When in 2006 California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger asked a panel of education experts to recommend an overhaul of the state’s troubled public schools, observers hoped the celebrity chief executive was about to bring his unique brand of postpartisan politics to an issue that sorely needed it. Schwarzenegger had built consensus in a fractured legislature on such difficult issues as workers’ compensation, prison reform, and the largest package of public-works bonds in the nation’s history. He was working closely with Democrats on health care. And now he had declared that 2008 would be his “Year of Education Reform.”

But that optimism faded when Schwarzenegger, confronting a growing deficit in the state budget, shelved most of the far-reaching recommendations that his own commission sent his way. It would be neither fair nor practical, the governor said in January 2008, to ask the education community to accept a major dose of reform at the same time that he was proposing to cut state spending on the schools.

“We can’t do…all the things that we wanted to do,” Schwarzenegger said in an appearance before the California Newspaper Publishers Association. “It’s just simply because we won’t have the money available. And it is very hard to negotiate and to sit down with the education coalition and to say, ‘Here is what we want you to do; here are the 20 things we want you to do, but we’re going to take 3.5, 4 billion dollars away from you.’ So that doesn’t make any sense.”

Total Recall

Schwarzenegger’s caution undoubtedly grew out of his experience in 2005, when he did try to push education reform and budget cuts at the same time, and failed miserably. But his strategy also reflected the approach he has taken to education policy since he was elected: mostly hands-off. Despite a political persona and personal résumé that suggested the issue would be a perfect one for him, and despite the public’s seeming thirst for new ideas to improve the schools, Schwarzenegger has not made education policy a priority.

Bonnie Reiss, a longtime friend of the governor who served on his staff for two years, advised him on education issues, and was one of his appointees to the state Board of Education, said Schwarzenegger told her and others in his administration why he did not want to get involved in a long, politically difficult effort to overhaul the public schools.

“The recall election was not about public education,” Reiss said, referring to the historic 2003 election in which voters ousted a sitting governor, Gray Davis, and installed Schwarzenegger in his place. “The recall was about the budget, economic issues, energy, businesses fleeing the state. He used to say California was like a patient in triage. First we have to stop the bleeding. Then we have to heal the patient. Arnold felt very strongly that the anger of the voters that created the recall was not about public education. As critical as it was, it was not one of the first things he had to do in triage.”

Like a good physician, Schwarzenegger, at least for his first four years, followed the Hippocratic oath: do no harm. He proposed nothing that would undo the bipartisan momentum California has built on solid academic standards and a testing regimen that tells students, parents, and schools where they stand, in relation not only to the entire state but also schools with similar demographics. And he has vetoed bill after bill sent to him by a legislature that often does the bidding of the state’s powerful teachers unions, which have opposed much of California’s accountability system. The result has been a record best described as a kind of benign support for the status quo. That might not be an entirely bad thing. California’s schools, appear not to be worsening with respect to national trends (see Figure 1), and adding more reforms just for the sake of reform might not necessarily improve them.

 

Commando

Ironically, Schwarzenegger when he took office was probably more steeped in education policy than any California governor in a generation. He has four children, for one thing, and while they attended private schools, Schwarzenegger’s kids at least gave him a partial window into a world that was completely unknown, on a personal level, to three of the four governors who had preceded him in the office. He had also sponsored a successful ballot initiative, Proposition 49 in 2002, which set money aside in the state budget for an expansion of afterschool programs. That campaign led him to meet and seek the support of people from across the education community, from teachers to administrators and school board members.

As a candidate in 2003, he criticized the performance of the schools and pledged to restore more control to local districts. Schwarzenegger’s most vivid campaign promise on education policy was to cut through the red tape that bound local districts to the state’s multivolume Education Code. A series of stories in the Sacramento Bee detailed how the legislature and previous governors had created one special program after another, known as “categoricals,” that lived on without much if any assessment of whether they were accomplishing their goals. The programs tied up more than one-third of the education budget, limiting the ability of local trustees and administrators to spend money as they pleased.

A district that didn’t need new textbooks, for example, might still be forced to spend more money on instructional materials, or lose it, because the state had set aside a pot of money for the purchase of new books after it was disclosed that the massive Los Angeles Unified School District had many campuses where the students lacked basic texts. A school that didn’t need any more security measures might add them anyway because the legislature, after the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, had appropriated another pot of money to be used only for more campus police, cameras, and metal detectors. The state funded at least 20 separate programs for teacher training alone, each with its own set of requirements, objectives, and paperwork—and with little thought put into whether they complemented or duplicated one another.

Soon after taking office, Schwarzenegger proposed a sweeping reform that sought to repeal the statutory mandates for 22 of the special programs and fold the money into general-purpose budgets for districts to spend as they chose. The new governor’s proposal might not have been sexy, but it was sensible, and it was consistent with what he had said during his campaign and with what many education reformers and analysts had been arguing for years. Of course, it also met with opposition from constituencies and legislators with ties to the programs that would no longer be guaranteed a steady stream of revenue, and the proposal soon bogged down in the legislature.

But Schwarzenegger’s aides pressed on. Working closely with then state senator Dede Alpert of San Diego, a veteran legislator who shared the governor’s goals, they eventually settled on a compromise that consolidated 26 programs and $2 billion in funding into block grants covering six broad subject areas. Districts were freed to spend the money within each grant on any of the programs in that subject area or on new priorities consistent with the goals of those programs.

The deal could have been a model for Schwarzenegger to build on. He could have celebrated his success and pushed for more the following year, perhaps exploring the concept of granting broad freedoms over spending, even total flexibility, to districts whose students were meeting state goals. But Schwarzenegger stopped there. According to Reiss, he did not push harder for local control because once he took office he learned how much power the teachers unions held over many local school boards. Cutting the strings from Sacramento, he concluded, would only give the unions more control at the local level.

“It would be nice to think that they make all the right decisions,” Reiss, a liberal Democrat, said, “but with the way the power structure works, that’s not the case.”

Raw Deal

As he began his second year as governor, Schwarzenegger struck a more confrontational pose with the Democrats who controlled the legislature. He proposed a series of policy reforms involving the state’s budget, public employee pensions, the drawing of political district lines, and education. The proposals were not built around any theme other than that they were all things that the majority Democrats in the legislature and their interest-group allies were sure to oppose.

Nowhere was that more true than on education. Schwarzenegger offered two ideas that were neither new nor terribly imaginative. One was to tie teacher pay to performance. The other was to extend the length of time a new teacher would have to work before qualifying for permanent status, or tenure. There was nothing wrong with either idea. But it was difficult to see how either would have transformed the schools. And they certainly didn’t seem to be worth the political risk Schwarzenegger was taking in proposing them.

Indeed, the proposals were the equivalent of a declaration of war on the teachers unions and their membership. The massive California Teachers Association (CTA) and the smaller California Federation of Teachers (CFA) reacted in kind, targeting Schwarzenegger with their invective and their advertising dollars. To make matters worse, the governor unveiled the proposals just as he was also revealing that, in his new budget, he was going to break a promise he had made to the education lobby a year before.

In his first weeks as governor, desperate to try to balance the budget without raising taxes as he had pledged during his campaign, the rookie chief executive met behind closed doors with teachers, administrators, and school board members in search of solutions. In the end, these groups shocked their friends in the legislature by agreeing to a plan that would shave $2 billion from the minimum the state constitution required the state to spend on the schools. In exchange, Schwarzenegger agreed to resume funding the schools at no less than the constitutional minimum one year later.

What he did not fully realize at the time was that his pact would commit him to giving the schools the lion’s share of any new revenue that flowed into the state. As it happened, tax receipts were projected to increase by about $5 billion in 2005–06, Schwarzenegger’s second year as governor. But the terms of his deal with the educators would have forced him to give $4.7 billion of that new money to the schools while cutting health care, social services, prisons, and other programs. It was either that or raise taxes, which Schwarzenegger had said he would not do.

So the governor broke his word and broke his deal. He did propose a $3 billion increase for the schools, enough to keep pace with enrollment growth and inflation. The school community, led by the California Teachers Association, launched a campaign to vilify him. The CTA alone spent more than $50 million to defeat his measures, and the teachers were joined by the other public employee unions. By the time the fight ended in a special election in November 2005, all of Schwarzenegger’s proposals would be defeated and a majority of voters would be saying that they were not inclined to reelect him to a second term the following year. Just 30 percent of Californians said they approved of the way Schwarzenegger was handling the education issue (see Figure 2).

The governor’s problems had a lot to do with substance: the voters did not share his view that bad teachers were at the root of whatever ailed the schools, and they didn’t like the fact that he had broken his word on funding (see Figures 3 and 4).

But Schwarzenegger also had a communications problem. Many of the education policies he would pursue as governor were designed to help close the achievement gap between students from low-income families and those from more affluent circumstances, a goal most voters shared. But he never really tried to pull those policies together into a coherent program that voters could understand and identify with him.

A similar problem had once plagued Schwarzenegger’s image on environmental issues. Although he was pursuing a number of policies that voters, when polled, said they supported, few associated those policies with the governor, and most rated him poorly on the issue. It was not until he embraced the movement to combat global warming with new controls on carbon emissions that voters began to identify him as an environmentalist Republican. But the governor never found a similarly dramatic education policy that could grab the attention of the public, who typically associate school policy with Democrats.

