On what basis should we distribute rewards to salespeople?

It seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? First, “we,” meaning the public at large, don’t usually get to decide such matters. Second, there are obvious systems of rewards for salespeople already in place, foremost among them the system of commissions, which pays salespersons for the value they directly contribute to a firm’s operation.

Replace the word “salespeople” with “teachers,” however, and we move from the realm of silly questions to the arena of intense policy debate. Teachers are in most cases public employees. So we do, in theory at least, get to decide how they are paid. The commission model for teachers, variants of which have been proposed for many years, would involve compensating them for the value they provide to their school’s operation, that is, the degree to which they educate their students. Unfortunately, the amount of education a student receives in a given year is much harder to quantify than the total sales recorded by a clerk in a store. Measuring student growth has been made somewhat easier by recent advances in the tracking of student performance on standardized tests over time. But the notion of paying teachers on the basis of their ability to improve test scores, often termed “merit pay,” while earnestly debated by education policy researchers, is strongly opposed by teachers unions and is a political nonstarter in many parts of the country.

Lost in the debate over merit pay are some interesting, and to some extent disturbing, facts about the way we currently distribute compensation to teachers. Most districts reward teachers for their years of experience, advanced degrees, and in some cases special credentials such as a certificate from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). If every year of experience and every credential were strongly associated with a teacher’s ability to educate students, we could feel content that our system rewarded the ability to educate de facto. But the available evidence suggests that the connection between credentials and teaching effectiveness is very weak at best, and the connection between additional years of experience and teaching effectiveness, while substantial in the first few years in the classroom, attenuates over time. Though exact results vary from one study to the next, there is little doubt that credentials and additional years of experience (beyond the first few years) matter far less to teacher effectiveness than they do to teacher compensation as it is currently designed.

What if, rather than proposing a direct pay-for-performance system, we took the intermediate step of stopping the practice of paying rewards for credentials that have no established association with the ability to educate students? A simple case study, based on the teacher workforce in North Carolina, suggests that this policy change would return several dividends. Money currently spent on rewarding teachers for valueless credentials could be used to increase starting salaries, a policy goal espoused by nearly all interested parties, from education reformers to teachers unions. Shifting teachers’ lifetime compensation toward the beginning of their careers would make the profession more attractive to highly qualified college students. Finally, the age-earnings profile for teachers would more closely resemble the profile for other professions. Doctors and lawyers reap the full rewards of competence in their profession within 10 years of entrance. Teachers must wait three times that long, even though evidence suggests that they become fully competent in their profession just as quickly.

Pay for Effectiveness

Before we take the next step and introduce the “evidence-based” salary schedule, let’s review the basic details of teacher compensation in North Carolina. School finance is relatively centralized in North Carolina, to the extent that there is a statewide teacher salary schedule. Local districts are permitted to supplement the schedule, and almost all of them do. But the state’s salary schedule largely determines the rewards paid to teachers across the state. Moreover, the statewide schedule is typical of teacher compensation in most other public school systems nationwide.

On the North Carolina salary schedule, teachers receive rewards for experience, for attaining advanced degrees, and for becoming certified by the NBPTS. A master’s degree entitles a teacher to a permanent 10 percent increase in salary. Teachers with doctoral degrees earn a permanent 15 percent differential relative to those with bachelor’s degrees. Teachers with NBPTS certification receive a permanent 12 percent boost in salary. Finally, teachers accrue increments to their salary as they gain experience. At the top rung of the experience ladder, teachers with 27 or more years in the classroom earn 68 percent more than starting teachers with equivalent credentials.

Contrast this information with what we know about the relationship between credentials and classroom effectiveness, as measured by student test-score gains. Numerous studies, including several based on North Carolina data, show no significant relationship between advanced degrees and effectiveness, with the possible exception of high school teachers who receive advanced training in their field of specialty. An evidence-based salary schedule, accordingly, would pay no automatic premium for these degrees.

To a large extent, the jury is still out on the importance of NBPTS certification. Studies have shown that teachers nominated for this certification have a legacy of superior classroom performance, but there is less evidence that the process of certification actually improves their performance. Nonetheless, whether NBPTS certification improves teacher quality or merely identifies high-quality teachers, there is some evidence to support a premium for it. How large a premium? We’ll return to that question after discussing the returns to experience.

Teachers with more experience are automatically paid more in North Carolina, and in virtually every other public school system in the country. Research has shown that experienced teachers are more effective in the classroom. So the real-world salary schedule looks a lot like the “evidence-based” schedule, right? Not exactly. Consider the evidence in Figure 1. This chart shows two forms of returns to experience. The lighter bars track the returns paid out in the 2007–08 salary schedule, relative to the salary for starting teachers. The darker bars track the returns to experience in terms of teachers’ ability to improve test scores, based on a recent analysis of North Carolina secondary schools. The returns to experience are measured by tracking the performance of each individual teacher according to time in the profession.

These two forms of returns to experience look very different. Relative to a teacher just beginning in the profession, teachers with one or two years of experience raise test scores by an extra 5 percent of a standard deviation. They are paid, on average, 2 percent more than starting teachers. If the standard were to pay teachers an extra 1 percent of salary when they raise test scores by 2.5 percent of a standard deviation, then highly experienced teachers who post a 25 percent test-score advantage over rookies should be paid a 10 percent premium. Instead, their premium approaches 70 percent. Visually, the darker bars rise quickly at first, moving from left to right, but largely level off once a teacher has six years of experience. The salary schedule marches right along, providing continuously increasing rewards to teachers as they progress from 6 to 27 years of experience, even though their classroom effectiveness has barely improved.

The existing salary schedule rewards teachers too little for the substantial improvements they post in the first few years on the job, and too much for the later years of their career, when they show only incremental advances. An evidence-based salary schedule would alter this arrangement, focusing the rewards on the early rungs of the experience ladder.

Looking at Other Professions

Rewarding younger members of a profession for their rapid early gains in expertise is quite common outside of teaching. Consider the age-earnings profile of physicians. The opening figure shows earnings information taken from the American Community Survey of 2006. Young doctors in their late 20s and early 30s are paid relatively low salaries: 30-year-old physicians earn about one-third what their 45-year-old colleagues are being paid. But the ascent of the pay scale is rapid. Within 10 years, the 30-year-old physician can expect to reach the peak of the earnings distribution—a plateau, really, since doctors earn their high maximum salaries for a decade or more.

The picture is quite similar for lawyers. The average earnings of 25-year-old lawyers, fresh from law school, are a fraction of what 45-year-old attorneys are paid, possibly because many of the 25-year-olds are still trying to land a job. The ascent of the pay scale is once again rapid. By the age of 35, the typical young lawyer has attained a level of compensation that can be expected for the next quarter century, with a few years of extra-high earnings in the late 40s.

Contrast these market-driven age-earnings profiles with that of teachers, whose salaries are determined not so much by market forces but by collectively bargained agreements. Whereas the young lawyer can expect to reach peak earnings by age 35, and the young physician by age 40, the opening figure shows that the young teacher must wait until age 55 to attain that professional stature. What is more, the “plateau” in the young doctor or lawyer’s future is more of a true peak for teachers. Beyond the age of 55, average teacher earnings fall off rapidly, as many take early retirement once their pensions have vested.

It is true, of course, that the educational profile of the typical young doctor or lawyer is different from that of the typical beginning teacher. Teachers can usually begin work with no more than a bachelor’s degree, while doctors and lawyers must complete several more years of very costly specialized training. But the market is telling us something here: across professions, young practitioners spend a few years learning on the job; after this learning period, a 35-year-old practitioner is just as proficient as a 55-year-old. All our evidence suggests the same is true in teaching, yet the teaching profession has not established a pay schedule that reflects this basic fact.

Rational Teacher Pay

Looking at the opening figure, it is not difficult to understand why rates of exit from the teaching profession are high relative to rates in other fields. The 25-year-old teacher is not that much worse off financially than college friends who went into other professions. In addition, the teacher likely has less of a debt burden to bear. By the age of 35, however, the teacher’s compensation has declined precipitously relative to that of peers. Most economists would tell you that the teacher should have anticipated such an eventuality. But not every college student plotting out the future behaves as rationally as an economic model would presume.

So now we have some basic principles on which to build a better model: Reward characteristics associated with greater effectiveness; do not reward those that have no evidence linking them to effectiveness. To launch the system, all we need to do is pin down the increment of compensation for a given increase in effectiveness. There are several ways to do this, but let’s consider just one. Suppose that we reward a characteristic associated with an improvement in test scores of 1 percent of a standard deviation with a 1 percent increase in salary. This would make the height of the lighter bars in Figure 1 match the height of the darker bars. This rule also gives us a perspective to think about what the right increment would be for NBPTS certification. While new evidence could be helpful in determining the exact amount, it’s fairly clear that North Carolina’s 12 percent increase is larger than what evidence would support. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s set the premium at 5 percent. Here’s what would happen.

First, we would find ourselves with a fair amount of surplus cash. Although the rewards for the first few years of experience would increase, there would be dramatic decreases in the rewards for more time in the classroom. Eliminating the automatic salary increments for advanced degrees and reducing the premium for NBPTS certification would save still more.

What should be done with this extra money? One straightforward response, consistent with the goals of a wide range of advocates, would be to plow it straight back into teacher salaries, raising the base salary underlying these rewards. Increasing starting salaries in teaching has been advocated by, among others, the National Education Association, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, and the authors of a heavily publicized 2007 report by McKinsey & Company on the characteristics of the world’s most effective school systems. Using data from the actual characteristics of North Carolina public school teachers, we can simulate just how much of a boost could be applied to starting salaries using the savings associated with the evidence-based salary schedule. As shown in Figure 3, this schedule features a starting salary of $37,000, about 25 percent higher than the current low rung on the salary schedule, which is less than $30,000. As expected, the returns to experience would be concentrated in the first years on the job. After just three years in the classroom, teachers would earn salaries above $40,000. Under the current salary schedule, it takes teachers with bachelor’s degrees 13 years to reach that level.

Common-sense reforms to teacher pension systems, such as those discussed in Education Next by Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky (see “Peaks, Cliffs, and Valleys,” features, Winter 2008), would have a similar effect of making the returns to teaching more front-loaded. Under current pension systems, a teacher switching to a different career after five years leaves with virtually nothing in retirement savings. If school systems used modern 401(k)-style defined-contribution plans, early departing teachers could take their retirement savings with them, as many private-sector employees currently do. Old-fashioned pension plans discourage young college graduates not yet committed to a profession from giving teaching a chance.

