It is not easy getting an interview with Mayor Michael Bloomberg – he’s a busy man. He oversees a city of more than 8 million and is thinking (or not, depending on the headline of the day) of running for president of the United States, when he isn’t preoccupied with water-main breaks, terrorist threats, or the losing Yankees. Persistent requests had me cooling my heels one afternoon last fall on a first-floor bench in City Hall, with a group of garrulous, local—that’s
Gotham!—news photographers.

Finally, advised by Bloomberg aides to “keep it short,” I was escorted into the second-floor “bullpen,” the famous non-office office where the billionaire mayor holds court. The cavernous hall, once the meeting chamber of the city’s Board of Estimate (the building is 200 years old), has been transformed by Bloomberg into a warren of cubicles for his 50 top aides and assorted clerical staff, with two small conference tables placed prominently on the raised “stage” at one end of the room. This is where the mayor does much of his business, including interviews with reporters.

No sooner had I settled down at one of the tables on the stage with two Bloomberg aides than the mayor appeared. A compact man in a tailored gray suit and starched white shirt,he is as short as he appears on TV (about 5’7″), but carries himself like a linebacker.

“Because I know you’re busy,” I began, “I’ll dispense with my usual first question—What did you have for breakfast?—and go right to my second—”

“My favorite breakfast?” the mayor interrupted. “If I were going to have one breakfast, it would be toasted Wonder Bread with a quarter inch of Skippy Super Chunk melted onit. And then slices of overripe banana and breakfast bacon.”

(When I told United Federation of Teachers [UFT] president Randi Weingarten about the breakfast monologue several days later, she too interrupted: “I have breakfast with the mayor. Did he tell you that?”)

“I’m doing a story for Education Next,” I said, attempting to get back on track, “a quarterly—”

“Um, John!” the mayor interrupted again, shouting at someone behind me. “What’s all the press doing in there?”

There was a quick huddle, as another aide explained that the press was there for Shakira, who would be arriving shortly. “What on earth am I doing with Shakira?” asked the mayor,as he turned back to me and smiled. Shakira, as the New York Daily News put it the next day, is a “sultry Colombian singer,”and was planning, according to the mayor’s official schedule for the day, to discuss “anti-poverty initiatives.”

It is now abundantly clear what “mayoral control” of schools means: education shares the stage with Shakira. That may be troubling to some; to others, it is important that education is even on the stage.

“It makes a difference,” Seymour Fliegel, a 30-year veteran of New York City’s school wars and a former deputy superintendent in East Harlem, told me recently, “that the same guy who can command the garbage trucks and police cruisers is talking about education.”

It is the bully pulpit, New York–style. And Bloomberg is not afraid to use his special brand of celebrity for the cause. He has brought in Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg to help with fundraising and asked Jack Welch to help develop a leadership academy. He has made education important—hot, even. And mayors from all over the country, like Washington, D.C.’s Adrian Fenty, are visiting Mayor Mike, to see how it’s done.

In a recent New York Times Magazine poll, 17 percent of New Yorkers said that “better public schools” (the third-highest category, just after better restaurants and safer streets) was “the best thing about New York becoming a wealthier city.” Whether it’s the money or the man, there’s no doubt that Bloomberg, in the middle of his second term as mayor, has created such good feeling about the city that many people think he should be president.

New York, New York: Opinions Vary

“I commit to you today,” Mayor Bloomberg said when the New York State Legislature handed him control of the city’s schools in June of 2002, “I will make the schools better…. I want to be held accountable for the results, and I will be.”

“I met with the mayor early on,” says Sy Fliegel, “and I said to him, ‘You want to take over the city’s schools? And be held accountable for how they do? Are you crazy?’”

Whether crazy or not, it’s clear that Michael Rubens Bloomberg is rich and savvy and used to getting what he wants. The 65-year-old Boston native, who has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering (Johns Hopkins) and an MBA (Harvard), founded a media empire that bears his name and has propelled him to the leaderboard of America’s richest: number 44on the Forbes list in 2006.

Once elected, Bloomberg captured control of New York’s schools and introduced sweeping changes to the nation’s largest public school district, a huge, bumbling, and seemingly uncontrollable education bureaucracy of over 1,400 schools, some 80,000 teachers, 6,000 central office and regional staff, and 1.1 million students. And in 2007 the city won the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education (worth $500,000) for raising student achievement, reducing the achievement gap, and helping greater proportions of African American and Hispanic students achieve at high levels.

Former Mayor Ed Koch calls Bloomberg “a colossus” for what he has done for the city’s schools.

Poppycock, say Bloomberg’s critics, a crew of education insiders, parents, and an assortment of others, including Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s elected public advocate. Despite massive increases in annual education expenditures, they say, improvements in student achievement have been modest at best. And they accuse the Bloomberg team of, among other things, cooking the test score books, flooding the system with inexperienced educators, handing out millions of dollars in no-bid contracts, shutting parents out of the school reform effort, spinning the facts, not caring about curriculum, and creating such constant institutional disarray that things may just be getting worse.

Indeed, since Bloomberg took the reins of the city’s school district in 2002, there have been two major organizational realignments and dozens of minor ones. One side calls this flip-flop; the other sees inspired mid-course corrections that ensure deep and systemic change.

Can the Vastness Be Conquered?

When Bloomberg gave his first State of the City address, in January, 2002, he announced his intention to seek mayoral control of the schools and abolish the infamous New York City Board of Education, which he called “a rinky-dink candy store.” He joined a long list of New York mayors, educators, and business leaders who believed that the city’s public school system was broken, ravaged by a generation of politics, patronage, and corruption set in motion by the bitter battle between the teachers union and the predominantly African American and Puerto Rican community in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district of Brooklyn in 1967 and 1968 (see “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” book review) . In the decades following, mayors had to compete with the board of education and local community boards for power. It was ugly. The seven-member board of education set broad instructional guidelines, hired a chancellor, and determined a capital budget, but the mayor decided the operational budget. Add to that mix 32 different semi-autonomous community school boards that oversaw elementary and middle schools and hired superintendents to run them. With hundreds, sometimes thousands, of jobs at stake, the system was more of a personal patronage mill for local politicians than a place for children to learn. The state legislature, which gave school districts their authority, was reluctant to dismantle an arrangement that greased so many political wheels. Bloomberg called the system “a disgrace.”

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the disillusionment reached such a level that all parties realized something had to be done. A task force of state and city leaders, including the UFT’s Randi Weingarten, began to meet on a regular basis. Michael Bloomberg joined the group after his election in November 2001, helping to remove the last stumbling blocks to mayoral control, in part by granting sizable pay increases to the teachers (16 percent to 22 percent, depending on seniority,over a two-and-a-half-year period).

“No mayor before him,” says Weingarten, “was willing to negotiate significantly higher salaries for school teachers.” She gives Bloomberg “huge credit” for getting that job done. He also, though Weingarten doesn’t say this, took some of the heat off the unions, which had shouldered much of the blame for the system’s dysfunction.

While the risks of assuming responsibility for education results were enormous, Bloomberg seems not to have worried about them. “I have always thought that, if you take a look at all of society’s problems,” he says in our interview, leaning forward with clasped hands resting on the polished table, “they could be ameliorated or solved with better education. There is an enormous correlation,” he continues, “between economic level and social problems—crime, obesity, all kinds of stuff, smoking—and economics, basically, is tied to education.

“We talk about all the civil rights,” he says. “We talk about voting. We talk about the ability to be in charge of your own destiny. But if you don’t have the skills to get a good job, so what?” He hesitates, but just for a moment. “If you can’t read, write, do math, work collaboratively, raise a question, understand an answer—we don’t do a very good job in our school system.”

Taking It On

Being the education mayor, according to Bloomberg, has everything to do with management. Thus, his choice for chancellor was Joel Klein, a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer and non-educator he hired in July 2002. “It’s not an education job,” Bloomberg says bluntly.

But he knew what he wanted done. “We talked about the big things,” says Bloomberg of his early marching orders to Klein. “Getting control of the school system and ending social promotion. Moving the headquarters from across the river over here so you could dismantle the bureaucracy. And selling that building so that our successors can’t put it back together. Negotiating three contracts with the teachers union and one with the principals’ union.”

One thing that Bloomberg and Klein had going for them was a universal perception that the city’s school system was a mess. “Intellectually, you can understand it, but until you get in and feel it, you really can’t appreciate it,” explains Klein. His first day on the job, he noticed a secretary with a phone call on hold. “I said, ‘Why is that call just sitting there on hold?’” he recalls. “And she said, ‘Well that’s just an irate parent; eventually, she’ll hang up.’”

With his eye on fixing the accountability system, Klein eliminated the 32 community boards and created 10 regional districts, under his direct command. He moved headquarters from the notorious 110 Livingston Street building in Brooklyn to the lavishly renovated Tweed Courthouse in downtown Manhattan, literally in City Hall’s backyard.

Over the next five years, Bloomberg and Klein pushed for more charter schools (starting 45); dramatically increased the number of small middle and high schools (231 of them through September of 2007), enticing the Gates Foundation to contribute over $100 million to the effort; established a “leadership academy”(with over $70 million in private funds, including $4 million from the Broad Foundation) to train principals; and eliminated “social promotion,” first in the 3rd grade and later in the 5th. They replaced the old system, launching a dramatic housecleaning of veteran education bureaucrats and firing dozens of school principals, with a tightly controlled,top-down management structure that left little to chance.

Klein’s first major hire, the deputy chancellor, was Diana Lam, a veteran administrator with a reputation for improving test scores. But Lam immediately alienated some vocal education reformers, who said she got the pedagogy wrong, and some teachers, who accused her of outlandish micromanaging: for example, mandating “reading rugs” in all classrooms. It was not all her fault. Bloomberg had promised “one, unified, focused, streamlined chain of command” that included an order that “the Chancellor’s office will dictate the curriculum and pedagogical methods.” Lam was done in by a nepotism charge (putting her husband on the payroll) and resigned in March 2004.

Two years later, the Bloomberg education team would change course, opening the floodgates to a wave of decentralization.If nothing else, Bloomberg has ensured that his successor “can’t put it back together.”

Meanwhile, thanks to a strong economy, the end of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s long-running school finance litigation (which resulted in the city receiving over a billion dollars more per year), and increased state funding for education by the new Democratic governor, Eliot Spitzer, New York City’s schools are rolling in dough: the education budget, including pensions and debt service, has soared from just under $13 billion a year in 2003 to nearly $20 billion today. Where all the money has gone will be argued about for generations, but no one disputes the fact that teachers, with double-digit percentage pay increases, have done well under Bloomberg (see sidebar).