The Kid & I

Schwarzenegger’s signature issue could have been the achievement gap. His focus on poor kids began before he became governor, with his sponsorship of Proposition 49 on the 2002 ballot. Although the measure was more about politics than policy—it was designed to raise the Hollywood actor’s stature in advance of a future run for governor—the ballot initiative did reflect Schwarzenegger’s sincere interest in inner-city schools, dozens of which he had toured during work for his nonprofit foundation, the Inner-City Games. The foundation began as an effort to promote afterschool athletics in schools serving primarily underprivileged children. Schwarzenegger expanded the program to include an academic element as well, with tutoring and homework sessions. The measure proposed to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars a year to expand the programs, with first priority for the money going to schools serving disadvantaged pupils. In a national television interview during the campaign, Schwarzenegger spoke of the support he had from his parents as a child in Austria and how it made the difference in his development.

“When I look in those inner-city schools and I see those kids going out after school and not having this kind of supervision, not having this kind of help, not having this kind of love, anyone to help them with their homework, anyone that mentors them and tells them that they’re great, I say to myself those kids will never be ready and have the opportunity to use this land that that they have, the land of opportunity,” Schwarzenegger said. “They will never make it. And so what I promised myself at that point was—is that I’m going to go out and make sure that every child has the same opportunities that I had.”

Schwarzenegger’s measure won the support of educators, law enforcement, business groups, and lawmakers from both parties. It passed easily, with 57 percent of the vote, in the same election at which voters returned then governor Gray Davis to office for a second term.

But Proposition 49 was flawed. It was ballot-box budgeting at its worst, setting a narrow priority for state spending that would tie the hands of legislators, future governors, and educators, the very kind of “auto-pilot” spending Schwarzenegger would later decry. But it did reflect his desire to improve conditions for poor students. And as governor, Schwarzenegger would continue that same pattern: pursuing a variety of well-intended if imperfect policy approaches meant to help underprivileged children.

One of his first acts as chief executive was to settle a lawsuit filed against the state by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of students in 18 districts around California, most in poor communities. Students in those schools, the lawsuit alleged, were being denied equal opportunity because they lacked qualified teachers, modern textbooks, sanitary bathrooms, heat, and air-conditioning. The state, under Governor Davis, had fought the lawsuit, using an expensive private law firm to argue that the problems, if they existed at all, were the responsibility of local school districts.

Schwarzenegger held that those districts, even if they were responsible, were incompetent. So he told his staff to settle the lawsuit, and he was personally involved in the negotiations, some of which he convened in his famous “smoking tent” in the inner courtyard of his Capitol office suite. After months of talks, the governor agreed to a solution that would pump $1 billion into schools in poor neighborhoods. The settlement included standards for the schools to meet and empowered county superintendents to enforce the edict and monitor compliance. The ACLU, in a bit of hyperbole, compared the deal to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

Schwarzenegger also stepped into a dispute over the future of the state’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, siding with Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa against the district’s board and the teachers union (see “Power Struggle in Los Angeles,” forum, Summer 2007). Arguing that the district’s poor and largely Latino student body was suffering from neglect, Villaraigosa wanted to take over the entire district, a move the governor supported. But the mayor could not win approval of that idea in the legislature, and he and Schwarzenegger settled for a compromise that rather than increasing accountability would have defused it further, dividing responsibility for the district among the board, the superintendent, and the mayors. Schwarzenegger announced early on that he would sign any bill Villaraigosa could get to his desk, and that’s exactly what he did, with great fanfare. But the courts struck down the new law as a violation of a state constitutional provision prohibiting anyone but a locally elected school board from running the schools.

Schwarzenegger also made a big rhetorical commitment to vocational education, now called career technical education, reflecting his belief that the schools were shortchanging students who either would not go on to college or would begin college but never finish. Schwarzenegger added $20 million to the program’s budget in 2006—once again making an exception to his call for more local control—and proposed a bigger increase in 2007. His school construction bond, which voters approved in 2006, included $500 million for new and expanded buildings for career technical education, an unprecedented level of funding.

Preschool was another issue where Schwarzenegger said he preferred to focus scarce resources on problems afflicting disadvantaged students. When Hollywood director Rob Reiner proposed a ballot initiative (Proposition 82 in 2006) calling for an income tax increase to make preschool universal and free for all of the state’s four-year-olds, the governor sided with opponents, who noted that the measure would use precious potential tax revenue to pay for a service that a majority of the state’s youngsters already received. The initiative would have given free preschool to the children of middle-income and wealthy parents and squeezed out a flourishing network of private preschools in favor of the new publicly financed system. During the campaign, Schwarzenegger pledged to increase the state’s commitment to preschool for poor children, and he later added $100 million to the budget over two years to open more slots for four-year-olds from low-income families. In the end, the ballot initiative was rejected by the voters.

Still, Schwarzenegger has not left much of a mark on education policy. His biggest impact might have come from playing defense. He has vetoed a number of bills that would have undercut California’s much-lauded system of standards, testing, and accountability. He rejected a measure that would have exempted the state’s growing Latino population from testing in English until they had been in California’s schools for three years, a proposal he said would give the schools less incentive to teach English quickly. And he sent back a proposed law that would have allowed schools to use “alternative assessments” for students who had failed the state’s high school exit exam.

State senator Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat who has focused on reducing the number of high school dropouts in California, said he thinks Schwarzenegger sincerely wants to improve the lot of poor children. “I think he is driven by the reality that too many kids are falling through the cracks,” Steinberg said in an interview. “I think he recognizes that this issue of the forgotten kid is in many respects a civil rights issue, an equal opportunity issue, and an economic development issue. His heart is in the right place. The question is whether he will have the desire or the ability to make education reform on finances and policy a focus and a priority of his administration.”

The Running Man

As Schwarzenegger ran for reelection in 2006, he deflected questions about his education policies by commissioning, with the leaders of the state legislature, an independent research project to recommend funding levels and reforms needed to provide a quality education for every child in California. That project, overseen by Stanford University researchers, produced a series of studies concluding that the schools needed more money but that, without significant reforms, no amount of money would produce much change. Among the policy changes the researchers recommended: the state should eliminate categorical programs and devolve more authority to school districts and even school sites, giving principals the right to hire and fire their own staffs.

A separate panel the governor appointed to review the research recommended a series of far-reaching measures to put the Stanford group’s broad conclusions into practice:

• Make teaching a true profession—with training and pay to match—while also holding teachers more accountable for their results in the classroom.

• Invest more money in education, give districts and even individual schools more control over the money while directing funds to students who need the most help, and eliminate almost all categorical mandates.

• Empower county superintendents to enforce accountability rules, make the independently elected state superintendent of public instruction a sort of “inspector general” for school quality, place state education policy under the governor, and make the state board of education advisory to the governor.

• Create a comprehensive student-data system that tracks individual student progress from preschool to the workforce.

Instead of embracing those ideas and running with them, Schwarzenegger backed away in January 2008, citing the enormity of the state’s budget crisis. Instead, he recommended new state interventions in 98 districts that were failing to meet the standards of the federal No Child Left Behind law; waivers from state rules and regulations for high-performing districts; and an improved data system to guide state and local decisionmaking in the future. He also pledged to lead a series of public hearings on the issue around the state in 2008.

His proposals for 2008 were, then, a microcosm of his entire career as governor. They were driven by good instincts and informed by good advice, but they were piecemeal rather than comprehensive, and they were unlikely to engage the public in a way that could build widespread support. Anyone hoping to see him one day create the broad consensus necessary for fundamental education reform will have to wait at least another year.

Daniel Weintraub is the public affairs columnist for the opinion pages of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter.

If you had been a 10-year-old on the streets of San Lorenzo, California, in the summer of 2003, you would have had a hard time avoiding Jason Singer and Cathy Cowan. Singer, now 37, had enlisted Cowan, a teacher, to help him recruit 5th-grade students for the charter middle school he planned to open in just a few weeks.

“We talked to children in parks and churches,” says Cowan, now 48, “sitting on park benches or playing in their own yards. If we spotted a likely child, we’d follow him home, then ring the doorbell and talk to his parents.”

The pair were unlikely stalkers. After college Singer had spent two years in Trinidad as a Fulbright scholar studying the impact of race on imagination. As part of the Mississippi Teacher Corps, he’d taught literature to high school students in Greenwood, then launched a nonprofit youth employment organization and a for-profit airline ticket exchange. Cowan, who holds an undergraduate degree in business and a master’s in education, had left a corporate job to join the New York City Teaching Fellows program.

Singer had just spent a year as a Fisher Fellow in a program run by the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Foundation in San Francisco, training designed to turn him into a school principal with an entrepreneur’s skill set. He’d spent weeks in college classrooms learning business practices and months in KIPP schools seeing how they are run. Then he landed in San Lorenzo, a racially diverse, low-income city about 15 miles south of Oakland, to start KIPP Summit Academy from scratch.

KIPP was founded in 1994 by Teach For America alums Michael Feinberg and David Levin, who now run KIPP schools in Houston and the South Bronx. In 2000, Gap founders Doris and Don Fisher donated $15 million to start the KIPP Foundation, with a goal of replicating Feinberg and Levin’s charter school model across the country. Since then, more than 50 founding principals like Singer have launched 57 KIPP schools in 17 states, plus Washington, D.C., serving over 14,000 students. Another 13 Fisher Fellows are now searching for sites and teachers for schools they will open in 2008. CEO Richard Barth says the network expects to have about 100 KIPP schools operating by 2011.

