who have special learning needs or academic interests, or whose schedules or locations make it difficult for them to attend brick-and-mortar schools, the core instructional process will be online. School communities, with lots of interaction among students and teachers, will be built virtually. Brick-and-mortar schools will be very different places than they are today: using more technology, staffed by fewer but more able teachers, working with much better information, and delivering instruction better matched to student needs.

EN:What are the most promising innovations in education technology?

LC: Since the 1990s, school boards and superintendents have generally moved swiftly to adopt technological enhancements to administrative functions by placing them online and automating many routine procedures. The collection of individual student achievement data is now possible technologically, and its dissemination to teachers swiftly offers many opportunities for intervention, remedial work, and enrichment. For classroom instruction, many school boards have also adopted interactive whiteboards, student clickers, and handheld devices for teachers and students to collect data for field projects or for what is happening in a classroom. Some highly motivated individual teachers have created imaginative uses of computers for students to learn. Such efforts are promising innovations that can incrementally improve teaching and learning. For-profit schools, that is, schools run by businesses (e.g., Edison Schools), often give students and teachers abundant access to machines and integrate technology use in their overall school design.

The majority of public school teachers, however, view technological innovations as burdensome add-ons. Teachers need to be directly (not as tokens) involved in adopting and using technological innovations and in establishing on-site technical assistance and facilitating teachers-helping-teachers use existing technologies in daily lessons (e.g., Apple Classroom of Tomorrow experience in the 1980s and 1990s; Berkeley [CA] Teacher Led Technology Challenge project in the late 1990s). Such involvement can lead to teachers creatively integrating the innovation into routine classroom instruction. Unfortunately, this approach remains distant from the current mind-set among policy elites and vendors anxious about getting new devices into classrooms.

JC and TM: The most promising innovations can be grouped into two broad categories, instruction and information. As it is, schools are universally organized for kids to get all of their instruction in classes of 20 to 30 led by a teacher. Technology is treated as an add-on to this structure. Elementary kids typically visit a computer lab once a week. A few computers also sit at the backs of classrooms, for kids to use, if time allows, after the teacher is finished teaching the core lesson. At the secondary level, computers are largely for word processing and Internet research and have little to do with core courses. It need not be this way.

Every educator knows that kids need individual help. Each student is not going to understand material through the same presentation, with the same exercises, or at the same pace. Technology can teach from multiple angles and with multimedia—animation, simulation, online teachers—and very interactively, with students constantly engaged and providing input. Technology can customize instruction literally for every student. Kids could have substantial amounts of customized remediation or acceleration, and even entire courses. Education could be dramatically differentiated.

Until recently, schools were in the Stone Age of information—knowing almost nothing about the achievement of their students or the success of teachers in promoting it. Today, accountability systems require annual student testing in reading and math, and provide objective and reliable (if limited) measures at least once a year. Moreover, technology is fast making it feasible to monitor student progress with online assessments that can be integrated with curricula throughout the school year. Information systems can help teachers adjust their instruction on the fly, reteaching skills that haven’t been learned, easing up on skills that students master quickly, and customizing by student.

Administrators can become more effective as well. Information systems can immediately show principals and district officials which classrooms are succeeding and which are struggling, which parts of the curriculum are being learned and which are going over kids’ heads. Sophisticated statistical programs can help administrators draw vital inferences about the learning process, especially about the extent to which each teacher is providing “value-added” to students (after allowing for differences in student backgrounds and other influences on learning that teachers can’t control). As information becomes available, it will be impossible to ignore, even if it speaks the unspeakable secret that some teachers are highly effective and others are not. As schools are forced to deal with the truth—and pressured to improve—students will benefit.

EN: What role will school boards and teachers unions play in using technology to reform schools? In short, what are the politics of adopting technology?

LC: The politics of adopting new technologies remain a top-down (school board and superintendent), elite-driven (civic and business leaders, vendors) operation largely determined by the district’s history of innovation, available resources, and responsiveness to key stakeholders. Unions have played a largely peripheral role in either endorsing (some union chapters have gotten district approval for schools in which new technologies are central) or opposing classroom technological innovations (cybercharter schools, for example). School boards and parents, however, will fight efforts to substitute machines for teachers, even when champions of reducing labor costs dress up the purchase of new technologies as overall savings and a technological Utopia. They will resist such moves because they see the purposes of public schools as more than efficiency and working to bolster a growing economy through supplying skilled graduates.

JC and TM: Unions will resist technology. Their mission is to protect the jobs of teachers in the regular public schools, and real technological change—which outsources work to distant locations, allows students and money to leave, substitutes capital for labor, and in other ways disrupts the existing job structure—is a threat to the security and stability that the unions seek. For decades, the unions and their allies have been the major obstacles to education reform, regularly using their formidable political power to block or weaken the reforms they do not like, from accountability to school choice to pay for performance. No surprise, then, that they are already working to kill or limit virtual charters, and to ensure that technology fits neatly into the status quo.

But this time they won’t succeed. Technology has a far-reaching capacity to transform politics. As distance learning proliferates, for example, teachers will be less geographically concentrated in districts, considerably more dispersed, and much more difficult for unions to organize. The substitution of technology for labor will lower the demand for teachers. The teaching profession will become much more diversified and less conducive to sameness and solidarity. There will be many new schools and a dramatic increase in choice and competition. All these developments, operating together in mutually reinforcing ways, will work to sap the organizational strength of the teachers unions, undermine their political power, and weaken their ability to block in the policy process. As they are less and less able to block them, reforms of all kinds—not just those that are high tech—will begin to flow through.

School boards are a bit more nuanced. They clearly do not want to lose students and revenue to cyberschools or other sources of competition. Many board members are also beholden to the unions, which are influential in local elections, and school boards have regularly joined forces with the unions—in the courts and state legislatures—to oppose competitive threats. Yet school boards in districts with especially active parents, weak unions, limited budgets, and kids whose needs are going unmet may have incentives to embrace technological change and become early adopters. In rare cases, school boards may see that, by acting entrepreneurially, they can set up their own cybercharters and win over students and revenue from other districts, thus using competition to make themselves better off; indeed, a small number of districts around the country (in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example) are already blazing this trail.

Technology is a double-barreled agent of change. It generates the innovations that make change attractive, and at the same time it undermines the political resistance that would normally prevent change from happening. There will be struggles and setbacks, and the process will take decades. But the forces of resistance will ultimately be overcome, and American education transformed. This will mean real improvement for the nation, its children, and its schools. It will also bring the dawning of a new era in which education politics is more open, productive changes are more readily embraced, and learning is liberated from the dead hand of the past.

The post Virtual Schools appeared first on Education Next.

In the 1990s Continental Airlines was struggling, even more than its troubled U.S. airline peers. As the company’s then-president Greg Brenneman explained in a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), “Continental ranked tenth out of the ten largest U.S. airlines in all key customer service areas as measured by the Department of Transportation: on-time arrivals, baggage handling, customer complaints, and involuntary denied boardings.” The airline had already been in bankruptcy twice, and was headed for a third round as its cash dried up.

In 1994, Gordon Bethune took the helm, with Brenneman becoming president and chief operating officer. They staved off bankruptcy by renegotiating with their creditors. And they launched an organizational turnaround that proved remarkably successful, catapulting Continental from worst to best among bigU.S. carriers.

By 1995, Continental was moving up on the Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) performance measures (see Figure 1). Its stock price was soaring. And the turnaround stuck. The latest rankings by Consumer Reports place Continental first among the seven big U.S. airlines. Zagat’s 2007 survey of frequent flyers found overall ratings for the big airlines were low and declining, with the “notable exception” of Continental. Continental was the only big airline, and one of only five overall, to be a Zagat Top Spot.

The mid-’90s were also a time for change in New York’s police department (NYPD). As W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne describe in their 2003 HBR case study, “Turf wars over jurisdiction and funding were rife. Officers were underpaid relative to their counterparts in neighboring communities…. Crime had gotten so far out of hand that the press referred to the Big Apple as the Rotten Apple.” In response, then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani hired William Bratton to lead the NYPD, fresh from a string of successful turnarounds of other agencies, including NYC’s transit police.

Though crime rates in NYC had started to decline in the late 1980s, Bratton’s arrival accelerated the trend (see Figure 2). Time wrote in a 1996 cover story, “The drop became a giddy double-digit affair, plunging farther and faster than it has done anywhere else in the country, faster than any cultural or demographic trend could explain. For two years, crime has declined in all 76 precincts.” As Kim and Mauborgne note, the change wasn’t just a flash in the pan or a nationwide trend: “Statistics released in December 2002 revealed that New York’s overall crime rate [was] the lowest among the 25 largest cities in the United States.”

Finding the Keys

These turnarounds are classic: rapid U-turns from the brink of doom to stellar success. They may not last forever. But if a failing school could achieve similar results for several years, thousands of students would benefit permanently. How did they happen? This article explains what we know, from plentiful cross-sector research, about how to engineer turnarounds within existing organizations. It then identifies two critical policy issues that states and districts must address to accelerate the prevalence of real, successful turnarounds in education.

Education reformers faced with failing schools and districts tend toward one of two camps: The Incrementalists hold that meaningful improvement can only happen slowly, with soul-wrenching culture change leading to instructional change and eventual student success. The Clean Slate Club believes the only way to fix failing schools is to shut them down and start fresh, with entirely new rules, staff, and leadership.

Both camps have it wrong, but for different reasons. The slow and steady approach won’t work for chronically failing organizations. The fresh-start method is much more promising, based on the dramatic success of some newly formed schools serving tough populations. But most start-ups fail or bump along in the purgatory of mediocrity, even in sectors that, unlike education, enjoy abundant venture capital and a ready stable of capable entrepreneurs. Moreover, troubled organizations across sectors regularly transform themselves from bad to great without a clean slate. The consequence of education’s failure to recognize turnarounds as a means of school improvement is twofold: in education, turnarounds have been tried rarely and studied even less. While education researchers catch up, practitioners can use the turnaround lessons of other sectors.

Essential Actions

To identify what makes turnarounds successful, we reviewed dozens of studies across a wide range of organizations: nonprofits of differing sizes, some in highly regulated industries such as health care; government agencies with varying missions; and for-profits in numerous industries. Case studies of single turnarounds comprise most of this research, including studies of both large, stand-alone entities and small units within larger organizations, closer in size to schools. The turnaround precursors, patterns of action, and chronically challenging environments we found were surprisingly consistent across these varied venues, bolstering their potential relevance to both districts and schools. Turnarounds were attempted when organizations were failing by many measures, not just financial metrics.

While this article uses the well-documented Continental Airlines and NYPD cases as illustrations, what happened in these two organizations is similar to what we saw across the research. We coded the cases from this broad research to reveal two overall success factors.

First, turnaround leaders work in an environment that gives them what we call “the big yes.” Second, bad-to-great transformations require a point-guard leader who both drives key changes and deftly influences stakeholders to support and engage in dramatic transformation. To be sure, staff help effect a turnaround, but the leader is the unapologetic driver of change in successful turnarounds. Effective turnaround leaders follow a formula of common actions that spur dramatic improvement. The actions interact to move the organization rapidly toward impressive, mission-determined results that influence stakeholders to support additional change. Below, we explain the six most consistent actions in the bad-to-great formula and provide an example of what each action might entail in school and district turnarounds.

Focus on a Few Early Wins

Successful turnaround leaders choose a few high-priority goals with visible payoffs and use early success to gain momentum. While these “wins” are limited in scope, they are high-priority, not peripheral, elements of organization performance. Early wins are critical for motivating staff and disempowering naysayers.

At Continental, Bethune and Brenneman initially focused on what Brenneman calls “the customers in seat 9C, the business travelers who book the aisle seats in the front of the plane. They pay full fare, and they travel a lot.” To win these customers back, Continental launched a massive effort to refurbish airplanes inside and out, recarpet their terminals, and upgrade food service, all in six months rather than the four years originally estimated.

These changes might seem merely cosmetic. But in fact they addressed a major concern of the customers most important to the airline’s success. And the upgrades built positive momentum for further change. As Brenneman recalls, employees “could see senior management finally taking the actions they knew had been needed for years.” For a demoralized organization, this kind of mission-focused early win is vital to convincing the team that it can in fact be successful.

At NYPD, Bratton initially launched an effort to crack down on minor offenders. While their offenses weren’t the city’s biggest crime issues, the effort helped convince skeptical citizens and officers that the police could make a difference.