The proposed salary schedule shown in Figure 2 is constructed to be expenditure-neutral. If we simply switched from one schedule to the other, the budgeted amount for teacher salaries would not change. A conversion to the evidence-based salary schedule could thus be seen as a means of boosting starting teacher salaries without increasing expenditures on education. Granted, the boost to starting salaries is not as great as some advocates would like—the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has called for starting salaries of $45,000—but remember that this new schedule is based on the arbitrary decision to reward credentials that improve test scores by 1 percent of a standard deviation with a 1 percent boost in salary. A further flattening of the salary schedule would permit a further increase in starting salaries, with no net growth in public expenditure.

Transition Costs

The evidence-based salary schedule is not a win-win proposition; a switch from current schedules would create clear winners and losers. Beginning teachers fare better under the new system. On the current salary schedule, a starting teacher who expects to hold nothing more than a bachelor’s degree throughout her career will receive earnings over 30 years worth $620,000 in present value terms, discounting at a 5 percent rate. On the evidence-based salary schedule, this present value increases 11 percent, to $686,000. Even a teacher entering the profession with a master’s degree is better off under the evidence-based salary schedule, even though it pays no reward for the advanced degree. This is because the benefit of front-loading the returns to experience outweighs the lost 10 percent salary increment over the long term.

Older teachers would be harmed in a direct switch from the current system to an evidence-based salary schedule. It is too late for these teachers to reap early returns to competence, and depriving them of the present system’s rich rewards for advanced degrees and experience beyond the first few years would cut directly into their expected future earnings. Teachers with bachelor’s degrees and more than 20 years in the classroom would experience an immediate pay cut. Bachelor’s degree–holding teachers with at least 17 years on the job would see a decline in the present value of future earnings, if we assume a 30-year teaching career.

Academic institutions that grant advanced degrees to teachers would also suffer under this plan. Without the promise to teachers of a guaranteed salary increment, enrollment in master’s-level programs would undoubtedly decrease. Such a shock to the system of advanced teacher education could, however, lead to improvements in program quality. If postgraduate education makes teachers more effective, they should be rewarded for it. An evidence-based salary schedule would directly reward teachers when they demonstrate evidence of greater effectiveness. Teachers would thus enroll in advanced degree programs of their own accord if those programs were known to improve effectiveness. Alternatively, individual teacher education programs could be accredited on the basis of their demonstrated ability to improve teacher effectiveness. Graduates of accredited programs could then receive guaranteed increments. An ideal evidence-based salary schedule would be flexible in light of new evidence.

Political Reality Check

Given the losses to experienced teachers, and the likely opposition of those in the business of educating teachers, is the evidence-based salary schedule a pie-in-the-sky ideal with no chance of becoming reality? Not necessarily. Entry-level teachers will find it in their best interest to choose the new system, if given a choice. The relative benefits become even more obvious if they intend to stay in the profession only a few years.

Phasing in the system, applying the evidence-based schedule to new teachers while retaining the traditional schedule for those who wish to remain on it, would shift the burden from highly experienced teachers. Of course, this burden would not disappear. It would shift to taxpayers, who would have to finance higher levels of teacher salaries until the completion of the phase-in period, perhaps 20 years or longer. The costs of paying new teachers on the evidence-based schedule while keeping existing teachers on the traditional schedule would peak after 10 years, at which point savings associated with the flattened rewards for experience would begin to outweigh the costs of higher salaries to younger teachers. In North Carolina, the long-run transition costs would amount to about $1.6 billion, half of which would be incurred in the first dozen years after the transition. That’s equivalent to a one-time charge of $180 per state resident, or roughly $12 per resident per year if financed over a 30-year period. Relative to the more than $1,000 per capita the state government spends on education each year, this is a modest sum.

There are many other solutions to the three-way negotiation problem among new teachers, experienced teachers, and taxpayers. For example, experienced teachers could be guaranteed their current salaries, plus cost-of-living adjustments, rather than the original raises on the traditional schedule or the salary declines imposed by an evidence-based schedule. The 25 percent increment to starting salaries could also be reduced, or phased in gradually.

Should a family of four be willing to pay an extra $50 per year to finance a move to an evidence-based salary system? Since taxpayers would in the end reap benefits from the move by introducing a system that attracted more qualified teachers with no additional cost after the transition period, most observers would say yes. Taxpayers nationwide pay billions of dollars each year in salary premiums to reward teachers for credentials of highly questionable value. Fifty dollars a year is a small price to pay to reallocate this money in a manner that encourages highly qualified teachers to enter the profession and stay there.

Jacob Vigdor is associate professor of public policy studies and economics at Duke University and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

By the time youngsters reach high school in the United States, the achievement gap is immense. The average black 12th grader has the reading and writing skills of a typical white 8th grader and the math skills of a typical white 7th grader. The gap between white and Hispanic students is similar. But some remarkable inner-city schools are showing that the achievement gap can be closed, even at the middle and high school level, if poor minority kids are given the right kind of instruction.

Over the past two years, I have visited six outstanding schools. (For a list of schools, see sidebar.) All of these educational gems enroll minority youngsters from rough urban neighborhoods with initially poor to mediocre academic skills; all but one are open-admission schools that admit students mostly by lottery. Their middle school students perform as well as their white peers, and in some middle schools, minority students learn at a rate comparable to that of affluent white students in their state’s top schools. (For one impressive example, see Figure 1.) At the high school level, low-income minority students are more likely to matriculate to college than their more advantaged peers, with more than 95 percent of graduates gaining admission to college. Not surprisingly, they all have gifted, deeply committed teachers and dedicated, forceful principals. They also have rigorous academic standards, test students frequently, and carefully monitor students’ academic performance to assess where students need help. “Accountability,” for both teachers and students, is not a loaded code word but a lodestar. Students take a college-prep curriculum and are not tracked into vocational or noncollege-bound classes. Most of the schools have uniforms or a dress code, an extended school day, and three weeks of summer school.

Six Effective Urban SchoolsAmerican Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS), Oakland, CA Amistad Academy, New Haven, CT Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, Chicago, IL KIPP Academy, Bronx, NY SEED School, Washington, DC University Park Campus School, Worcester, MA

Yet above all, these schools share a trait that has been largely ignored by education researchers: They are paternalistic institutions. By paternalistic I mean that each of the six schools is a highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values. These paternalistic schools go beyond just teaching values as abstractions: the schools tell students exactly how they are expected to behave, and their behavior is closely monitored, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance. Unlike the often-forbidding paternalistic institutions of the past, these schools are prescriptive yet warm; teachers and principals, who sometimes serve in loco parentis, are both authoritative and caring figures. Teachers laugh with and cajole students, in addition to frequently directing them to stay on task.

The new breed of paternalistic schools appears to be the single most effective way of closing the achievement gap. No other school model or policy reform in urban secondary schools seems to come close to having such a dramatic impact on the performance of inner-city students. Done right, paternalistic schooling provides a novel way to remake inner-city education in the years ahead.

But while these “no excuses” schools have demonstrated remarkable results, the notion of reintroducing paternalism in inner-city schools is deeply at odds with the conventional wisdom of the K–12 education establishment. For a host of reasons, teachers unions, school board members, ed school professors, big-city school administrators, multicultural activists, bilingual educators, and progressive-education proponents do not embrace the idea that what might most help disadvantaged students are highly prescriptive schools that favor traditional instructional methods. And even the many parents who are foursquare in favor of what paternalistic schools do cringe at labeling the schools in those terms. In 2008, “paternalism” remains a dirty word in American culture.

Paternalism Reborn

What is paternalism and why does it have so few friends? Webster’s defines paternalism as a principle or system of governing that echoes a father’s relationship with his children. Paternalistic policies interfere with the freedom of individuals, and this interference is justified by the argument that the individuals will be better off as a result. Paternalism is controversial because it contains an element of moral arrogance, an assertion of superior competence. But in the last decade, government paternalism has enjoyed a kind of rebirth.

In a 1997 volume titled The New Paternalism, New York University professor Lawrence Mead, the leading revisionist, explored the emergence of a new breed of paternalistic policies aimed at reducing poverty, welfare dependency, and other social problems by closely supervising the poor. These paternalistic programs try to curb social problems by imposing behavioral requirements for assistance and then monitoring recipients to ensure compliance. “Misbehavior is not just punished” in paternalistic programs, writes Mead. “It is preempted by the oversight of authority figures, much as parents supervise their families.” The schools I visited are paternalistic in the very way Mead describes.

Paternalistic programs survive only because they typically enforce values that “clients already believe,” Mead notes. But many paternalistic programs remain controversial because they seek to change the lifestyles of the poor, immigrants, and minorities, rather than the lifestyles of middle-class and upper-class families. The paternalistic presumption implicit in the schools is that the poor lack the family and community support, cultural capital, and personal follow-through to live according to the middle-class values that they, too, espouse.

In the narrowest sense, all American schools are paternalistic. “Schooling virtually defines what paternalism means in a democratic society,” the political scientist James Q. Wilson has written. Elementary schools often attempt to teach values and enforce rules about how students are to behave and treat others. The truth is that hundreds of parochial and traditional public schools in the inner city are authoritarian institutions with pronounced paternalistic elements. Yet the new paternalistic schools I visited look and feel very different from these more commonplace institutions.

The most distinctive feature of new paternalistic schools is that they are fixated on curbing disorder. The emphasis springs from an understanding of urban schools that owes much to James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling’s well-known “broken windows” theory of crime reduction: the idea that disorder and even signs of disorder (e.g., the broken window left unfixed) are the fatal undoing of urban neighborhoods. That is why these schools devote inordinate attention to making sure that shirts are tucked in, bathrooms are kept clean, students speak politely, and trash is picked up.

Paternalistic schools teach character and middle-class virtues like diligence, politeness, cleanliness, and thrift. They impose detentions for tardiness and disruptive behavior in class and forbid pupils from cursing at or talking disrespectfully to teachers. But the new paternalistic schools go further than even strict Catholic schools in prescribing student conduct and minimizing signs of disorder.