The Mayor v. the Unions Who has really won in the battle with the unions? From the beginning, Mayor Bloomberg maintained what most observers viewed as a “lighter touch” in his negotiating style; and UFT president Weingarten called him”a breath of fresh air” after a postelection meeting in 2001. The teacher blogosphere lit up with complaints after Weingarten was spotted sitting in the mayor’s Yankee stadium box during the 2004 baseball playoffs. Several Joel Klein hugs, including one at the Broad Prize awards, left many union members wondering about Weingarten’s apparent coziness with management and a teachers’ contract that conceded to shorter summers, allowed a six-period day, mandated staff development, made teachers patrol cafeterias, and weakened the grievance procedure. “It’s nice, in retrospect, for all of us to get up and say, ‘Teacher salaries have gone up 43 percent,'” Weingarten says. “But two of those three contracts were knock-down, drag-out battles. They weren’t easy…. What’s good is that he [the mayor] sees the difference – how money matters….” Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor, found common ground with Weingarten, the union president. The mayor achieved some work-rule changes; the union got some more money. Case in point: firing bad teachers. For years the union clung to the inviolability of tenure. Removed from the classroom for malfeasance, as many as 700 teachers would report to “work” at assigned locations, where they would do nothing, sometimes for years, while their cases wound their way through a byzantine – “Kafkaesque” is another term frequently applied – resolution process. Bloomberg won some modest concessions from the UFT in the spring of 2007, tightening up the procedures by which tenure was granted, but not on the firing question. Then in the fall, the mayor turned up the heat, announcing the formation of a special team of lawyers and consultants to help principals build cases against bad teachers. Weingarten called the plan “disgusting.” Another case in point: merit pay. The union had always opposed it. “She’d get killed if she recommended it in New York,” quipped Julia Koppich, an education consultant and expert on unionism, speaking about Weingarten in 2005. Thus it was seen as “a major breakthrough” for Bloomberg when the UFT agreed to allow performance bonuses to teachers working in schools in impoverished neighborhoods. In Bloomberg style, the bonuses would be given to the schools, where four-member”compensation committees” (composed of two teachers, the principal, and a principal’s appointee) would decide how to distribute the money. If you factor in pensions, the teachers appear to have won that round. Pending legislative approval, a 25-year veteran teacher will be able to retire at age 55 rather than 62, at 50% of her current salary, instead of being reduced to 35% as a penalty for early retirement, as it is now. This benefit enhancement is estimated to be worth almost a quarter of a million dollars to the employee. So which side has won overall? Neither yet, and the battle is far from over. –Peter Meyer

Taking Stock

So, are New York’s children getting a better education? The most heated debates have centered around test scores and instruction, class size, and the failure to engage parents and other stakeholders in the process. Two early and high-profile dissenters from the Bloomberg reforms were education historian (and Education Next editorial board member) Diane Ravitch and Manhattan Institute scholar (and Education Next contributor) Sol Stern. Both had championed the cause of mayoral control and applauded Bloomberg when he got it. Both were later appalled, first by the instructional regime introduced by deputy chancellor Lam, then by the failure to show any significant academic improvements, and, finally, for efforts,according to Ravitch and Stern, to cover up the bad news.

In one of her most controversial moves, Lam tossed out Success For All, a highly regarded phonics-based program, and replaced it with “balanced literacy,” which gives greater emphasis to the whole-language approach. The city spent hundreds of millions of dollars retraining teachers and then ordered schools to devote 150 minutes of every school day to the new program. Despite the “massive effort” to make balanced literacy work, according to Sol Stern, 4th-grade reading scores actually dropped. When the scores rose 10 points in 2005, Stern pointed out, scores in other New York cities increased by the same proportions (as did those of the city’s Catholic schools).

“Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein regularly trumpet their ‘historic gains’ in test scores,” wrote Diane Ravitch in March 2007. “They say that since the mayor gained control, scores have gone up by 12 percent in reading and 19 percent in math.” Ravitch called those gains “vastly inflated” and accused Bloomberg of counting increases from 2002–03 (6 percent in reading and 15 percent in math) before he even got control of the schools, let alone implemented any reforms. Without those years, Ravitch claimed, the “actual gain” was 6.4 percent in reading and4.2 percent in math.

David Cantor, press secretary for the city’s Department of Education, dismisses Ravitch’s criticism as nitpicking. He argues that it was fair to use the 2002–03 scores because “the Chancellor and the Mayor were managing the schools” during that time (Bloomberg took charge of the schools in June 2002 and Klein came on board in July) and “had already started to make changes.” And even if those earlier years’ scores were omitted, Cantor argues, New York student gains were substantial—especially when compared to the gains of students in the rest of New York State….”

For Stern it seems “a classic case of unintended consequences.” Mayoral control had come to mean the power “to deflect criticism, dominate the media, and use the schools as campaign props.”

Even by 2005, as Bloomberg prepared to run for his second term, opinions on his education reforms ran the gamut. New York Times education writer David Herszenhorn wrote, “a picture emerges of two years of extraordinary upheaval… there are schools across the city where principals expressed optimism. At the same time, the mayor’s inability so far to achieve clear-cut success, even where he had personally shone a spotlight, helps explain why many New Yorkers fail to see any change and why some say things are actually worse.”

The mayor forcefully defended his education reorganization efforts and went on to win reelection by a nearly 20-point margin. Then came devolution. In what Sol Stern called “a 180-degree turn” and State Regents board member Meryl Tisch, a Bloomberg supporter, described as “jimmy[ing] around with stability and order during a time when academic achievement has not been soaring,” the mayor unveiled a second “sweeping” reorganization of the schools. He said he was instituting a new rating system for schools, principals, and teachers; a new financing scheme that would get more money to needier schools; a rigorous review of teachers before granting tenure; and more principal autonomy, tied to a sharp increase in the role of private and nonprofit groups in school organization and administration.

“This is the most innovative reform in the country,” says Sy Fliegel, whose private support organization (PSO), the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association, was one of nine to receive a contract with the city to provide technical and managerial services to New York’s public schools. In the second reorganization, the ten regional superintendent offices, created in the first overhaul, were abolished, and four of the superintendents were made CEOs of new public learning support organizations (LSOs), each offering, for a price, a range of services to newly autonomous schools. Kathleen Cashin, for instance, a veteran superintendent of what had been Region 5, has formed a “Knowledge Network” that offers a “content rich” curriculum based on E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge system at an annual cost of $42,438 per school. Or, for $47,500 a school can sign up with former Region 3 superintendent Judith Chin’s “Integrated Curriculum and Instruction” LSO and get a “thinking curriculum.”

Decentralization came with an A-to-F grading system that triggered a storm of protest when the first results were released in October 2007: 50 schools got Fs and 99 received Ds. “The city’s focus on student improvement is commendable,” opined the New York Times. “But Mr. Bloomberg should ditch the simplistic and counterproductive A through F rating system.”

Not all the reaction was negative. Joe Williams, former education writer for the New York Daily News and author of Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education, counseled critics to recall how bad things had been. “It’s more productive,” said Williams, whose child attends a newly minted C school, “instead of being defensive about it, to talk about how you get it to a B and then to an A.” And the head of the principals’ union, Ernest Logan, e-mailed his members to say, “Controversy aside, these progress reports and the enormous amount of data now being collected open new doors for the CSA [Council of School Supervisors and Administrators], UFT, and DOE. We have a unique opportunity to develop solid, specific and meaningful solutions for each individual school.”

Then came NAEP. In a front-page story in the New York Times in November 2007, Bloomberg was charged with making “no significant progress in reading and math” and “little narrowing of the achievement gap” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It was, as Randi Weingartner put it, “bad news.”

“Shame, shame!” scolded Whitney Tilson. Tilson, a hedge fund manager and founding member of Teach For America who issues a regular e-mail newsletter about Bloomberg’s education reforms, called the Times story “lousy” and argued that the NAEP scores showed noteworthy improvements in three of the four measures. Both Klein and the mayor defended the results. As the chancellor put it, “generally speaking,” they showed “good progress.” But Klein and Bloomberg were sobered. “Even though there was some progress in math scores for 8th graders, overall,” said the mayor, “the results for them weren’t what we would have liked them to be. And I won’t make any excuses for that. As I said, the old system made excuses for failure; we’re focused on achieving results. The big reason why we pay attention to test scores is because they show us where we need to make improvements.”

Can Gotham’s Mayor Be Elected President? Interpretations of Michael Bloomberg’s record in education could soon become a national political issue. As Education Next goes to press, Bloomberg’s aides continue to circulate rumors that the ambitious, deep-pocketed, independent-minded New York City mayor is contemplating a run for the presidency. Bloomberg himself has become a numerologist, reminding guests at a house party that 271 is the magic number of votes needed to win the Electoral College. After the early primaries, John McCain has acquired a commanding lead in the fight for his party’s nomination. But as long as the Republican party is blamed for an unpopular war and a sliding economy, he is more likely to limp than gallop into the general election. If that should make it an easy Democratic year, the tightening of the horse race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is inevitably pushing gender and race issues to the fore, creating divisions that may take longer than usual to heal. What should be a landslide could be a cliff hanger after all. If the vote were split three ways, it seems just barely possible an independent could slip through. After all, Ross Perot gathered 20 percent of the vote in 1992 and he had never held political office. True, the folks in Dayton, Ohio, and Ypsilanti, Michigan might think twice before voting for the mayor of Gotham, even if he has reform credentials. Only two mayors of any city – Grover Cleveland (Buffalo) and Calvin Coolidge (Northampton, Massachusetts) – have ever been elected president. But Bloomberg will soon be term-limited in New York City. With all that cash on hand, why not go for the whole ball of wax? If he does, Americans might have a renewed opportunity to ponder the state of American education.

Bloomberg’s Bottom Line

When all is said and done, both the mayor and his critics are half right. Over the entire period that Bloomberg and Klein have been in office, math test scores of New York City’s students have risen faster than those of students statewide (see Figures 1 and 2). In reading, however, their scores have only kept pace with those of students statewide, suggesting that theLam reforms were misguided.

As a work in progress, Bloomberg’s reforms mirror those, at least in intent, at the heart of No Child Left Behind and offer a peek at what kind of an education president Bloomberg would make.

“A key to turning around our schools has been establishing accountability,” he says. “And in public schools from coast to coast, nothing has done more to establish accountability than the No Child Left Behind Act. Washington needs to do the right thing for our kids and reauthorize a strengthened No Child Left Behind Act. In our city, we’ve replaced a culture of excuses in our schools with a culture of performance. No Child Left Behind is achieving the same sea change on a national scale.”

Would he have done anything differently? “Sure,” says the mayor. “You would always do things differently. That’s the thing with innovation. You don’t always know how it’ll work, what it’ll cost, who’s going to buy it. I’m not a ‘would have, could have, should have’ kind of guy. You learn and you move forward.”

There are some who wonder whether the city hasn’t just replaced one form of nonaccountability with another. Betsy Gotbaum has formed a panel to review the whole question of mayoral control. But Bloomberg just may have outsmarted everyone. The new plan—the devolution of power—comes closer to putting power in the hands of parents than anything tried in New York before. There is a healthy, and growing, charter school community (with 50 more charters allowed by recent state legislation) that, if combined with true choice and the new school evaluation process, could provide meaningful improvement in education opportunities. Apparently, many New Yorkers are still impressed. Even after the school grading program and release of the NAEP scores, a Quinnipiac University poll (November 2007) showed that, by a 47 to 25 percent margin,voters consider Bloomberg’s takeover a success.

“If we leave office with the public believing that you can educate all the kids in the city,” says Bloomberg about how he hopes to end his term, “that you can, in a big city, stand up to the political and labor interests and focus on every child and that they will then hold our successors’ feet to the fire to do that, you really will have accomplished something great.”

Peter Meyer, former news editor of Life magazine, is a freelance writer and contributing editor of Education Next.

The 14-year-old in the discipline school, let’s call him Kareem, was having a bad day. He’d gotten into a food fight, and he was in big trouble. He didn’t want to face the principal and whatever punishment was going to be meted out. So he walked out of the school, at 26th and Jefferson streets in pockmarked North Philadelphia, trekked for nearly two miles through some of the city’s most dangerous streets, and presented himself at the front desk in the blond brick headquarters of the city school district.

“I want to speak to Paul Vallas,” he announced.

The perplexed guards called the head of the district’s alternative schools office, a woman named Gwen Morris, who had worked in the system for more than three decades and before that had been a Philadelphia public school student herself.

Morris and a few other Vallas aides called the student’s mother and the school principal and efficiently sorted things out. But the boy kept insisting: he wanted to speak to Vallas.

Morris has seen way too much to be easily impressed by the putative saviors who come and go in urban schools. But she still sounds amazed when she tells this story. Even in the fog of his often troubled life, Kareem had heard of Vallas. He knew this building as the place where Vallas worked. And he had absorbed the gist of what Paul Vallas is reputed to be able to do: solve problems in urban schools. Make things better.