In schools, early wins must tackle similarly visible goals essential to the learning mission. An elementary school might aim to raise reading scores to within one grade level of year-end goals for 90 percent of 5th graders by the first semester’s end. This is challenging in schools where many children are multiple grade levels behind. But it is achievable, as many cases of high-poverty start-up schools have demonstrated, and a necessary step toward achieving grade-level pass rates at year’s end. All other changes can support this goal. Imagine the impact when teachers realize that the school need never again graduate a class of non-readers.

A district also must focus early wins on student learning to fit the turnaround formula, perhaps by adopting similar goals for one subset of struggling children or a few low-performing schools. To achieve the goals, the district must then tackle barriers blocking success for those students or schools. For example, a district might arrange to provide targeted schools with materials online to work around book shortages or improve dramatically their access to interim assessment data. Such online materials, assessment data, and other changes in district management systems are not themselves “early wins.” They must be used as tools to achieve rapid academic results and convince stakeholders that additional focused change will produce more success.

 

Break Organization Norms

In a failing organization, existing practices contribute to failure. Successful turnaround leaders break rules and norms. Deviating to achieve early wins shows that new action gets new results.

In response to Continental’s financial struggles, an entrenched norm of cost cutting pervaded the organization. As Brenneman explains, the company’s “myopic focus” on costs had led to perverse tactics: skimping on cabin air conditioning and flying more slowly to cut fuel use; removing high-revenue first-class seats to squeeze in more passengers; and eliminating corporate discounts even for the airline’s top customers. Brenneman calls the result a “doom loop. By focusing only on costs, the airline had created a product no one wanted to buy.” Declining revenues sparked more ill-advised cost cutting, such as morale-sapping wage reductions.

When Bethune and Brenneman took over, they pursued strategies that actually increased costs, like the plane and terminal upgrades. The airline started paying employees more, based on performance. For every month the airline finished in the DOT’s top five for on-time arrivals, each employee received $65. The on-time bonuses cost the company $3 million per month, but improving the on-time record boosted overall financials by an estimated $8 to $9 million per month.

Like many large organizations, Continental had accumulated hundreds of regulations. The result was a nine-inch-thick tome known as the “Thou Shalt Not” book. A central part of leadership’s plan was to free employees to do what was needed to solve problems and meet customers’ needs. To make the point, the executives took a copy of the book into the parking lot, soaked it with gasoline, and torched it in front of a crowd of employees.

Bratton, too, made a practice of norm busting. At NYPD, he soon learned that only 5 percent of the budget went to narcotics forces, even though a high percentage of crimes were drug-linked. The reason? An assumption that the department’s top priority was responding to 911 calls, rather than to the kind of long-term, preemptive work done by the narcotics unit. In addition, the narcotics squad worked Monday through Friday, while narcotics activities and related crime soared on weekends. One of Bratton’s early actions was a major reallocation of staff and resources into narcotics, including shifting officers’ time to weekends.

In an elementary school, the leader might bend time-use norms by having teachers provide rolling reading instruction as children arrive on buses in the morning. Rescheduling classroom volunteers into lunch-hour chaperoning could replace lost morning teacher-planning time. This schedule adjustment would add one to three weekly instructional hours per child in many schools.

For districts, delivering individualized reading assessment and instruction to every classroom via technology, for example, would require veering from textbook and technology budgets, as these line items are typically separate. Shifting dollars can ignite turf battles, because budgets are often equated with number of staff positions and job importance of district department leaders. The key is making the learning goal the organization’s clear priority.

Push Rapid-Fire Experimentation

Turnaround leaders press a fast cycle of trying new tactics, discarding failed tactics, and investing more in what works. They resist touting mere progress as ultimate success.

Bratton’s most famous innovation was the introduction of the Compstat system, short for computer statistics, which provided everyone from precinct staff to top brass with detailed statistics and maps showing how patterns of crime and law enforcement actions played out in different places and over time. The system made possible big, department-wide strategic decisions, like the reallocation of resources to narcotics work.

Perhaps more important was the system’s value for precinct commanders as a day-to-day management tool. The Time cover story on Bratton begins with an account of a semiweekly Compstat meeting, in which a precinct commander is grilled about a rise in robberies and his response. New problems demand new strategies, and the Compstat meetings were designed to keep that fast cycle of response-measure-adjust going.

In a school, the leader might redeploy a motivated, technology-capable staff person to provide Compstat-style reports of student-by-student, teacher-by-teacher, grade-by-grade results on mandatory quizzes. This effort would provide the fodder for making changes before semester’s end. Most important, each person and team would receive timely data about the progress of students for whom each is accountable.

In a district, new interim assessment data would provide feedback about what schools, grades, and student subgroups are meeting goals. Slow progress would be a trigger for district organizers to do some problem solving.

Get the Right Staff, Right the Remainder

Successful turnaround leaders typically do not replace all or even most staff at the start, but they often replace some key leaders who help organize and drive change. For remaining staff, change is mandatory, not optional.

At Continental, cleaning house at the top of the organization was a big part of the turnaround. Of 61 officers, Bethune and Brenneman showed 50 the door. Some housecleaning took place at lower levels as well, but an organization with 40,000 employees can’t possibly transform itself by swapping out all of its people.

Continental’s new “people strategy” focused on making dramatic change mandatory for employees already in their positions. When the maintenance department told Brenneman that plane and terminal upgrades, his key “early win,” was a four-year project, Brenneman insisted on his six-month schedule: he’d find someone else to do the work if the maintenance department wasn’t up to the job. As it turns out, the department was up to the job, once it was clear that change was mandatory.

Bratton also mostly replaced leaders, not the rank and file. His “number two” was a veteran officer who knew everyone at headquarters. One of his first jobs was to help Bratton identify members of top staff likely to oppose or seek to undermine his reforms, leading to what Kim and Mauborgne call “a dramatic changing of the guard.” Bratton did replace half of his precinct commanders, but not immediately. The turnover grew out of the Compstat process. As Time wrote in 1996 on Bratton, “Effective precinct commanders…merely get grilled to a medium rare at Compstat. Those who show up unprepared, without coherent strategies to reduce crime, are fried crisp, then stripped of their commands.” Swapping out people was core to Bratton’s approach, but it followed from his turnaround efforts rather than preceding them.

In a school, the total staff replacement advocated by the Clean Slate Club would not be necessary. While not every teacher would be willing and able to do what’s needed, most would rise to the occasion. The rest typically reveal themselves during the “early win” phase and must then be removed.

The most important early staff decision would be the selection of an organizer to drive the action plan. The person might or might not be selected from the current staff and might be given power exceeding the person’s current title and tenure. This individual would ensure, for example, that analysis of student progress and instructional problem solving happened regularly, timed with the quiz schedule.

For a district turnaround, the superintendent would need to tap a trusted leader who could cut through the usual district machinery. This leader’s team would need to include additional organizers who could focus on implementation issues in targeted schools or student populations, and each of these people would need to be accountable for learning success among their assigned students. The superintendent might also replace critical department leaders from the start, making room for team members who can drive change.

Drive Decisions with Open-Air Data

Successful turnaround leaders are focused, fearless data hounds. They choose their initial goals based on rigorous analysis. They report key staff results visibly and often. All staff who participate in decisionmaking are required to share periodic results in open-air sessions, shifting discussions from excuse making and blaming to problem solving.

Again, Bratton’s Compstat meetings are a powerful example. These regular gatherings brought together top brass with all 76 precinct commanders, the police force’s key line managers. At every meeting, one commander took the hot seat, facing questions about the precinct’s performance that emerged from the Compstat data. How was the precinct working to solve the problems the data revealed? Why was performance going down on some key metrics?

The result was what Kim and Mauborgne call “a culture of performance…. An incompetent commander could no longer cover up his failings by blaming…neighboring precincts, because his neighbors were in the room and could respond. By the same token, the meetings gave high achievers a chance to be recognized.” Some commanders used similar tactics within their own precincts, extending the new culture.

Bethune and Brenneman, too, used data to drive change. As they were poised to assume the leadership of Continental, the twosome met over dinner for a week, poring over data and writing down “everything that was wrong with Continental.” The result was a set of some 15 key metrics that the pair decided to track rigorously and publicly over time and compare with those of their competitors. Results on these metrics, good and bad, became the central focus of a massive communications campaign that leadership launched inside and outside the company.

“Using data to drive instruction” has become such a mantra in public education that it’s important to pause here and explain how data strategies in successful turnarounds differ from typical K–12 data systems. The keys are using the right data to drive change and requiring all relevant staff to put their data on display in an open-air forum and then face tough questions (and helpful problem solving). The process helps people improve their practice, but it also transforms the culture.

In a school, staff capable of leading instructional change for learning results would be identified by student progress data. Those not capable of leading or accomplishing instructional change would be identified as well. The progress data would provide the school leader with a guide to the staff changes that would further improve student learning, and the achievement of early goals would help build support for such changes.

In a district, progress reports would enable the leader to evaluate the school-level leaders and district team members responsible for implementing changes by tracking the results achieved for defined groups of students within or across schools. Each of the staff leaders affected would need to be included in regularly scheduled meetings to present their own performance data for discussion.

Lead a Turnaround Campaign

Successful turnaround leaders know that change of any kind is hard and that people resist it for many reasons unrelated to success. Leaders use a consistent combination of motivating and maneuvering tactics that include communicating a positive vision of success; helping staff personally feel the problems customers feel; working through key influencers; and silencing critics with speedy success of early wins, thereby casting vocal naysayers as champions of failure.

Continental’s leadership orchestrated a “forgiveness campaign” to apologize to its unhappy customers. Officers, from the CEO through the vice presidents, divided complaint letters and started placing calls. Each officer took a city served by Continental and contacted travel agents and corporate customers. Saying “sorry” was part of the script, but the other was outlining the airline’s bold plan to fix problems. “We heard our share of shouting,” recalls Brenneman, but he argues that the campaign helped reverse the “doom loop” by convincing many customers that change was happening. Of course, this communication onslaught only worked because leadership had results to show, flowing from its early wins.

According to Kim and Mauborgne, one of Bratton’s specialties was putting managers face to face with the operational problems as a way of convincing them, in ways that no amount of memos, speeches, and PowerPoint presentations could, of the change imperative. As head of the NYC transit police, Bratton had famously battled complacency by requiring all senior managers to ride the subway to work and meetings, including at night, and did so himself.

At NYPD, Bratton hired John Miller, an investigative journalist, to lead his communications efforts, both inside and outside of the force. And he needed all the help he could get. One key “early win,” processing small “quality of life” crimes, was nearly scuttled by court officials who feared these cases would clog the dockets. By allying with the mayor and running a smart media campaign, Bratton framed the issue as make or break for NYC’s future, causing judicial leaders’ concerns to appear selfish and petty. The strategy worked.

In both schools and districts, leaders and their teams would need to analyze the required involvement and likely reaction of all stakeholders: school and district staff, parents, students, unions, and community members. At the start, most stakeholder groups would feel that their power was being reduced as the turnaround leader focused sharply on early-win goals. Leaders would need to communicate clearly how success would affect children’s later learning and work prospects. They would need to find ways for staff to empathize with children experiencing slow or no change. And they would need to identify vocal supporters and work with them to rally others to advocate for change. Most important, the leaders would need to achieve naysayer support or silence by accomplishing early student-learning gains.

The Turnaround Environment

These six key actions recur in story after story of successful turnarounds. But don’t turnaround leaders also need a supportive environment? Yes and no. Some conditions prove to be not that valuable, or even detrimental. Some scholars, for example, conclude that too much money dooms turnaround efforts, by diluting leader attention rather than focusing it on early wins.

One environmental condition is critical. Turnaround leaders need a “big yes,” a clear nod from the top in support of dramatic change, even if it causes discomfort and political fallout. However, there is no evidence that the larger organization needs to be highly effective or in turnaround mode to grant the “big yes” to a unit leader. Indeed, breaking the norms and rules of the status quo to achieve support-winning early victories is what successful turnaround leaders do.

While leaders at both Continental and NYPD had a “big yes” from their ultimate bosses, they were not handed a clean slate. Instead, they faced the same tough environmental conditions plaguing failing schools and districts: tight budgets, deep-seated status quo routines, and tough opposition from organized employees. They turned around their organizations nonetheless.

Enabling School and District Turnarounds

To enable more widespread, successful turnarounds in education, state and district leaders need to focus on two critical policy changes. First, states (particularly governors) need to create much more political will to try turnarounds at the district level and to retry when some inevitably fail. They can only do this by developing much more capacity, in-house or through contractors, to take charge of failing schools when districts don’t act.