Pupils are typically taught not just to walk rather than run in the hallway—they learn how to walk from class to class: silently, with a book in hand. In class, teachers constantly monitor whether students are tracking them with their eyes, whether students nod their heads to show that they listening, and if students have slouched in their seats. Amistad Academy enforces a zero-tolerance policy. Calling out in class, distracting other students, rolling your eyes at a teacher—all rather common occurrences in most middle-school classrooms—result in students being sent to a “time out” desk or losing “scholar dollars” from virtual “paychecks” that can be used to earn special privileges at school.

Teachers ceaselessly monitor student conduct and character development to assess if students are acting respectfully, developing self-discipline, displaying good manners, working hard, and taking responsibility for their actions. The SEED school even requires students to have teachers sign a note after each class assessing how the student performed on a list of 12 “responsible behaviors” and 12 “irresponsible behaviors.”

Culture Change

Paternalistic schools are culturally authoritative schools as well. Their pupils learn—and practice—how to shake hands when they are introduced to someone. At SEED and Cristo Rey, students practice sitting down to a formal place setting typical of a restaurant and learn the difference between the dinner fork and the salad fork. The new paternalistic schools thus build up the “cultural capital” of low-income students by taking them to concerts, to Shakespearean plays, on trips to Washington, D.C., and to national parks. They help students find white-collar internships, and teach them how to comport themselves in an office.

One of the distinctive features of Cristo Rey is its novel work-study program, which dispatches students one day a week to clerical jobs in downtown Chicago in accounting firms, banks, insurance companies, law firms, and offices of health-care providers. For the first time in their lives, students are surrounded by white-collar professionals who had to attend college and graduate schools as a prerequisite to landing their jobs.

At the same time that these schools reinforce middle-class mores, they also steadfastly suppress all aspects of street culture. Street slang, the use of the “n-word,” and cursing are typically barred not only in the classroom but in hallways and lunchrooms as well. Merely fraternizing with gang members can lead to expulsion. If students so much as doodle gang graffiti on a notebook or a piece of paper at Cristo Rey, they are suspended. And if they doodle a gang symbol a second time, principal Pat Garrity expels them. The school day and year are extended in part to boost academic achievement, but also to keep kids off the street and out of homes with few academic supports.

The prescriptive rigor and accountability of paternalistic schools extend not just to student character and conduct but to academics as well. AIPCS is one of only two middle schools in Oakland to require every 8th grader—including special ed students—to take algebra I. All KIPP Academy 8th graders complete a two-year high-school-level algebra I course and take the New York State Math A Regents exam, a high school exit exam. In 2006, an astonishing 85 percent passed it.

Paternalistic schools, in short, push all students to perform to high standards. They spell out exactly what their pupils are supposed to learn and then ride herd on them until they master it. From the first day students walk through the door, their principal and teachers envelop them in a college-going ethos, with the goal that 100 percent of students will be admitted into college. Over time, paternalistic schools create a culture of achievement that is the antithesis of street culture.

By their very nature, the new paternalistic schools for teens tend to displace a piece of parents’ traditional role in transmitting values. Most of the schools are founded on the premise that minority parents want to do the right thing but often don’t have the time or resources to keep their children from being dragged down by an unhealthy street culture. But the schools do not presume that boosting parental participation is the key to narrowing the achievement gap. Parents’ chief role at no-excuses schools is helping to steer their children through the door—paternalistic schools are typically schools of choice—and then ensuring that their children get to school on time.

Principals and teachers at these schools are surprisingly familiar with students’ personal lives. As a result, students call on teachers and principals for advice and help. Teachers are deeply devoted to their students, often answering phone queries from students late into the night, showing up before school starts to help a struggling pupil, or staying late to help tutor. A KIPP student recalls, “I needed help in math in 5th grade and called my teacher one week three times a night.” It is not uncommon for students to describe their schools as a “second home.”

What really makes this a kinder, gentler form of paternalism is that parents, typically single mothers, choose to send their children to these inner-city schools—but they are also acting under duress. They believe their neighborhood schools fail to educate students and are breeding grounds for gang strife and drugs. They are often desperate for alternatives, and are particularly excited to find a no-nonsense public school committed to readying their children for college. In this sense, paternalistic schools draw a self-selected student population. Even so, there is surprisingly little evidence that these schools are “creaming” the best and brightest minority students. At most of these schools, students are typically one to two grade levels behind their age-level peers when they arrive.

The Old Educational Paternalism

Twice before in U.S. history paternalism has held sway in schools for low-income or minority students—with very different results. The first major expansion of paternalistic schooling was the Indian boarding schools of the late 19th century, which sought to “civilize” Native Americans. The second major expansion took place when urban schools sought to acculturate the multitudes of European immigrants to American society.

From the start, Indian boarding schools proved controversial and unpopular with many parents. Agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs rounded up Indian children—often against their parents’ will—to attend the schools. Upon their arrival, children’s hair was cut, Native American garb was replaced with school uniforms, and teachers forbade students to speak in their native tongue, often punishing students who failed to speak in English. Students with exotic or hard-to-pronounce Indian names were abruptly given Anglo surnames. Unlike the paternalistic schools of today, which seek to boost existing values among beleaguered single-parent families, Indian boarding schools sought to eradicate local culture and traditions and destroy the parent-child bond.

A more benevolent paternalism was evident early in the 20th century when urban schools took on the task of acculturating millions of Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrant children. Schools tried to “Americanize” impoverished immigrants by teaching them English and acclimating them to the schedules and expectations of city life. Most teachers and school administrators eagerly embraced the role of cultural evangelist. Teachers inspected children’s heads for lice and lectured them about hygiene and nutrition. Students were taught how to speak proper English; Anglicizing of names was common.

The ethos of Americanization was powerful, even within many immigrant slums. Time and again, when cities provided foreign-language instruction, immigrants declined to enroll in classes taught in their native tongue. Schools for immigrant children reinforced values that parents held but alone could not pass on to their children—namely, the desire that their children learn English and become Americans. On the whole, historians have judged the relatively rapid Americanization of millions of poor newcomers to be a qualified success.

In the latter half of the 20th century, paternalistic education largely disappeared from inner-city schools in the United States. For a quarter century after the controversial 1965 Moynihan report on “The Negro Family,” urban school administrators abided by an unwritten gag rule that barred candid discussion of the impact of ethnic culture and family values on academic performance. A core premise of paternalistic schools—that they can transport students out of poor communities by providing a sustained injection of middle-class values—became politically taboo. Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced this trend beginning in the 1970s. By advancing the notion that students have the right to free speech and the right to due-process protections if they are to be suspended or expelled, the Court made it more difficult for principals and teachers to play a morally authoritative role.

Scaling Up

As Lawrence Mead has pointed out, paternalism is neither conservative nor liberal per se; in some eras of American history, liberals have pressed for paternalistic programs, while at other times conservatives have lobbied for them. At first glance, the character training and rituals of these paternalistic schools give them a decidedly traditional feel. The schools teach old-fashioned virtues, simply put. Yet these virtues—perseverance, discipline, politeness—are really the same as the “noncognitive skills” that liberal education reformers like Richard Rothstein and economists like James Heckman want inner-city schools to boost in order to raise academic achievement and compensate for low-income students’ economic and cultural deficits.

In fact, the founders of many of today’s paternalistic schools are liberals who believe that closing the pernicious achievement gulf between white and minority students is the central civil-rights issue of our century. Most of the founders and principals of the schools I visited were uneasy with having their schools described as paternalistic. “I don’t think there is a positive way to say a school is paternalistic,” Eric Adler, cofounder of the SEED School in Washington, D.C., asserted. Dave Levin, cofounder of the network of KIPP schools, shared Adler’s reservations: “To say that a school is paternalistic suggests that we are condescending, rather than serving in the role of additional parents….”

Today’s paternalistic schools are more palatable to liberals than earlier models were because their curricula for character development promote not only traditional virtues but also social activism. SEED, for example, explicitly encourages community involvement in progressive causes, as do KIPP Academy, Cristo Rey, and University Park. SEED requires students to participate in community service projects and teaches each student to “make a commitment to a life of social action.” Students are urged to reflect on their own experiences with prejudice, discrimination, and bullying.

While liberals applaud these schools for placing poor kids on the path toward college (and out of poverty), conservatives cheer them for teaching the work ethic and traditional virtues. And there is great demand for seats in paternalistic schools among inner-city parents. So why not create lots more of them? Unfortunately, the three legs of the education establishment tripod—teachers unions, the district bureaucracy, and education schools—are all unlikely to embrace key elements that make paternalistic schools work. (See sidebar, for some habits of effective urban schools.)

Habits of Highly Effective Urban Schools (abridged) 1) Tell students exactly how to behave and tolerate no disorder. 2) Require a rigorous, college-prep curriculum. 3) Assess students regularly, and use the results to target struggling students and improve instruction. 4) Build a collective culture of achievement and college going. 5) Reject the culture of the streets. 6) Extend the school day and/or year. 7) Welcome accountability for teachers and principals and embrace constant reassessment. 8) Use unconventional channels to recruit committed teachers. 9) Don’t demand much from parents. 10) Don’t waste resources on fancy facilities or technology.

In paternalistic schools, principals must be able to assemble teams of teachers with a personal commitment to closing the achievement gap, teachers who are willing to work an extended school day and school year, who want to instruct teens about both traditional course matter and character development, and who will make themselves available to students as needed. But requiring teachers to work longer days and years would in most cases violate union contracts. So would allowing principals to handpick teachers (who may or may not be certified) and fire those who are not successful in the classroom. District bureaucrats, meanwhile, are loath to grant individual schools the freedom to do things differently, especially when it comes to curriculum and budget.

It would appear that education schools (and many K–12 educators trained there) bear a special animosity toward paternalism and its instructional incarnations. This is evident in their dislike of teacher-directed instruction, “drill-and-kill” memorization, rote learning, and direct instructional methods that emphasize the importance of acquiring basic facts and skills.

The Romantic educational philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and his American heir, John Dewey) continues to prevail. Most K–12 educators (and their teachers in ed schools) believe students should be free to explore, to cultivate a love of learning, and to develop their “critical thinking” skills unencumbered by rote learning. By contrast, the new paternalistic schools are animated more by obligation than freedom. Mead argues that “the problem of poverty or underachievement is not that the poor lack freedom. The real problem is that the poor are too free.” Paternalistic schools assume that disadvantaged students do best when structure and expectations are crystal clear, rather than presuming that kids should learn to figure things out for themselves.