Little things. Big things. Of the cadre of non-educators—business leaders, military men, government officials, lawyers—who have been called on to transform large urban school districts in recent years, Paul Vallas has been at it the longest and, in the minds of many, is the one with the best track record. Since 1995, he has tackled the third- and eighth-largest districts in America—Chicago and Philadelphia. Both of them are old-politics big cities with school systems long steeped in racial tensions and marked by tough unions, deteriorating buildings, and white and middle-class flight. Intensifying poverty and racial isolation accompany escalating demands for better student outcomes.

Vallas lasted longer in both Chicago and Philadelphia than most urban school leaders, six years in Chicago and then five in Philadelphia, but he wore out his welcome in both places. He left the Philadelphia district in many ways transformed, most agree for the better, but still with a sour taste and a big deficit. While he won converts among longtime district staff for his energy and commitment, he alienated the people who hired him; things had become so bitter that he didn’t show up for his own sendoff. A similar thing happened in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley, who had installed him to clean up what had been described as the worst school district in America, eased him out after he had done just that.

The saga of Paul Vallas, to hear him tell it, is one of too much success.

“What happens with turnaround superintendents,” he said, “is that the first two years you’re a demolitions expert. By the third year, if you get improvements, do school construction, and test scores go up, people start to think this isn’t so hard. By year four, people start to think you’re getting way too much credit. By year five, you’re chopped liver.”

But Vallas has little time for reflection or looking back. He is focused on what may be his biggest challenge yet as superintendent of the Recovery School District (RSD) in the ruined city of New Orleans.

The powerbrokers in New Orleans are thrilled to have him. “He has vision, he has shown us what we can have, what can be accomplished,” said Penny Dastugue, a member of the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or BESE, which runs the RSD. “He’s really brought hope to so many and promise, and he delivers. He’s created buy-in from all parties, and that’s never existed in this city. We’ve been so divided along racial lines, along neighborhood lines. He’s been able to take us all above that and help us see what needs to be done. This is the first time I’ve been hopeful for the city and the children.”

The Philadelphia Story

Depending on whom you talk to, Paul Vallas is either a loose cannon or a genius; he is, in fact, a combination of the two. His energy level is boundless, his temper legendary, his gangly charm equally so. His style of leadership, the “Vallas treatment,” is by now well established. Do things big, do them fast, and do them all at once.

He arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 2002, after a difficult, contentious year in which the state took over the city school district, declaring it bankrupt financially and academically. The governor at the time, Republican Tom Ridge, and the state legislature had been at war with the previous superintendent, David Hornbeck, over the adequacy of funds sent to Philadelphia.

In fall 2001, with the help of some city Democrats interested in more school choice, the legislature disbanded the Board of Education and installed the School Reform Commission (SRC), dominated by gubernatorial appointees and led by an African American Swarthmore businessman named James Nevels. Along with the takeover came a $317 million bond to help the district get back on sound financial footing and $75 million in extra operating funds.

Harrisburg was clear on its favored reform strategy: make Philadelphia a showcase for the private management of low-performing schools. Ridge initially had wanted Edison Schools to run up to 70 low-performing schools in the district and operate the central office under contract.

But Nevels and later the full SRC balked at turning over the management of the district to Edison and at giving all the $75 million in extra state money to private providers. In its first year, the SRC began the process of assigning 45 schools to private providers, Edison and other for-profits as well as some nonprofits, while searching for a new CEO.

When they got Vallas, he immediately began putting his stamp on the “diverse provider” model. He added universities to the mix of school managers. He said he wanted $50 million of the new state money for his own reforms.

“I told them I wouldn’t take the job unless I could get [extra] money for the non–privately managed schools,” he said. As a result, the private managers were left with less than they expected in extra funds to implement their programs, and the all-out experiment originally envisioned by the proponents of privatization there is not what happened.

Using the bond money as a cushion, Vallas began building brand-new schools and doing major renovations on old ones, something that hadn’t happened in decades. He got rid of most middle schools, converting the entire district to a K–8 and 9–12 grade structure. He instituted a standardized curriculum for all subjects and grades. He created afterschool programs, Saturday school, and summer school, the running of which was mostly outsourced to private companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review.

He doubled the number of children in preschool and reshaped the high school landscape. When he started, there were 38 public high schools in Philadelphia with an average enrollment of 1,700. When he left, there were 62, including charters, with an average enrollment of 800; half have fewer than 500 students. One in particular is a monument to his vision, the spectacular School of the Future, a technologically dazzling building designed with Microsoft that serves one of the poorest areas of the city.

Vallas expanded Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, often in areas more known for gang warfare than academic achievement, while setting up more disciplinary schools and alternative schools for overage underachievers, which were also contracted out to private providers.

Personally, Vallas was all over the place. At SRC meetings, parents who were used to being politely thanked after their carefully timed three-minute speech suddenly found themselves with Vallas at their side getting more information on their complaint. Many mornings, he hung out at schools and talked to parents, teachers, and students as they arrived. At night, he went to neighborhood or church gatherings.

Everywhere, he carried a small notebook and wrote down what people told him. Back in the office, he’d tear out each page and hand it to a cowed aide for attention. Today. Immediately.

“It was on some levels a really wild ride and the best thing that ever happened to the city,” said Ellen Savitz, a veteran district educator who found herself in the twilight of her career with the chance to create five brand-new small high schools, including the School of the Future. “He came into a system where, oh my God, you figured you have to move out when your kid is old enough for school, things are so bad. And he came in full barrel and said, ‘We can do better.’ And he proceeded to do it.”

Teacher recruitment stepped up. Almost all new hires were certified, compared to just three in five when he took over, and more of them stayed beyond their first year. Test scores went up more or less steadily, especially at the elementary level. In 2002, 29 percent of students were advanced or proficient in reading and 19.5 percent in math on the state achievement test, the PSSA. In 2007, 38 percent of students scored at the proficient level in reading, and 41 percent did so in math.

More schools met federal achievement goals. At the start of the Vallas era, just 26 of the district’s 200-plus schools made Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind. By the time he left, that number had increased to 166.

It is an impressive record, but his endless array of new programs and initiatives exhausted not only those around him, but the district’s available resources as well. In the beginning, nobody was too concerned about the way Vallas was spending money. He had been the director of the Illinois Economic and Fiscal Commission, the state legislature’s budget arm, and the revenue and budget director for the city of Chicago. He was energizing everyone around him, and he kept presenting budgets that he said were balanced.

“Early on he decided, no guts, no glory,” said Cecilia Cummings, who served as Vallas’s chief communications officer. “He was going to go for broke.”

But for some, “going for broke” meant exactly that: driving the district into deficit while failing to follow up with a serious look at what was working and what wasn’t. In Philadelphia, he outsourced a multitude of services, with little qualm and minimal oversight. In the end, the district had run out of money and had no idea exactly what was responsible for the successes. Parent activists, who both appreciated Vallas and were wary of him, and who clashed philosophically with Whelan and the SRC over reform strategies and privatization, nevertheless came to a similar conclusion. They were concerned too that while test scores were going up in the lower grades and students had more high school choices, 11th-grade scores were still abysmal and the dropout rate, close to 45 percent, hardly budged.

Vallas lobbied for more money from the city and the state, and was only partially successful. “He believed if we could show results, that investment would follow,” said Cummings. “And I think that was his big disappointment and unfortunately his greatest failure, in assuming that the investment would follow.”

The SRC lobbied some as well, but didn’t go to the mat on the question of whether the district was under-resourced by the state and city. Gradually, Vallas’s  persona and his initiative-a-day approach began to grate on its members.

“Vallas came in with a lot of promises, a lot of unfocused activity,” said Dan Whelan, the retired chief executive officer of Verizon Pennsylvania who served for five years on the SRC and started out as an enthusiastic supporter. “He had a can-do attitude with a cure for every problem, all of which provided hope for a time. However, in the end he didn’t deliver sustainable change in some very fundamental areas.” Whelan said that while shaking things up, Vallas did little to change a system culture that tolerated lax spending habits, duplication, and absenteeism.

The Breakup

For sure, Vallas is not a bottom-up, capacity-building sort of person. There was no succession planning. He failed to cure many systemic ills. While for most of his term he got along with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, he really didn’t move the famously intransigent union on many important issues. Teacher pay for performance, for one. The U.S. Department of Education gave the city a $5 million grant to work out a pilot project, but after months of fruitless negotiations with the union, the district gave up and used the money instead for charter schools.

The beginning of the end of his tenure happened when, just four months after he had told the Philadelphia City Council that the budget was balanced and a month after the SRC, by a 3–2 vote, had renewed his contract until 2010, the district suddenly was revealed to have a $73 million deficit.

“I think Paul relied on the finance team, and the finance team was telling him all along he was spending too much, and he was constantly getting them to stretch the buck, be more creative,” said Fred Farlino, who came out of retirement to be the district’s chief operating officer for part of Vallas’s tenure.

Vallas, said Farlino, “would absolutely stretch it to where it won’t stretch any more. That’s what he was good at, and he drove people crazy, but when you looked around, and saw how he was transforming the district, you’d say, maybe Paul’s right, maybe I’m stuck in the mud.”

Embarrassed SRC members, led by Whelan and James Gallagher, the president of Philadelphia University, pushed for Vallas’s ouster. In the spring of 2007, they took him to lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel and told him that they had lost confidence in him. Nevels, until then a Vallas ally, took their side.

Governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat and former Philadelphia mayor, fought hard to have Vallas stay. “Paul was successful in implementing a menu of strategies aimed at boosting academic achievement, and extraordinary strategies that involved huge organizational change to occur simultaneously,” said Donna Cooper, Rendell’s policy chief. “The standardized curriculum, technology, a robust alternative education pipeline, a culture focused on student scores, closing the teacher shortage, creating new high schools. His gift is successfully implementing numerous strategies at once at a very deep level. A lot of people can say what they want to get done. Paul actually got a lot of it done.”

But after the spring lunch meeting, Vallas had had it. Los Angeles had wooed him and then the offer came from New Orleans. He told Cooper and Rendell that he was out.

Even now, though, Vallas will say that Philadelphia’s budget woes have been overblown, primarily caused by a few bad breaks in the last fiscal year: more retirements than expected that caused a large one-time benefit payout, failure to sell a school building, a delay in state reimbursement for some funds. “The deficit I left on paper was $40 million. The deficit I inherited was $160 million,” he said. “And look at all we did.”

Vallas has no time for criticism that he tried to do too much, too fast. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know what that means, juggling too many balls at once. That’s how we get the type of growth we get; you can’t focus on one thing. Our kids have multiple problems that need multiple solutions, not a magic bullet, but a cocktail.”

If that “cocktail” needs to include programs to address students’ out-of-classroom needs, so be it. You won’t find Vallas philosophically debating the issue of whether schools can reasonably be expected to succeed academically in desperately poor areas before the issues of poverty are addressed.

Nor will he philosophically defend choice and privatization over other strategies, although he says he felt the diverse provider model in Philadelphia was a success, albeit compromised by the decision made by the SRC before his arrival to make the companies work within the existing teacher contract and other rules under a so-called “thin management” arrangement.

“The EMOs didn’t get the autonomy they needed to develop the models they needed to develop,” he says.

He can easily reconcile that with his top-down approach. “I’m about centralized and aggressive intervention, but I support diversity in management models and decentralization for local decision making.”

As CEO, Vallas was tough on the private managers. He fired one company, Chancellor Beacon, barely a year into their contract. He borrowed what he liked; he instituted a version of Edison’s monthly computerized Benchmark testing program for the entire system, and gave some district schools equivalent extra dollars per pupil to see what they could do with more resources. He seemed to prefer charters, recruiting nationally successful models like KIPP, and urging some locally grown ones to open new schools.

Studies of the effects of private management have produced inconsistent conclusions. One report by RAND and Research for Action, a local group, said the privately managed schools did no better than others and weren’t worth the extra investment. But a Harvard study, by Education Next editor Paul Peterson and Matthew Chingos, showed that the public schools managed by for-profit companies were more successful at raising student performance than either the district-run schools or those operated by nonprofit organizations.