Second, states and districts could do much more to fuel the pipeline of K–12 turnaround leaders. One key step is to open the door to noneducation leaders with turnaround competencies, induce them to take the job, and invest to equip them with the education know-how they need to succeed.

A few states and districts, such as Chicago, the District of Columbia, and Louisiana, are attempting real turnarounds. Related efforts, such as New Leaders for New Schools and the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program, are underway to help more turnaround leaders succeed. Mass Insight Education has launched a national campaign to encourage state leaders to play a more active role.

All of these initiatives are promising. And the good news is they don’t have to start from scratch. From Continental Airlines to NYPD to countless others, turnarounds have happened with dramatic results. Turnarounds can happen in education, too.

Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel are codirectors of Public Impact, a national education policy and management firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Their earlier work on this topic includes School Turnarounds: A Review of Cross-Sector Evidence on Dramatic Organizational Improvement (Center on Innovation and Improvement, 2007), and Julie Kowal and Emily Ayscue Hassel, Turnarounds with New Leaders and Staff (Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement, 2005).

The post The Big U-Turn appeared first on Education Next.

To receive a standard state certification in most states, prospective teachers not only must be college graduates but also must have taken a specific set of education-related courses that comprise approximately 30 credit hours of coursework. Prospective teachers are well advised to pursue studies at a college or university within the state where they expect to teach, because it is often only within that state that students can get the courses required for state certification in the subject area and for the grade levels that they will be teaching.

Such certification requirements limit the supply of certified teachers, and as a result, serious teaching shortages are regularly observed. For example, in California, one-third of the entire teacher work force, about 100,000 teachers, will retire over the next decade and need to be replaced, compounding what the governor’s office calls a “severe” current teacher shortage. Other states are facing a similar situation. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics projects a shortfall of 280,000 qualified math and science teachers by 2015. As former National Education Association president Reg Weaver put it, “At the start of every school year, we read in the newspaper…stories about schools scrambling to hire teachers.”

Teachers of minority background are in especially short supply. In 2004, only 14.1 percent of the nation’s teachers were African American or Hispanic, even though these ethnic groups comprised 26.5 percent of the adult population. That shortage has led to calls for remedial action. In the words of Weaver, “An impressive body of research confirms that recruiting and retaining more minority teachers can be crucial to” raising the achievement of minority students. “States and school districts need to develop programs…[that] reach out to minorities still in school, offering encouragement and incentives to enter the teaching profession. We need more minority teachers. School districts need to aggressively recruit them.”

The Certification Debate

Both colleges of education and teachers unions oppose any relaxation of certification requirements. In Weaver’s view, “The solution is not to develop alternative routes of entry into the profession or to increase the supply of recruits by allowing prospective teachers to skip ‘burdensome’ education courses or student teaching. The solution is to show a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and show us the money.”

According to this point of view, certification is necessary to ensure teacher quality, because teaching, like other professions (law, medicine, the sciences, and so forth), requires mastery of an esoteric body of substantive and pedagogical knowledge that cannot be obtained without undergoing a rigorous training program. Arthur Wise, former head of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, “Rigorous teacher preparation is key to ensuring that no child is left behind…. Content knowledge is only one indicator of readiness to teach…. [Schools of education] must prepare new teachers to teach the great diversity of students who are in America’s classrooms today.”

But Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, says that the “certification process” has only a “crude capacity for ensuring” quality teachers, because pedagogical “knowledge can be acquired by means other than coursework.” Teachers learn to teach by practicing the craft, not by taking coursework in its history or psychology. If that is so, then both the teaching shortage and the paucity of minority teachers can be alleviated by opening the classroom door to all college graduates, not just to those who have taken the required courses associated with state certification.

Although no state has abandoned its traditional certification programs in response to calls for broader recruitment paths into education, all but three states have set up some kind of alternative certification pathway, and the number of alternatively certified teachers has steadily grown. In 2001, just 20,000 alternative teaching certificates were issued. By 2006, nearly 60,000 alternatively certified teachers were entering the teaching force each year, roughly one-fifth of new entrants (see Figure 1).

In many states, however, the alternative certification requirements closely resemble traditional ones. As Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (and Education Next senior editor), explains, “Typical alternative certification programs have come to mimic standard-issue pre-service college of education programs…. Alternative certification has been co-opted, compromised, and diluted. Education schools—brilliantly turning a threat into an opportunity—have themselves come to dominate this enterprise, blurring the distinctions that once made it ‘alternative.’”

Symbolic vs. Genuine Alternatives

To see which states have established genuine alternative certification programs and which have only symbolic ones of the kind described by Finn, we compared alternative certification rules to requirements for traditional certification in each state. We obtained information from state web sites as well as from publications available for prospective teachers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. When necessary, we contacted relevant officials in state departments of education (see sidebar with Table 1).

Our research revealed that the design of alternative certification programs varies considerably from one state to the next. In 26 of the 47 states that allow alternative certification, the situation is as Finn describes, similar to standard-issue education school programs. But in the other 21 states, alternative teacher certification can be obtained without completion of most of the coursework associated with traditional certification (though the states may require additional coursework after a teacher secures a classroom position).

The variation in state practice allows us to provide some preliminary answers to questions frequently raised about alternative certification: Do states that provide a genuine alternative, not simply a symbolic one, recruit more teachers who take the alternative certification route? Do they open the classroom door to more minority teachers? What is the impact on student learning?

The answer to the first question is very clear: it makes a good deal of difference whether alternative certification is meaningful or symbolic. In the 30 states that do not have genuine alternative certification, only 5 percent of the newly certified teachers chose the alternative route in 2004–05 (the most recent year for which information is available). Hardly anyone bothers with an alternative certificate if the requirements are essentially the same as for the traditional one. In the 21 states that offer genuine alternative certification, however, 28 percent of newly certified teachers utilize the option (see Figure 2). Altogether, 92 percent of those with an alternative teaching certificate received it in one of the 21 states that have such certification in reality as well as in name.

Minority Representation

To the second question, there is also a fairly clear answer: minorities are represented in the teaching force to a greater extent in states with genuine alternative certification than in other states. Information on the number of minority teachers in each state is available from the Office for Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Education. Together with census data, that information allows for the calculation of the ratio of minority teachers to minority adults for each state, which serves as an index of minority representation. If the index for a given state has a value of 1.0, then the percentage of minority teachers equals the percentage of minority adults in that state. If the index exceeds 1.0, then minorities are overrepresented in the teaching population; if the index is below 1.0, minorities areunderrepresented.

In 2004 (the most recent year for which data are available) minority teachers were seriously underrepresented in the nation’s public school classrooms. The nationwide ratio in 2004 was 0.53, which means that only a little more than half as many minority adults were teachers as one would expect, given the minority composition of the adult population.

The index of minority representation was nonetheless considerably higher in the 21 states with genuine alternative certification than in the 30 states with a symbolic substitute or no alternative certification (see Table 1). In the states with genuine alternative certification, the weighted average index of representation was 0.6, while in the states with a symbolic substitute or no alternative certification, the index was 0.2. In the three genuine alternative certification states with the largest total populations (California, Texas, and Florida), the index of representation was 0.56, 0.68, and 0.72, respectively, while in the three largest states with a merely symbolic or no alternative certification option (New York, Illinois, and Ohio), the index of representation was 0.38, 0.33, and 0.51, respectively. In other words, genuine alternative certification seems to give minority adults interested in a career in education greater opportunity to become a teacher.

Of course, minority teachers may be recruited by avenues other than alternative certification. Sixteen states report the ethnic background of alternatively certified teachers to the U.S. Department of Education. In 14 of them, the percentage minority for those alternatively certified exceeds by a wide margin the percentage minority of the state’s teaching force as a whole. In Mississippi, for example, the disparities are massive: 60 percent of the more than 800 teachers who were alternatively certified in 2004–05 were of minority background, while the overall Mississippi teaching force is just 26 percent minority. Other states where percentage differences between the two groups exceed at least 10 percentage points include California, Delaware, and Texas. In other words, there is every reason to believe that alternative certification is key to recruiting more minorities into the teaching profession.

Impact on Student Learning

But is alternative certification, however desirable a device for recruiting minorities into the teaching profession, impairing student learning? That is ultimately the justification for traditional teacher certification, regardless of its consequences for teacher shortages or for the recruitment of minority teachers. And that apparently is the rationale for those who interpret the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act as requiring a certified teacher in every classroom, the basis for the complaint in the California case Renee v. Spellings. That suit objects to the presence in classrooms of teachers who have not received traditional certification.

Most studies show very little, if any, connection with a teacher’s classroom effectiveness and certification status. Harvard economist Thomas Kane and his colleagues (see “Photo Finish,” research, Winter 2007) found no difference between the amount of learning taking place in New York City classrooms under the direction of non-certified teachers and in those under the direction of regularly certified ones.

Nor is there convincing evidence that minority teachers are less effective at teaching minority students. On the contrary, the results from an experiment conducted in Tennessee (see “The Race Connection,” research, Spring 2004) indicate that minority students learn more from teachers of their own ethnicity than from other teachers.

Our results are consistent with that research and other studies that have found little reason to equate certification with “highly qualified.” Students attending schools in states with genuine alternative certification gained more on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between 2003 and 2007 than did students in the other states. The finding holds, even when one adjusts for changes in the ethnic composition, free-lunch eligibility,class size, and education expenditures for each state (see Figure 3).

In states that had genuine alternative certification, test-score gains on the NAEP exceeded those in the other states by 4.8 points and 7.6 points in 4th- and 8th-grade math, respectively. In reading, the additional gains in the states with genuine alternative certification were 10.6 points and 3.9 points for the two grade levels, respectively. Among African Americans, test-score gains were also larger in the states with genuine alternative certification.

It is possible that the disproportionately large gains in test-score performance in the states with genuine alternative certification were due to some other factor, possibly other education reforms those states were introducing at the same time they were widening the door to the teaching profession. We cannot dismiss this possibility, inasmuch as we were able to control only for changes in certain demographic and policy variables, not for changes in other state policies that might explain the difference in test-score gains among states.

But the burden of proof would now seem to shift to the plaintiffs in the Renee v. Spellings case, who argue that traditional state certification is necessary to ensure teacher quality. Genuine alternative certification opens the door to more minority teachers, and student learning is more rapid in states where the reform has been introduced. Meanwhile, scientific evidence that alternative certification harms students remains somewhere between scant and nonexistent.

–Paul E. Peterson, director of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), is editor-in-chief of Education Next. Daniel Nadler is a PEPG research associate.

The post What Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification? appeared first on Education Next.

The post School Choice International appeared first on Education Next.

As an educator today, I draw on the writings of University of Washington political science and education professor Walter Parker, who has noted that “engaged citizens do not materialize out of thin air. They do not naturally grasp such knotty principles as tolerance, impartial justice, the separation of church and state, the needs for limits on majority power, or the difference between liberty and license.” If our students are to understand the pressing issues of the day, they must be exposed to myriad viewpoints and able to synthesize information from multiple sources.

Forensics challenges students through events in both speech and debate. In the discipline of platform speaking, students select a controversial subject and conduct extensive research before trying to persuade the audience. Competitors in extemporaneous speaking have 30 minutes to prepare a seven-minute response to a question, complete with source citations. Topics the National Federation of State High School Associations developed for extemporaneous speaking contests in 2008 included, Should public schools be allowed to segregate along gender lines? Should phone companies that aided in illegal wiretaps by the government be immune from prosecution? Should China relax its one-child policy?

In competitive debates, students do not choose which side they will defend. Most tournaments involve switch-sides competition, in which debaters defend the proposition (affirmative) and opposition (negative) sides an equal number of times. To prepare, student competitors must look at the issue through a nonpartisan lens or from multiple perspectives, thereby gaining a deep understanding of issues that confront our national (and world) leaders. Over several years of teaching and coaching debate, I have witnessed students shift their views on a host of topics as a result of their debate experience. Most often, they grow to acknowledge, accept, and empathize with those who hold opinions contrary to their own.

Students who hope to succeed in forensics must possess wide-ranging knowledge of current issues. It is not uncommon to catch my students reading from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Political Science Quarterly, not to mention pocket copies of the Constitution, Common Sense, and inspirational books of quotations.