Were it not for the recalcitrance of the education establishment, a grand bargain might be in the offing: If inner-city schools across the nation successfully adopted a no-excuses model, perhaps conservatives would be willing to support spending increases for longer school days, an extended school year, and additional tutoring. And perhaps liberals would be willing to grant principals and teachers of these schools a great deal of autonomy, allowing these schools to circumvent state and district regulations and union contracts.

For now, the spread of paternalistic schooling is taking place on a school-by-school basis in dozens of schools, but not on a massive scale. Unlike earlier generations of exemplary inner-city schools, today’s paternalistic institutions fortunately follow replicable school models and do not depend heavily on charismatic principals whose leadership cannot be copied elsewhere. The founders of these schools are devoting substantial resources to replicating their flagship schools, but they continue to encounter obstacles both political and practical. The difficulty of funding an extended school day and year, the reluctance of districts to grant autonomy to innovative school leaders, and the flawed charter laws and union contracts that tie the hands of entrepreneurs are just some of the factors that impede the spread of paternalistic reform. These obstacles make the restructuring of inner-city schools en masse in the mold of paternalism unlikely in the near future.

Still, these entrepreneurial school founders battle on, slowly replicating their institutions across the country. It is too soon to say that all of the copycat schools will succeed. But the early results are extremely encouraging. It is possible that these schools, so radically different from traditional public schools, could one day educate not just several thousand inner-city youngsters but tens or even hundreds of thousands of students in cities across the nation. Done well, paternalistic schooling would constitute a major stride toward reducing the achievement gap and the lingering disgrace of racial inequality in urban America.

David Whitman is a freelance journalist and former senior writer at U.S. News & World Report. This article was adapted from his forthcoming book, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2008).

Last year, more than 30 states increased public funding for pre-K education. Advocates Pre-K Now and its congressional allies are pushing for new federal spending and regulations. Some analysts project enormous long-term benefits to participants from publicly funded “universal” pre-K as well as societal benefits and taxpayer savings. Others question their methodologies along with their calculations. In this Education Next forum, two of today’s leading authorities on early childhood education consider what the research tells us about the effects of preschool, how preschool programs should be designed, and what it all means for public policy.

EDUCATION NEXT: What does the evidence tell us about the effectiveness of early childhood education programs and interventions?

DOUGLAS BESHAROV: The idea that early childhood education “works” stems largely from the widely trumpeted results of two experimental programs operated in the 1960s and 1970s. Both the Perry Preschool Project and later the Abecedarian Project [see Figure 1] reported substantial initial gains in cognitive indicators followed by significant long-term improvements in later school performance, rates of teenage and nonmarital births, and employment and earnings.

Debate continues about the validity of these findings, but there is no denying that these programs operated in a far different social and demographic setting than programs today and that they were “hothouse” programs: Run by top-notch specialists, the programs served fewer than 200 children, cost at least $15,000 per child per year in today’s dollars, often involved multiple years of services, had well-trained teachers, and instructed parents on effective child rearing. Significantly, the children they served had low IQs or had parents with low IQs. Since these two pioneering initiatives, no other rigorously evaluated programs have had similar results, despite many efforts to replicate them.

Recent assessments of school-based pre-K programs in Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia indicate that they substantially raise children’s vocabulary, math, and reading comprehension test scores at the end of one year. This important development points to the promise of such programs, but questions have been raised about the studies. In any event, they have so far only measured immediate or early gains in learning. There is as yet no evidence that these programs will have a lasting impact on the children.

One additional note: American families are divided about how much time young children should spend in child care. Although some advocates seem to think that early childhood education can begin in infancy, many families—and experts—are worried about having young children spend too much time in nonparental care. In this discussion, I assume that the early education is being offered for older preschoolers.

CRAIG RAMEY: The evidence is quite strong in favor of early education benefits, particularly for children from low-resource families. Low-resource families have limited parental education, very low family incomes, and/or parents unable to consistently provide high-quality learning opportunities essential for normal brain and behavioral development. Early education yields results in terms of later academic achievement that are greater and last longer than do educational interventions that begin after failure in school. The Abecedarian Project was not a one-time hothouse program; it was immediately replicated with a new group of similar children (in Project CARE) who demonstrated equal benefits throughout their school years and early adulthood. Next, we adapted this educational intervention for low birth-weight and premature children in the Infant Health and Development Program, conducted in eight cities with 985 participants, and found benefits in all eight cities, with the greatest benefits for children from families with the lowest levels of parent education. The last time these children were assessed, at age 18, they showed continued benefits from their early education. Other rigorously studied interventions include the Milwaukee Project and the Chicago Parent-Child Centers, which served thousands of children in multiple locations and resulted in long-term gains.

Key features of the proven programs that most likely account for the benefits are 1) employing highly competent staff, trained for their positions and then actively supervised; 2) monitoring children’s progress; 3) providing educationally focused professional development or in-service training; 4) directly addressing children’s needs to become capable in language and cognitive/academic abilities; 5) having adequate, stable facilities and supplies to support the educational, social, and recreational activities; 6) including and respecting parents as natural partners in preparing children for school; and 7) reporting the findings frequently to multiple audiences.

EN: Can we generalize the results from well-designed, generously funded pilot programs to large-scale efforts at the state or national level?

CR: It is a serious misrepresentation to claim that the best evidence for benefits of early childhood programs comes only from “pilot programs” that were extremely expensive. The costs of programs that have produced positive results are in the same ballpark as or lower than those of many already funded public and private programs serving three- and four-year-olds. Two very large, congressionally initiated programs that provided funding levels well in excess of the costs for the so-called “hothouse” programs failed. The first one, the Comprehensive Child Development Program, served poverty-level families and their children throughout the first five years of life, at more than twice the cost of the successful programs. The second, the National Head Start/Public School Early Childhood Transition Program, served children, families, and schools from kindergarten through 3rd grade, offering comprehensive Head Start–like services to poverty-level families. Despite very high levels of funding, these programs did not produce any measurable benefits to children, families, or communities.

In contrast, results from some of the state and local programs are highly encouraging for low-income children. The Louisiana four-year-old program (known as LA 4) has shown with four successive cohorts of children (totaling more than 15,000 children to date) that a high-quality, full-day pre-K program accelerates children’s achievement in math, language, and early literacy skills; reduces grade repetition when they enter public school; and reduces special education placement. The first cohort, now old enough to participate in third-grade testing, scored higher than did other low-income children who did not receive public pre-K. I lament that many of the best-known federally funded grant programs have produced disappointing or no evidence of benefits to children; I judge that this is because too many of these grantees failed to deliver the high-quality programs for which they were funded.

DB: However one interprets the evaluations of demonstration projects like the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian, the unavoidable conclusion is that the measured impacts of three national programs that seek to implement their approach—Head Start, Early Head Start, and Even Start—have been tragically “disappointing,” the word used by most objective observers.

According to repeated evaluations, these three programs do not make a meaningful difference in the lives of disadvantaged children. Here’s just one example: After almost a year in Head Start (with an average cost of about $7,700 in 2005), children were able to name only about two more letters than their non–Head Start counterparts, and they did not show any significant gains on much more important measures, such as early math learning, vocabulary, oral comprehension (more indicative of later reading comprehension), motivation to learn, or social competencies, including the ability to interact with peers and teachers.

Separate Purposes, Separate Policies I read the research literature to say that early education programs can probably make a marked improvement in the lives of disadvantaged children, but that we have only a partial idea of how they should be organized and managed, that is, brought to scale. As of now, there is no actual model of early education or preschool services that has been proven successful in closing the achievement gap, and any additional funding should be used to create a flexible system that can change, and improve, as more knowledge is accumulated. It is possible that the children from middle-income families might also benefit from preschool programs. The danger is that preschool will become a new middle-class entitlement, displacing the more intensive (and extensive) efforts needed to shrink the achievement gap among severely disadvantaged children. We need separate policies for each purpose, and bundling them together is a sure recipe for a new middle-class benefit that shortchanges the poor. —Douglas Besharov

EN: Advocates of expanded early childhood education forecast large long-term savings to taxpayers. How are those figures arrived at and do you find those projections to be credible?

DB: The only two rigorously evaluated early childhood education projects with a formal benefit-cost analysis are the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian projects (both performed by Steven Barnett). According to Barnett, for every dollar spent, the Perry Preschool saved taxpayers $7.20 and Abecedarian saved taxpayers $3.78. However, in both analyses, the bulk of accrued taxpayer savings is questionable; in the Perry Preschool analysis, the majority of savings resulted from probably inaccurate calculations in crime reduction. (Barnett uses self-reported arrest data from the children when they were older, but these arrest data seem inconsistent with official convictions data, an indication that the arrest data are inaccurate.) In the Abecedarian analysis, the majority of estimated savings accrued from projected participant earnings, which have no effect on savings to the taxpayer. If these questionable savings are removed from the calculations, according to RAND Corporation researchers the Perry Preschool saved taxpayers about $2.50 for each dollar spent; according to my calculations, Abecedarian saved taxpayers about $.66 for each dollar spent.

William Dickens of the Brookings Institution recently performed a revised benefit-cost analysis for the Pew Charitable Trusts (the leading foundation supporting the expansion of preschool programs). Although he only considered the benefits to taxpayers, his findings are instructive. Even taking the impacts of the two projects at face value, the benefit-cost ratio of an institutionalized Perry Preschool–type program would turn positive only after about 90 years. For Abecedarian, the ratio would turn positive after about 55 years.

Still, we should not use the absence of valid benefit-cost estimates as an argument against early childhood education. How children are raised, including the content and quality of early education and child care, unquestionably shapes their development. The question is not whether some vastly oversimplified benefit-cost claim can be used as a political argument in favor of early childhood education but, rather, how best to improve existing programs so that they are more effective in narrowing the achievement gap.