“The positive,” Vallas says, “is that they took the worst schools and they made gains comparable to the district as a whole. If you want to be negative, you can say we invested more money in them, but the schools didn’t perform better than the district schools. The bottom line is, I think the EMOs proved to be a good whipping boy…the rest of the school district benefited from a substantial amount of additional money the EMOs brought in.”

The Next Challenge

For certain, Vallas saw poverty before arriving in New Orleans. “I had some schools in Philly, more than half the kids were not being raised by their biological parent.” In New Orleans, he says, “the hurricane intensified the trauma, and I have to make adjustments for that.” He recites his litany of remedies: the longer school day and year, a managed, standardized instructional program, and so forth, but he also adds “more counselors, mentors, more school-based behavioral health services, obviously you have to bring more resources to the schools to provide for the needs of the children.”

Vallas now sits in a tiny, unadorned office in the Recovery School District headquarters. It is a former warehouse painted yellow, brick-red, and green and flanked by an abandoned commercial site and a new post office, across a potholed street from several boarded-up houses that form the landscape of what is now New Orleans. The single metal door that people enter to register their children is pockmarked with rust. There are no nameplates on the office doors, just Scotch-taped paper announcing the room number. Staffers bring lunch, because there is no place within walking distance to buy food.

From here, Vallas directs 39 schools with 14,000 students and supervises another 26 charter schools. (The Orleans Parish School Board is in control of 7 schools plus 12 charters, some of which operate under the Algiers Charter Schools Association.) He is again in the middle of a devastated city, trying to mesh his litany of top-down remedies with private management and charters.

He hardly ever sits still. On this day, he has taken a pill to calm him for an airplane trip that he ultimately decides not to take, and at 6’5″ seems confined by the room. In the Crescent City, he lives with his oldest son, Paulie, who has just graduated from high school, in a spare apartment not far from the Convention Center; his wife Sharon and three other sons are back in Chicago.

Working 12- to 16-hour days, and demanding the same of his staff, he caroms from his office to schools to working lunches to meetings to evening events. The warren of narrow, barren hallways and small rooms is constantly in motion. In one room, Gwen Morris and another Philadelphia recruit, Nilsa Gonzales, are crunching the numbers to get an afterschool program going. In another, Deputy Superintendent Kyle Wedberg, who also worked in Philadelphia, is trying to figure out how to handle the delicate problem of cutting teachers, many of whom worked in New Orleans before the hurricane but have failed to meet certification requirements. People run from one office to the next, phones to ears and papers in hand. In addition to whatever they are doing, they must be poised at a moment’s notice to respond to Vallas’s latest command. The sense of urgency is palpable.

On an October Tuesday, shortly before he must submit a spending plan to BESE, Vallas presides over a staff meeting. Most everyone else is bent over a BlackBerry, notebook, or laptop, taking notes on what Vallas wants. He sits at the head of the table with one foot on his chair, knee drawn to his chin. From this posture, he barks orders.

“Get Dell on the phone and set up training dates for teachers to use the new EPIC computers the district has been promised. Hold any payment until they’re set.”

He switches gears. “I’m trying to get the state to understand that we can’t open ten new charter schools in a year. We’re almost at the saturation point.” Then, “We need space for preschool kids with disabilities.”

Next, he’s on to alternative schools. “Give me Abraxas,” he says, referring to a company hired in Philadelphia to deal with elementary-age offenders. “We have kids under indictment for murder who are in elementary school. That’s a concern here.”

He exhorts everyone to be on the hunt for sources of funds. “You know what I want, as we manage this, we all have to be budget directors in our own right.”

As he talks about all his programs, he gets more urgent. He points out that between 50 and 60 percent of the students have failed LEAP, Louisiana’s state test. “Kids are giving up, they don’t think they can pass the LEAP exam. God, only 38 percent graduate…they’re leaping off a cliff. If you think I’m off the reservation here, let me know.”

On the way back from a working lunch, Vallas spies a young boy sitting in the back of a police cruiser in front of a school. Like a shot, he’s out of the car and into the school, commandeering the principal’s office, finding out that the boy hit a teacher, telling her that she’ll soon get a “climate manager” to help deal with the traumatized families of children like this. He gets out his cell phone and orders Eddie Compass to get to the school, pronto.

Compass, the former New Orleans police chief, soon materializes at Vallas’s side. Later, Compass explains how he had a low-pressure, high-paying consulting job when Vallas changed his life in a ten-minute hallway conversation. “He’s probably the most incredible man I ever met,”Compass remarks. “He said, ‘We need people who will make a difference.’ If he as an outsider is doing this, how can people who live in the city not help him?”

That evening, Vallas attends a house party hosted by Edison Schools, which has been hired by the Broadmoor Improvement Association to operate a charter school in the neighborhood. He mutters as he goes in that he would like to see more charters; a few weeks later, he will announce that he wants to give all principals more autonomy next year.

At the party, Vallas is treated like a rock star. “He’s bringing us world-class experience and knowledge,” said Phyllis Landrieu, president of the New Orleans Parish School Board. “He’s been at the top of the world in education, and he knows how to show us the way.”

Cheryllyn Branche is principal of the Banneker Elementary School and one of the few veteran New Orleans educators welcomed back into the system. Like other New Orleans natives, Branche lost her home to Hurricane Katrina. Though she likes Vallas and is attracted to his energy and commitment, she questions whether he is thinking through his policies and initiatives. For instance, does after-school make sense in a district where there are hardly any neighborhood schools, many parents don’t have cars, and public transportation is spotty?

“Resources are being pushed to the school level. That’s something that never happened before,” she said. But she worries whether the specific programs these dollars are funding are the right kinds of initiatives. “The EPIC computers, technology, how much difference will they make if the teachers don’t know how to use them?”

In New Orleans, she adds, “Paul Vallas faces challenges I’m sure he’s never had.”

When Vallas unveiled his two-year spending plan in late October 2007, it included laptops for every high school student, interactive “whiteboards” for every classroom from grades 4 through 12, an extended day, class size no larger than 20 in elementary school and 25 in high school, and special programs for academically lagging 8th graders. BESE members—his bosses—were concerned how he could pull this off with the available dollars. Vallas allayed their fears, but by December the RSD was facing a cash crunch brought on partly by spending on his initiatives and partly by school construction costs not immediately reimbursed by FEMA. With benchmark tests showing that 80 percent of students were reading below grade level, he declined to save money by laying off teachers, preferring to rely on his seasoned financial team to balance the books while retaining crucial educational services.

“We opted,” he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “to put children ahead of cash flow.”

Dale Mezzacappa covered education for the Philadelphia Inquirer between 1986 and 2006 and is now a freelance writer.

Public school leaders throughout the United States are approaching consensus about what it takes to educate all students well: more class time, smaller schools, a college preparatory curriculum, instructional coaching for teachers, and utilization of data to understand student needs. Yet results on the ground vary dramatically and remain, in large part, disappointing. Despite similar student demographics and budget constraints, a few schools report great results year after year, while many struggle. Why is it that some schools can sustain high graduation and college acceptance rates, while others, with the same basic design, have 50 percent dropout rates?

The Bridgespan Group is a nonprofit organization that works with other nonprofits and foundations on issues of strategy, philanthropy, and leadership. In our work with public school educators seeking to close the achievement gap for disadvantaged students, we have confronted this question often and have come to believe that the critical difference between schools that excel and schools that do not is the quality of execution. Leaders must be willing to make choices about what matters most and then “sweat the details” in aligning resources and effort behind those choices.

When a school is able to execute a good design successfully, everyone—leaders, teachers, administrators—agrees about what drives student achievement. Equally important, they do not allow their priorities to be sidetracked in the face of day-to-day pressures and pulls from other directions.

This article highlights the experiences of three education nonprofits with which Bridgespan has engaged: YES Prep Public Schools, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), and Envision Schools. All three have school designs that incorporate the widely-agreed-upon elements mentioned above, and all three have achieved sustained results (YES Prep and KIPP for over a decade) on the dimension that matters most: their students’ performance. In addition, they have successfully replicated these results in multiple schools.

Design Is Necessary, but Insufficient

It clearly matters that YES Prep, KIPP, and Envision schools are well designed, but many other districts and schools are also making good design choices. To achieve sustained success, commitment to the design needs to be followed up with consistent resource allocation decisions and well-crafted systems and processes that support the design intent. Leadership time spent “on task” is also an important factor. Too often, school leaders get bogged down by disciplinary, administrative, operational, and/or political issues and don’t have time to dedicate to the most important part of their school: what goes on in the classrooms. We have surveyed school leaders in a number of client organizations. At less successful schools, leaders spend less than one-quarter of their time on student learning, teacher professional development, and school culture. Leaders at more effective schools dedicate more than half of the day to these high-value activities.

Achieving that level of focus and the momentum that accompanies it is difficult, even when a school is new and has been created with a particular educational approach. When a school leader is attempting to turn around a poorly performing school, the task becomes even harder, although perhaps more critical. In poorly performing schools, there are usually more challenges to contend with, such as demoralized staff (which often leads to high turnover), increasing pressures from district staff to meet adequate yearly progress targets on standardized tests, and physical environments that are poorly maintained and often unsafe. It can be enormously challenging to create a sense of urgency for change; identify a vision that a team can align behind; and ensure that school staff, students, parents, and key partners are ready, willing, and able to do the painful work of changing expectations and behavior.

In this larger context, the issues faced by the leaders at KIPP, YES Prep, and Envision, all three of them charter organizations, may differ on some dimensions from those of their peers in district schools (see Figure 1). The potential for distraction, however, is equally great. Our case studies illustrate what it looks like to establish and maintain a focus on what matters most in practice at these three organizations. These schools are succeeding in creating a culture in which student learning is central and the immediate (or comfortable) does not trump the important. Their strategies for executing their school designs are instructive for all public school leaders.

YES Prep Public Schools

YES Prep was conceived in 1995 by a group of teachers, parents, and community leaders as a program within an existing school. In 1998, under the leadership of teacher Chris Barbic, they opened their first school. Today, YES Prep is an open-enrollment public school organization that serves 2,100 predominantly low-income (80 percent) and minority (95 percent Latino or African-American) middle- and high-school students at five schools in Houston, Texas. Most students enter YES Prep schools one or more grade levels behind in math and English.

Over its history, the organization has achieved remarkable outcomes: 100 percent of YES Prep graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges, and YES Prep schools consistently rank among the best on the Texas state standardized tests. In 2006, and again in 2007, YES Prep ranked among the “Top 100 High Schools in America” in Newsweek magazine.

YES Prep schools are rooted in the belief that what matters most to the success of students in high school, college, and beyond is the quality of their interactions with teachers. So for YES Prep, the priority is recruiting, developing, and retaining teachers who are committed to doing “whatever it takes” (the YES Prep motto) to prepare students to graduate from a four-year college.

“When we started with the first school, we had 17 teachers,” Chief Academic Officer Jennifer Pagani reflected during a recent interview. “Those teachers were incredibly, intensely dedicated to their craft—really thoughtful and spirited practitioners. And looking back at that first year, it seemed to us that it was all about the teaching. It was about how the teachers interacted with the students, and it was about the standards that the teachers set for students to meet. We got results, so we figured that’s what we needed to focus on.”

As they thought about building on their experience, however, she and Barbic also realized that it would be a challenge to sustain their success, let alone replicate it. The trick would be to find (and keep) the large number of mission-aligned educators who would make the commitment to YES Prep. “We realized that in order to preserve the intensity of instruction that we had in the school, we needed to figure out teacher development and retention,” says Pagani.

They also felt strongly that leaders of YES Prep schools would have to be great teachers, groomed from within the organization.

Sweating the Details

To that end, Barbic and Pagani began to invest time and resources on recruiting and developing teachers. The approach, which is constantly being honed, begins with rigorous, and increasingly scientific, selection and includes extensive ongoing support and training once they hire a teacher.