That rate of expansion is rare in today’s charter school world. Beginning in the late 1990s, for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) like New York City-based Edison Schools began expanding at what Ste­ven F. Wilson, author of Learning on the Job, called a “dizzying pace.” Edison, founded by publishing millionaire Christopher Whittle in 1992, grew to 51 schools in just four years; Advantage, which Wilson started in 1997, was managing 16 charter schools within two years. But even that pace was not fast enough, and only a handful of EMOs became profitable before their capital ran out and they had to close some of the schools they had just opened. Edison spent a disastrous two years as a public company and now operates 31 charter schools and provides management services to 54 district schools. Advantage was merged into Mosaica, which runs 35 charter schools in eight states and the District of Columbia.

The great majority of charter schools are single institutions, founded by local education reformers. According to “Quantity Counts: The Growth of Charter School Management Organizations,” published in August 2007 by the National Charter School Research Project (NCSRP) at the University of Washington in Seattle, of the 3,600 charter schools, which served over 1 million students in the 2006–07 school year, only 9 percent were operated or managed by a nonprofit charter management organization (CMO) or for-profit EMO. According to the NCSRP, the country now has 24 EMOs and about 30 CMOs. Most of these organizations are controlled from a central office and are growing slowly because their headquarters staff can only manage the complicated task of opening schools one at a time. “Those who thought that proven models could be rapidly scaled up have concluded that they underestimated the difficulty of creating substantially better schools from scratch,” the NCSRP report explains. The entire charter school movement, once hailed as a vehicle for transforming education, serves less than 3 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren, less than the percentage who are schooled at home.

Growing Charters

If the charter movement is to fulfill its promise, high-quality schools must be replicated quickly. In the business world, when the owners of restaurants or retail stores want to expand, they choose between two models: corporate-style growth with central management or franchising. Chains like Starbucks scale up corporately; each of its 7,087 U.S. stores is owned by and managed from its Seattle headquarters. Others, like McDonald’s, follow a franchise model. Though they look and feel much the same, the vast majority of the 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the United States are operated by a founding franchisee. The advantage of franchising is that it allows an organization to grow rapidly without putting its own intellectual and financial capital at risk. While franchisees are building individual units, the central organization can spend its resources on promoting the brand and developing new products and services.

KIPP has adapted the franchise model to its goal of preparing disadvantaged urban children to succeed in college and beyond. The process Singer and KIPP’s other founding principals use to locate sites, raise funds, and find their young customers is very similar to the efforts of America’s 900,000 franchisees, operators of the nation’s restaurants, print shops, and senior-care services. Each KIPP school pays 1 percent of its annual revenues to the KIPP Foundation; business format franchisees pay a percentage of their revenues, called royalties, to their franchisor in exchange for using its brand name, products, and support system. If a business franchisee fails to pass inspections or falls behind in payments, the franchisor has the right to pull its name, but in most cases the franchisee keeps the business premises. If a KIPP school fails to pass an annual inspection or meet its enrollment goals, or if its students fail to achieve, KIPP, too, will take away its name and support, but the school itself may remain open.

Unlike a typical business franchisor, KIPP grants its new schools considerable freedom in deciding how they will earn and keep the KIPP brand. Choices regarding specific curricula, for example, are made by local school leaders. Nor does KIPP have specific requirements for its facilities, and KIPP schools operate in everything from new buildings to leased space in shopping centers. KIPP LEAD College Prep in Gary, Indiana, for example, rents classrooms from the local YMCA.

The majority of CMOs, however, opt for greater control over each site and take a corporate approach to growth. The leaders of corporate-model CMOs oversee the building and operation of each new school themselves. The trade-off for the slower growth is the assurance that each new school replicates the CMO’s standards for building design, staffing, and programs.

Even centrally managed CMOs, though, come in different flavors. Mike Ronan, CEO of Lighthouse Academies in Framingham, Massachusetts, says he has tight control over his organization’s 11 schools. “I’m literally in every school at least once a month,” Ronan says. “I sit on all our boards and I like visiting with our school leaders.” Lighthouse schools all look alike, with bright blue and yellow walls; use the same educational resources; and share a culture that Chrissy Hart, 29, a former KIPP teacher who is now principal of the Lighthouse Intermediate School in Gary, Indiana, calls “arts-infused, warm, and lightly responsive.” Procedures for tasks like paying bills and ordering supplies are spelled out in operations manuals. Hart and her fellow principals can hire and fire teachers, but if student scores start slipping, Ronan and his corporate staff will replace the principal and keep the school.

New Haven–based Achievement First, with 12 charter academies in central Brooklyn and the state of Connecticut, and 3 more opening this year, can be characterized as providing “central support,” says CEO Doug McCurry. “Our model is evolving. We don’t see it as a cookie-cutter thing, but we do have common benchmarks, a common scope, and an emerging set of best practices. We provide a robust back office to take the heavy lifting—budget, initial teacher recruiting and screening, curriculum development, and operations—off our principals so they can focus on academics.”

Uncommon Schools, with a home office in Manhattan, follows yet a different corporate model, with its nine schools arranged in five geographic networks in New York and New Jersey, plus two “associate” schools in Boston that participate in professional development activities but are not managed by the CMO. CEO Norman Atkins says that each network has its own managing director and that the configuration will enable Uncommon Schools to grow “reasonably” to 30 schools in the next few years.

Such reasonable growth is supported by the NewSchools Venture Fund in San Francisco, which announced in 2007 that it would focus its current wave of funding on Achievement First, Lighthouse Academies, Uncommon Schools, and a handful of other centrally managed CMOs that are growing within specific geographic areas. CMOs that are replicating their original schools in targeted cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Oakland—provide a consistent design and are “opening slowly, to make sure they get each one right,” says Julie Peterson, communications director for the fund.

The organization’s reluctance to support a franchise model hinges on the issue of leadership. Kim Smith, cofounder of the NewSchools Venture Fund says, “The KIPP model works as long as you have really exceptional leaders to replicate the network’s high quality. Over time they will be more difficult to find.”

KIPP leaders and those of two other franchise ventures, the Big Picture Company in Providence, Rhode Island, and EdVisions Schools in Henderson, Minnesota, insist the franchise approach to growth can work. Darryl Cobb, KIPP’s chief academic officer, explains: “We are building a bench of leadership capacity throughout the network. Our Fisher Fellowship training program receives about 500 applications a year to fill 8 to 15 places.” Melissa Gonzales, 28, was a founding teacher of KIPP Heartwood Academy middle school when it opened in San Jose in 2003; today she’s a Fisher Fellow preparing to open a high school there in 2008. “Now 70 percent of our fellows are coming out of KIPP schools,” Cobb says.

“We have a design that we are looking to make happen wherever we can,” says Dennis Littky, one of the cofounders who started the Big Picture Company with “the Met” (the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center) in 1996 in Providence. That design replaces traditional coursework with a curriculum individualized to each student for the three days they are in school. The other two days, students serve internships in community workplaces. In 2000, Bill Gates toured the Met and “loved what he saw so much, he gave us money to build 12 more like it,” Littky says. Today there are 51 Big Picture schools in this country, 7 in the Netherlands, 1 in Australia, “and we could create 50 more,” he says.

Littky’s partner, Elliot Washor, who operates out of an office in San Diego, says, “We are a loose franchise model and think of ourselves as the mother ship. We help new charters with building and facilities design, pedagogy, community relations, and principal development, and employ eight coaches who act as school consultants.” Instead of collecting a set percentage of each school’s revenues, Big Picture Company is exploring charging established schools fees for specific services. One challenge facing Big Picture is that current college admission standards are not compatible with that organization’s style of personalized, real-world learning. Washor says, “One of our next ventures is to open our own college.”

EdVisions is even more educationally progressive. Students in each of the 50 EdVisions schools started since 2000 (44 are charters) take only math classes—all other learning comes from standards-based projects they complete during the school year. Schools are led not by principals, but by founding teachers, and all pay fees for services. “If we help a school from the start, we charge them $75,000 over the first three years,” CEO Doug Thomas says. Fifty more schools are in EdVisions’s pipeline, ten of which should open soon. EdVisions assigns a coach to each school, explains Thomas, who visits on a regular basis, and provides a summer institute and professional development days for all its teachers. “We have an evaluation system to hold schools accountable to our design and practices,” Thomas adds.

Some CMOs that initially adopted a franchise model changed course when unable to grow the brand while maintaining quality. In 2000, Larry Rosenstock started the first High Tech High in San Diego, a small school that combined rigorous courses with technology-based projects and community internships. Like Big Picture, the school attracted national attention and a replication grant from the Gates Foundation. By 2004 Rosenstock had created a network of 16 more urban High Tech High charter schools, in California, Arizona, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. A 2004 Forbes article, titled “Where Everyone Can Overachieve,” says each affiliate paid Rosenstock’s organization 8 percent of its operating budget for services ranging from building management to charter compliance work.

Two years later, Rosenstock dismantled the network and retrenched, focusing on opening and operating schools near his original San Diego facility. “Basically, the problems with a network strategy are distance, the differing charter laws in each state, different political environments, and different theories of action [for running a school],” Rosenstock says today.

Getting It Right

The history of business franchising is rich with failures. Franchising as a business model has been around since the Middle Ages, but gained traction in the United States in the 1950s when McDonald’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken began their inexorable march along our highways. For many years, franchising thrived in a “Wild West” fashion, with no laws to fence out scoundrels and no guidelines for conscientious franchisors to follow. The Federal Trade Commission reined in the industry in the 1970s by establishing rules for what franchisors must disclose to prospective franchisees before signing them on. By then, the franchisors still standing had developed their own strategies and procedures that now represent the industry’s best practices.