CR: There have been several different methods used to calculate benefits—and wildly different returns claimed—sometimes as high as $16 returned for $1 invested (definitely not realistic returns for most children and communities) to more conservative estimates of $1.40 returned for $1 invested (far more sustainable and based solely on costs to the public). A similarly high rate of return is unlikely for most current and proposed pre-K programs because many of the children being served have relatively low levels of risk for school failure, placement in special education, later criminal behavior, or failure to become economically self-sufficient in adulthood. The largest benefits claimed economically come from a relatively small study of 123 children in the Perry Preschool Program, where all of the children by age three were performing in the category now labeled developmentally or cognitively delayed (IQ scores below 85 prior to entering the program). This fact is seldom shared in public venues where a community is fighting to obtain support for expanding or improving its supports to vulnerable young children. By overstating the economic return, advocates may be creating unrealistic expectations and ultimately dooming the long-term community support for providing high-quality educational programs to all young children.

The largest short-term savings will be from reduced grade repetition (cut in half in the Abecedarian Program) and special education costs (reduced by 75 percent in the Abecedarian Project). Special education tends to cost double what regular education costs, and special education students today are eligible for free education until the age of 21 (rather than 18).

EN: Are there clear instructional standards that states ought to require providers to adopt? Should we consider a national curriculum for preschool?

CR: A single national curriculum should not be adopted for preschool. Early childhood education programs can succeed only when consistent high levels of instruction are provided in ways that are adapted to the learning and behavioral needs of young children. Young children learn through active engagement and play, not just sitting quietly or passively and receiving teacher-dominated lesson plans. Key evidence-based features of what three- and four-year-old children need to learn to prepare for becoming strong early readers have provided the core for a number of new published curricula, some of which have been rigorously evaluated and reported on; others are now being tested and evaluated. When instructional standards are made explicit, then programs can plan in ways that ensure that all teachers and teaching assistants have the knowledge, skills, and appropriate attitudes to provide high-quality instruction.

DB: It is highly unlikely that any one curriculum will meet the needs of all American children. Various curricula, however, show promise and, more importantly, indicate that much more can be done to prepare disadvantaged children for school. For example, both Project Upgrade (funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) and Early Reading First (funded by the Department of Education) used rigorous evaluation techniques and found that a properly or narrowly focused early childhood intervention can make a significant improvement in at least some elements of the cognitive development of disadvantaged children. Both programs provide staff with step-by-step, practical guidance about teaching language and literacy to preschoolers.

Congress should mandate a systematic program of research and experimentation, one that tries and evaluates different approaches to see what works best. Most important, making distinctions among children from different family backgrounds and with different degrees of need will be crucial. Those who are most behind almost certainly need a more intensive curriculum.

EN: Should we license early childhood educators?  If so, what are the appropriate criteria?

DB: The nature and quality of staff surely matter. The available research, however, is ambiguous at best. Some studies, for example, find that having a preschool teacher with a BA increases math scores; others find no effect on math scores but significant increases in writing scores; and still others find no effects whatsoever. However, the likelihood of selection effects in such studies has led many to question these results. (Better teachers tend to self-select into programs with children from more affluent and better educated families, and that is why the children may do better).

Many have become disenchanted with licensing and specific educational requirements for teaching K–12. Such requirements may not improve child outcomes significantly, and might even compromise them. Imposing more formal educational qualifications might exclude good teachers who were unable to obtain higher levels of education or are unwilling to make the career investment that licensing entails.

The preschool curriculum evaluation studies mentioned above suggest a more promising approach. Project Upgrade had as much impact as the state pre-K programs but, rather than rely on much more expensive public school staff, the program taught the regular child-care staff how to be more effective.

CR: The idea that licensing will help drive up the quality of instruction is a sound one. Licensing would be a major advance if it were grounded in practical demonstration that teachers and teaching assistants have the right set of skills to educate young children, and know how to individualize instruction and interactions with young children who differ in their social and emotional needs, their linguistic needs, and their needs related to specific early academic skills. The traditional ways of preparing teachers for elementary-school education will not suffice to prepare highly skilled educators for children under five years of age. What we urgently need is a thorough review and report about the adequacy of existing college preparation programs that grant associate degrees in early childhood education. Ideally, in the future, the degree-granting programs would work collaboratively with licensing entities in a manner similar to what exists in nursing, clinical psychology, medicine, dentistry, and allied health professions. What should be emphasized is how well teachers instruct in their classrooms, not just their formal education and degrees earned.

EN: What kinds of accountability measures, if any, would you advocate for early childhood education?

CR: The more than a dozen early childhood education programs that produced lasting benefits could point to those results because they held their programs accountable. Following the example these programs set, accountability has been accepted as valuable and been well implemented in a number of large-scale pre-K programs, such as those in Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and parts of California. I further want to refute the myth that assessing the progress of individual children is stressful to children (all teachers are expected to monitor and document children’s progress already). But I also think that classroom practices should be documented. When classroom instruction is directly observed and feedback is provided in ways that help teachers and teaching assistants improve their classroom practices, children have been shown to increase their gains. How could we not require that each and every program document the instruction and other supports provided, including the quality and consistency of instruction, the amount of time the program is offered, and the progress of the participating children and families?

DB: If we are to believe the repeatedly negative evaluations of Head Start, Early Head Start, and Even Start, these programs have unacceptably small impacts to justify their cost. The political process has begun to recognize their limited effectiveness and to hold them accountable. Presumably because of disappointing evaluations, Head Start’s funding has essentially remained flat since 2001, at about $7 billion. Yet, during the 2007 reauthorization of Head Start, nary a word was spoken about its questionable impacts. Most members proclaimed that Head Start “works” or “is highly successful.” Worse, Congress eliminated the Head Start National Reporting System, a series of cognitive tests administered twice a year to all Head Start children and designed to be “used in planning training and technical assistance efforts for local programs.” Critics argued that the tests focused only on cognitive impacts, that the questions were not age appropriate, and that the process was intentionally designed to prove Head Start was ineffective and therefore should be terminated.

Whether or not these complaints are valid, the accountability system was still in the development stage, and there is now no systematic way to measure the progress of Head Start children through the program. A better route would have been to improve the testing system the way all testing systems are improved: by trial and error, while keeping an open mind.

A Complicated Question The research funded to study long-term benefits of early educational programs was concentrated on children from highly impoverished families or children who already showed delays or disabilities. To date, the limited evidence about children with lesser risks or children from strong, healthy, well-resourced families indicates that high-quality education (as expected) does not have a strong positive or negative effect. This confirms what the most detailed scientific reviews conclude: children need to have frequent positive learning experiences on a regular basis during the first five years of life. Whether these are provided by parents, natural kinship networks, or paid-for child-care and preschool programs does not matter. There are important societal and practical issues, however, regarding whether pre-K should be provided free only to families who cannot afford an alternative. These questions include the potential value of having a socially and economically diverse group of children together prior to kindergarten; supporting families with working parents who require full-day care and education for their young children; and where best to serve children with special needs whose early education costs already are fully assumed (regardless of family income) by the public schools (based on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA]). —Craig Ramey

EN: If the government is to finance early childhood education, how should the funds be distributed: through the school system, by giving tax credits or vouchers to parents, or by some other mechanism?

DB: Up to now, the early childhood education movement has focused on expanding school-based pre-K programs [see Figure 2 for enrollment and state spending trends], with the ultimate goal of “universal pre-K.” According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, in 2006 states spent $3.3 billion on pre-K programs, up from $970 million in 1992. As much as 90 percent of these funds go to public schools, with the remainder going to selected center-based child-care providers. It is difficult to see why all pre-K programs—nationwide—should be entrusted to a public system fraught with so many serious shortcomings, especially in the low-income communities most in need of effective early education programs.

When early education funds are given to schools and other agencies to serve a specific neighborhood, parents must either send their child to the local free program or use their own money to pay to use a different one. Hence, they are denied real freedom to select the provider of their choice, or at least to receive government help to pay for their chosen provider.

More troubling, this top-down approach to funding early education programs is a retreat from the unquestionable success of child-care vouchers. Since 1991, the Child Care and Development Fund and other federal programs have provided almost $100 billion in child-care subsidies via state-distributed vouchers—with nary a problem—and low-income parents have had the freedom to choose the particular providers they want, largely without government constraints (even unlicensed providers can be used in most states).

CR: We do not have an adequate scientific basis, thus far, to endorse any single system of funding for early childhood education. I also do not think that programs with little or no benefits should continue to receive funding. The mega–child care subsidies program has funded programs that sometimes are of extremely low quality. Head Start and Early Head Start programs have ambitious goals and reasonable standards, but their actual implementation is far too uneven. These public subsidies for poor quality care must not be tolerated. Accordingly, I favor competitive market-driven approaches alongside publicly funded initiatives, so long as all of these are held publicly accountable using the same standards and measures of performance and benefits. Several interesting ideas have scarcely been tried, such as adequately funded vouchers, substantial tax credits, public-private partnership programs, and parent participatory contributions to early childhood programs. We need to support rigorous investigations of alternative strategies for providing young children with the care and education they need to succeed in school and life. There is likely to be plenty of room for having multiple approaches—all of which could be held to the same high quality standards—to help young children and their families.

Douglas M. Call assisted Douglas Besharov in the preparation of his responses.

Not since Abraham Lincoln have we had a president with as unusual an early education as the one experienced by the man who will take office on January 20, 2009. John McCain and Barack Obama each had considerably more formal schooling than “Honest Abe,” who spent only a few months in a one-room schoolhouse in his childhood. But the oddities of their educational experiences exceed even those of Teddy Roosevelt, the only other contender for this honor. (Though home schoolers may claim TR as their own, he was actually tutored by paid professionals.)

McCain apparently attended some 20 schools, including military base schools, public schools, and the elite Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia. He was bounced among so many schools as a child that McCain claims to have been educated mainly in his “mother’s mobile classroom.” Obama attended Indonesian Catholic and public schools, took correspondence courses under his mother’s watch, and graduated from an elite Hawaiian independent school. His early schooling was so problematic that his mother enrolled Obama in the correspondence course so that he could learn English (see “The Early Education of Our Next President”).

Both candidates had mothers who taught their sons a great deal and made careful choices—when they could—in selecting their sons’ schools. In the end, both young men went to top- notch colleges and pursued advanced degrees; needless to say, both have accomplished much. One can hardly make a better case for school choice.