A few years ago, while driving home from work in Alaska, I received a call from a former student who was at a tournament in Florida. At the time, students commonly used Foucault’s writings to argue against federal action to alleviate the harms of the status quo. As the student launched into a description of how an opposing team had presented a unique twist on Foucault, I thought, “Man, I don’t know how I would answer that.” Before I had a chance to respond, he blurted out, “It was sweet. Do you know what we did?” He then explained how he drew on his understanding of readings from social ecologists, professors of intercultural communication, and John Stuart Mill to develop his own criticism of Foucault’s thoughts on power, knowledge, and discourse. The tournament judge commended both teams for developing new takes on a common argument.

Whether forensics is a mainstay in the curriculum, an extracurricular club, or used occasionally by teachers in the classroom, it has the power to inspire students to learn and to help them grasp the concepts we aim to instill.

Shawn Briscoe is debate coach and adjunct professor in the Department of Communication and Discourse Studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage and coaches speech and debate at South Anchorage High School.

The post Intellectual Combat appeared first on Education Next.

Though parents and tutors have been teaching children in the home for centuries, in the late 1960s and 1970s there emerged for the first time in the United States a political movement that adopted this practice as a radical, countercultural critique of the public education system. Conservatives who felt the public schools had sold out to secularism and progressivism joined with progressives who felt the public schools were bastions of conservative conformity to challenge the notion that all children should attend them. By the early 1990s they had won the right to home school in every state. Some home-school advocacy groups have attempted to secure a federal law or Supreme Court ruling that would establish uniform national guidelines grounded in First or Fourteenth Amendment rights, but to date such efforts have failed (to the great relief of home-school advocacy groups that oppose this strategy). Home schooling thus falls under state law, and these laws vary widely. A complex matrix of specific statutory language and judicial interpretations emerged out of the maelstrom of political activism over the issue that started in the late 1970s. In Indiana and Michigan, for example, there are virtually no restrictions on home schoolers and very little accountability to government. Home-schooling parents are not even required to register. In Pennsylvania and New York, state agencies oversee and regulate home schooling in a number of ways, from curricular requirements to parental qualifications to mandatory home visits by certified personnel to obligatory standardized testing.

By the 21st century, state laws were well established and uncontested, though nearly every year state legislators or judges, especially in the most permissive states, seek to increase regulations on home-schooling families in the name of accountability. Such initiatives nearly always fail due to the astonishing grass-roots organization and political mobilization of home schoolers. The most recent challenge to home schooling arose when a California court cited a 1929 state law that ostensibly requires home tutors to be state-certified. After several months of protests and concomitant uncertainty for the 160,000 home-schooled children in the state, the court reversed the ruling to permit home schooling as a “species of private school education” and came surprisingly close to finding in the federal Constitution a right to home school.

Reliable nationwide numbers are difficult to obtain, but the National Center for Education Statistics estimates that from 1999 to 2003 the number of home-schooled children increased from around 850,000 to roughly 1.1 million, a 29 percent jump in four years. Movement leaders suggest even higher estimates of around 2 to 2.5 million children currently being home schooled. Some states keep their own figures. Virginia had 3,816 registered home schoolers in 1990. By 2007 the number had grown to 20,694. Maryland saw similar growth, from 2,296 in 1990 to 24,227 in 2006.

After three decades of explosive growth, the rate of increase in home schooling has begun to slow somewhat, and home-schooling rates are even declining a bit in some states. In Pennsylvania, there were 24,415 reported home schoolers in 2002, the largest figure the state had ever seen. But in 2003 the number of registered home schoolers dropped to 24,076. In 2004 it declined again to 23,287, a decrease of 3.3 percent from the previous year.

Among the possible explanations for declines in home schooling is the increased use of home-based public charter schools, often called “cybercharters” because of their extensive use of online curricula, by families that had previously been home schooling independently. Home schooling is blending with other education movements to lead the way toward a 21st-century education matrix that is far more dynamic and adaptive than the schooling patterns of the past.

The New Home Schoolers

Survey research has revealed a heterogeneous population of home schoolers and higher rates of minority home schooling than expected. Economist Guillermo Montes’s analysis of data from the massive 2001 National Household Education Survey found that 70 percent of respondents cited a nonreligious reason as the top motivator in their decision to home school. Home schoolers whose motivations are primarily religious have certainly not gone away, but they are now joined by those whose reasons range from concerns about special education to bad experiences with teachers or school bullies to time-consuming outside activities to worries over peanut allergies (see Figure 1).

Increasing participation in home schooling among African Americans has drawn media attention in recent years. The U.S. Department of Education estimated that by 2003 there were 103,000 black home schoolers (see Figure 2). Nonprofits, including the Children’s Scholarship Fund, founded in 1998, have provided vouchers to help low-income families afford private schools, and some are using the money to home school. Several nationwide support groups have been formed by African Americans to build momentum; the newest and largest is the National African-American Homeschoolers Alliance, cofounded in 2003 by Jennifer James. By 2006 the organization had 3,000 members. James learned of home schooling by watching the success of home schoolers at the Scripps National Spelling Bee and embraced it for her family. “Families are running out of options,” James told the St. Petersburg Times in 2005. “There’s this persistent achievement gap, and a lot of black children are doing so poorly in traditional schools that parents are looking for alternatives.” Home schooling is becoming the method of choice for many, and as such “the Black homeschool movement is growing at a faster rate than the general homeschool population,” according to J. Michael Smith, president and cofounder of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the nation’s most powerful home-school advocacy organization.

Growth in home schooling can be spotted among other ethnic and religious groups as well. Native Americans in Virginia and North Carolina have founded home-school organizations in an effort to escape assimilationist public schools and preserve their traditional values. Hawaiian natives have found home schooling to be the solution to the gulf between tribal ways and public education. Jews, especially those who follow the Orthodox tradition, have been home schooling in much greater numbers in recent years. While Roman Catholic families have long had a presence in the home-schooling world with such institutions as the Virginia-based Seton Home Study School (founded in 1980), recent years have seen an explosion in Catholic home schooling and resources. Islamic home schooling has also grown rapidly, especially since 9/11, largely because “the public school system is not accommodating to Muslims,” in the words of Fatima Saleem, founder of the Palmetto Muslim Homeschool Resource Network.

Large numbers of parents whose children have diagnosed learning disabilities have pulled them from local schools, believing they can do a better job teaching them at home. Increasing numbers of wealthy Americans are hiring private tutors for their children. The U.S. Department of Education estimated that in 2003, 21 percent of home schoolers were being taught this way. Business Week editor Michelle Conlin explained the appeal of home education to “creative-class parents” as an outgrowth of the “spread of the post-geographic workstyle” and “flex-time economy.”

A final group of home schoolers that should be mentioned is children involved in sports requiring rigorous training, acting and modeling, demanding arts or music programs, and other time-intensive activities. In motocross, where an elite-level 13-year-old can earn over $100,000 a year, 90 percent of minors are either home schooled or dropouts. Circe Wallace, a retired snowboarder turned action-sport agent, remarked in 2006, “I’ve been in this business 15 years, and it’s always been those with parents that understand the freedom and flexibility of home schooling that go the furthest.” Orange County gymnast Katy Nogaki was 11 years old when she told a reporter, “my coaches…said if I home schooled, I could come to the gym early and I could get really far in gymnastics …. When I was in regular school, I wasn’t as good, but when I was home schooled, I got state champion.”

Many of the new breed of home-schooling parents, even if they do not become dues-paying members of home-schooling political organizations, still need help with pedagogical or curricular decisions, playmates for their children and companionship for themselves, and opportunities to get out of the house for a while. Home-school support groups can serve as remarkably diverse social networks. In a National Home Education Network online forum, Pam Sorooshian described her Southern California group:

My homeschooling group includes Moslem, Jewish, Quaker, Baptist, Messianic Jews, Pagan, Baha’i, atheist, agnostic, Catholic, unity, evangelicals, other Protestant denominations, and probably more. We have African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Middle Easterners, and other minorities. We have stay-at-home dads and single mothers. We are FAR more diverse than the neighborhood school I pulled my oldest child out of 10 years ago.

In short, home education is now being done by so many different kinds of people for so many different reasons that it no longer makes much sense to speak of it as a political movement or even a set of movements. Make no mistake: the veteran political movement is still going strong, as legislatures that attempt to increase regulations quickly discover. For a growing number of Americans, however, home schooling is just one option among many to consider, for a few months or for the entirety of a child’s schooling.

New Home Schooling in Practice

Home-schooling families of the 1980s and 1990s fell somewhere along a continuum of pedagogical practice bounded on the left with “unschooling,” a word coined by educator John Holt to describe the liberation of children from adult-imposed constraints on their learning. Unschoolers had no formal curriculum, no tests, grades, schedules, or benchmarks. Instead, children were free to do as they please with the parent serving largely as a facilitator of the child’s individual growth and development. On the righthand side of the continuum was the formal “school in a box” approach whereby a parent purchased a full year’s worth of textbooks, worksheets, tests, and assignments and attempted to reproduce in the home the same basic pedagogical strategies practiced in most schools. Not surprisingly, progressive types leaned toward unschooling and conservative Protestants trended toward formal curricula, usually provided by fundamentalist private schools, the most popular being A Beka Book, Bob Jones Complete, and Christian Liberty Academy Satellite Schools.

While some families began on one side of the continuum and stayed there, most gradually incorporated something from both approaches. The most typical progression according to a 1999 study by Karen Rogers Holinga was from complete dependence on a prefabricated curriculum in the first year of home schooling to a more flexible, eclectic orientation by the third. Nevertheless, since the great majority of home schoolers in the 1980s and 1990s were conservative Protestants, Christian presses did a brisk business selling textbooks and other material to them, at huge annual conventions attended by thousands, at local Christian bookstores, and, increasingly, over the Internet.

Home schoolers have for some time been creating hybrids that blend elements of formal schooling into the usual pattern of a mother teaching her own children at home (see Figure 3). One of the simplest hybrids is the “Mom School.” Pioneer Utah home schooler Joyce Kinmont explains, “a Mom School happens when a mother is home schooling a child who wants to do something that can be done best in a group, so she invites other home-schooling families to join her. The mom is the teacher.” Related but slightly different is the home-school cooperative, wherein a group of mothers (and sometimes fathers) pool their expertise, each teaching a subject she knows well to all the children in the group. Sometimes such co-ops are held in the homes of respective group members, but often they meet in area churches or other buildings.

The most successful and developed cooperatives begin to look quite a bit like schools, with an adult teacher in the front lecturing to rows of students sitting quietly at desks, sometimes hiring experts to teach advanced subjects like calculus, foreign languages, or physics. Others carry a more free-flowing pedagogy into the new setting. North Star, a Massachusetts cooperative billing itself as “self directed learning for teens,” was formed in 1996 by two disgruntled public school teachers. At North Star, no attendance is taken, no grades or evaluations offered. Students learn about whatever they want. In 2006, students asked for and got tutoring in Greek mythology, historical interpretation, Shakespeare, prime numbers, martial arts, culture and belief, electronic music, dance, historical fiction, and much more. Most students engage in apprenticeships and internships in the local community. Though the graduates receive no transcript or degree, a 2006 Teacher Magazine article reported that 49 percent of alumni had been accepted to college and 49 percent had secured full- or part-time jobs.

While large numbers of home-schooled kids transition to traditional schools in their teen years, home schooling for older children is a high-growth market, and there has been an explosion in innovative programs for them. Home schoolers have challenged and are increasingly overturning laws barring them from participation in high school sports and other extracurricular activities offered by public schools. Journalist Peter Beinart found that Wichita’s 1,500 home-schooling families had created “three bands, a choir, a bowling group, a math club, a 4-H Club, boy- and girl-scout troops, a debate team, a yearly musical, two libraries and a cap-and-gown graduation.” “Home-schooled” children were meeting in warehouses or business centers for classes “in algebra, English, science, swimming, accounting, sewing, public speaking, and Tae Kwan Do.”

Many with roots in conservative Protestantism have had trouble adjusting to the more worldly culture that often accompanies cooperatives, especially ambitious endeavors like sports leagues and orchestras. Disagreements over “what kinds of uniforms are appropriate for home-school cheerleaders and whether rock music may be played at home-school events” are not uncommon, says Beinart, as lifelong home schoolers rub shoulders with families fresh from the public schools.

Blurred Boundaries

None of the small-scale culture skirmishes begin to match the controversy generated by the growing popularity of government-sponsored initiatives for home schoolers, however. Many public school districts, having lost the fight to criminalize home schooling, now openly court home schoolers. School districts around the country are experimenting with programs that allow students to home school for part of the day but take certain classes at the local public school.