“We used to hire people who looked great on paper and were passionate,” Pagani explains, “but there was still more attrition than we wanted to see, and inconsistent results. So we worked with a psychologist to develop a personality profile of an ideal YES Prep teacher. We did this looking at our most successful teachers based on the results they got with their students. We also looked at subjective inputs, including how they interacted with students. And we came up with the seven personality traits that really define a YES Prep teacher [see table]. If you’re not hitting five of the seven, you’re not right for this program.”

 

Candidates also teach during the recruiting process. “We ask them to do a lesson plan. And then they teach in front of our students. We get to see what things they prioritize, and the kind of rapport they develop with students. And it gives us a sense of what they value as teachers.”

Professional development for YES Prep teachers begins before they ever enter the classroom, and once started, it never really stops. At its core is a strong teacher-coaching staff, which represents a major investment of time and money. Each YES Prep school has two dedicated coaches on staff who support about 10 teachers each. And as with teacher recruiting, YES Prep is constantly refining its approach to coaching. Early on, coaches met on a regular schedule with all of the teachers they were supporting. But as time passed, Pagani and Barbic recognized that new teachers in particular needed an even higher level of hands-on support. “We’ve started trying some alternative scheduling,” Pagani explains, “so that our coaches go to work with a single teacher for three or four days straight, modeling lessons, watching lessons, providing immediate feedback, helping with lesson planning, and then coming in the next day as well.”

In addition, YES Prep has been creating a teacher handbook that is a living document constantly under revision. YES Prep teachers have created evaluation rubrics that provide them, and observers, with a pragmatic guide for what YES Prep teaching should look like in the classroom.

YES Prep aligns people, resources, and time around developing great teachers. School directors play a vital role in this effort. Directors are all former YES teachers, and they are groomed as classroom leaders and school culture builders. Once in the role, school directors continue to teach to stay connected to the classroom; they also set priorities so that they can spend the majority of their day observing classrooms and coaching teachers. From the beginning, Barbic created systems that would enable school leaders to focus on student learning and teacher development. For example, the disciplinary system distributes day-to-day enforcement responsibilities across the staff and, in some cases, among the students themselves. This arrangement enables school leaders to focus on what matters most.

YES Prep leaders have made difficult choices to maintain their priority focus on teachers. They increased total school enrollment and average class sizes in order to fit additional instructional resources into the budget. They also cut costs in their extracurricular programs and sought ways to keep facilities, transportation, and other non-classroom costs from dominating the budget.

“Not to say that you can’t get results any other way, but for us, it started out being about excellent teaching—and spending a lot of time on the development of materials for teaching, and on the art of teaching,” Pagani explains. “That’s what we did, and it worked, so that’s what we’re going to stick with.”

KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program)

Teach For America alums Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin created the Knowledge Is Power Program in 1994 with the goal of improving academic outcomes for underserved students. But they based KIPP on the idea that the key to creating and sustaining a successful school is leadership. As Feinberg puts it, “Instructional strategy, funding, and curriculum are important concerns, but they don’t make or break a school. The leader does.”

Armed with this shared belief and the confidence that they could lead, Feinberg and Levin launched KIPP as a 5th-grade public school program in inner-city Houston, Texas. Then in 1995, Feinberg remained in Houston and Levin returned home to New York City to establish KIPP in the South Bronx. “We were in horrible buildings; we didn’t have any money; we weren’t using the same curriculum,” Feinberg recalls. “But those things really weren’t essentials.” What was essential was Feinberg’s and Levin’s ability to motivate teachers and influence what went on in the classrooms, from determining curriculum to selecting and managing teachers.

By 1999, the schools were performing at the top of their districts. That same year, the CBS News television show 60 Minutes featured KIPP, which drew the attention of Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of Gap, Inc. The Fishers invested $15 million to form the KIPP Foundation, with a goal of replicating KIPP schools nationwide for the country’s neediest children. The KIPP Foundation focuses its efforts on recruiting, training, and supporting outstanding teachers to become school leaders and on opening new, locally run KIPP schools in high-need communities.

The KIPP Foundation provided a platform for Feinberg and Levin to test their approach on a larger scale. To do so, they had to articulate the KIPP design more fully. The first two schools each had their individual styles and strengths. How could that translate into a replicable formula?

In tackling this task, Feinberg says, they “backed into” the five essential tenets of the KIPP model: High Expectations (for academic achievement and conduct); Choice and Commitment (KIPP students, parents, and teachers all sign a learning pledge, promising to devote the time and effort needed to succeed); More Time (extended school day, week, and year); Power to Lead (school leaders have significant autonomy, including control over their budget, personnel, and culture); and Focus on Results (scores on standardized tests and other objective measures are coupled with a focus on character development).

Articulating these five tenets was a significant step toward formalizing the KIPP model. But what mattered most was, and is, putting a strong leader in each school. As Feinberg puts it, “If we truly do a great job of recruiting and selecting a leader for a school, then technically we’re done. The school will be successful. Any training or help we can give would be nice, but it’s not necessary. The leader is going to find a way to do it.”

Sweating the Details

To ensure that the right school leaders are selected and that those leaders have every opportunity to hone their skills before taking on a school, the KIPP Foundation has invested heavily in leader recruiting and training. The KIPP School Leadership Program is a yearlong effort that includes a four-week intensive training session (originally offered through UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and now located at the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute), residencies at other KIPP schools, and support from experienced KIPP staff. The program attracts applicants from organizations across the country. KIPP chooses its school leaders from among the graduates, evaluating candidates on 11 competencies that include critical thinking, communication skills, key personal attributes, and prior experience with disadvantaged students.

The KIPP Foundation helps each new school leader and location secure facilities and a charter, and build a strong board. Once a school opens, the foundation provides professional development opportunities to the growing network of KIPP teachers, school leaders, and support staff through content retreats and the weeklong KIPP School Summit. But decisionmaking, including curriculum, faculty selection, budgeting, and all other local-level details, is left to the school leader and the local board of directors.

KIPP has grown substantially since receiving the initial KIPP Foundation grant. As of this writing, there are 57 KIPP schools (including elementary, middle, and high schools) in 17 states and Washington, D.C., serving more than 14,000 students. Almost all are public charter schools. Students who entered KIPP schools in 2005 achieved the largest academic gains made in the 10 years since KIPP began.

In 2006, Richard Barth became CEO of the KIPP Foundation. Under his leadership, the foundation has begun to cluster KIPP schools in certain areas. These clusters each have a superintendent who works with school leaders and the KIPP Foundation. According to Barth, “The benefits of growth through localized scale are compelling. Not only are local superintendents of KIPP schools better positioned than our national staff to identify and groom local talent and ensure long-term sustainability; the pooling and sharing of support services allows the energy and time of our school leaders to remain focused on the highest-value activities: working with faculty, students, and families.” This is in stark contrast to many districts, where principals are overburdened with administrative activities.

Outside of the school inspection process that the KIPP Foundation conducts, the schools are accountable for their own results and school culture. “If they want to have someone heading up instructional leadership, that’s their prerogative,” Feinberg says. “It’s like being a head football coach. If their specialty is defense, they might not need a defensive coordinator. A great leader knows where his or her strengths are and where the holes are….I don’t think there’s ‘one way’ to do it. It’s up to them. We look at the test scores at the end of the year.”

Envision Schools

In the late 1990s, Bob Lenz was teaching at the Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo, California, working on new approaches to educating students. “We had been experimenting with breaking up the school into learning communities, we called them ‘academies,’ and we were doing a lot of project-based, interdisciplinary learning,” Lenz explains. The idea was that the material the students were learning in one class—science, say—could be integrated with the work they were doing in other classes.

The approach was successful; in 1999, Drake was named a New American High School and featured in U.S. News & World Report. The problem, Lenz says, was that he “kept hearing how project-based learning was nice for wealthy, suburban kids, but, ‘kids in urban settings aren’t going to be able to do this kind of work.’”

Project-based, interdisciplinary learning requires teaching teams to integrate a theme or project into rigorous lesson plans from a variety of disciplines, and to coordinate delivery among teachers and across classrooms so that projects progress apace and students meet curriculum goals. This approach presents numerous day-to-day challenges and demands aligned systems for instructional leadership and coaching. “I saw places where this work was being done,” Lenz says, “and it wasn’t sustainable because the systems pushed against it.”

Determined to create a system in which his innovative instructional approach would work for disadvantaged children, Lenz co-founded Envision Schools with Daniel McLaughlin in 2001. As of this writing, Envision operates four San Francisco Bay Area high schools that serve predominantly first-generation college-bound and low-income students. The young organization has already achieved notable success: in 2005 its first campus, Marin School of Arts and Technology (MSAT), was the highest-performing school in its district on California’s academic performance index (API). That same year, Envision’s second campus, City Arts & Tech High School (CAT), had the highest API gain in the San Francisco Unified School District, and it was rated as one of 12 exemplary schools in the nation by the U.S. Department of Education. In the 2006–7 school year, MSAT, CAT, and Envision’s third campus, Metropolitan Arts & Tech High School (Metro), outperformed the state average on the percentage of 10th-grade students passing the California High School Exit Exam.

Not surprisingly, what matters most at Envision—the focal point of execution—is its instructional system, which requires a team of teachers, facilitative leadership, high-quality analytical tools, and expert support. “We use a triangle to describe what we have,” says Lenz (see Figure 2). The first point of the triangle is ensuring that students master the content. The second is having them be able to demonstrate their knowledge, in the form of a project, such as a short documentary—something that requires presentation. For example, a student might do research on an environmental issue in a science class, create a public service announcement about the issue in a digital media class, and write a persuasive paper about it in English language arts. The third point of the triangle is building in a way to chart students’ progress over time and having them reflect on what they have learned and how. The idea is to create a tangible context for everything a student learns, so that it has meaning and resonates over time.

Sweating the Details

In aligning resources and people to achieve results for students, Envision’s leaders started with their own positions. The organization’s executive leadership is a partnership of two CEOs—the chief executive officer (McLaughlin) and the chief education officer (CEdO, Lenz).

“We designed the instructional model first, and then started thinking about how we would create a business model to support it,” Lenz explains. “We knew that we had to have a CEO, but we didn’t want the educational model to become subservient to the organization’s operations, so we chose the education officer title for balance. It creates a healthy tension, and as we’ve brought in people on one side, we bring someone in on the other side to maintain the balance.”

Envision invested up front in a dedicated team to deploy and refine its model. This investment meant that schools would need to be situated in lower-cost locations and that ancillary afterschool programs would need to be kept to a minimum. Further, Envision made the decision not to provide transportation and food services.

Lenz and Director of Instruction Jeannette LaFors spend much of their time working with schools: meeting weekly with school principals and teachers at their campuses, analyzing and reflecting on results, building out Envision’s professional development programs, and working with teachers to create tools that can support projects. “Our expectation is that teachers jointly will be designing projects that make them interdependent,” says LaFors, whose core responsibility is facilitating teacher teams. “That’s very different than in traditional schools, where teachers often work in silos, responsible solely for their own areas.”

Lenz, LeFors, and the teaching teams at each school spend time every week reviewing student results and sharing classroom observations to reflect on and enhance their practice. This time is built into the school schedule, and the associated financial cost of having the full teaching team together is prioritized in the budget.

One of the most visible signs of Envision’s commitment to sweating the details of its instructional system is student “exhibitions.” “They speak to the collective responsibility the teachers have for the students,” Lenz explains. “Students will tell you about how rigorous and rewarding exhibitions are. Teachers will tell you the same thing.”

As Envision has matured as an organization, its leaders have had to address the realities on the ground to maintain their focus on what matters most. When the organization was still in its early stages, for example, they realized principals were spending a significant amount of time on facilities procurement and maintenance and very little time in classrooms. So this year Envision took the job off of the school leaders’ plate by adding a facilities manager centrally and, as of this writing, is looking at adding an operations manager at each school. At the same time, Envision reset expectations for instructional leadership among principals supported by new professional development and tools developed by the instructional leadership team.