Despite the obvious differences between serving hamburgers and providing public education, the best practices of the franchise-model CMOs look remarkably similar to those of business franchising.

First, successful franchisors carefully select and train their franchisees. “The secret of making a franchise system sustainable is selecting good franchisees and preparing them well,” says Darrell Johnson, president of FRANdata, a franchise-research firm in Arlington, Virginia. Industry leader McDonald’s screens all applicants through written and in-person interviews and requires all its franchise candidates to spend 2,000 hours working in existing restaurants and several more weeks in classrooms at Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Illinois. Most franchisors offer classroom and hands-on training programs that last one to five weeks.

Applicants to KIPP’s yearlong Fisher Fellowship program must have at least four years of teaching experience, strong communication skills, and critical thinking abilities. KIPP’s recruiting staff screens candidates through written applications and telephone and in-person interviews; selected candidates travel to California for a final round of interviews. Glenn Davis, 26, who teaches 6th-grade math at KIPP LEAD in Gary, Indiana, says he’ll apply to the Fisher Fellowship program in two years, because he hopes to start a high school for his current students. Davis and his principal, April Goble, 32, are both alumni of Teach For America (TFA), as are a majority of KIPP’s teachers and leaders. That pipeline will get larger; TFA, which has 5,000 teachers working in urban and rural schools this year, plans to expand to 7,500 by 2010.

Thomas Carroll, chairman of the Brighter Choice Charter Schools and the Brighter Choice Foundation, a charter school developer in Albany, New York, says that CMOs wishing to adopt a franchise model could create programs similar to KIPP’s fellowship to train their own crops of education entrepreneurs. “It’s hard to protect intellectual property in the charter school world; there’s no formula for a secret sauce. If someone wanted to set up something similar to KIPP, no one could stop them.”

In fact, other organizations are adding to the ranks of potential charter school founders. Building Excellent Schools, in Boston, has a fellowship program for independent charter school leaders that is similar to KIPP’s. Fellows receive practice-based training and guidance while they are designing, launching, and sustaining new charter schools. The nonprofit New Leaders for New Schools, founded in New York City in 2000, has trained 431 principals who are now serving as leaders in urban schools and plans to build a 2,000-person national principal corps by 2018. A pilot master’s program at Hunter College bypasses traditional education courses and focuses on coursework specific to the needs of teachers and principals who will work in urban locations. KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First are all providing support and instructors to the program.

Second, experienced franchisors provide specific instructions for launching the business. Commercial franchisors send new franchisees off with thick operating manuals, detailing exactly what their unit should look like and how they must prepare their products or deliver their services.

At KIPP schools, what must be replicated is the culture, says Ryan Hill, 31, director of KIPP’s regional office in Newark, New Jersey. “There’s no overseer who says we must do things a certain way, but when you visit our schools you’ll see similarities.” Although they are 2,000 miles apart, the atmospheres in KIPP Summit and KIPP LEAD feel almost identical. Students move quietly down the halls in straight lines. In class, their eyes stay focused on the teacher; when a question is asked, students’ hands shoot up to show they know the answer. Ask a 5th-grade class in any KIPP school when they’ll start college and they’ll all chant “2015.”

Third, successful franchisors perfect their prototypes before replicating them. In Time to Make the Donuts, the late William Rosenberg reported that he spent five years tinkering with the layout, beverage menu, and donut varieties of his first five stores before launching the franchise program for Dunkin’ Donuts in 1954. Like Rosenberg, the founders of KIPP and Big Picture spent years working on their prototype schools before opening more schools. High Tech High’s Rosenstock, however, expanded quickly, without conducting a long-term test of his prototype.

And fourth, the most successful franchise systems grow carefully, within one geographic area at a time. When Fred DeLuca started Subway in 1965, his goal was to have 32 sandwich shops in ten years. His first store was in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and all his early franchisees came from nearby towns. McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc was less cautious and sold early franchises near his prototype in Illinois and in California, where the McDonald brothers had launched the original 15-cent hamburger restaurant. “The California franchisees were impossible to control,” says John Love in his book McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. Kroc suspended franchising on the West Coast and “concentrated closer to home, beginning in Illinois and fanning out to neighboring states,” Love says.

Steven Wilson says that early on scattershot expansion—building a charter school wherever a group of local citizens wanted one—weakened EMOs because corporate personnel were always “shuttling to far-flung schools.” Most EdVisions growth is in the Midwest, but Big Picture Company would like to paint a nationwide canvas with its schools. KIPP’s director of network growth, Mike Wright, says that the network’s future expansion will be limited to target cities (there are 14 for the 2009-10 school year) or within one of eight designated regions where elementary, middle, and high schools are being built in clusters.

A Quality Brand

The charter school movement began nearly two decades ago with tremendous potential for narrowing the achievement gap by improving education for disadvantaged students. Two decades from now, charter schools will still be too few to have fulfilled their promise, unless the franchise model for growth takes hold. Even some corporate-model CMOs could adopt a franchise model for future expansion. These CMOs could still guide facilities design, pedagogy, principal and teacher development, and community relations, while trusting local leaders like Singer and Cowan to open and run their schools.

Together, KIPP, EdVisions, and Big Picture are seeding new charter schools at a pace that far outdistances the corporate-model CMOs. The danger, of course, is that expansion will outstrip quality. Wright admits he and other executives at the KIPP Foundation grapple with the problem of closing schools that don’t make the grade. “How do we balance autonomy with collaboration and with oversight?” he asks. “Thus far, we’ve attracted highly educated entrepreneurs who have made us into a great franchise model. If we transitioned to a wholly owned and operated model, we would lose what makes KIPP what it is today.”

Franchisors must protect the value of their brands by terminating franchisees who fail to maintain the system’s quality. The franchise-model CMOs have built in some safeguards: day-to-day decisions are managed by an entrepreneurial principal who has the flexibility to change programs that may not be working and to expand those that are. KIPP sends an inspection team of financial, academic, real estate, and legal personnel to each new school on an annual basis, and EdVisions and the Big Picture Company require visits from their own evaluation teams. EdVisions has removed its name from half a dozen schools, says CEO Thomas. Since 2000, KIPP has closed four schools—in Atlanta; Chicago; Asheville, North Carolina; and Edgewater, Maryland—and “deKIPPed” three more that are still operating although under different names.

Of course, KIPP’s brand name did not mean much to the San Lorenzo parents Singer and Cowan approached in 2003. Interest sparked, says Cowan, “when we told them about our longer school day, from 7:30 AM to 5 PM, Saturday classes, and four more weeks of school in the summer, time we’d use to improve their children’s skills and prepare them for college. The city has high rates of crime and teen pregnancy, and parents were thankful we were offering a place where their children would be safe and productive, rather than being home alone.”

KIPP Summit opened in fall 2003 with a full roster of 5th graders, and added a grade and more students for each of the next three years until reaching its present status of 359 5th to 8th graders and a waiting list. Two years ago, Singer started the process all over again, raising money and interest in KIPP King Collegiate, the charter network’s first West Coast high school. Cowan prepared to become Summit’s principal by joining the Fisher Fellows program, and in fall 2007 Singer welcomed his new school’s first crop of 9th graders.

The bottom line? Done right, franchising can quickly provide hundreds more classrooms full of 5th graders chanting out the year they, too, will be ready for college.

Julie Bennett is the author of Franchise Times Guide to Selecting, Buying, & Owning a Franchise (Sterling Publishing, 2007).

“Reading First is the most effective federal program in history.” So reads the opening line of a report that Alabama superintendent of education Joseph Morton sent to his congressional delegation last June, in which he recounts how the program has raised reading achievement for poor students in his charge. Morton’s view is shared by leaders in many other states, where thousands of Reading First elementary schools have reported unprecedented progress closing the “literacy gap” among the poor.

And yet a string of ironies plagues Reading First, threatening its future at the height of its promise. The program is the only component of No Child Left Behind to be rated “effective” by the White House Office of Management and Budget, yet the administration has done little to protect it. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings calls it “the most effective and successful reading initiative in the nation’s history,” yet she removed its two leaders from their jobs. It is the one part of the No Child Left Behind law educators say they like, yet it has been targeted for deep cuts in funding (see Figure 1). Its prescriptive approach would seem easy fodder for Republicans to attack, yet Democrats in Congress have led the assault against it.

A glance at education headlines suggests that Reading First has succumbed to the fallout from “scandal” (see sidebar). The true story, however, is that the program is a victim of its own high standards. It’s a federal program that appears to be working to change the way states and schools teach reading—and change never comes without conflict.