Obama and McCain have hinted at the possibility that they are willing to embrace school choice for the sons and daughters of other Americans. “A truly historic commitment to education,” Obama says, “will require a willingness to break free from the same debates that Washington has been engaged in for decades—Democrat versus Republican; vouchers versus the status quo; more money versus more accountability.” During the heat of the primary campaign, Obama proclaimed, “We need to support charter schools. I think it is important to experiment, by looking at how we can reward excellence in the classroom.” Although he voted against legislation that would permit a voucher experiment in Washington, D.C., he has since said, in perhaps an unguarded moment, “If there was any argument for vouchers, it was ‘Alright, let’s see if this experiment works,’ and if it does, then whatever my preconceptions, my attitude is you do what works for the kids.”

McCain goes much further, saying, “Choice and competition is the key to success in education in America. That means charter schools, that means home schooling, it means vouchers.” On another occasion, he urged, “We should try charter schools all over America.”

If the next president decides to provide the range of choices for other Americans that he himself enjoyed many years ago, he would not have to win over a hostile public. According to the latest Education Next–PEPG poll, more Americans support than oppose charter schools, tax credits for education expenses, and Internet-delivered courses for advanced (and rural) students (see “The 2008 Education Next–PEPG Survey of Public Opinion”).

But the president would have some educating to do. Much of the public still knows little about charter schools, which today serve only 2 percent of the population. Online schooling is in its infancy, and Americans remain skeptical of its use for credit by either dropouts or home-schooled students.

Still, the public recognizes that the existing school system is mediocre or worse. Two-thirds give the nation’s schools a grade of no better than “C,” and more Americans think highly of their local police department than of their neighborhood school.

Nor are many people content with current federal efforts to fix the situation. Public support for No Child Left Behind eroded noticeably between 2007 and 2008.

Both Obama and McCain promise to reform that law. If they use the occasion to encourage creative new ways to give more Americans decent choices among schools—perhaps through charters, perhaps over the Internet, perhaps through vouchers or via the tax code—they could put their own heterodox education to good civic use.

— Paul E. Peterson

Disrupting Class

Clay Christensen and Michael Horn’s essay (“How Do We Transform Our Schools?” features, Summer 2008) has a plaintive quality to it. Their argument about disruptive innovation is compelling in a for-profit setting, not so in elementary and secondary schools, which are positively hostile to innovation, nondisruptive as well as disruptive. It makes no difference whether the schools in question are public or private, not-for-profit or for-profit. They all look and act the same. Why? The culture: in the things that matter—organization, administration, curriculum, teaching, and learning—they are all cut from the same cloth.

Consider entrepreneurial behavior for a moment. It requires incentives (to think as an entrepreneur) and rewards (to behave as an entrepreneur). Neither exists in elementary and secondary schooling. To the contrary, schools are positively hostile to entrepreneurship, the key condition for successful innovation of any kind. What is more likely than a disruptive technology in the schools is a disruptive technology that end-runs the schools: indeed, all the things that kids like about technology—games, Facebook, texting, PDAs, cell phones, smaller and smaller computers, 24/7 uncensored web access—are off-limits in schools.

The authors’ conjecture about the “commercial system” in the U.S. beginning with the “writing of concepts in textbooks” reveals more than they perhaps intended. Made possible by Gutenberg and invented by Jan Comenius (The Great Didactic), the textbook was the technology that made mass education possible (and has come to symbolize the anti-intellectualism that is the hallmark of American schools). Wikis, collaborative web sites for storing and sharing data, may be the ultimate disruptive technology, spelling both the emblematic and literal end of the textbook, an event to be devoutly welcomed and applauded.

Denis P. Doyle
Co-founder and Chief Academic Officer
SchoolNet, Inc.

The Governator

Daniel Weintraub’s chronicle of the tortured path of education politics under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (“No Country for Strong Men,” features, Summer 2008) hints at the frustration surrounding the death of the Year of Education Reform in California, but it fails to reach the obvious conclusion: if the “Governator” cannot do it, nobody is likely to do it—now or in the future.

The backdrop of current California education politics is a $2 million set of studies that convincingly argue that the system is the problem. The studies conclude that virtually any amount of added funding is likely to be swallowed up without a trace of improvement in student achievement and without significant changes in the rules, regulations, and incentives. Based on those studies, the governor’s own commission, of which I am a member, called for an array of interlocking changes that would break school districts free to deal with California students mired at the bottom of state rankings on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Governor Schwarzenegger, because of his immense personal power and because he became governor without the usual strings attached to California politicians going through the primary process, stands in a unique position to move the schools forward. But it appears that even he finds the task of securing the future for California children to be too difficult. If that doesn’t change, California will fuel its economy with imported workers from other states and countries, because California schools simply are not preparing students for a dynamic, skills-based labor market.

Stories of education politics always have their punch lines centered on which of the named combatants wins. The stories are grounded in the battles over propositions, budgets, and the like. And, they find it easy to ignore the real losers—the students.

Eric Hanushek
Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution
Stanford University

Daniel Weintraub’s article is an excellent overview of Schwarzenegger’s limited vision and impact on K–12 education. Just when the governor appeared ready to think hard about new concepts, an $18 billion budget deficit appeared. When there was money, in 2006, the governor and legislature created more than 20 small-widget categorical programs rather than addressing fundamental problems. They spent all the new money rather than saving it for years when state economic growth slows.

But my conclusion from his speeches and discussions is that the governor hopes his proposals for larger system change will trickle down to education. He is relying on voter initiatives for legislative redistricting and saving money from good revenue years. Redistricting may produce more legislators who are moderates and not as beholden to interest groups. Health care, however, is his top priority, so even these initiatives may never touch education.

The education coalition will not permit real policy change without a lot of new money. The coalition is more than teachers unions and includes school boards, administrators, PTAs, and noncertified employees represented by several different unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Governor Schwarzenegger has no coalition that can overcome this alliance, with its proven pressure tactics that include student demonstrations. So the best strategy is to wait for economic conditions to improve and try to put together a deal that has more money and real reform. This approach has not been implemented since 1983, and this governor is term-limited in 2010.

Michael W. Kirst
Professor Emeritus
Stanford University

Reading First

Shep Barbash has done a masterful job of explaining the goals of the Reading First program and its journey through periods of legislative gymnastics, controversy, and success in selected states (“Looking Beyond the Reading First Controversy,” features, Summer 2008). Barbash has underscored the unique nontraditional features of the program and how those features made both acceptance of the program and its implementation difficult. His analysis is timely given the recent Reading First Impact Study, which will no doubt provide fuel for gutting the program.

The need to design and implement a rigorous impact study was essential to the improvement of the evidence-based Reading First program. That is why Bob Sweet and I included evaluation targets in the law and substantial funds ($25 million) to address the targets. However, for this interim report, few evaluation tasks were completed, including the determination of which instructional materials improve reading proficiency. Unless the final report addresses this issue, it will not be possible to identify which programs and materials were most beneficial for which children and under what conditions.

The Department of Education was provided the resources to reduce misinterpretation of the study’s findings, positive or negative. Yet it delayed the evaluation by using a research design that was not originally intended, potentially limiting an analysis of factors essential to valid interpretation. Evaluations are about accountability and improvement. Improvement is difficult if you have to guess what the data mean.

Barbash’s review of Reading First programs in four states and in the Bureau of Indian Education is important because it highlights critical factors essential to reading improvement: strong leadership, effective professional development for teachers and principals, data-driven differentiated instruction, specific coaching and guidance to ensure implementation fidelity, and continuous program evaluation. Barbash has vividly described why change in education is so hard, but has given us examples of states and systems achieving the almost impossible on behalf of struggling readers. That is a real contribution.

G. Reid Lyon
Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy
Southern Methodist University

Wrong Numbers

William Howell and Martin West have written an interesting article about Americans’ utter ignorance concerning the amounts their tax dollars contribute to public education costs (“Is the Price Right?” features, Summer 2008). While homeowners and parents were somewhat more knowledgeable than others, they too were way off in their estimates of per-pupil expenditures in their districts and average teacher salaries in their states. Yet the vast majority of Americans support increased spending on schools and believe that more money will result in more student learning.

It is humbling for us policy wonks to see how far off the public is about not only their investments in public schooling, but what might make a difference in student outcomes. But frankly, I’m more concerned about the taxpayers’ and the pollsters’ lack of interest in the unfairness of how the nation’s only universal service is funded. Every level of government—local, state, and federal—underfunds the least well-off communities, with few exceptions, when considering varying student needs generated by poverty, disability, and language. Clearly, major efforts to educate the public are going to be necessary if school financing is ever to become fairer as well as wiser. We have learned that how money is spent is just as important as the amount. And given the lack of knowledge about funding, I shudder to think what a survey would show about what the money buys.

But are Americans any more informed about how their taxes and tax breaks work in other sectors, with the likely exception of the war in Iraq? Homeowners deduct mortgages and lower-income renters get virtually no help. We provide much more support to the elderly than we do to young children. Even the pinch of high health-care costs has not yet generated a successful public demand for more government investment. My hunch is that the public’s knowledge of school funding is no less than their knowledge of other important funding issues.

Cynthia G. Brown
Director of Education Policy
Center for American Progress

A Matter of Time

We read with great interest the article by Caroline Hoxby and Sonali Murarka, which reports promising results from their randomized-control study of New York City charter school students (“New York City Charter Schools,” research, Summer 2008). One aspect of their research in particular caught our eye: the association of more school time with improved learning outcomes. Their finding that a longer year (and in many schools, a longer day, too) correlates to higher student proficiency rates is yet another indication that the traditional school calendar in the U.S. is not sufficient if we are going to meet our goal of moving all students to, at minimum, academic proficiency.

At least one-third of charter schools across the country operate with an expanded schedule. In Illinois and New Jersey, 80 percent of charter schools have a longer school day or year or both. At the newly formed National Center on Time & Learning, we are firm believers that more time can improve student learning because, like Hoxby and Murarka, we have seen it work. In Massachusetts, 18 urban district schools have added at least 300 hours to their school calendar. An analysis after one year of the initiative (involving 10 schools) showed that students in these schools outpaced average proficiency gains in the state in math, science, and English language arts. Our research suggests that an expanded school schedule offers a multitude of educational benefits, including more time on task, a broader array of enrichment programs to engage students in school, and time for teachers to participate in real collaborative planning and additional professional development.