School districts with high rates of home schooling have seen significant drops in funding, tied as it is to per-pupil enrollment. The Maricopa County school district in Arizona, for example, had by the year 2000 lost $34 million due to the exodus of 7,526 home schoolers. In an effort to win some of them back, the district began offering à la carte services through satellite campuses at strip malls and other locations. Home schoolers there have attended weekly enrichment classes in such subjects as sign language, art, karate, and modern dance. The district receives one-quarter of each pupil’s government allocation for every student it enrolls in one of the classes. The state of Washington has been a national leader in establishing such partnerships. At the Homeschool Resource Center operated by the Seattle Public School District, home-schooled children can choose from a rotating menu of classes or just stop by to use the computer center or library.

The College Board has seen a dramatic rise in home schoolers who take Advanced Placement tests. Some 410 home-schooled students took them in 2000, while 1,282 did so in 2005. Home-schooling diploma services have multiplied across the country, as have honor societies like the Houston-based Eta Sigma Alpha. Many states have begun to extend to home schoolers the popular dual-enrollment programs (sometimes called “Running Start”) that allow high-school students to enroll for free in classes at local colleges. Florida and Washington are perhaps the national leaders in establishing such programs, but other states are warming to the possibility.

Not surprisingly, all of this innovation and experimentation at the secondary level has led to a dramatic rise in applications to institutions of higher education by students without a traditional high-school background. In 1986, 90 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities had no explicit home-schooling admissions policy. A 2004 study by Paul Jones and Gene Gloeckner found that by that year, over 75 percent of the institutions did, and that the majority of admissions officers surveyed had very positive feelings about home-schooled applicants. Another 2004 study by Sean Callaway of Pace University, of the home-school admissions policies of 72 colleges and universities and the performance of home-schooled students who were enrolled, found that home schoolers were generally happy with the way they were evaluated and universities were happy with the performance and graduation rates of the home schoolers they admitted.

Virtual Schools

Among the most innovative and successful of the public-private hybrids is the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), founded in 1997 and operated by the Florida Department of Education. It partners with all 67 Florida school districts to bring a complete high-school curriculum moderated by certified teachers to the homes of residents across the state, many of whom live on isolated produce farms or ranches. In the 2006–07 school year, more than 52,000 students were enrolled in FLVS. By 2006, 21 other states and several local districts had begun similar programs, both to service homebound or other special-needs students and as an effort to lure home schoolers (and the tax dollars they represent) back into the public education system.

More provocative have been online schools founded by private companies that have taken advantage of charter school laws in various states to make their services available for free to home schoolers. California was an early innovator, with virtual charter schools opening shortly after the Charter Schools Act was passed in 1992. By 2001 the state had 93 cybercharters serving more than 30,000 students, which meant that over $200 million of California’s public school budget was being paid to private firms offering home-school curricula and technology. After it became clear that some of these outfits were making scandalous profits by offering minimal services, California legislators passed SB 740, which imposed strict financial guidelines on cybercharters, including a requirement that they spend at least 50 percent of public revenues on salaries and benefits to state-certified teachers. The law also set limits on pupil-teacher ratios, required more expansive record keeping, and imposed strict penalties for failing to meet these and other standards.

By 2006, 18 states had a combined total of 147 virtual charter schools educating over 65,000 students. Many cybercharters have faced growing pains similar to those seen in California. The Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School (WPCCS) opened its virtual doors in the fall of 2000 as Pennsylvania’s second cybercharter and the first to offer its services across district lines. After nine months enrollment topped 1,100. Many school districts, frustrated that they now had to pay an outside organization to educate students in their own districts, many of whom had not even attended public schools before, simply stopped making payments, causing WPCCS to lose nearly $1 million in 2001. The Pennsylvania Department of Education responded by withholding $850,000 in state aid from 60 districts, sending the money directly to WPCCS. Lawsuits were filed by 23 districts, and in May of 2001 senior judge Warren Morgan ruled against the school districts. That did not stop complaints about WPCCS and several other cybercharters. In 2002 the state legislature passed Act 88, shifting authorization of cybercharters from local districts to the state department of education and setting more rigorous requirements and accountability measures. Despite increased scrutiny, virtual charters have continued to grow. By 2008 WPCCS, now called PA Cyber, was employing 500 people to educate 8,500 students on a $60 million budget.

For-profit cybercharters have many enemies. Many politicians and public school advocates agree with Democratic Rep. Patrick Rose of the Texas state legislature that “we ought not be in the business of supporting for-profit education. Any program that takes money out of our public schools would be against our better judgment.” Profits have indeed been sweet for many cybercharters, operating as they do without extensive facilities and support staff, though advocates always stress the cost of developing curriculum, advertising, and computer networks, as well as of high turnover rates. Cybercharter advocates and entrepreneurs are not surprised at the criticism (and lawsuits, nearly all of which have been unsuccessful) they have been handed from public school districts, Democratic legislators resistant to educational choice initiatives, and teachers unions. What has taken them off-guard, however, is the vocal and bitter opposition among many leaders in the home-schooling community. Right- and left-wing home-schooling leaders have set aside long-standing grudges to unite in protest of virtual schools. In 2003, dozens of home-school leaders from a wide range of ideological positions signed a resolution condemning virtual charter schools called “We Stand for Homeschooling.” The Home School Legal Defense Association did not sign the statement but has heaped condemnation on cybercharters. Elizabeth Smith, wife of HSLDA’s president, in a 2007 address urged her audience of Protestant home-school leaders to pray against the “assault of the Enemy” that cybercharters represented: “if we will band together…through prayer…our groups will win.”

Cybercharter backers have had difficulty understanding and responding to such criticism. Ron Packard, founder and CEO of K12, a curriculum provider whose services in 2007 reached over 25,000 students through virtual schools in 16 states and the District of Columbia, has been “shocked” by opposition coming from HSLDA. He told CNSNews.com, “It’s really amazing to me that a group that has fought so hard for its right to home school would oppose someone else’s parents who are fighting for their right to be doing at home a great public school education.” Home-school movement leaders’ reactions do make sense, however. Animus toward government was what bound leftist and conservative Christian home schoolers together in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is what has brought them back together to oppose virtual charters.

For veteran Christian leaders especially, the cybercharter movement has cut in on their business. HSLDA senior counsel Chris Klicka explains how “even in independent-minded states like Idaho and Alaska” Christian home schoolers are enrolling in cybercharters “by the thousands. They are attending government home-school conferences (where Christ or God cannot be mentioned) and receiving the secular, government home-school newsletters. They no longer go to the Christian home-school conventions.” Christian curriculum providers have lost market share as well. Christian home schoolers who would otherwise be purchasing Christian curricula as independent home schoolers now receive nonreligious, government-sanctioned curriculua for free through cybercharters. It is only natural that Christian companies would resent such a move and interpret it as a clandestine effort by the secularist state to destroy them. Despite the united front of opposition, with studies like Carol Klein’s 2006 Virtual Charter Schools and Home Schooling finding high levels of parent satisfaction and student achievement at virtual schools, it is highly unlikely that independent home schoolers and advocates for traditional public schools will be able to stop them.

The increasing diversity of home schoolers and institutional configurations should not obscure the fact that many who home school still choose this option out of frustration with or protest against formal, institution-based schooling and seek to impart an alternative, usually conservative Christian, worldview to their children by teaching them at home. Yet it is also the case that increasing numbers who opt to home school do so as an accessory, hybrid, or temporary stopgap, or out of necessity given their circumstances. It is this newer group of home schoolers who are challenging the historical dichotomies between public and private, school and home, formal and informal that have played such an important role in the movement’s self-definition and in American education policy. Trends toward accommodation, adaptation, and hybridization will likely increase as U.S. education policy seeks to catch up to the sweeping demographic, technological, and economic changes taking place. A movement born in opposition to public schools ironically might offer public education its most promising reform paradigm for the 21st century.

Milton Gaither is associate professor of education at Messiah College and author of Homeschool: An American History, from which this article was adapted. His blog reviewing recent research on home schooling can be found at gaither.wordpress.com.

The post Home Schooling Goes Mainstream appeared first on Education Next.

Two education bills from George W. Bush’s first term are long overdue for reauthorization. One, of course, is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in late 2001. The other is the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), which in November 2002 replaced the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) with a new Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

The first bill is already iconic: a Lexis-Nexis search covering NCLB since its passage quickly overloads and shuts itself down. No such difficulties, however, hamper a hunt for stories about IES. Half of the meager fourscore hits produced by the agency’s title turn out to be for a similarly named organization in Angola. Searching instead for IES director Grover “Russ” Whitehurst only confirms that many high school sports teams have a Whitehurst on the roster. It seems safe to say that IES is operating well under the radar of mainstream media attention.

But as the organization responsible for putting the “scientifically based” in the scientifically based research mandated by NCLB—not to mention the home of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—IES deserves attention in its own right. With Whitehurst moving to the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution after his term expires this month, and as drafts for IES reauthorization begin to make the Beltway rounds, it is time to assess the contribution of IES to the history of federal education research and look ahead to its future.

At best, education research is hard to do well: it studies a field in which all else is too rarely equal, one often driven not by facts but by values and aspiration. “Scientific” study of education at the federal level is thus a difficult mission. Achieving it has been made harder still by the inability of a succession of research agencies to withstand pressures to politicize or gain significant funding. Lawmakers constantly tout the virtues of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) when discussing what they want from education research, but they have just as constantly failed to endow that vision with either firewalls or cash.

IES, however, has a structure that heightens its autonomy from political interference. Whitehurst has used the opening provided to promote a new culture of favored research that, while sometimes narrow in methodological scope, has changed the conversation in the research community about rigor and relevance—and thus changed, at least at the margins, the research enterprise itself.

Still, has education research managed to move from tracing a vicious circle to a virtuous one? With new sets of policymakers—in the White House, Congress, and IES itself—taking office after the 2008 elections, the real tests may be yet to come.

Truth vs. Partisanship

President Hoover’s 1931 advisory committee on education grandly proclaimed the battle of “Truth vs. Partisanship.” Education policy “cannot hope to rise above partisanship,” it argued, “…unless mere differences of opinion, tenaciously held, are dissolved by revelations of pertinent facts established by scientific method and presented in understandable terms.” The Hoover committee thus summed up two truths about federal education research. First, rhetoric elevating the methodical quest for the scientific truths underlying education and its outcomes would echo repeatedly throughout the decades that followed. Second, its reality would fall far short. Even though a desire to collate and diffuse “statistics and facts” about education motivated the creation in 1867 of the earliest national department of education, research neither before Hoover nor since has ever achieved the status his advisors envisioned.

Indeed, at the turn of the 19th century, the first Office of Education (OE), by virtue of its placement in the Interior Department, spent more effort administering the breeding of Alaskan reindeer than driving or disseminating education research. (The reindeer would depart for greener bureaucratic pastures in 1907.) Periodic efforts to bolster OE’s clout did not take hold until after World War II. The faith in scientific research inspired by the war, afterward institutionalized in the likes of the NSF and the NIH, soon spread to education. In the 1960s, a series of research-and-development centers and then regional educational laboratories was rapidly established. But soon a grander proposal was in play—a plan, as Lee Sproull and her coauthors describe in Organizing an Anarchy, born “out of frustration with the failure of OE and belief in the power of scientific research.” The driving force was Nixon aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had realized (he wrote in 1969) that “almost nothing is known about education.” OE had inadequate resources or autonomy to do much about this, and Moynihan convinced the president to seek creation of a powerful independent research organization. Nixon’s subsequent message to Congress stressed the application of “science…to the techniques of teaching” and outlined an independent National Institute of Education (NIE) that would hire a “permanent staff of outstanding scholars” from across the sciences, contract with other researchers, and serve as “a focus for educational research and experimentation.” As such, the president anticipated a quarter-billion-dollar annual appropriation. The Budget Bureau’s Emerson Elliott, who became acting director of NIE, says it aimed even higher: “it was formulated by Moynihan as a billion dollar agency.”

Things didn’t work out that way. Michael Timpane, NIE director in the Carter administration, later said the agency “inherited at best a mixed bag of research projects, was slow to organize, inexpert at explaining itself, and soon fell from political grace.” As an indicator of the latter plunge, consider that Nixon’s $250 million agency netted $70 million in fiscal 1975 and barely $50 million 10 years later. Across 13 years NIE had six directors plus five acting directors, and was subject to constant reorganization and political intrusion. President Reagan fired its entire advisory board, despite its members’ statutory fixed terms, and his first director was most noted for decrying the “false” premise “that education is a science, whose progress depends on systematic research…”

In 1985, however, Secretary of Education William Bennett merged NIE and NCES into OERI. OERI head Chester Finn, as an aide to Moynihan, had helped create NIE; now he helped put it out of its misery.