A Questionable Controversy Complaints from three vendors who felt unfairly shut out of the program led to an investigation and a series of reports by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General citing supposed lapses by Reading First staff and potential conflicts of interest among contractors and panelists reviewing programs. The program vendors who raised concerns were Robert Slavin, author of the Success for All reading curriculum; Cindy Cupp, author of the Dr. Cupp Readers; and Jady Johnson, executive director of the Reading Recovery Council of North America. Slavin’s is a spurious case. Early in Reading First’s implementation, he alleged that two curricula of proven efficacy, his own Success for All, as well as a rival, Direct Instruction (DI), were being unfairly shut out of Reading First. More specifically, he charged that, under federal duress, states were pressuring districts to avoid his program or to create guidelines that made its adoption less likely. Yet the inspector general (IG) not only failed to substantiate Slavin’s charges about Success for All, but actually built its “case” around the fact that several peer review panelists—as well as the program’s director, Chris Doherty—had ties to Direct Instruction programs. Yet even this charge is dubious; it would be impossible to construct any panel of reading experts that didn’t include individuals with professional ties to the existing reading programs, and the IG never alleged actual financial conflicts of interest. Furthermore, DI commands only a modest share of the Reading First market. Nor did the federal review panel have direct oversight over the selection of individual programs, since few states discussed specific core programs in their state applications, and none identified Direct Instruction. The decision about which “research-based” curricula to use was left to the states and districts. Cupp alleged that the state of Georgia, with federal encouragement, shut her product out of Reading First by prohibiting its use until she got an independent appraisal showing that it was research-based. The IG’s investigation of Georgia exonerated the state and the feds. As for Reading Recovery, which is a one-on-one intervention program for first graders, its efficacy, cost effectiveness, and research base are all disputed. (The What Works Clearinghouse found some evidence of effectiveness in a recent review; other studies have found its approach to be less efficient than modifications to the program that use more phonics and that deliver instruction to small groups.) What’s most relevant, though, is that it’s a “pull-out” program using a tutoring approach, while Reading First explicitly requires the use of core, classroom-based reading programs. Its use has been discouraged by Reading First directors in most of the states cited in this article. Doherty was forced to resign after he was “caught” steering states away from programs he felt did not meet the requirements of the law. (A series of vivid e-mails in which he denigrated things he believed were flagrantly against the law did not help his cause.) His deputy, Sandi Jacobs, was reassigned. Congress held hearings and decried the Department of Education’s management of the program. And, most recently, it slashed the program’s budget by more than 60 percent. Yet it is far from clear that Doherty did anything wrong. The dispute over his actions rather reflects a deeper disagreement over the proper role of the federal government in education, an ambivalence well captured by the Reading First law itself, which embodies a contradiction. Not only does the law require that districts use curricula that rely on “scientifically-based reading research,” a phrase, defined at length that appears 25 times in the statute; it further instructs the Department of Education to assist and hold states accountable in meeting this rigorous requirement. But, as if denying or ignoring the import of what such assistance necessarily entails, it leaves in place older language that prohibits the department from endorsing programs or dictating local decisions about curricula. The IG and some in Congress have interpreted this prohibition as trumping the mandate to guide the states and hold them accountable, but no legal guidance has been issued establishing that this is so.

 

A New Breed

The goal of Reading First is for all children to read at grade level by the end of 3rd grade. The law instructs the U.S. Department of Education to make sure that states and districts use funds for curricula and practices that are grounded in “scientifically-based reading research,” as defined by the National Reading Panel report commissioned by Congress and published in 2000.

The report identified five interlocking elements essential to effective reading instruction. Reading programs funded by Reading First must include explicit, systematic instruction in these five elements: 1) the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds, known as phonemes, that make up words—referred to as “phonemic awareness” (the word “cat” has three phonemes); 2) phonics, the relationship of phonemes to the letters that represent them in written language; 3) fluency, the ability to read text accurately and quickly; 4) vocabulary development; and 5) comprehension strategies.

 

In addition, as a condition of funding, Reading First schools must administer timely classroom assessments and must adjust instruction as needed for every child based on the results.

The emphasis on early intervention to prevent failure in the nation’s youngest and most at-risk students marks a major break from the unsuccessful remediation models of the past three decades, which focused on helping older students after they had already fallen behind. Indeed, Reading First’s commonsense demand—do what has been shown to work—amounts to a sea change for teachers, principals, curriculum coordinators, publishers, trainers, state education agencies, colleges of education, professional associations, teacher accreditation agencies—everybody in the field of reading education.

The initiative’s detailed prescription also represents a sea change for federal education programs. Beyond prescribing a particular approach to reading instruction, it also demands scrutiny of all funded activities, every step of the way. The program is a hybrid: it gives formula grants to states, but to receive their share of funds (fixed amounts calculated by a formula tied to the states’ levels of need) states had to submit applications specifying in detail how they would set up competitive grant programs for their districts aimed at helping low-performing, high-poverty schools improve reading instruction in grades K–3. A panel of experts reviewed the state applications and rejected the initial proposals of virtually all states, typically because they did not meet the program’s rigorous criteria. (States were allowed to submit their applications again and again, until finally all 50 state applications met all criteria and were accepted. Several states had to submit their applications more than five times before the panel finally approved their plans.)

But the vigilance of the federal government didn’t stop there. It created and funded (at $1.8 million per year for each) three university-based technical assistance centers to help build the capacity of state staff to serve their districts, and set aside nearly $1 million per year to monitor the states and help keep them on track. As a result, if a state or a funded district fell off the wagon and started using reading programs not based on scientific research, the program’s leaders in Washington knew about it and tried to intervene. That sort of oversight was unprecedented and, most surprisingly, welcomed, at least by the state directors of Reading First who had seen many federal programs come and go, and who began to see this new initiative as something very different and very useful.

State Standouts

As of fall 2007, more than 6,000 elementary schools in 1,700 districts had received Reading First grants, about 10 percent of the public elementary school market. Making sure these districts and schools remained faithful to scientifically based reading research fell primarily to state departments of education (SEAs), agencies with little or no experience leading instructional change. Yet the crafters of the Reading First program viewed the states as key leverage points. Indeed, the most important (and uncertain) premise of Reading First was that it could catalyze and support meaningful change in the SEAs—could help them build agile expert systems that gave high-quality support to schools and districts—and thereby improve reading achievement among the poor, not just in isolated schools and districts as in the past but across entire states. Toward that end, the regulations permitted states to retain 20 percent of their grants (instead of the maximum 5 percent in other programs) for administration.

To find out if this gambit has paid off, I conducted about 200 interviews (each lasting an hour or more) from October 2005 through October 2007, with participants at all levels of Reading First, including directors in 17 states and the federal Bureau of Indian Education (I interviewed most of these more than once); directors and staff at the program’s three regional technical assistance centers; external evaluators of state programs; senior executives at publishing companies whose core reading programs are in many Reading First districts; trainers that the state directors cited as particularly effective; and district personnel whose schools had shown significant gains in reading achievement. The 17 states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, and West Virginia. I chose them on the basis of recommendations from trainers, colleagues, and U.S. Department of Education staff who felt they were committed to the program and afforded diverse viewpoints on its implementation. I used these criteria and the strength of the data to select five case studies.

And, indeed, it appears that the strategy is working, and not just in terms of promising student results (see sidebar). The most enduring achievement of Reading First may be that it has nurtured a group of state leaders who have developed deep expertise in the science of reading instruction and have been able to get steadily better at helping the districts teach more children how to read. In states where Reading First is working, districts look not to their long-standing networks of consultants and colleges for expertise, but to their state administrators. This is a bureaucratic revolution.

Preliminary Results Are Promising Several studies of Reading First are under way, including some randomized field trials and a few using quasi-experimental methods. Until those results are in, we can only make very broad comparisons between Reading First schools and other schools in each state. This early evidence is pointing in a positive direction. For example, in Alabama’s 94 Reading First schools, the percentage of all 4th graders deemed to be proficient (stanine 5 and above) on the Stanford Achievement Test rose 12.7 points, from 40.1 percent in 2003 to 52.8 percent in 2007, more than twice as fast as the gain for students at other schools (which rose 5.5 points, from 64.2 percent to 69.7 percent in the same period). The percent proficient jumped 13 points for minority students in Reading First schools and 6.7 points for minorities at other schools. Reading First schools were 82 percent minority (mainly black) in 2007, more than twice the percentage in other schools (36 percent). In Washington state, the percentage of 4th-grade students meeting or exceeding the grade-level standard on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning in the first group of 51 schools increased 23.7 points (from 39.7 percent in 2003 to 63.4 percent in 2007), while the gain statewide during that period was just 9.7 points (from 66.7 to 76.4 percent). The state’s major at-risk subgroups—blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans—all posted gains exceeding 20 points. In Arizona’s first group of 72 schools to win grants (comprising 1,800 educators and 26,000 students), the percentage of students meeting or exceeding the standard on Arizona’s state AIMS (Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standard) reading test rose from 45 percent in spring of 2004 to 59 percent in spring of 2007, nearly triple the gain for the state over the same period (62 to 67 percent). The percentage of 3rd graders meeting oral reading fluency benchmarks on the widely used Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) increased from 28 percent in fall of 2003 to 52 percent in spring of 2006, more than triple the increase for students at a comparison group of non–Reading First schools over the same period (31 to 38 percent). The percentage of English language learners meeting 3rd-grade DIBELS oral reading fluency benchmarks has more than doubled, from 19 percent in fall 2003 to 41 percent in spring 2007.

 

Alabama

“Alabama is light years ahead of everyone else in closing the achievement gap,” Sandi Jacobs, Reading First’s former assistant director in Washington, said to me in October of 2005, two years before the state posted the biggest two-year increase in 4th-grade reading scores ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Until she retired in January, Alabama’s Katherine Mitchell was the highest-ranking state administrator in the country whose sole job was to improve reading achievement. No state has more zealously followed the tenets of Reading First or taken greater advantage of the program’s flexibilities. Alabama, which launched its own reading initiative in 1998, has been allowed to amend its Reading First plan several times and redirect funds to meet a succession of emerging needs identified by the data and Mitchell’s coaches in the field.