This year we mark the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk. That report outlined four key recommendations concerning educational content, expectations, teachers, and time, noting that progress on each of these fronts would require leadership and fiscal support. We can point to important federal and state progress on all the recommendations, except for time. Only Massachusetts has a statewide initiative to assist traditional public schools in expanding school schedules. Now that Hoxby and Murarka’s charter school data and the Massachusetts initiative show such promising results, we are hopeful that “time” will finally take its rightful place in our country’s education reform lineup.

Jennifer Davis
President

David Farbman
Co-Director of Research
National Center on Time & Learning

Charters as a Diverse Sector

Charter schools are too often treated as a monolithic reform and too rarely treated as a diverse sector. When we think of charter schools as a reform, we tend to either praise or criticize, depending on the particular snapshot of charter schools we’re discussing. When we think of them as a sector, we understand that charter schools mirror other sectors—private schools and traditional publics—in their range of quality and outcomes. And we can learn from their successes and failures.

Viewed from this sector perspective, your two charter school articles (“Brand-Name Charters,” features, and “New York City Charter Schools,” research, Summer 2008) offer valuable contributions. From a reform perspective? Not so much.

The article about franchise charter schools describes a vibrant subsector. It explores the problem of growing beyond a small number of successful schools while simultaneously addressing quality control. Where the article runs into trouble is when it tells readers, with no empirical backing, that the charter movement began “with tremendous potential for narrowing the achievement gap,” suggesting that there are “too few” charter schools to fulfill that promise. In truth, research has shown charter performance to be similar, on average, to the performance of traditional public schools.

The second article offers a more direct comparison of charters to other public schools, using a random lottery design. The results add one more data point to the diverse assortment of studies about charter performance: an example of the charter sector outperforming, on the whole, nearby traditional schools. The comparison here, it should be noted, is to New York City schools that have been criticized as underfunded and underperforming. The study thus tells us either that the charters did well, the other schools did poorly, or a combination of both.

The authors are careful to state that the significance of the findings is limited to large cities with similar student populations, to which I would add a caution about the generalizability beyond New York City itself. As with the first article, the second is strongest when it approaches charters as a diverse sector, teasing out the sorts of school practices associated with higher test scores. Let’s keep trying to learn about what works.

Kevin G. Welner
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns
By Clayton M. Christensen, with Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson
McGraw-Hill, 2008, $32.95; 288 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Clayton Christensen is a professor at the Harvard Business School and the author of a widely used book on innovations in business titled The Innovator’s Dilemma. Published originally in 1997, with the subtitle “when new technologies cause great firms to fail,” The Innovator’s Dilemma went into a second edition in 2000 with a new tag line, “the revolutionary bestseller that changed the way we do business.” I note further editions published in 2003 and 2006. Clearly there is something here that has been of interest in the world of business schools and businessmanagement.

Christensen is an expert on Silicon Valley, its changing products and fortunes, but in his new book, written with two colleagues, he draws on the history of many other fields of business enterprise, from making automobiles and radios to launching new kinds of investment opportunities. His central idea is there is a kind of “disruptive innovation” that causes great companies to fail and new start-ups to replace them. Here he applies the theory of disruptive innovation to the field of education. What can we learn from this transfer of tools of analysis, apparently helpful in business, to education?

Christensen sets the stage by asking why it is so hard to improve schools, running through some common explanations: We don’t spend enough money on them, we don’t use enough computers, students have become lazy and media- and game-addicted, schools are just too traditional. And then there are the teachers unions. While he accepts that all may play a role in school failure, he sees another as the central problem: education and schooling are not childcentric and in particular do not respond to the reality that children are different and learn differently. He is a strong advocate of the work of Howard Gardner on “multiple intelligences,” supporting Gardner’s theory that there are many kinds of intelligence, and many ways of learning, and that different children bring different kinds of intelligence to the learning endeavor. Thus, according to Christensen, the traditional classroom, with children of a given age being taught by a single teacher using a common pedagogy, will not do. Effective reform requires “customization” of the process of teaching, to adapt to the varying styles of different children. And the way to attain this new model of education is through the computer, with its ability to present a nearly infinite variety of ways of teaching in almost any field. But standing in the way of such a transformation is the fixed structure of the school, the age-determined set of classes, slotted into a curriculum where one learns certain things at a certain age and must move on to the topics determined as suitable for the next year.

“Disruption” of this pattern is required, and Christensen leads us through his theory of “disruptive innovation,” which he contrasts with “sustaining innovation.” “Sustaining innovation” is one improvement after another in a given product—the automobile, the telephone, the business computer—which the product innovation departments of established companies introduce. But there is another kind of innovation, which the established companies do not recognize, or do not consider profitable, or cannot fit easily into their established patterns. Christensen offers many examples from business history: the large business computer was displaced by the personal computer, the fixed radio set by the small transistor-driven portable. Leading corporations were blind-sided by these disruptive innovations. This is what education needs if we are to see improvement (see “How Do We Transform Our Schools?” features, Summer 2008).

Are charter schools this kind of disruptive innovation? Teachers unions and public school systems think so, but they will not quite do for Christensen, though he recognizes some as being truly innovative. Does the huge expansion in the number of computers in schools serve as an appropriate disruptive innovation? It could, but it doesn’t, because they are used primarily to supplement old practices rather than establish the new ones that are truly disruptive and innovative. The truly disruptive innovation, according to Christensen, is one that is directed to the nonconsumer of the established product. This seems to be a key feature of his theory: The small personal computer did not supplement the large business computer of the early days of the computer revolution, but instead served those who didn’t have any computers at all; the transistor-driven small radio was embraced by those who had no other access to radios.

But how do we apply this story, based on histories of business successes and failures, to schools? By way of Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and the computer’s capacity to provide different ways of teaching and learning. Christensen heads each chapter with a vignette featuring students, teachers, and administrators in an imaginary high school. In one of these vignettes Maria, an able student interested in learning Arabic, which is not offered in the school, is directed to a computer program and shown happily learning the new language. This is an example of the “nonconsumer”—this student was not already taking Arabic, though she may have been studying another language. Rob is an able athlete—an example of Gardner’s “bodily-kinesthetic intelligence”—who is having difficulty with chemistry. He also gets connected to a computer program, which teams him up with a Japanese student who is eager to learn English and will in exchange help him with his chemistry. One is less optimistic that this approach to improving chemistry for Rob will work as well as the Arabic program for Maria. One wonders, too, whether there is any kind of specialized computer program imaginable that will make use of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence to improve knowledge of chemistry.

Christensen is aware of the strong class differences among children as reflected in school achievement, but he is convinced by research that shows that a great part of intellectual ability is determined by the experience of the first 36 months of life, particularly the amount and kind of language directed to children. Nothing much can be done about that when the children reach school, even in pre-kindergarten, so he puts his money on multiple intelligences and the computer.

Christensen acknowledges the many problems that are involved in what he hopes will be a revolutionary change in how education works, when many kinds of imaginative computer programs addressed to all kinds of students are in use. The lockstep system of education is bolstered by many institutions, such as the production and adoption of widely used uniform textbooks, and Christensen hopes that they will be undermined by the rapid advance of computerized teaching programs, adapted to different children. He sees opportunities for this kind of disruptive innovation in the small rural schools that cannot offer many subjects, in urban secondary schools in low-income areas with similarly restricted course offerings, and for homebound and home-schooled students. He sees the beginnings of a market response in companies such as Apex Learning, established by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Enrollment in online-delivered courses rose from 45,000 in 2000 to 1 million in 2007. From a perspective based on the experience of innovative growth in other areas, Christensen writes that “the data suggest that by 2019 about 50 percent of high school courses will be delivered online.” This is an astonishing projection, and one doesn’t know what to make of it. Is it really possible? Christensen shows a surprising self-confidence on other matters as well. Critical of contemporary education research, he touts an approach which seems not particularly different, but from which he expects great results. “Other fields,” he writes, “have bodies of research that allow people to predict with great certainty the results of actions.” “Great certainty?” I wonder.

Disrupting Class breathes a degree of confidence that is on the whole foreign to the world of education, one that may be characteristic of the world of the business school. In business case studies, one learns just why businesses succeed or fail, and the course of action that would have avoided failure. In the world of real business, things are of course not so simple. Undoubtedly more, and one hopes better, use of computers will be made. Perhaps they can be adapted to different styles of learning. Christensen envisages this as emerging from “user networks” developing “user-generated content.” That certainly seems more feasible, if it can be done, than the enormous up-front expense incurred in developing a large array of courses adapted to different kinds of students. But one cannot resist a degree of skepticism. What we have learned to value in schooling is verbal and mathematical skills, and perhaps we have been excessive in the degree to which we value the kinds of intelligence that lead to high achievement in these competencies. But such achievement cannot be attained by every style of intelligence, using distinctive means adapted to it. So I remain skeptical of the prospects for “disruptive innovation” in our education system if its success will rely on heightening the role of other kinds of intelligence.

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

See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan
By Gareth Davies
University Press of Kansas, 2007, $39.95; 387 pages.

As reviewed by Luther Spoehr

Gareth Davies, a historian at Oxford University, brings care and precision to his study of the process that produced federal education legislation and regulation in the United States from the mid-1960s into the 1980s. His book illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of this approach to the history of education policy.

Davies starts out by telling how President Lyndon Johnson, after his 1964 landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, made the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 integral to his War on Poverty. Previously, federal involvement in education had been minimal, even after Congress responded to the Russians’ launch of Sputnik by passing the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958.

Initially, ESEA money had few federal strings attached; there was little oversight or accountability. The amount of money involved was relatively small—federal aid never amounted to more than 10 percent of the total cost of education—and vocal constituencies in districts around the country fought for every available dollar. Quoting historian James T. Patterson on the growth of “rights consciousness,” Davies notes that those constituencies often defended ESEA and demanded its expansion with the language and logic of the civil rights movement.

Davies’s biggest contribution comes in his discussion of the post-Johnson years, when he criticizes the master narrative that portrays post-1960s American politics as “a sustained reaction against Great Society liberalism.” While not denying that such a reaction took place, he finds that in education “the persistence and even growth of big government during a supposedly conservative era” matters more. Congressional votes are revealing: four-fifths of House Republicans voted against ESEA in 1965; when it was renewed in 1974, “conservative opposition had all but disappeared.”