Finn’s greatest success was in revamping NCES as an authoritative source for neutral data (see “Troublemaker,” features, Spring 2008). But the labs and centers, with which Finn waged war over earmarking, returned those attacks with political interest. And over time, the OERI suffered from some of the same problems as NIE. It had frequent changes of leadership; new monies it received were encumbered by new duties. The agency remained politically permeable and legislatively micromanaged.

On cue, the rhetorical cycle began again: OERI needed to be “depoliticized,” Rep. Major Owens (D-New York) argued in 1991, “so that… research activities can gain the kinds of credibility and support they merit.” Owens favored the restoration of a powerful independent policy board; others, gazing at the NSF/NIH grail, wanted to organize around distinct “institutes” within the agency, each focused on a different educational ill. Five of these were ultimately created, but not supported. Bush OERI director Christopher Cross argued that the institutes would need $50 million—each. But funding in fiscal year 1996 totaled just $43 million.

By the time reauthorization came due again, OERI was in trouble. The Clinton administration decision to use OERI to develop and oversee a system of voluntary national tests drew renewed accusations that the agency had been politicized for the president’s policy purposes, and the GOP-led Congress finally forced the issue out of the agency’s jurisdiction; Rep. Michael Castle (R-Delaware) would soon charge OERI with a long list of familiar sins, including “the creeping influence of short-lived partisan or political operatives, the funding and dissemination of questionable studies…and…no real sense of mission, mired by duplicative programs and competing interests.” In the fight between truth and partisanship, partisanship had won yet another round.

The Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002

Unexpectedly, though, as a new iteration of the research function took shape, what political scientist Terry Moe calls “the politics of bureaucratic structure” actually worked to promote agency insulation. There were various reasons for this, among them the fruitful foray into the study of reading by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the centrality of such “scientifically based research” in the concurrent debate over the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. President Bush praised ESRA as “an important complement” to NCLB that would “substantially strengthen the scientific basis” of classroom teaching. Likewise, the Democratic legislators so crucial to the passage of NCLB made ESRA bipartisan as well. As research became salient, so did “good” research, and as the congressional debate over education became inseparable from a broad endorsement of “accountability,” an autonomous IES became a marker of members’ commitment to that cause.

Accordingly, Castle’s first draft of ESRA in 2000 envisioned a National Academy for Education Research, Statistics, Evaluation, and Information independent of the Department of Education, run by a director serving a fixed term. Each of its three centers (for research, statistics, and evaluation) would be headed by a presidential appointee also serving a fixed term and under statutory stricture to guarantee that agency activities were “free from ideological agendas and undue political influence.” Intriguingly, what constituted valid research was to be mandated in law. Quantitative hypotheses, for instance, had to be “evaluated using experimental designs in which individuals, entities, programs, or activities are assigned to different conditions with appropriate controls to evaluate the effects of the condition of interest through random assignment experiments, or other designs to the extent such designs contain within-condition or across-condition controls.”

The end product retained key features of this first draft. But a series of changes was made over time. The academy was moved back into the department, becoming the Institute of Education Sciences, but retained its independent director, who gained appointment powers over the centers’ commissioners—except, notably, at NCES. The definition of “scientifically based research standards” for education wound up less proscriptive than in earlier drafts, but still limited causal claims to research designs that could bear their weight. A new advisory board (the National Board for Education Sciences, or NBES) was given formal approval powers over the institute’s long-term research priorities and its mandated strengthened peer-review process. And for the first time, a majority of the board was to be composed of researchers, rather than practitioners or other consumers of research (see Figure 1).

 

The first director of IES, moving over from OERI, was Russ Whitehurst. Whitehurst’s strong academic credentials broadcast his methodological predilections. He came to the Bush administration from the quantitatively minded psychology department at SUNY-Stony Brook with a long scholarly record that included stints editing research journals and serving as academic director of the Merrill-Palmer Institute. Per the mission statement of the latter, IES would be led by someone dedicated to “evidence-based programs and interventions” and the models that probed them.

The First Authorization Cycle

In the fall of 2006, IES received what an Education Week survey termed “mixed, but mostly positive, grades”; and the follow-up here likewise found widespread praise, leavened with caution. All sides agree that the six years since ESRA was passed have been consequential ones for education research.

Fans of IES tend to praise a new sense of agency independence and, not unrelated, a renewed emphasis on scientific rigor. IES has more structural autonomy than its predecessors; and below the surface the agency’s authority is also much improved, former OERI head Kent McGuire says, in ways that are “not sexy but critical.” In one telling shift, the director shot up the bureaucratic ranks to Level II on the executive schedule. That placed the position just one rung beneath the secretary and, by no coincidence, at the same rank as the director of NSF. (Assistant secretaries, by contrast, are normally at Level IV.) The ability to hire personnel outside civil service constraints and to roll funds over multiple fiscal years has been equally helpful. So too has language in ESRA that gives the director explicit authority to prepare and publish research and evaluation reports “without the approval of the Secretary or any other office of the Department.”

Thus if, as Finn argues, “three things matter in Washington, in terms of autonomy: the ability to manage your own money; to manage your own people; and to manage your own words,” IES has made important strides on all three fronts. One insider notes the dramatic contrast between the “most partisan Department of Education I have seen since 1988, and the most independent research and stats agency.”

IES has taken advantage of this independence to drive changes in expectations and values in the research community. The agency’s grant-review process was revamped to one Whitehurst says was “explicitly modeled on NIH,” emphasizing separation of the peer review and contracting processes and requiring agency reports to be peer reviewed before publication. The change in vocabulary has been striking: loud language touting the “rigorous scientific standards” set forth in statute emanates constantly from IES, relentlessly pressing the importance of randomized, controlled trials as the “gold standard” for judging whether and how a given intervention is effective. The online What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) judges “what works” with regard to curricular interventions on this basis alone. Blasted by high-volume endorsements of experimental design, researchers may be forgiven for feeling like Manuel Noriega in his 1989 Panama compound.

Some, of course, are clapping along to that beat; the quantitatively minded choir to which IES could preach has been a growing part of the education research community. But there are many others dubious of what they see as the myopic focus of IES. For them, the IES mantra of “transformation” via “evidence-based intervention” amounts (ironically enough) to a sort of faith-based program, an unrealistically dogmatic view of what should count as research. Instead, they argue, as former OERI head Sharon Robinson puts it, “you have to have a range of methods and rigor in all methodologies” and that an exclusive approach created mistrust in large segments of the education establishment, instead of “enlarging the political army.” Further, Knowledge Alliance’s Jim Kohlmoos argues that “the irony is that as you insulate [the agency]—which is a positive thing, in my opinion—you run the risk of becoming less relevant” to the world of practice. This connection, of course, is one of the things that WWC is designed to enhance; that it is not uniformly seen as doing so remains a concern. (Recently a parallel, and peppier, site titled Doing What Works has arisen in the department—not in IES, though it uses IES research.)

Suggesting these views had at least some traction on the Hill, early House drafts of NCLB reauthorization tinkered with the standard for scientifically based research, weakening its focus on experiments. A recent proposal for reauthorization approved by the IES advisory board, the National Board for Education Sciences, tweaks the language back again to reemphasize that causal claims can be made “only in well-designed and implemented random assignment experiments, when feasible.”

Even those who resent that focus must concede that IES practices what it preaches. The agency has rarely parroted the lines scripted by its political bosses or industrial heavyweights: Whitehurst was careful to cast caveats upon education secretary Margaret Spellings’s claims that rising student test scores in 2005 offered “proof” of NCLB’s effectiveness, adding in 2007 that widely divergent state standards for “proficiency” in fact made it hard to judge NCLB’s impact. While the administration has strongly pushed phonics-based reading curricula, IES gave positive marks to the rival Reading Recovery program and later reported ambivalent if still preliminary results for Reading First (a broader report on this topic is due in late 2008). And WWC found in 2007 that expensively touted math texts and test-preparation software had little effect on student outcomes: textbook superpower Houghton Mifflin’s elementary mathematics curriculum, for instance, was “found to have no discernible effects on…achievement.”

Such insulation is good for the perceived integrity of the institute. Even congressional Democrats, angered by what they see as the gross politicization of science agencies under the Bush administration, make an exception for IES. But being apolitical takes special political skill. Otherwise—as with the initial Reading First report—it runs the risk of antagonizing potential allies, and of cooling ardor for institute initiatives and departmental appropriations (see Figure 2). (Reading First funds have been cut from $1 billion to $393 million to, possibly, zero in 2009, and IES’s own funding has been flat since fiscal 2004.) It can mean, too, that the institute does not participate in shaping legislation with important ramifications for research, such as the NCLB reauthorization.

Over time, however, as Whitehurst’s tenure lengthened vis-à-vis latecomers to the administration, his role of honest if prickly broker has garnered more deference. Time, too, has helped soften the edges between Whitehurst’s focus on quantitative experimental methodology and those pushing more immediate “relevance” over his brand of “rigor.” Sharon Robinson concedes, “They’ve come a long way toward lowering the guard and righting the rhetoric,” and Whitehurst himself seemed to be channeling his inner Robinson in February, when he told an American Enterprise Institute conference that education is “richly contextual and multivariate” and that research should encompass a “panoply of existing techniques.”

Still, moving toward reauthorization, IES must deal with concerns from at least two corners of the education research constituency. On one side are partisans of the regional centers and labs first created in the 1960s. Under IES the centers have seen their funding cut and the scope of their research tightened; the labs have been pushed to supplement with experimental research their traditional role of local dissemination and “rapid response” technical assistance. Whitehurst argues that while Congress should determine what it wants to know, IES should determine how to find that out. But the labs, especially, originally set up to maximize local political support, have always done so; and their customers, officials used to receiving quick customized help, have not always been pleased with the changes at IES. Indeed, the Democratic addendum to ESRA notes that protecting the regional system was “a critical priority.” Those members are now in the majority.

Coming from another angle are those who fear for the independence of the National Center for Education Statistics. Recall that the head of NCES differs from other IES commissioners in being a Senate-confirmed presidential appointee with a fixed term. The idea is to give the job additional status and independence, even from IES, placing yet one more barrier between politics and data. As a guardian of statistical information, NCES holds its main aim to be the integrity and credibility of that data; it should have little to say about its analysis.

But the managerial messiness of this has never pleased Whitehurst, and IES has sat rather heavily astride both NCES inputs (especially hiring) and outputs (its publications). NBES’s proposed reauthorization language goes further, making the NCES commissioner an appointee of the IES director, though dismissible only for cause. Advisory board chair Robert Granger argues that this is “a more rational model,” creating efficient lines of accountability and ensuring that the director and commissioner will be compatible. Whitehurst suggests that having a presidential appointee at NCES could prove more problematic, not less, in terms of partisan influence, without the director to buffer the commissioner from political winds.

One could foresee circumstances in which this would be true. But in general the proposal runs counter to the long-standing recommendations of the National Research Council and its guide to Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency. Certainly the heft of a presidential appointment is useful to the NCES commissioner in bureaucratic dealings. More broadly, statistical agencies, in this view, are qualitatively different, not to be treated, as Elliott puts it, as “just another government agency.” Even such a fan of managerial efficiency as the Office of Management and Budget, whose program evaluation gives both IES and NCES coveted (and rare) grades of “effective,” feels that “real and perceived independence” is best served by the current system.

The drive by IES for managerial (and budgetary?) control also seeks to alter the complicated relationship between NCES and the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAGB has autonomy regarding the conduct and presentation of NAEP, but proposed changes would give most of that power to NCES, which would itself be under the thumb of IES. NCES would be happy to get the envisioned authority in the proposed language, if limits on its own autonomy were not part of the deal, but the current system is intentionally uncomfortable, dividing authority in a way that is itself insulating.

Looking Ahead

It seems unlikely, given current sentiment on the Hill, that these changes will receive legislative sanction. But there will be plenty of time for the debate to play out. Few expect much progress on ESRA reauthorization even in 2009, pending movement of the equally late NCLB reauthorization. As that approaches, it is worth remembering Whitehurst’s hopeful testimony in 2002 that “we are close to a point where the right investment in the right structure could get us close to a tipping point, where education becomes an evidence-based field.” Has that occurred?