“We don’t ever think a school will know how to do something unless we show them how to do it,” Mitchell says. “What varied was how fast the schools could learn. But we had to teach them all just about everything.”

Like some other states, Alabama requires schools to choose reading curricula from a short list of programs that have been certified by the state as based on scientific reading research. Unlike other states, Alabama pays program vendors to give extra training on their products. It is the only state to fund not just reading coaches but also principal coaches, who train principals to be better instructional leaders and who drive accountability to the district level by ensuring that schools get support from superintendents and central-office staff.

Arizona

Known as a whole-language state whose districts protected their independence, Arizona began to change rapidly when Jaime Molera was appointed state superintendent of instruction in May 2001 and Reading First was signed into law as part of No Child Left Behind eight months later. Molera, his successor Tom Horne, and their Reading First directors, Marie Mancuso and her successor, Kathryn Hrabluk, used the law to leverage big changes in state reading policy that should endure no matter what happens in Washington.

“Before Reading First we had several fragmented statutes that were a reflection of the historic reading wars,” Mancuso says. “The law really gave our state the foundation we needed not only to revise them into one coherent piece of legislation, but to change state board policy, revise our early reading standards to reflect scientifically based reading research and, most important, provide guidance to our districts and schools about how to provide a system centered around a prevention model for early reading achievement. The Reading First award gave us the resources not just in funds but in technical assistance to really implement our plan the way we had written it.”

Like Alabama, Arizona committed extra funds, including $1 million for training, to extend the program’s approach to all its elementary schools, and has worked with districts to redeploy federal Title I and Title II funds to pay for reading coaches, training, and research-based curricula.

Arkansas

Arkansas is among the few states that do not require Reading First schools to adopt a commercially published core reading curriculum. Instead, Reading First director Connie Choate has used her state department of education staff to develop protocols, write materials, and train educators to provide the functional equivalent and closely track their results.

Schools are required to teach phonics and phonemic awareness systematically and explicitly and to use the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) to monitor students at least monthly and adjust instruction as needed. Each school-based Reading First coach receives at least two weeks’ training by state staff over the summer, including on the job while teaching summer school (an idea inspired by Alabama), and 30 days during the school year.

Choate’s staff did a task analysis of student learning expectations in the state’s English Language Arts standards (recently strengthened) and wrote 320 mini-lessons for 2nd and 3rd grade. Special education teachers were given a six-tiered matrix of intervention procedures for students who need extra instruction and practice. The statewide literacy-training program was strengthened to include instruction on fluency-building exercises, interventions, DIBELS, and how to teach vocabulary.

“As an agency we’re moving from monitoring to technical assistance—that’s a huge transformation for us,” Choate says.

Bureau of Indian Education (BIE)

Spread across 23 states, BIE schools pose enormous challenges. Under the federal Title system, 100 percent of their students are considered economically disadvantaged and at risk for educational failure. The percentage identified as learning-disabled is well above the national average. A high percentage of both students and teachers speak English as their second language. The entity responsible for them—like the schools themselves—suffers from high staff turnover and does not function well. Compared to most SEAs, BIE has minimal resources. Its Reading First director, Lynann Barbero, has a staff of two to cover 25 Reading First schools scattered across 11 states.

But Barbero also has two advantages. First, while state laws often prohibit SEAs from encroaching on district autonomy, because Barbero’s office in effect is the district, she has been able to intervene directly in schools where the core curriculum was not working. Second, because of her background in special education, she knows which curricula work best for students who are far behind their peers or who need extra practice.

“Most core reading programs are not designed for kids way below grade level. It’s crazy to have kids sitting in an ineffective program for 90 minutes before giving them what they really need,” Barbero says. “We’ve totally stopped that. Kids identified with intensive needs are put into a replacement core program right away.”

The new director of BIE, Kevin Skenandore, has decided to use $2.3 million from a congressional education-enhancement appropriation to expand Reading First to all Bureau schools serving K–3 students.

“There is no question for the Bureau that this program is producing results,” says Barbero. “Our data are as clear as day. We can now say, ‘If you follow the Reading First guidelines, you’ll get results. If you don’t, you won’t.’”

Washington

When Lexie Domaradzki took the job as the state of Washington’s Reading First administrator in 2003—she has since been promoted to lead administrator for K–12 Reading—she was determined to shatter the myth that poor children couldn’t learn to read as well as anybody else. Four years later, she takes it as almost a personal failure that the 4th graders in her Reading First schools, more than 3,700 students, have cut the achievement gap with the state by more than half but haven’t eliminated it.

Like the program’s national director, Chris Doherty, Domaradzki had worked prior to Reading First with large groups of schools (as an area manager covering five states for the Success for All Foundation). Like Jacobs, she had been an elementary-school teacher. She also has a master’s degree in organizational development, which she says taught her about how systems can be changed.

“Like Sandi and Chris, we set high expectations and have worked to meet them with a mix of accountability and support,” she says. “Organizational culture and results both have improved dramatically.” So much so that Washington’s statewide K–12 reading plan is now based on Reading First.

Prescription Works

Reading First is controversial because it is prescriptive. Simply put, it requires states and districts to follow the dictates of reason and science when spending taxpayers’ money on education and holds them accountable if they fail to do so. Navigating among conservatives who oppose intrusive government, liberals who oppose President Bush, educators who guard their independence, and commercial interests who guard their market share, the law’s framers and program leadership sought to leverage the power of the federal government to attack a complex pedagogical problem that the federal government was never designed to solve: illiteracy caused by faulty teaching.

Ironically, the things federal officials were faulted for are the same things that state Reading First directors say they have tried to do themselves and that (they say) have made the program so successful. Doherty and Jacobs selected the best available experts to review grant proposals, evaluate curricula and assessments, and provide technical assistance; they steered educators away from approaches of doubtful efficacy and insisted that they choose among things more likely to work; they closely monitored implementation and pressed states to intervene when districts failed to execute their plans for raising student achievement and to cut off funds when noncompliance was not corrected. Each of these steps was essential to make the program work, the state directors say. Each required strong leadership. And each contributed to the backlash that, to the directors’ dismay, prompted Secretary Spellings (for reasons and with consequences still unclear) to throw the two staffers responsible for her “most effective” success story under the bus.

Says Rick Nelson, a retired teacher and former president of the American Federation of Teachers local in Fairfax County, Virginia: “State standards and No Child Left Behind gave teachers a knife and said: serve those peas faster, longer! Reading First gives 10 percent of teachers a serving spoon.” He might have added: but if you work in Washington, best not get caught telling anyone how to hold the spoon.

Shepard Barbash is former bureau chief in Mexico City for the Houston Chronicle and a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications.

On international tests, Chilean students in 2006 outperformed those of all other Latin American countries in reading and were second only to Uruguay in math (see Figure 1). But although Chile’s educational performance appears to outstrip that of its closest competitors, the country’s educational system has become highly controversial among scholars throughout the western hemisphere. By and large, the education systems of most Latin American countries are all but ignored by outside scholars. However, the Chilean system has generated a veritable cottage industry of research scholarship that has yielded a range of conflicting findings.

The explanation for this odd fact: since 1981 Chile has had a more comprehensive school choice system than any other country in the world, as well as a system of publicly available information on student test performance. Scholars have thus seen Chile as a place to test theories of school choice. Do students with vouchers learn more in private schools or in those run by municipalities? What is the impact of a voucher system on equality of educational opportunity? The answers to these and related questions have been just about as varied as the number of scholars who have inquired into the matter. On balance, the bulk of the research shows a small educational advantage for students who attend privately operated voucher schools rather than municipal ones. But hardly any study looks at differences among the voucher schools, and none has examined differences between private schools in networks and those that operate on a stand-alone basis. Yet interest in school networks has escalated since many operators of charter schools in the United States have begun to expand their operations beyond a single school. Some have argued that this is the ideal way for connecting school choice to school improvement. If effective schools can expand either by setting up or by “franchising” other schools, school quality can gradually improve. But others say that the formation of networks of schools will lead to a standardization that will undermine the vitality of individual school communities.

Chile is an ideal place for exploring these questions. In 2002, only 53 percent of students were still being educated in municipally run schools, which nonetheless received a good deal of their funding from the vouchers paid for by the national government. Another 9 percent of students attended fee-based private schools that were independently operated and received no government assistance whatsoever. For the most part, these were schools with well-established reputations that served the country’s upper class. The remaining students attended what might be called voucher schools, because the schools, while private, had been since 1981 heavily dependent on the subsidy that the schools received from the national government for each student they enrolled. This sector is the fastest growing segment of the Chilean educational system.

Like American charter schools (see “Brand-Name Charters,” features), Chile’s privately run voucher schools may be part of a larger organization or school network, or operate on their own. Most schools are of the stand-alone or “mom-and-pop” variety: 25 percent of all students in Chile attend such schools. But another 13 percent of students attend schools that are part of a network of two or more schools.

The schools, inside and outside of networks, vary from one another in many ways. Some are operated by teachers who once worked in municipal schools. Others are run by business entrepreneurs. Fifty-nine percent of the network schools are run by nonprofit entities, either religious or secular. For-profit organizations operate the remainder. Some schools as well as some networks are religious. Most networks, and especially those in rural areas, consist of just two or three schools. Only about 20 percent of primary (K–8) private voucher school students attend schools that belong to networks that have more than three schools (see sidebar).