Strong chapters on school desegregation, bilingual education, education for the disabled, and school finance all support Davies’s argument that “in the 1970s, reform often emanated from…within the federal bureaucracy, from the lower federal courts, and through the energetic efforts of congressional staffers, lobbyists, and public interest law firms.” Education reform’s “comparative detachment from…electoral politics” allowed the push for change to continue.

Reformers were opportunistic. Nobody who wrote or supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 thought that the term “minority” included so-called language minorities. But in 1970 the new head of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), J. Stanley Pottinger, saw his opportunity and took it. New regulations eventually became law, and at the Supreme Court the solicitor general (strict constructionist Robert Bork!) successfully defended the “Lau remedies,” regulations stemming from Lau v. Nichols (1974) requiring, among other things, that students be instructed in their native language until deemed ready for English-only classrooms.

The same “minority rights” arguments appeared in the policy debates that led to the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (famous as PL 94-142). Davies observes that no “mass mobilization” of the disabled demanded change, and “the White House was completely absent from the story.” The essential participants were progressive public-interest lawyers, agreeable lower courts, and local school districts anxious that they not be stuck with the entire special education bill.

By the time the reader gets to the Carter-Reagan years, Davies has established his main point: in the 1970s, prior reforms were well protected, and disparate groups pushed, sometimes successfully, for more. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter made good on his promise to establish a separate Department of Education (more for political than educational reasons). Campaigning against Carter in 1980, and consistent with his claim that government was the problem, not the solution, Ronald Reagan vowed to dismantle the new department, only to find once in office this was easier said than done. Opposed by powerful institutionalized interests (who were aided by his own subtly subversive secretary of education, Terrel Bell), Reagan decided that the game wasn’t worth the candle. Then, with the luck that attended much of his career, Reagan made education reform his own when the National Commission on Excellence in Education announced in 1983 that the nation was “at risk.”

Still ahead were the “standards movement,” culture wars, the “education presidencies” of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and, of course, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). These are beyond the scope of Davies’s book. But the increasingly convoluted, intricate pattern of “policy innovation” he describes foreshadows future policymaking trends.

Davies’s dissection of these complexities scuttles any notion that things turn out as they do because a single powerful person or group wants it that way. His narrative spotlights the compromises, unintended consequences, miscalculations, and ad hoc adjustments that make laws and regulations the products of chance and circumstance. At the same time, his story fits neatly into another master narrative, one about the decline of federalism in the United States. With “states rights” and “local control” discredited by association with segregationists, people resisting federal involvement in education lacked an ideology to justify their stance and the political means to sustain it. Davies notes, “conservatives have…decisively [abandoned] the small government faith of their forefathers.”

Davies is consistently persuasive; his research is prodigious, particularly in his exploration of government archives, as well as memoirs and oral histories by policy participants. But his approach has significant limits. Although Davies says his “analysis is predicated on the assumption that compensatory programs…have fallen short of the buoyant expectations of the mid-1960s,” and notes that even at the time there was a “lack of convincing evidence that federal dollars were improving the quality of American education,” he does not explain why those expectations existed, or why dissenting voices went unheeded. Writers and educators who generated outrage or excitement, such as Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, Ivan Illich, and others, go unmentioned. James Coleman’s famous 1966 report, dubious about the ability of schools to promote equality, gets less than a full sentence. Were policymakers unaware of these views?

In short, Davies shortchanges the role of the Zeitgeist and ignores important parts of the context (schools, for instance) where policy played out. His narrow vision lets him dodge the question that should ultimately engage historians of American public education: to what extent, if any, were schools, teachers, and students better or worse off as a result of federal involvement in education policymaking? Good as it is, See Government Grow also shows why we need to keep “education” in the study of “education policy.”

Luther Spoehr is lecturer in the departments of education and history at Brown University.

Everyone knows that the Internet is changing the way the world works, plays, and connects. Yet its most powerful applications only seem obvious after some entrepreneur has brought them to life. Of course the web is a great way to distribute books, but it took Amazon to make this clear. Of course the Internet is a smart way to distribute movies, but it took Netflix to make it happen.

So it is with adult learning. Most professionals would rather develop their skills online, on their own schedule, at their own pace, than sit in daylong, mind-numbing “workshops” that bring a lot of boredom and frustration but little intellectual stimulation. So it’s not surprising that as long ago as 2006 (eons in Internet time) the American Society for Training and Development reported that across all sectors almost 40 percent of professional development (PD) was delivered via technology (See figure 1). (Surely the numbers are even higher now.)

 

One would think that our elementary and secondary education system would embrace online learning for teachers and administrators, too. Traditional professional development for educators isn’t exactly winning rave reviews; in 2006, for example, the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher found that only half of teachers thought that “providing more opportunities for professional development would help a lot in keeping good people in teaching.”

It’s not hard to understand why: as with other professionals—or even K–12 students—individual teachers don’t want or need homogenized training. They need “differentiated instruction,” targeted to where they are in their careers and focused on the subjects they teach, their own strengths and skills gaps. None of this is easy to deliver in traditional settings.

And school schedules make face-to-face training logistically challenging. Some districts have created special “professional development” days for their teachers (likely not popular with working parents); others try to cram PD into the heads of exhausted instructors as soon as the closing bell rings.

As in so many other areas, our education system appears to be lagging behind in exploiting the Internet. Last year the National Research Council (NRC) published Enhancing Professional Development for Teachers: Potential Uses of Information Technology. It reported on a recent survey by Leah O’Donnell of consulting firm Eduventures, which found that six in seven teachers had participated in “conventional” professional development experiences, but a “markedly lower” proportion had access to online training.

This is particularly perplexing, given that teachers could be receiving targeted training in the comfort of their own homes, on their own schedule, and without the hassle or frustration of face-to-face PD. And the offerings of online teacher training are growing—and growing better. For example, PBS’s TeacherLine offers more than 100 interactive courses for pre-K–12 teachers, who can earn PD credits or (for a nominal fee) even college credit for completing them. Or consider CaseNEX, an online professional development company that spun off from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. Via online video, teachers can engage with real-life “case studies” of classroom challenges and participate in an interactive online community of professionals. And yes, they can earn credits for doing so.

So why aren’t K–12 educators embracing online professional development in greater numbers? The NRC report suggests several possible reasons, including a lack of knowledge about such opportunities among teachers and administrators; a bias among principals for more traditional methods; and institutional resistance from district professional development staff who might see their own jobs disappear if teachers bypass their programs and engage in training created from afar.

This institutional resistance appears to be the most likely explanation, but it’s not limited to central office staff. As with so many things in life, the problem comes down to money. Traditional professional development providers (including colleges of education) have a lot of dollars at stake in the face-to-face model. They are likely to be outcompeted by national providers in the purveyance of customized teacher training.

And teachers themselves have come to expect to be compensated for the time they spend in professional development activities. A recent study by Education Next executive editor Frederick M. Hess for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that the collective bargaining agreements of more than half of the nation’s 50 largest school districts mandate that teachers be paid stipends for participating in PD outside of the regular school day. If these teachers participated in online professional development instead, at home, at night or on the weekends, would they have to be paid for their time? It’s not clear.

Perhaps accountability is an issue, too. Under the traditional model, teachers get credit just for showing up. In an online setting, they would probably have to demonstrate mastery of a subject via an assessment. And almost nothing stirs up a faculty lounge more than the dreaded words “teacher testing.”

Still, judging from the Internet’s success in revolutionizing other fields, eventually the resistance to online professional development will crumble. How long that will take will be a decent indicator of just how calcified our education system has become.

Professors are constantly asked if their students are better or worse today than in the past. I conducted an experiment to try to answer that question for one group of students.

For my fall 2006 course, Calculus I for the Biological and Social Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), I administered the same final exam I had used for the course in the fall of 1989. The SAT mathematics (SATM) scores of the two classes were nearly identical, and the classes contained approximately the same percentage of the Arts and Sciences freshman class.

The content of the calculus I course had not changed and, from a math standpoint, using the old exam was completely appropriate.

The average exam score for my 2006 calculus I class was significantly lower than for my 1989 class. Comparing the effects of scaling in the two years reveals the extent of the decline. In my 1989 class, 27 percent of students received As on the test and 23 percent Bs. When I graded my 2006 class on my 2006 scale, 32 percent received As and 37 percent Bs. But if I instead graded my 2006 class on the 1989 scale, only 6 percent would have received As and 21 percent Bs. If I graded the 1989 class on the 2006 scale, 52 percent would have received As and 26 percent Bs.

Why did my 2006 class perform so poorly? With the proliferation of AP calculus in high school, one might think that the good students of 2006 place out of calculus I more frequently than did their 1989 counterparts. However, in 1989, 30 percent of the Arts and Sciences freshmen either took the harder engineering calculus course or a higher level mathematics course (calculus II or III, linear algebra, or differential equations). The percentage in 2006 is only 24 percent.

I am inclined to conclude that the 2006 JHU students are not as well prepared as the corresponding group was in 1989, despite there being significantly more competition to get into JHU today than ever before.

This phenomenon is probably shared with many other universities. The year 1989 is, in mathematics education, indelibly tied to the publication by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics of the report “Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics,” which downplayed pencil-and-paper computations and strongly suggested that calculators play an important role in K–12 mathematics education. My 2006 students would have been about two years old at the time of this very influential publication, and it could easily have affected the mathematics education many of them received. A 2002 JHU study found that students for whom “in K–12, calculator usage was emphasized and encouraged” had lower mathematics grades in the large service courses.

As it stands, universities have no way of rejecting applicants who do not know arithmetic adequately for college-level mathematics. Since 1994, the College Board has allowed the use of calculators on the mathematics SAT. The College Board’s calculator policy states, “Every question on the SAT Reasoning Test [SATM] can be solved without a calculator; but you will gain an advantage by using a calculator with which you are familiar.” I believe it is precisely this gained “advantage” that causes the SATM to fail universities in the admissions process.

My findings spread like wildfire through the mathematics community. Finally, we have data that confirm what we all thought. The surprise was the general indifference that administrators at JHU had toward the study. This kind of drop in SAT scores would be a crisis, but the news that high-performing students were less prepared for college math than students 17 years earlier didn’t seem to bother anyone, at least not enough to contemplate taking action. I urge universities to join together to negotiate with the College Board for a more appropriate test or to look to an alternative test that adequately gauges mathematics preparation.

W. Stephen Wilson is professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. The unabridged version of the study is available here.