The quick descent to technical minutiae in the discussions already occurring on reauthorization actually bodes well on this point. Early murmurings suggested the new ESRA could be passed, as a noncontroversial measure, in order to clear the congressional decks for NCLB. This didn’t happen, of course, but even informal designation as “noncontroversial” suggests IES has come a long way. There are few questions about its basic structure. Legislators seem serious about avoiding confirmation of a partisan hack to the IES directorship, when that job opens up. So far, insulation remains good politics.

But politics lurk close. In a months-long tussle between IES and Congress over the evaluation of Upward Bound, IES insisted that a robust test of whether the program made a difference to students required a control group—students eligible for but not served by it. This meant some students would be recruited for Upward Bound but denied participation. And lawmakers decried that as unethical and “discriminatory,” even comparing it, ominously (if inaccurately), to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments. In early 2008 the evaluation was canceled.

Whitehurst called the legislative intervention “a terrific mistake.” On scientific grounds, he was right. But as he conceded, “We produced some of these problems for ourselves,” in part by centering on a single kind of evaluative procedure and by failing to consult with the advocacy community and Congress in advance before grappling with a popular program.

Will “the Upward Bound problem…be contained to Upward Bound,” as Whitehurst later insisted? Probably so, but it nonetheless showed how easily breached is agency autonomy when its exercise roils partisan waters. Further, if a director as experienced as Whitehurst could stumble into this sort of controversy, how will his greener successor fare? Some of Whitehurst’s effectiveness, and leeway, is a matter of longevity and related learning (on all sides) that will have to be repeated after the transition. Given ESRA’s tight association with NCLB, the crumbling consensus around the latter will bring new pitfalls to navigate.

Whatever November’s outcome, January 2009 will bring major changes to Washington. It is not clear that it is worth betting the structural house on things having changed for good. Indeed, in purely practical terms, the IES budget is not big enough to tip the field of education research on its own. Structure matters, but so do resources; and the politics of knowledge is no different from politics as a whole—defined, as Harold Laswell put it long ago, by who gets what, when, and how. By this standard, IES is distinctly undercapitalized (see Figure 3). The institute’s funding (for research and dissemination) is up by a third compared to the final days of OERI, to $160 million or so; that said, that level was achieved in fiscal 2004 and has hardly budged since. The bipartisan NCLB commission proposed doubling that amount. And in its draft reauthorization bill, NBES proposes that IES become a $1 billion agency as of fiscal 2009, finally meeting Pat Moynihan’s 1970 vision. Of course, a billion 1970 dollars equates to some $5.3 billion today. Some advocates argue that to parallel corporate research-and-development budgets the figure should really be 2 percent of overall investment, or something like $10 billion.

That those numbers sound utopian speaks to the need for new political dexterity at IES that also maintains its scientific integrity. Still, Whitehurst and IES can take pride in having made a solid start. If the randomized-controlled-trials approach was oversold, this has served to move the field by force, further and faster, toward recognizing the need for rigorous research standards generally. The unstinting focus on promoting scientific rigor, even through a single lens, must thus be viewed as broadly positive. And if these changes are, ultimately, at the margins, in American politics that is where most change occurs. The institution is in place: the next administration, next Congress, and next director will have the chance to institutionalize it.

Andrew Rudalevige is associate professor of political science at Dickinson College. This article is adapted from “Structure and Science in Education Research,” in Frederick Hess, ed., When Research Matters (Harvard Education Press, 2008).

The post Juggling Act appeared first on Education Next.

The fiscal impact of that program has been a matter of dispute. According to school choice supporters, such as Marquette University professor and former Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) superintendent Howard Fuller, MPCP saves the taxpayers considerable cash, as the voucher is smaller than per-pupil spending by MPS. But Wisconsin state senator Russ Decker, a leading opponent of vouchers, has argued that the program gives money to children who would attend private schools anyway and declared, “You’ve got a lot of additional money going into the choice program that we could better use funding public education statewide.” Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, which conducts budget-related analyses for state legislators, has provided fodder to both sides of the Milwaukee voucher debate with periodic estimates of the financial impact of eliminating the program based on a wide range of assumptions regarding changes in public schoolenrollments.

The dollar amounts in question have become significant, as the voucher program continues to grow. MPCP started in fiscal year 1991 as a small initiative, capped at 1 percent of MPS enrollment, with a few hundred students from low-income families who chose to attend secular private schools. (In the remainder of this paper, “fiscal year” shall be generally understood.) Starting in 1999, the state expanded the program to religious schools and lifted the cap to 15 percent of MPS enrollment (about 15,000 students). In 2007 the cap was raised to 22,500. With these changes in the legal framework, enrollments have grown steadily to about 18,500 students in 2008 (see Figure 1).

The way in which the legislature funds the program has also changed in important ways over the years. Fiscal impacts have varied over time as a result of those decisions. At the same time, features that were adopted when the program was small outlived their rationale as the program grew, and the vestiges that persisted have caused notable distortions.

What has been the net fiscal impact of MPCP? Who has benefited and who has taken a hit as the program has grown? How has MPCP affected taxpayers statewide? Milwaukee taxpayers? In this analysis, I show that under most plausible scenarios the program has saved taxpayers money annually since 2000, with estimated savings reaching $31.9 million in 2008. The beneficiaries have been Wisconsin state taxpayers and property taxpayers outside of Milwaukee. Property taxpayers in Milwaukee, however, have seen their taxes go up, the result of legislative decisions on the MPCP funding formula made in the program’s earliest days.

Designing a Voucher Program

It is important to recognize that any fiscal impact of MPCP on school districts and taxpayers is not inherent in the concept of a voucher, but the result of specific characteristics of the situation in Wisconsin. As a benchmark case, consider a hypothetical voucher program that has no net impact on taxpayers or on per-pupil district revenues. First, suppose all voucher students would otherwise have gone to a public school. Second, suppose the amount of the voucher is identical to the revenues per pupil at the district school. The diversion of voucher funds from the district to the voucher school would leave per-pupil revenues unchanged and would also have no net impact on taxpayers. The money simply follows the child in the same way that state monies follow children when they move from one school district to another that has equal per-pupil revenues.

In one important respect, today’s MPCP matches the hypothetical program. Although this was not initially the case, since 2000 the formulas that determine state and local revenues for MPS have not counted voucher students. Because the revenues MPS is allowed to spend are calculated on a per-pupil basis, the loss of a voucher student leaves MPS per-pupil revenues unaffected, as is the case when a student leaves for another district.

The impact on the public purse is a different matter. The amount of the voucher is less than the per-pupil revenues allocated to MPS, which implies a savings for taxpayers, just as voucher supporters claim.

Offsetting such savings, however, are the voucher expenses for those eligible students who, in the absence of the program, would still have attended a private school. Those families would have saved the taxpayer money by paying their own education bill, but as they are eligible for a voucher, they can attend the private school at public expense instead. The taxpayer bears the cost that the low-income family would otherwise have borne. One might well argue that this is a worthy use of taxpayer funds, but in the narrow context of determining the program’s fiscal effects, it counts as a negative impact.

The net impact on taxpayers, then, is 1) the savings that come from the difference between the voucher and the per-pupil revenue at district schools, for those who would have attended them in the absence of the voucher program, minus 2) the voucher costs for students who would have attended private schools anyway. Let’s consider the latter factor first.

Estimating Private School Use

According to a federal survey, about 5 percent of low-income families send their children to private school, less than half the 12 percent rate for all families. That figure may underestimate what we are looking for, which is the percentage of low-income voucher users who would have attended private schools without them. One can derive a better estimate from recent research conducted on other urban voucher programs that serve low-income families. Those studies have collected information on private school usage by voucher-seeking families, both those who were awarded vouchers (by lottery) and those who were not. Only a few thousand such students have been studied, so estimates are not from as large a sample as one would like, and the cities in these studies may differ from Milwaukee in some respects, but the data provide as direct an estimate as can be obtained. A midrange estimate derived from this literature is that about 10 percent of voucher-using students from low-income families in big cities would have attended private schools anyway (the percentage is higher for one-year attendance and lower for more sustained attendance).

This 10 percent estimate can be checked for consistency with trends in private school enrollment before the voucher program began in Milwaukee. I have examined long-term trends for private school enrollment using two data sets. University of Wisconsin professor John Witte reports on Milwaukee private school enrollments from 1960 to 1997, while the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) provides enrollment figures for Milwaukee’s private schools from 1993 to 2008.

These data show a drop of more than 25,000 in private school enrollment from the mid-1960s to the beginning of MPCP (interrupted by a temporary rise from 1977 to 1984). The Catholic schools were particularly hard hit, having served an ethnic population that was migrating to the suburbs throughout these decades.

I have spliced the two data sets together for the period since MPCP began and examined the trends that would have obtained without the program, under varying assumptions about the percentage of voucher students that would have attended private schools anyway. I find that under the 10 percent estimate drawn from the lottery literature, the resulting private enrollments are consistent with prior trends. When it is assumed that 30 percent of voucher-using families would have chosen private schools, the resulting enrollments imply a noticeable slowdown of the long-term downward trends, a result that seems possible, but not at all compelling. If the rate were assumed to be 50 percent or more, long-term downward trends would have been reversed, which does not seem credible.

To summarize, data from voucher experiments in other cities indicate that about 10 percent of low-income voucher users would have attended private school anyway. This estimate is consistent with long-term downward trends in Milwaukee private enrollments, while rates of 30 percent or higher are not consistent with those trends. I provide estimates below of the fiscal impact of MPCP under assumptions ranging up to 30 percent, but 10 percent is probably closer to the correct figure.

Measuring the Gap

The other factor needed to calculate MPCP’s net fiscal impact is the gap between the voucher and MPS per-pupil revenues. The specific concept I use for MPS is the “revenue limit,” set by Wisconsin statute, which places a maximum on each district’s combined revenues from local property taxes and state formula aid. Although districts are not required to raise local levies up to the amount allowed by the revenue limit, in practice, that is what happens: statewide, approximately 99.8 percent of revenue limit capacity is used and, in most recent years, Milwaukee has used 100 percent. The revenue limit does not cover federal revenues, but this can be ignored when estimating the impact of MPCP on state and local taxpayers. Nor does it include categorical state aid, primarily for special education and low-income students, which constitutes about 6 percent of revenues from state aid and property taxes in Wisconsin, and 9 percent in Milwaukee. This means my analysis will underestimate the savings from voucher students, since some of them would draw on categorical state aid were they in MPS.

Figure 2 depicts the per-pupil revenue limit for MPS, which rose from $5,804 in 1994 (the year Wisconsin established revenue limits) to $9,141 in 2008. The graph also depicts the increase in the maximum MPCP voucher, from $2,446 in 1991 to $6,501 in both 2007 and 2008. (The average voucher is slightly less than the maximum. Since average voucher data are only available with a lag, I use the maximum voucher in this analysis, which slightly underestimates the savings from MPCP.) The gap between the MPS revenue limit and the MPCP maximum voucher size was generally around $2,000 from 1997 to 2003, but drifted up to $2,332 in 2007 and $2,640 in 2008.

Net Fiscal Impact

MPCP’s impact on taxpayers can be readily calculated from the gap between the voucher and per-pupil MPS revenues, under any given assumption regarding the percentage of voucher users who would have otherwise attended private school. Table 1 presents these calculations for 2008, with each row representing a different assumption, from 0 to 30 percent. My preferred estimate, as explained above, is 10 percent, indicated by the bold figures, and the other rows show how the results vary depending on the assumption one makes about private school usage in the absence of vouchers.

The calculations are based on 18,500 enrollees in MPCP, a voucher amount of $6,501, and MPS revenue limit per pupil of $9,141. Consider the results under the 10 percent assumption, shown in the second row. Column 1 shows the savings on voucher users who would have attended MPS. At the 10 percent rate, there are 16,650 such students (0.90 ¥ 18,500), each of whom saves $2,640 in public funds ($9,141 – $6,501), for a total of $44 million. Column 2 shows the expenditure on voucher users who would have attended private schools anyway. At the 10 percent rate, 1,850 such students each receives $6,501, for a total of $12 million. Column 3 shows the net savings, the difference between columns 1 and 2, which is $31.9 million.

As the other rows show, the result is somewhat sensitive to the assumed percentage, but for most of the relevant range the net savings amount is positive. It does not turn negative unless one assumes close to 30 percent of MPCP’s low-income voucher users would have attended private schools, an assumption that seems unrealistically high.