Proponents of school networks say that the networks facilitate the flow of information (such as research on best practices) among schools and provide political benefits, credibility, and legitimacy in the eyes of the community. They argue that larger schooling operations have more access to private investments and loans to expand than smaller operations do. Supporting this view, research on public charter schools in the United States indicates that well-established charter school networks can build credibility for fund-raising more easily than stand-alone charter schools can. The underlying hypothesis is that, all else bring equal, the more a schooling organization facilitates transactions between members of a school’s community, the better the school’s performance. The research conducted so far shows that stand-alone charter and brand-name schools, like their district counterparts, vary widely in quality.

Critics of school networks fear unintended negative consequences. They argue that large centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and make it difficult to maintain order and create a sense of community among students, parents, teachers, and administrators. Opponents also claim that large schooling operations grant too much authority to administrators and other professionals far removed from the classroom. Some critics are concerned that consolidation encourages standardization. For instance, they maintain that school networks must establish a brand to be successful, which necessitates relatively uniform operations and services from site to site. They argue that this branded approach to education stifles innovation.

Very little factual information is available to sort out the credibility of these claims and counterclaims. It is thus of interest to examine the Chilean experience, where both network and stand-alone voucher-subsidized schools have been operating for several decades. Information on more than one-quarter million students who were 4th graders in 2002 allows us to compare Spanish language and mathematics achievement in network and stand-alone voucher-subsidized schools. Our findings suggest that network schools in Chile are more effective than stand-alone schools, and that larger networks tend to outperform smaller networks. While we cannot be certain whether the higher performance of network schools is because good schools were the ones to expand or whether networking, by itself, had a positive impact, our results nonetheless add considerably to the sparse information currently available on a question of substantial policy interest.

The Many Faces of Voucher Schooling Schools that receive government vouchers in Chile vary from for-profit network schools to small stand-alone schools. Here are three examples: For-profit network Sociedad Educaciónal Tte. Dagoberto Godoy Ltda. operates seven schools: two are located in poor municipalities, four are in lower-middle-class municipalities, and one serves a middle-class municipality in Santiago. Owner Walter Oliva’s parents were teachers who founded most of the network’s schools in the 1970s and early ’80s. A successful entrepreneur, Oliva also has business investments in agriculture; he manages the schools and his other businesses from his headquarters in Santiago. Standardized test scores for these schools are high compared to the national average and very high compared to schools with similar students. Nonprofit Catholic network Congregación Salesiana operates thirteen schools: five in Santiago, four in the south of Chile, and three in the central part of the country. The smallest school in the network serves around 600 students, the largest more than 1,700. Although most Congregación Salesiana schools outperform similar schools in Chile, test scores vary widely across the network. For-profit stand-alone school Franz Liszt Nº 784 serves 240 students in Maipú, a middle-class municipality in Santiago. Owner Marina Goméz Bustamente taught for several years before buying this school after former owner and principal Maria Ester Gajardo Martinez passed away. Test scores are low compared to schools with similar students.

 

School Reform in Chile

During the 1980s, the Chilean government decentralized the administration of schools, transferring responsibility for public school management from the Ministry of Education to municipalities (recognized neighborhoods in Chile around which municipal services are organized). The government also changed the education financing scheme. Municipalities began to receive funding from the central government according to the number of students who chose to attend the municipal schools. Any enrollment loss had a direct effect on their education budgets. Equally important, privately run schools that had not charged tuition began receiving the same per-student voucher as the public schools. Tuition-charging (elite) private schools mostly continued to operate without public funding.

Despite the parity in funding, significant differences remained between municipally run schools and privately run voucher schools. First, starting in 1994 municipal elementary schools were not allowed to charge parents fees, while all privately run voucher schools could. Second, municipal schools were required by law to accept all who applied. Private voucher schools, in contrast, were allowed to consider results from admissions tests and parent interviews when making admission decisions. Third, municipal schools had to comply with labor laws that made it virtually impossible to fire a low-performing teacher. Privately run voucher schools had greater freedom to terminate employment. In addition, municipal school teachers received salary increases incrementally, based on years of experience. There were no rules with regard to incremental salary increases in the private school sector.

The policies sparked a movement of students from municipal to previously existing private schools as well as the establishment of new institutions. In 1981, 15 percent of the nearly 2.9 million Chilean K–12 students had been attending private schools that received some public subsidy, and another 7 percent attended elite, unsubsidized private schools. By 1990, 34 percent of students attended privately run voucher schools; by 2002, enrollment in such schools reached 38 percent of the roughly 3.4 million in total enrollment (see Figure 2). The trend continued after 2002, the year in which the data for this study were collected. By 2005, 43 percent of students were enrolled in privately run voucher schools. As indicated above, about one-third of the voucher schools belong to networks, while the remaining two-thirds operate independently.

Beginning in 2003, after our data were collected, the Chilean government sought to alter several features of the system, although not all of the changes have been fully implemented: Rather than providing vouchers at a flat rate, voucher amounts are to be tied to family income. Private voucher schools can no longer select students in primary school; for secondary school admission, they can administer tests, but they cannot conduct parent interviews. In addition, Congress recently passed legislation that will hold schools accountable for student achievement and improvement over time.

The political debate continues. In 2006, widespread student protests of inequalities in the education system prompted debate over whether entrepreneurs should be able to own and run private voucher schools for profit. Proposed legislation, which initially prohibited for-profit education organizations, now would require that such entities make available to the public information on their profitability as well as their use of voucher funds.

 

Data and Methodology

Our study is based on student-level data from Chile’s national standardized test, Sistema de Medición de la Calidad de la Educación (Educational Quality Measurement System—SIMCE), which assesses students in grades 4, 8, and 10 in language, mathematics, history and geography, and natural sciences. In 2002, SIMCE evaluated 274,863 4th graders. Complementing student test scores are parent and teacher questionnaires, which include socioeconomic and environmental information on the students, their families, their peers, and their schools.

Because we lacked complete data for some schools, our study includes 252,202 students. Fifty-eight percent of the students were attending municipal schools, 24 percent were attending stand-alone schools, and 18 percent were attending network schools. In addition to separating out municipal and stand-alone private schools, our analysis subdivides the network schools into five groups—those that are in networks of two, three, four, five, and more than five schools—for a total of seven categories. (We have excluded information from the elite, independent schools that receive no government subsidy.) We compare the test scores of students in each of the seven categories, taking into account differences in the students’ socioeconomic characteristics, including parent schooling, self-reported household income, the number of non-school books in the home, and the quality of the peer groups (calculated by averaging family background and home resources for all students in the classroom). We also included some school-level control variables—whether or not the school was located in a rural area, the total number of students per school, and the average monthly tuition a school charges.

If these variables fully account for differences in student and peer demographics across the various categories of schools, then this strategy will provide unbiased evidence on the relative effectiveness of municipal, stand-alone, and network schools. We cannot account for other factors that could be significant. For example, the average student attending a privately run voucher school, whether network or stand-alone, may have parents who place a higher value on education than those of the average student attending a municipal school. Because we do not have a measure of parent commitment to education, we may confuse the effect of having a committed parent with that of attending a private school. Similarly, the “brand name” value attached to network schools may enable them to select more-qualified students, on average, than their independent counterparts.

As a result, simple comparisons of student outcomes in municipal, stand-alone, and network schools might give misleading estimates of the impact of schools on student achievement, even after adjusting for the measured characteristics of the students who attend each type of school. In order to correct for this selection bias, we restrict our analysis to differences across students in the type of school they attend that result from the types of schools available to them. More specifically, we assume that an individual’s probability of choosing a given school type is affected by the school density (that is, the number of schools per square kilometer) of each type in her municipality. All else being equal, students are more likely to choose schooling alternatives that are more densely concentrated in their municipalities. The crucial assumption made by our method is that school choice is influenced by local school supply, but school densities at the community level do not directly influence student achievement.

Though every precaution has been taken to make the comparison exact, it is still possible that our results overestimate the benefits of privately subsidized schools over municipal ones. For example, it is possible that voucher schools are to be found in greater density in higher income areas, where more parents are willing to pay additional fees for their children to attend higher-quality schools. To the extent that is happening, our results could be biased toward finding greater voucher benefits than is actually the case. For that reason, our comparisons between private and municipal schools should be interpreted cautiously. However, that potential source of bias is unlikely to affect comparisons between stand-alone private schools and network ones, the main focus of this analysis.

 

Results

We report our results in terms of standard deviations of student test scores. The difference in performance between American 4th and 8th graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress is about one full standard deviation, suggesting that students improve by one quarter of a standard deviation each year. Although comparable measures of the rate of student learning are not available for Chile, researchers studying the Chilean school system typically consider a difference in student achievement of 10 percent of one standard deviation to be a small to moderate effect. Without accounting for any differences in students’ socioeconomic status, the Spanish language and mathematics test scores of students who attend network schools are considerably higher than the scores of those attending stand-alone schools. After controlling for student and peer attributes and for selection bias, we still find a substantial positive and statistically significant effect of attending a network school on student achievement. Students at network schools score 19 percent and 25 percent of a standard deviation higher than students at stand-alone schools in Spanish language and math, respectively. We also find that students at municipal schools do significantly worse than students at stand-alone schools on achievement tests (19 percent and 16 percent of a standard deviation in Spanish language and math, respectively), although, as discussed above, we are less confident in these results because of the difficulties of accounting for the selection of students into and by private schools.