What Works

YES Prep, KIPP, and Envision illustrate the central thesis that quality execution—deciding what matters most and sweating the details—underlies strong results for students. Their school designs incorporate many of the same elements that other educators and policymakers are now embracing. The “innovation” at YES Prep, KIPP, and Envision—the differentiator that sets them apart—is the effort expended on the day-to-day leadership and management challenges.

All three align money, people, and leadership time to their most important activities. All three are building systems that translate general concepts into specific, repeatable actions that ensure quality execution throughout the organization. Finally, they move quickly to make changes when things aren’t working as planned.

As we consider the national challenge of providing a quality education to all children, whatever their starting point, we need to address not only matters of educational structure and policy, but also—and critically—the on-the-ground execution required to improve teaching and learning every day, in tens of thousands of classrooms. To obtain the best possible results for students, school leaders must have the mandate, the support, and the discipline to maintain a relentless focus on what matters most.

Barry Newstead and Susan Colby are partners at The Bridgespan Group, where Amy Saxton is case team leader.

In 1999 the Ohio Supreme Court found the Cleveland school voucher program to be constitutional, thereby allowing the three-year-old initiative to continue. Shortly thereafter, the anti-voucher coalition filed suit in federal court, asking for a preliminary injunction that would end the program until the court could decide the case. Despite the disruption such an injunction would cause, Judge Solomon Oliver proved remarkably cooperative, enjoining the program on the eve of the fourth year of its operation: four thousand students from low-income families would have to give up the voucher assistance that had allowed them to attend private (mainly religious) schools until it could be determined whether the program violated the “establishment of religion” clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

Teachers unions and other members of the anti-voucher coalition were elated. For the first time, an ongoing school voucher program had been halted.

But the judge’s decision provoked a powerful backlash. Newspaper editorials condemned it; one cartoon depicted a school bus running down black children, with a crazed Judge Oliver at the wheel. The Bradley Foundation, John Walton, Ted Forstmann, and others pledged millions of dollars to keep the kids in school. Realizing he had reached too far, Judge Oliver reversed part of his ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court dissolved the remainder of the injunction. Even though an appeals court later affirmed the judge’s subsequent ruling on the substance, that decision was itself overturned in 2002 by the Supreme Court in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which found no violation of the “establishment clause” as long as students had a choice of school, religious or secular.

The anti-voucher lobby learned a valuable lesson: fighting school choice in the abstract is fine, but forcing disadvantaged kids out of good schools is risky business.

Five years later, the tables turned. School choice activists, myself included, celebrated the passage of the nation’s first universal voucher program in Utah. But it turned out, just as it had for the unions in Cleveland, that we had badly overplayed our hand. Making use of a little-known provision in the Utah constitution, voucher opponents put the new law up for a referendum, where voters killed the voucher program by a large margin.

The teachers unions and their public-school allies schooled us. Now our future prospects depend on how much we learned in the process.

Vouchers in Utah

Since the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris ruling, the school choice movement’s progress in enacting vouchers and tax-credit legislation has been steady but slow. Voucher and tax credit programs have been enacted by the District of Columbia, Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, but such gains have been offset by disappointing setbacks in states such as Texas, South Carolina, and Missouri, despite energetic pro-choice campaigns in these states. Even worse, courts in Colorado and Florida struck down voucher programs that had survived the legislative gauntlet. While each year since 2002 has witnessed new programs and a net increase in children enrolled in them, only around 100,000 students in the United States today are enrolled in publicly funded voucher or tax-credit programs.

So when a universal voucher program was proposed for Utah, the school choice movement jumped at the opportunity, even though it arose in perhaps the most unlikely of places. Utah’s public schools compare well nationally, with students scoring higher than the U.S. average in every subject and at every grade level. The state has relatively small urban, minority, and low-income populations, the key constituencies for school choice. Utah’s population is only 17 percent nonwhite, compared with 26.1 percent nationally; only 33 percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch compared with 42 percent nationally. The state’s large Mormon population generally eschews private alternatives in favor of public schools.

Though Utah’s public-school system outperforms those in most states, it is not without its weaknesses. Problems are especially pronounced among Hispanics, who account for 12 percent of the state’s population but a much larger share of dropouts. While most Utahns give high grades to public schools, half of Utah’s Hispanics rank their public schools fair or poor.

In 2000, Parents for Choice in Education (PCE), a pro-voucher advocacy group, spearheaded by businessman Doug Holmes and given handsome financial backing by the founder and CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, took the lead. Like groups then emerging in other states, PCE promoted vouchers for disadvantaged youngsters, even though its long-term objective was to provide choice for all families in Utah.

PCE was encouraged in its efforts by a variety of groups, foundations, and philanthropists from across the country. The Alliance for School Choice, a group financed by wealthy philanthropists, provided funding for lobbying and educational efforts in states, like Utah, that seemed ready to consider voucher or tax-credit legislation. The late Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose, economists whose advocacy of school vouchers began as early as 1955, had poured much of their personal fortune into a foundation bearing their name and solely devoted to turning their voucher theory into legislated reality. Meanwhile, Dick and Betsy DeVos (Dick, son of Amway cofounder Rich DeVos, is the former president of Amway’s parent company and was a 2006 Michigan gubernatorial candidate; Betsy is former chairperson of the Michigan Republican Party) established All Children Matter, a group that sought to elect state and local officials committed to choice. All three groups viewed Utah’s prospects favorably and supported PCE’s local efforts.

PCE focused its attention primarily on legislative and electoral politics. The organization’s first foray was a tiny special-needs voucher program called the Carson Smith bill, which was passed by the Utah legislature but vetoed by Republican governor Olene Walker. PCE and its allies helped thwart Walker’s subsequent election bid, and she was replaced in 2004 by a pro-voucher Republican, Jon Huntsman Jr.

While in March 2005 Huntsman reversed the Walker veto by signing into law the Carson Smith bill providing vouchers for students with special needs, the legislature fell just short of assembling the coalition necessary to enact a broader voucher bill. Again the Utah and national forces went to work, and in 2006 Utah was one of only two states to elect state legislatures that were more Republican than before. (The other, Georgia, passed its first school-voucher program, for children with disabilities, the following year.)

Led by PCE, the voucher coalition developed an innovative legislative vehicle. Bridging the gap between advocates of universal vouchers (favored by the Friedman Foundation) and means-tested vouchers (preferred by the Alliance for School Choice), the bill made vouchers available to all, but staggered the amounts by family income, with awards ranging from a minimum of $500 to $3,000 for the lowest-income children. Moreover, the bill provided that public schools would keep for a period of five years the difference between the voucher amount and ordinary per-pupil funding.

Hamstrung by a paycheck protection law that forbids the involuntary use of union dues for political purposes, the Utah teachers union proved no match for the school choice team in either the electoral or legislative arenas, and the bill was enacted and signed into law. But the union did not give up. Expected to file a legal challenge, for which the program’s backers were prepared, the union instead invoked a little-used procedure to refer the program to the ballot, which had the effect of halting the program’s implementation. A legal battle ensued over whether the procedure was applicable, with the union prevailing.

At that point, though months short of the actual vote, the battle was over. The bill’s opponents had moved the issue into the arena that is more favorable to them than the courts or legislatures: the voting booth. In that forum, when they are challenging programs that are not yet operational, the unions have never lost. In as many as ten ballot contests initiated by school choice proponents or referred to the ballot by unions, the opponents have prevailed in every one—even a Washington State referendum on charter schools in 2004—by resounding margins.

That record is not the result of unequal resources—Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tim Draper poured $20 million into a California initiative several years ago, and the Utah coalition reportedly spent $4 million, only half a million less than the unions—but rather of operating in the realm of the hypothetical. All the unions have to do is raise the specter that public schools may be harmed, and the electorate is likely to vote no.

All of the anti–school choice ballot campaigns have struck consistent themes. Utah choice opponents ran television advertisements warning about the demise of public schools should the initiative pass. One ad featured Utah’s “teacher of the year,” who worried that vouchers would “take resources from the public schools.” The furiously anti–school choice Salt Lake Tribune questioned the initiative backers’ motives, charging that these “adherents to the philosophy of the late Milton Friedman have tried for years not just to undermine public schools, but to eliminate them.” Other arguments focused on the issues of accountability for voucher schools and separation of church and state.

PCE and its allies, including the Sutherland Institute, a free-market policy group, gamely parried the charges, pointing to the poor performance of minority students in Utah public schools, explaining that public schools would lose students but keep most of their funding, and so on. The local school-choice team made some mistakes, too, most notably refraining from countering the signature-gathering effort with an advertising campaign that could have cast doubt on the nature and goals of the opposition. But overall, the campaign in support of vouchers was well run.

Regardless, in the end, 62 percent of Utah voters cast their votes against school choice (see Figure 1). Supporters failed to carry a single county. Opposition was even higher in Salt Lake County, an urban area where students were performing especially poorly.

The Milwaukee Model

The school choice movement is remarkably diverse in nearly every way, not the least in differences over goals. Disputes center around universal versus means-tested school choice, tax credits versus vouchers, and other issues. But most school choice advocates have set aside such disputes in specific instances so long as the ball is moved forward.

Where differences are increasing is on strategy, and the movement divides between those who favor an incrementalist approach and those who prefer bigger, bolder action. Considering that the movement is animated by a belief in individual choice, it is surprising how many advocates believe there is one right way to deliver school choice, and one right strategy to achieve it.

Among those who favor a one-size-fits-all approach, the Milwaukee voucher program is the preeminent model. It has endured stiff legal and political challenges and today provides educational opportunities for tens of thousands of disadvantaged schoolchildren. Yet Milwaukee has proven remarkably difficult to replicate. If only we concentrate the movement’s resources on a handful of promising states, some assert, we can create new Milwaukees; moreover, lesser efforts should be put aside to pursue that overarching goal. The largest and longest-running cloning initiative is in Texas, where over the past decade school choice advocates have invested tens of millions of dollars in political and legislative campaigns to create a large multicity voucher program, each time failing to pass any legislation.

The replicationists, for lack of a better term, miss two important points. The first is that all school-choice politics are local. Each state’s political, legal, demographic, and cultural environments define the possible. In one state, vouchers for kids in failing schools might present a viable option, while a special-needs voucher might be all that is feasible in another. A heavily Catholic state might favor tuition tax credits, while a state with large urban populations might prefer scholarship tax credits. The replicationists can summon at best mild enthusiasm for such cacophony, while incrementalists believe that at this embryonic stage in its development, the movement should promote every form of school choice and let a thousand flowers bloom.

The second insight is that the Milwaukee program was the product of an incrementalist approach. The original school-choice program enacted in 1990 was limited to one percent of the public school students and encompassed only nonsectarian private schools. The scope was limited because only a tiny program could be enacted.

Like subsequent school-choice initiatives, the Milwaukee program evolved in predictable ways. First, the program introduced consumers to the concept of school choice in a tangible rather than hypothetical way. Families watched as others enrolled their children in good schools, and demand grew to expand the effort. Those whose children entered the program developed a stake in defending it. New schools opened to meet increasing parental demand, and the program expanded to more than 20 times its original student eligibility (to 22,500 students), along with the inclusion of religious school options. Most important, the myths that can bedevil school choice were replaced by reality, leading even the city’s major daily newspaper to switch its editorial position from opposition to support. When the inevitable political challenge came in the form of a governor dead set on destroying school choice, the movement was so powerful that it forced the governor to capitulate and even sign an expansion. Milwaukee exemplifies the success and endurance of the incrementalist approach.

Indeed, the incrementalist approach has fueled nearly all the movement’s legislative triumphs, yielding the single most important insight for future school-choice strategy: choice begets choice. Even the smallest programs are worth pursuing because they can expand, lay the groundwork for additional efforts, or both.