Figure 3 depicts the net fiscal benefit from MPCP from 1994 to 2008, assuming that 10 percent of voucher users would have attended private schools. The net benefit was only about $2 million per year prior to the program’s expansion in 1999. Since then, as MPCP enrollments have grown and as the gap has widened between the voucher and MPS revenues per pupil, the benefit has grown from $7.3 million to $31.9 million in 2008. The remainder of my analysis addresses the questions of which taxpayers benefited, how the distribution of benefits has evolved over the life of the program, and why.

Wisconsin School-Funding Formulas

To understand the distribution of MPCP’s fiscal impact, one needs first to learn about Wisconsin’s regular school-funding formulas. There are two interlocked formulas: revenue limits and equalization aid. The revenue limit formula, underlying Figure 2, takes each district’s per-pupil revenues from the prior year and tacks on a legislatively determined annual increment. The total revenue each district is allowed to raise from property taxes and general state aid is simply that per-pupil amount, multiplied by enrollment (smoothed by three-year averaging).

The equalization aid formula determines the split of each district’s total revenue between state aid and local property taxes, with differences across districts based primarily on per-pupil property values. Taken as a whole, Wisconsin state aid has generally comprised two-thirds of the school revenues statewide, leaving one-third to be raised from property taxes, an arrangement that was once codified in state law and more recently persists by political custom.

Together, the two formulas determine the distribution of any cost savings that result from enrollment shifts. Suppose, for example, a number of students leave Milwaukee for a lower-spending rural district. Total revenues fall for MPS and rise for the rural district, but by a lesser amount, for a net saving of public funds. Two-thirds of the savings accrue to state taxpayers. The other third accrues to local property taxpayers across the state. This property tax relief is distributed across the state in approximate proportion to local property values. Specifically, Milwaukee property taxpayers would receive about 6 percent of the statewide property tax relief, since that is Milwaukee’s approximate share of statewide property values.

In principle, the funding for the voucher program could be integrated into the regular funding system. There is, after all, no inherent fiscal difference between students leaving MPS with lower-cost vouchers and students leaving for lower-cost districts. As public funds are freed up by voucher-using students, the net savings could be distributed among state taxpayers and property taxpayers across the state through these formulas. As we shall see, however, a rather different funding mechanism was adopted for MPCP.

Before 2000

In the earliest days of MPCP, when the program was very small, the funding formula had three key features. First, voucher students were counted as part of MPS enrollments for the purposes of calculating revenue limits and equalization aid. Second, the voucher expenses were deducted from MPS’s equalization aid. Finally, Milwaukee was given the option of raising its property taxes beyond that allowed by the ordinary revenue limit, to make up for the voucher expenses deducted from its state aid.

This was not an unreasonable system, for both economic and political reasons, in the earliest days of the program. For one thing, it effectively insulated the state budget and property taxes outside of Milwaukee from the program. In addition, the nature of the impact was left up to Milwaukee: it could choose to let the voucher money follow the child, accepting a net reduction in total (but not per-pupil) MPS revenues. Or, it could choose to maintain total MPS revenues, by paying for the vouchers out of higher property taxes.

Milwaukee chose the latter option, for reasons that are perhaps understandable. It might be argued, for example, that the decline in MPS enrollment was too small to affect certain indivisible costs, such as the number of teachers or buildings that comprise the lion’s share of the district’s budget. In this view, it would be justified to maintain total revenues, despite falling enrollments, for a higher revenue per pupil. In any case, the initial magnitudes were not huge: the impact on Milwaukee property taxes was no more than $2.5 million by 1995 and $7 million by 1998. This impact is depicted in Figure 4 by the dark bars in the negative region. The dotted bars in the positive region for this period represent the impact on MPS of the rise in per-pupil revenues.

With the program’s expansion to religious schools in 1999—MPCP enrollment nearly quadrupled that year—the impact on Milwaukee property taxes jumped to $28.3 million, as shown in Figure 4. The fixed-cost rationale for maintaining MPS total revenues became more tenuous, as MPCP enrollments approached 6,000, larger than 95 percent of all school districts in Wisconsin. But MPS chose to maintain total revenues, collecting $39.5 million more than would have been needed to maintain the per-pupil amount. The program had clearly outgrown its initial fiscal formula.

Reform Incomplete

Starting in 2000, voucher students were no longer included in the calculation of MPS revenue limits or equalization aid. This was a major reform. As a result, MPS was no longer able to maintain total revenues as it lost MPCP students, but could still maintain per-pupil revenues. Consequently, the dotted bars in Figure 4 disappear starting in 2000. The savings from MPCP were now fully available for taxpayer relief.

But the reforms were not complete. Logically, as the revenue limit of MPS fell with the departure of MPCP students, money that was freed up in the state’s general fund could have directly funded the vouchers. Funding would have followed the child, much as it does between school districts under the regular funding formulas.

Instead, the funding formula continued to deduct voucher expenses from MPS equalization aid, although the deduction was cut in half. Specifically, starting in 2000, half the voucher deduction was moved from the equalization aid of MPS to the other districts of the state. Later, the draw on other districts’ aid was eliminated, replaced by a direct draw on the general fund, and the aid deduction for MPS was reduced from 50 to 45 percent of voucher expenses. The key point here is that MPS still loses state aid to cover almost half the voucher expenses, even though MPS no longer receives any aid for MPCP students. This means MPS stands to lose revenues on a per-pupil basis.

To avoid this result, Milwaukee is still allowed to offset the MPCP deduction by raising property taxes—and it has chosen to do so. The resulting impact on Milwaukee property taxes can be seen in the dark bars in Figure 4. Starting in 2000, the impact is approximately halved from what the previous system implied, but the rationale for any adverse impact is gone. These higher property taxes no longer pay for the option of maintaining total revenues as enrollments decline; instead, they are necessary to maintain per-pupil revenues.

This means the entire net benefits of the MPCP program (and more) now accrue to state taxpayers and property taxpayers outside of Milwaukee, as depicted in the striped and light bars in Figure 4.

Fiscal Impact 2008

To understand the mechanics reflected in Figure 4, consider the data for 2008. Milwaukee property taxes were raised to defray voucher expenses totaling $54.1 million (0.45 ¥ $6,501 for each of 18,500 MPCP students). This was slightly offset by Milwaukee’s $3.1 million share of statewide property tax relief (discussed below), but still reached $51 million. Faced with the growing impact, the governor and the city of Milwaukee pressed for reform. The legislature responded with an ad hoc measure, “high poverty aid,” to reduce school property taxes, primarily in Milwaukee. This amounted to $7.4 million in 2008, so the adverse impact on Milwaukee property taxpayers was reduced from $51 million to $43.6 million.

Meanwhile, the rest of the state continued to benefit from MPCP. Because the 18,500 voucher users do not count in MPS revenue limits, $9,141 each was saved for the 90 percent of voucher students we assume would have attended MPS, a total of $152.2 million. Of that, one-third, or $50.7 million, went to statewide property tax relief. Milwaukee’s share was approximately $3.1 million (proportional to their share of statewide property values), leaving $47.6 million as the net benefit to property taxpayers outside of Milwaukee, depicted by the light bar in Figure 4.

The state’s general fund gained the other two-thirds of the $152.2 million saved from MPS revenue limits, or $101.5 million. However, the general fund paid 55 percent of the voucher expenses, totaling $66.1 million (0.55 ¥ $6,501 for each of 18,500 MPCP students). In addition, for 2008, the ad hoc property tax relief for Milwaukee cost $7.4 million. So the net benefit to state taxpayers was $101.5 million minus $66.1 million minus $7.4 million, which equals $27.9 million, depicted by the striped bar in Figure 4.

Drawing these all together, we have $27.9 million (state benefit) plus $47.6 million (non-Milwaukee property tax relief) minus $43.6 million (adverse impact on Milwaukee), which equals a $31.9 million net impact. This is the figure shown in Table 1. This net savings of $31.9 million from MPCP accrued entirely to the state’s taxpayers and property taxpayers outside of Milwaukee, along with an additional windfall of $43.6 million, effectively paid by the property taxpayers of Milwaukee.

Conclusion

The history of the MPCP illustrates how voucher programs can provide significant taxpayer savings when students voluntarily choose to attend schools that draw less on public funds than the schools they would otherwise attend. However, the same history also illustrates that if the funding formulas are not carefully constructed—and reformed as growth requires—some groups of taxpayers may be adversely affected.

The initial funding mechanism was designed for a small program, so the district was allowed to maintain total expenditures as enrollments dipped, through modest increases in property taxes. As the program grew, the mechanism was modified to enable the district to maintain per-pupil revenues, rather than total revenues. However, vestiges of the original funding mechanism meant that Milwaukee property taxes had to go up just to maintain per-pupil revenues. The underlying reason is that instead of funding the vouchers out of the savings to the state’s general fund, 45 percent of voucher expenditures are still deducted from Milwaukee’s state aid, even though their aid has not included funds for voucher students since 2000.

So who gains? State taxpayers and property taxpayers outside of Milwaukee. Who loses? Milwaukee property taxpayers. And why? We have seen the mechanics of how this occurred, but ultimately, this is a political question. The policymakers of Milwaukee and Wisconsin have known for some time about MPCP’s “funding flaw” (as it is called). It remains to be seen whether, as the program grows, this flaw will undermine it or instead lead legislators to complete the reforms that would integrate MPCP with the regular funding formulas so the benefits can be shared by all.

Robert M. Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas. The report from which this paper is drawn is part of the comprehensive evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program being conducted by the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas.

The post Who Gains, Who Loses? appeared first on Education Next.

Home schooling is hardly foreign to the American experience. John Locke’s advice to parents in colonial America was to educate their children at home. He could not imagine “what qualities are ordinarily to be got from…a troop of playfellows [at school]…usually assembled together from parents of all kinds.” Even if the teacher’s industry and skill “be ever so great, it can[not]…be expected that he should instruct them successfully in anything but their books.”

But somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, John Locke’s advice was forgotten, schooling became compulsory, and home schooling had to be reinvented. The honor goes to the antibureaucratic, anticompetitive, “new Left” school of thought articulated by Ivan Illich and his articulate disciple, John Holt, who captured the imagination of the flower children of the sixties.

If the baby was born in hippieville, the toddler was soon kidnapped by Christian social conservatives. By 1990, 85 to 90 percent of all home schoolers came from the ranks of the Religious Right. Even Holt could not resist a Libertarian cry:

Some may feel that the schools teach a dog-eat-dog competitiveness; others that they teach a mealy-mouth Socialism…. What is important is not that all readers…should agree on these questions, but that we should…work for…the right of all people to take their children out of schools.

That right is to be found in the penumbra of the Constitution that guarantees the right of privacy, home schoolers say, but getting the Supreme Court to agree has not been easy. In a famous case, the Court was persuaded, on religious grounds, to exempt Amish adolescents age 14 and older from Pennsylvania’s compulsory education law. It said nothing about the right to home school younger children or the rights of those who have secular reasons for preferring education at home.

Then last July a California appeals court drew on the Amish decision to interpret an ambiguous California law as giving families the right to home school their children. Oddly enough, the same court had said—only a few months earlier—that no child could be taught at home except under the supervision of a certified teacher. The court changed its mind, however, after Governor Schwarzenegger, the state secretary of education, and leading newspapers, to say nothing of highly organized groups of home schoolers, condemned the court’s action. Reversing itself, the California court concluded that ambiguities in state law should be interpreted in a way that makes them consistent with the federal Constitution. If Amish adolescents had the right to home school for religious reasons, that same right had to be given to all Californians.

The California decision is only the latest in a string of legal and political victories for home schoolers, who have parlayed Internet connections into a political potency that charter and voucher proponents have never matched.

The Internet is also feeding home schoolers an ever broader range of curricular options, so that families and students of all types—leftist, social conservative, rock star, or skateboard enthusiast—have easy access to the kind of instruction they desire. With improved educational materials readily available, home schoolers are winning spelling and geography bees, scoring off the charts on statewide tests, and gaining access to elite colleges.

As virtual schools, distance learning, sophisticated educational software, and synchronous online communication continue to spread, the movement is poised for rapid growth. Home schooling will segue into hybrid education, historian Milton Gaither says (see “Home Schooling Goes Mainstream” features). Some courses will be taken in school, others online. Students could attend district or charter schools during the elementary years but decide to take most high school courses online.

State legislatures are likely to become increasingly accommodating toward a movement that saves them money. The day may come when we hear the phrase, “We are all home schoolers now.” John Locke would be pleased.

— Paul E. Peterson

The post The Home-Schooling Special appeared first on Education Next.