Although these results provide some evidence of the effectiveness of school networks, a more precise analysis is needed to understand the optimal size of a network. We examined whether larger networks are more effective than smaller ones and found that, both with and without correcting for student and peer socioeconomic characteristics and selection bias, students at schools that are part of networks of three or more schools consistently outperform students at schools in networks of only two schools.

Figure 3 shows the results from our estimations. Students in schools in larger networks generally learned more than students in stand-alone schools. The results for Spanish language achievement show students in schools in networks with three schools learn 24 percent of a standard deviation more, those in networks of five schools learned 50 percent of a standard deviation more, and those in networks of more than five schools learned 23 percent of a standard deviation more. The effects on mathematics achievement are similar. Students who attend schools in networks with three schools learn 37 percent of a standard deviation more than students in stand-alone schools. The percentages for those in networks of five and more than five schools are 36 and 34, respectively.

Prior research in Chile and in the United States has demonstrated that, all else being equal, Catholic schools outperform public schools and other private schools. Since some of the network schools were affiliated with Catholic churches, that fact could be the explanation for the apparent positive benefits that come from networking. To determine whether that was the case, we checked whether the school owners were Catholic. Only 13 percent of the students attended such schools, however. And after adjusting for Catholic affiliation, the differences between network and stand-alone schools remained large and significant. In other words, the superior performance of network schools is not driven by the number of them that are Catholic.

Policy Implications

This paper compares the academic achievement of 4th graders in municipal schools, stand-alone schools, and network schools. Controlling for individual and peer characteristics as well as selection bias, we find that students in network schools outperformed those in stand-alone schools in both Spanish language and math. The stand-alone schools outperformed municipal schools but not by as large a margin. It also is of interest that students generally performed better in networks of large size. Most clearly, those in networks that contained three or more schools generally outperformed those in networks with only two schools.

Possible explanations for the positive school network effect include the substantial benefits of scale for employing education professionals and administrators, the bulk purchases of supplies and equipment, and the costs of implementing innovations in the curriculum. School networks may also benefit from greater access to credit and private investment than that extended to small individual schools in Chile. In addition, it may be that operating within a larger communal organization reduces agency problems; encourages interactions between parents, teachers, administrators, and students; and influences the development of professional school communities.

Of course, it is also possible that good schools are invited to join networks, while weaker schools are left on their own. In a competitive schooling environment, low-quality schools may be unable to attract students and additional resources needed to expand operations.

The results of this paper add evidence to the debate in the United States over the desirability of creating networks of charter and voucher schools. The findings provide some ground for optimism about the effects of networking on student achievement. Policies that provide incentives for schools to establish a network or to be managed by an organization that runs a network of schools may have the potential to increase educational outcomes.

Gregory Elacqua is professor at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, and former policy advisor to the Minister of Education of Chile. Dante Contreras is senior researcher at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Chile and associate professor, Universidad de Chile. Felipe Salazar is researcher at the Universidad Diego Portales.

With 57 schools serving more than 14,000 students and plans to open dozens more, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) is the darling of the school reform world. Ten years ago, KIPP was a pair of high-performing schools in poor neighborhoods in Houston and the South Bronx. But KIPP founders Michael Feinberg and David Levin wanted more, and with the financial backing of Don and Doris Fisher (founders of the Gap), they began replicating their schools across the country.

In this issue, we asked Julie Bennett, a business writer specializing in the study of franchises, to take a look at the rapid expansion of KIPP and other brand-name schools (“Brand-Name Charters,” features). Thinking of schools as franchises will no doubt raise a few hackles. As Diane Ravitch has written, “Schools are not like businesses or hamburger franchises. They are vital parts of their communities.” And compared with fast-food restaurants, the work done in schools requires a great deal more education, experience, skill, and smarts. But it’s hard to object to the basic idea behind the expansion of KIPP: once you’ve figured out how to create a school that can dramatically change the life prospects of poor kids, what better than to build more of them? And there’s some evidence that franchise-like connections between schools are beneficial in other countries.

In Chile, where a market-based approach to education has been in place for decades (and nearly all students attend private or public schools funded by vouchers), schools that are part of a network (which can resemble a franchise) are more effective than stand-alone schools (see “Scaling Up in Chile,” research). The authors suggest some reasons schools that are part of a network may outperform other schools: they can take advantage of economies of scale, and links between schools can facilitate the flow of information (to share best practices, for instance).

In “Brand-Name Charters,” Bennett contrasts two approaches to expanding the supply of effective schools (or hamburger joints or coffee shops). Most school management organizations in the United States (nonprofit and for-profit) embrace a corporate growth model, following the same detailed recipe again and again to develop additional sites. They identify what works and then assemble the components (for example, phonics-based reading, a content-rich curriculum, a longer school day) in highly recognizable schools with close ties to the central office. KIPP has more closely followed a franchise approach, hiring chefs with potential, training them well, and arming them with a thick cookbook of instructions. They identify great school leaders through a highly competitive screening process and teach them how effective schools work before sending them off to start their own schools (with relatively little meddling from the central office).

But while KIPP schools resemble franchises in some ways, the organization has gone beyond the franchise model in allowing school principals freedom to innovate. Perhaps in recognition of the fact that schools are not hamburger joints, KIPP principals are taught what has worked in other KIPP schools (and much more), but are encouraged to use whatever works in their own school. Only when it comes to replicating the culture of KIPP—that is, organizing new schools around KIPP’s founding principles of high achievement and no excuses—are school leaders expected to toe the KIPP line. While this loose franchise approach allows outstanding principals to exercise the kind of autonomy that is believed to be a key to effective schools, some fear that KIPP will eventually run out of school leaders equal to the task.

Bennett argues that replicating quality schools quickly is crucial to the success of the charter movement, and if done right these brand-name schools will be an important tool in the quest to reduce the achievement gap. Indeed, one advantage of the franchise approach is that it allows schools to scale up quickly. Growth is inevitably slower in a centrally managed organization because central office staff can only open so many new schools at a time. While there is always a tension between growing rapidly and maintaining quality, KIPP shows that good schools can be replicated, perhaps more rapidly than anyone expected. But it is too soon to know if such success is the exception or the rule.

— Marci Kanstoroom

Though an extremely controversial law, much contested in legislative, administrative, and even electoral venues for the past several years, No Child Left Behind (NLCB) has not generated a large volume of litigation. Given the well-known American propensity to sue, one might ask why not. One explanation is that Congress did not include a general grant to the citizenry of a right to sue, which would constitute, in effect, an invitation to do so. Would-be litigants therefore must comb through the law and regulations looking for possible chinks in the federal government’s armor.

Last August a public-interest law firm in California, Public Advocates, thought it had found a chink in the Department of Education’s interpretation of the “highly qualified” teacher provision of NCLB. In Renee v. Spellings, filed in a federal district court in San Francisco, Public Advocates argued that the department had flouted the law by permitting employment of teachers still in training.

NCLB required that all of the nation’s public school teachers be “highly qualified” by the end of 2005–06 and set as a standard that they have a bachelor’s degree, meet state licensure requirements, and demonstrate competence in a core subject. Many of the nation’s teachers, especially in the poorest urban districts and in the 5,000 school districts classified as rural, had fallen short of that standard. Congress’s approach to this shortage of formally trained teachers was to decree that it was unlawful.

When a law and social realities are seriously at odds, as in this case, administrators must employ flexibility and ingenuity to make the law “work,” or appear to. One of several approaches devised by the department was to allow so-called alternative-route teachers to teach for up to three years while seeking certification. (An “alternative route” is meant to facilitate entry of teachers who have not followed a standard teacher-training curriculum.) Attacking the three years of grace as a “major loophole,” Public Advocates asked the court to strike it down, asserting that 100,000 teachers nationwide had slipped through the loophole, 10,000 in California alone, which it took to be a measure of injustice but might be thought from a different political perspective to be an indicator of districts’ needs. The will of Congress is deeply ambiguous, because the law says both that alternative-route teachers satisfy the mandate and that full licensure cannot be waived provisionally.

A more tantalizing target of NCLB litigation has been a provision, dating from the mid-1990s and authored by Republicans who were trying to protect state governments from unfunded mandates, that says, “Nothing in this act shall be construed to…mandate a state or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this act.”

In 2005 two sets of litigants mounted suits with this language in an effort to secure more federal funding or relief from federal requirements, but were not expected by legal analysts to get far (see “NEA Sues over NCLB,” legal beat, Fall 2005). The state of Connecticut, most of whose claims have been dismissed by a federal judge in New Haven, in fact has not gone far. And the other case, which was brought by the National Education Association in collaboration with several school districts in Michigan, Texas, and Vermont, appeared headed for oblivion when the trial judge dismissed it. But the plaintiffs appealed, and in January of this year a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit ruled 2 to 1 in their favor (see “Accountability Left Behind,” features).

Rather than oblivion, Pontiac v. Spellings, as this case is known, could be heading eventually for the Supreme Court, which has the last word on states’ obligations under grant-in-aid statutes. The case has been remanded to the district court with an admonition that statutes enacted under the spending clause of the Constitution must provide “clear notice” of their liabilities should states accept the federal funding, along with the majority’s judgment that in NCLB, Congress failed to do that.

In the meantime, Congress continues to struggle with reauthorizing NCLB, and if some of the law’s critics have their way (see “The Enforcers,” legal beat, Fall 2007), the revised version will expand the opportunities to sue.

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