Future Prospects

Does the Utah defeat spell the end of vouchers, or even a slowing of momentum? While any defeat administered so decisively when victory seems at hand is inevitably discouraging, the national impact of the setback should not be exaggerated. After all, similar ballot defeats in California and Michigan have not prevented progress, however tortoise-like, in other states. But to generate faster movement, we need to focus on tactics that register enduring successes. Otherwise, the school choice movement is no more likely to win its struggle than the Super Bowl is going to be won by a series of long tosses into the end zone. But if first downs are ground out a few yards at a time, eventually we will see the goal line pass beneath our feet.

Since 2000, the number of jurisdictions with programs targeted toward disadvantaged youngsters has grown from four to ten (nine states plus the District of Columbia). Two programs started with vouchers for low-income children or students in failing schools, four with scholarship tax credits, and two with vouchers for kids with special needs. Some observations about this growth are worth noting. First, in terms of outcomes produced compared to dollars invested by the school choice movement, legislative success in the form of new or increased programs was much more likely to occur in states that already had some type of school choice program than in states that had none. Ohio, for instance, built upon the Cleveland program by enacting a statewide initiative for children in failing schools, while Arizona added to its individual scholarship tax-credit program with a corporate tax-credit and two new targeted voucher programs. Second, the growth rate has been greatest in programs that have reached their initial caps. Finally, Democratic governors and legislators (such as Pennsylvania’s Edward Rendell and Wisconsin’s Jim Doyle) are more likely to agree to expand existing programs, or (like Arizona’s Janet Napolitano and the heavily Democratic Rhode Island state legislature) to approve small new ones, than they are to support large new projects.

Utah’s strategy started out as an incrementalist approach, but the Carson Smith special-needs program was too new and too small to dispel concerns that Utahns might have about universal vouchers. A modest next step—such as a program targeted to disadvantaged children, who generally perform poorly in inner-city schools—might not have evoked a referendum, and if it did, likely would not have fared so badly.

Currently, the state with possibly the brightest prospects for school choice is Arizona, where choice through charter schools, open public school enrollment, scholarship tax credits, and special-needs voucher programs has made it all but impossible for opponents to demonize school choice. When Governor Napolitano pushed a full-day public-school kindergarten program, she referred to it as a “choice” program (families could choose whether or not to participate). Though antagonistic to school choice, she signed the voucher bills and allowed the corporate scholarship tax credit to become law without her signature. Should a Republican succeed Napolitano as governor, universal school choice could occur either as a result of legislation or even by voter initiative, as the number of program beneficiaries begins to eclipse the tally of teachers union members.

A state like Louisiana—with a newly elected, passionately pro–school choice governor, a legislature that has passed school choice with bipartisan support, a lousy inner-city public-school system, a long tradition of Catholic schools serving disadvantaged students, and no constitutional obstacles—may eventually present an opportunity for a sustainable large program, though the Utah experience cautions against overreaching in the short run. A state like Missouri, with support from minority legislators but opposition from rural Republicans, may at best be able to enact a small targeted program at the outset. The ultimate goal in either case remains the same: education funding that follows children to the school of their choice, with schools as the means rather than ends in themselves.

One bedrock lesson of warfare is that armies never should outpace their supply lines. That is the mistake that was made in Utah. Though school choice should be as American as apple pie, as with any type of change people may find it scary, especially when the issue is the education of children. People may know the status quo is bad, but fear that the unknown may be worse.

In the case of school choice, familiarity breeds demand. When it moves from hypothesis to reality, choice is increasingly difficult for opponents to distort. The faces of real children in good schools are the best reason to expand and sustain programs—and the best defense against the inevitable efforts to dismantle them.

Clint Bolick served as president of the Alliance for School Choice from 2004 to 2007. He is now director of the Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation at the Goldwater Institute and a research fellow with the Hoover Institution.

Schools across the nation are confronting the challenge to place an effective teacher in every classroom. In the provisions of No Child Left Behind, alternative licensure programs, and teacher pay plans, education reformers seek ways to improve the quality of the nation’s teaching workforce. One landmark effort to tackle this issue is Teach For America (TFA). The initiative famously launched by 22-year-old Wendy Kopp and a small cadre of allies in 1990 has brought thousands of talented young people into teaching. In this forum, Education Next asks Julie Mikuta and Arthur Wise whether Teach For America is a valuable strategy for recruiting the best and brightest into education and energizing school improvement, or a distraction and a device for sending ill-prepared neophytes to serve some of the nation’s neediest students.

EDUCATION NEXT: Has Teach For America (TFA) improved the caliber of candidates entering the teaching workforce or has it undermined teacher professionalism? 

ARTHUR WISE: Founder Wendy Kopp’s call to public service has resonated with a generation of graduates of the nation’s leading universities. She has designed and implemented a program that 1) attracts additional talented young adults to serve some of our lowest-performing schoolchildren, 2) places them in hard-to-staff schools with two-year commitments, 3) prepares them for this daunting task with a five-week summer institute, and 4) plays some role in their induction. TFAers are a potentially valuable resource to our schools.

Whether TFA has in fact “improved the caliber of candidates,” however, depends on the criterion used to make the judgment. TFA was designed to help solve the “teacher shortage” in “under-resourced” urban and rural schools and should be measured against this objective.

Most well-off suburban school districts, and even urban schools serving privileged students, generally manage to attract and retain the teachers they need. With few exceptions (e.g., STEM [science, engineering, and mathematics] fields and special education), these districts hire only career-oriented, fully certified teachers, do not face annual challenges in finding replacements, and do not turn to TFA.

High-needs urban and rural schools, on the other hand, offer their teachers extremely challenging students, unusually poor working conditions, and compensation unresponsive to market conditions even within the teaching profession. At-risk children in these schools are taught year after year by a passing parade of neophytes with varying degrees of preparation. The absence of accomplished veterans to guide beginners exacerbates the challenge: Students enter school behind their peers. Their teachers have not yet learned to be effective. Although TFA corps members do perform a short-term public service by filling vacancies in hard-to-staff schools, they deflect attention from the lack of trained and experienced teachers who should be filling those seats. The problem of underresourced and underserved public schools serving the underperforming students is a continuing national tragedy, thus far unsolved by local, state, or national initiatives.

Professions normally have common programs of preparation and extended terms of practice. TFA does not fit the professional model of teaching; other professions do not assign novices primary responsibility.

JULIE MIKUTA: One way to measure whether TFA has improved the caliber of teaching candidates is to take a close look at TFA’s own applicant pool. Traditionally, education majors have had some of the lowest SAT and GRE (Graduate Record Examination) scores, while the most-accomplished college students opted for careers in medicine, law, finance, or technology. TFA’s reputation for quality and selectivity has reversed this equation by creating a mindset on college campuses that teaching in a high-needs school is a highly desirable postcollege job. Roughly 10 percent of graduating seniors at Duke University and the University of Chicago applied to TFA last fall, as well as 11 percent of those at Spelman College, an historically black liberal arts college. The average grade-point average of the 2,900 TFA accepted corps members was 3.6; their average SAT score was above 1300. Nearly all held leadership positions on campus. As Negar Azimi pointed out in the New York Times (September 30, 2007), “Doing good has rarely been this hip—or this competitive.”

In general, the traits that TFA considers—including academic performance, verbal ability, and strong records of early leadership—line up with the traits found to correlate with teachers’ success. However, it has proved frustratingly difficult to compare teachers’ actual effectiveness in the classroom, because as a field, we too often rely on proxies like certification and tenure instead of on data that quantify teachers’ impact on student achievement.

To address this challenge, TFA relentlessly collects, analyzes, and uses data about the performance of the students in the classes taught by individuals trained through the program and has found that many of their teachers help students achieve at least a year’s worth of growth every year.

EN: Studies have shown that most TFA teachers leave the classroom after two to three years. Is that too short a time to have an impact in TFA’s targeted, troubled districts?

AW: Although many recruits with TFAers’ university backgrounds have great potential as teachers, few of them stay in teaching long enough to realize any advantage from those backgrounds. TFA recruits are a different “brand” of recruit from those who have invested time and money to prepare for a career of teaching. They seem to view their time in the classroom as community service; studies by Boyd and Grossman and by Kane and Rockoff have found that more than 80 percent are gone after three years.

The introduction of TFA recruits to teaching is not easy. As a September 2007 Washingtonian article on the new D.C. superintendent of schools Michelle Rhee (a TFA alumna) summarizes, “her first year of teaching was a disaster…. ‘I did not do right by the kids…. It was rough going.’ She says she couldn’t control the classroom; she spent her time disciplining, not teaching; she finished the year demoralized.”

Of course, every experienced teacher was once a novice, so not every student can have an experienced instructor. But there is almost universal agreement on the value of teacher experience, and research indicates a multiplier effect on students’ performance when they are taught by ineffective teachers over multiyear periods.

JM: Any measure of TFA teachers’ impact must begin with the environments in which they work. The 26 regions into which TFA places corps members include rural communities that struggle to lure enough teachers and urban neighborhoods that often lose their strongest teachers to the surrounding suburbs. This is the gap that TFA corps members step into. When I taught high school science as a TFA corps member in New Orleans, the science classroom next to mine was staffed midyear with a former band instructor because the school could not find a qualified science teacher to take the job.

Still, the question of how much impact any teacher can have in just two to three years is valid, especially given the research indicating that the largest growth in teacher effectiveness occurs during the first three years of teaching. But the first few years in the classroom can be ones of major impact. Yes, Michelle Rhee acknowledged that the eight-year-olds she taught in her first year “ran right over” her. However, as reported by the New York Times, by the end of her second year, students who had scored in the 13th percentile soared to grade level, with some students scoring in the 90th percentile. Rhee isn’t unique: TFA recruits many individuals who are able to figure out how to make those two years matter greatly to the students they teach, and equips them to help their students succeed academically.

EN: Is there any compelling evidence that TFA teachers are more or less effective than traditionally certified teachers (see Figure 1)?

JM: External research has validated TFA’s findings on teacher effectiveness: a June 2004 study by Mathematica Policy Research found that TFA teachers perform at least as well as traditionally prepared and certified teachers in similar schools, while a 2006 study published in Education Next (see Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger, “Photo Finish,” research, Winter 2007) found the same to be true in New York City.

The Mathematica Policy Research study of the effectiveness of TFA teachers was very sophisticated. Mathematica worked across six different high-poverty areas (ranging from the rural Mississippi Delta to urban Chicago) to randomly assign almost 2,000 students to 100 TFA and non-TFA classrooms. They then used common pre- and post-tests to get apples-to-apples results across these classrooms and geographies. The study found that students with TFA teachers attained greater gains in math and equal gains in reading compared with students of other teachers in the study, even those with certified teachers and with veteran teachers.

The impact on student achievement is the most important metric, but it is also instructive to consider the opinions of TFA corps members’ employers, who observe their practices day to day. Each year, TFA contracts with an external researcher to survey these principals, and year after year the majority of principals rate TFA teachers’ preparation and performance as at least as effective as that of other beginning teachers, and in many cases as even better than the overall teaching faculty. Additionally, some of the highest-achieving charter schools, like Achievement First, choose to staff their schools with TFA corps members. While these data are certainly subjective, they are yet another indicator that TFA has built a track record of preparing successful teachers.

AW: At least five studies include data on TFA. The 2004 Mathematica study says that “TFA teachers did not have an impact on average reading achievement. Students in TFA and control classrooms experienced the same growth rate in reading achievement—an increase equivalent to one percentile” [from the 14th to the 15th percentile]. In addition, many of the TFA teachers were actually more prepared than over half in the novice control group: “All TFA teachers had at least 4 weeks of student teaching, while many of the control teachers (and over half the novice control teachers) had no student teaching experience at all.” The abysmally low percentage of students at the proficiency level in both reading and math in this study demonstrates the results of the current policy of having inexperienced, untrained recruits teaching the most-needy students.

As a group, the studies tend to show that the students of uncertified TFA recruits underachieve when compared to students of new certified teachers, but this gap tends to disappear as the TFA recruits obtain professional knowledge through coursework and certification. Like similar studies in other areas of educational controversy, however, these results are indicative but not uniformly regarded as conclusive.

Whatever the relative performance of the two groups of new teachers, I know of no school or district that has made a conscious choice to hire TFA recruits instead of certified teachers. And the districts do not retain any substantial number of them long enough for the recruits to catch up to their peers. TFA recruits are placeholders in troubled schools where an adult must staff the classroom and no one else volunteers. They are hired because of the lack of certified applicants, not because they are considered more desirable.

 

EN: If TFA-like programs are going to improve teacher quality across the board, how should they be designed?

JM: When I was on the board of education for the D.C. public schools, I asked the person in charge of teacher induction how she determined which of the district’s teachers had been successful during their first year of teaching. She looked at me, somewhat incredulously, and said, “I ask them if they had a good year.” Her answer felt like a punch in the gut. Could it really be that the only way the district was assessing the quality of its teachers was to ask them if they liked the teaching experience? Is it possible that the experience of students didn’t factor at all into this assessment? Reflecting back on that moment, I can say with sad certainty that this response wasn’t unique to this individual or that district.

Every year colleges of education train thousands of teachers and send them into classrooms with very little understanding of whether that training was effective and what sort of achievement results these teachers will produce. Students would be much better off if policymakers and education leaders were to focus on student achievement results as a way to assess teacher quality overall, and to assess the quality of teacher preparation programs supported by federal and state dollars. TFA evaluates corps members’ performance by determining which teachers produced student gains of 1.5 years of achievement growth over the course of the school year. TFA has had to figure out how to assess teachers’ performance in subjects and grades that aren’t tested and how to compare results across state lines, where the quality and rigor of tests vary dramatically. At the heart of this effort is a focus on producing “significant gains” in student achievement and creating support systems aligned with that goal. This model marks a huge development in teacher assessment and support strategies.

TFA also regularly mines its data to figure out how it can select the individuals most likely to produce that sought-after 1.5 years of growth per year and how to tailor its training to best support teachers toward that end. TFA spends approximately $19,000 per corps member for training and ongoing support and development. This covers a rigorous five-week summer training institute with opportunities for practice, observation, coaching, and study, as well as support on planning skills and reflection toward a cycle of continuous improvement; a two-year program of teacher support and professional development, including a formal cycle of observations and feedback, and data-driven, student-achievement-focused tool kits; and help with placement and ongoing coaching over the two years from regional staff.

School districts hire TFA corps members through state-approved alternative certification programs, which require that corps members meet specific requirements. These vary by region and by position, but in most cases they call for corps members to pass subject-area tests before teaching and to take ongoing coursework during the school year. Teach For America works with school districts, states, and schools of education to ensure that corps members have access to coursework, test information, and preparation tools to meet these requirements. In many regions, TFA has established partnerships with graduate schools that enable corps members to obtain their master’s degrees in education.

AW: The sad reality is that our hard-to-staff schools will continue to have a disproportionate number of new teachers until we stop the hemorrhaging of their staff. We need a sharp break with tradition. Even certified teachers who have completed education-school coursework and student teaching need a structured induction program in order to become effective teachers. The need for training and supervision is even greater for recruits entering the field without any prior pedagogical training or experience, no matter how smart, dedicated, or steeped in subject-matter knowledge they may be. To be effective, all prospective teachers need a deep understanding of the subject matter, child development, and language development and sophisticated strategies for teaching content to diverse learners, managing the classroom, and assessing both how children learn and what they are learning.

I recommend a “teaching team strategy,” that gives only experienced teachers primary student responsibility, but in multiple classrooms and with the assistance of the novices. Senior teachers, appropriately compensated, lead instructional teams of other teachers, novices, and untrained personnel.

Since this very radical reform is unlikely to occur in the near future, we must for now at least insist that TFA recruits not only attend an intensive preservice summer institute but also receive structured mentoring that is uniformly as good in practice as on paper. They should be required to work toward certification while they are in the classroom.

In an ideal world, all new teachers would receive their capstone preparation and induction in a professional development school or an urban residency program. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has worked to improve professional development schools, which provide preparation and teaching experience. Three hundred of NCATE’s 650 accredited schools of education have a total of 750 professional development schools, each training 15 to 40 individuals each year. Studies published by NCATE (Teitel 2004) and by the American Educational Research Association (Cochran-Smith and Zeichner 2005) indicate that structured student teaching and internships in professional development schools increase the likelihood that novices remain in teaching, even in urban schools, and improve the performance of their students.

Recently, NCATE has begun working with urban residency programs, which pursue a similar strategy for those who have not been prepared as teachers. Existing programs include the Academy for Urban School Leadership in Chicago (training 53 this year), the Boettcher Teachers Program in Denver (16), and the Boston Teacher Residency, which currently (2007–08) has 84 participants and plans to have 100 to 120 candidates next year. One-half of Boston candidates are people of color; one-half of the candidates are in shortage fields of math and science.

Professional development schools currently provide more new teachers than TFA does each year, and urban residency programs are growing rapidly. These schools and programs should be receiving the lion’s share of policy attention, but unfortunately neither has a charismatic leader such as Wendy Kopp. These programs are not yet brought to scale, with the exception of Maryland, which requires all of its candidates to be trained in a professional development school. Other states could follow Maryland’s example. We hope they do.

An intermediate step could be the New York City Teaching Fellows program. Although this program does assign uncertified recruits as teachers of record, it also requires them to enroll concurrently in a master’s degree program focusing on teaching and learning.

TFA currently invests approximately $20,000 per recruit for a two-year teaching commitment. If the same amount were invested as a full stipend for a one-year Master of Arts in teaching program at a state university, America could reap more benefits over a longer period of time.

EN: Many TFA supporters point to the spinoffs launched by TFA alums, including The New Teacher Project (TNTP), the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), and YES Prep and argue that many of those who initially entered education through TFA have gone on to become influential change agents. How convincing is the evidence for this?

JM: If TFA did not exist, it is highly doubtful that the 2005 National Teacher of the Year Jason Kamras, who taught for nine years in the Washington, D.C., public school system, would have become a teacher. The same goes for Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, who went on to create KIPP based on principles for effective schooling that they first developed while they were TFA corps members. Today, KIPP’s schools catapult low-income students from the 30th percentile in math to the 70th or 80th, positioning them for success in high school and beyond. Because of TFA, KIPP schools are delivering an incredible education to more than 14,000 low-income students of color during this school year alone, and many of these students are being taught directly by current TFA corps members or alumni.

Add to the mix the impact of alumni like Mikara Solomon, who as principal of Bunche Elementary School in Compton, a very low income community in Los Angeles, led its transformation from one of the district’s lowest-ranked schools to one of the best performers, and the long-term impact of TFA alumni on students in low-income communities begins to emerge. TFA estimates that more than 280 of its alumni lead district or charter schools. At least 67 percent of alums continue to work or study full-time in education; half of these alumni are teachers.

TFA has also had an impact on district practices, much of which comes through the work of its alumni. The current administration of the D.C. Public Schools is staffed at the highest levels by TFA alumni who have remained committed to public education. The New Teacher Project has partnered with over 200 school districts in 32 states to recruit and prepare 23,000 teachers. Many of TNTP’s staff are TFA alumni as well; they sit side by side with human resources personnel to help fix broken recruiting and hiring systems that prevent the neediest schools from getting the best candidates. TFA alumnus Cami Anderson is superintendent of New York City’s district of Alternative Schools and Programs, where she oversees the educational needs of 50,000 young people at a variety of facilities, including transfer schools and correctional education facilities. In nearby New Jersey, alumnus Brian Osborne is the superintendent of the 6,000-student Maplewood-South Orange school district. And in Chicago, Michael Lach wields significant influence on district policy as director of science for Chicago Public Schools.

While I was head of alumni for TFA, each year about 90 percent of alumni indicated in an annual survey that they work, volunteer, or pursue graduate studies in fields that directly affect low-income communities. Whether they work inside or outside a school system, they bring a passion and sense of outrage that come from having spent at least two years learning about the challenges that low-income students and schools face.

AW: These talented graduates, most from fortunate backgrounds, complete their TFA commitments with direct experience trying to help the nation’s less fortunate population learn and then they move on. Small minorities have remained in education (it appears mostly in policy positions) and have a direct opportunity to make a difference in the status quo. Michelle Rhee, for example, first used her TFA experience to develop The New Teacher Project in a parallel attempt to increase teacher quality in urban areas by recruiting new types of teachers, and now to help improve one of the nation’s worst-performing urban districts.

Some TFA graduates are already becoming part of the next generation of society’s leaders, and many more will surely follow. They have directly experienced the teacher quality conundrum in hard-to-staff schools, and they will presumably be willing to advocate for new approaches to ameliorate the problems of underresourced schools and underserved children.

EN: How many teachers would TFA need to prepare every year for the program to have a significant, even transformative, effect on urban education?

AW: Six hundred fifty NCATE-accredited schools graduate over 100,000 career-oriented teaching candidates a year (about two-thirds of the total graduates of university-based teacher education programs). TFA hopes to provide 4,000 teachers a year—for two-year stints—by 2010. Even if it continues to concentrate its efforts on hard-to-staff urban schools, any significant systemic impact must necessarily be catalytic rather than proportional.

JM: The program was never intended to solve the teacher shortage problem or even to fix public education simply by preparing bright college students to teach for two years. Instead, TFA intends to transform public education by exposing these talented people to the challenges of public education and engaging them in figuring out solutions, and by concentrating its impact within certain markets. Nearly 45 percent of TFA’s 12,000 alumni live in six regions—NYC, Chicago, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Houston. As TFA grows, the organization’s impact will increase, as these alumni take on more visible and influential roles.

EN: Ultimately, what would you say is the single biggest impact—positive or negative—that TFA has had on American schooling?

AW: Given its small size TFA’s greatest positive impact may be the creation of a new generation of education and societal leaders with abiding interest and direct experience in the problems of educating our nation’s disadvantaged. The nation needs their help.

Government must invest in and redesign underresourced urban and rural schools so that they consistently provide high-quality education for their students. Eliminating the teacher shortage in hard-to-staff schools will require changing economic incentives, working conditions, and staffing patterns so that these schools attract and retain a competent teaching force that will help all students learn.

Teachers’ propensity to remain in a school depends heavily on their perception of teaching conditions and the degree to which they see the school environment supporting their teaching. Efforts to redesign hard-to-staff schools to provide attractive teaching conditions have been insufficient and inadequate.

Still I do not think any of us presumes to think that teachers will remain in positions as long as their predecessors did when many other types of occupations and professions were not open to women or people of color. There must be economic incentives, both relative to other professions and within the education profession, for career-oriented teachers to teach those students who most need their abilities and experience.

JM: There is no doubt that Teach For America has had a positive impact on American education. This impact has played out along two primary dimensions. First, the teachers it recruits are in fact good teachers who produce achievement gains for students that match or exceed those accomplished by other new teachers who have been prepared in other ways. Second, TFA has channeled thousands of talented people into education who might not otherwise have chosen this profession, and shown them what it takes to educate high-need students. Although TFA is by no means the entire solution to the problems facing public education, or even our teacher shortage, TFA is helping to redefine the educational and economic opportunities available in rural and urban communities.

Teach For America, by focusing all of its teachers on the singular goal of helping their students make more than one year’s worth of growth in a single year, is proving that we have no excuse for the perennial underachievement of children from low-income communities. As corps members and as alumni, TFA teachers carry this torch into their careers in education, public service, and other sectors, lighting a fire under our public will that can ignite much-needed change in public education. Their work will augment the efforts of many others who are simultaneously working at all levels and in a variety of fields to make high-quality education the norm, regardless of the school a child attends.

Even before and certainly ever since the 1983 release of A Nation at Risk by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, national economic competitiveness has been offered as a primary reason for pushing school reform. The commission warned, “If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all—old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority.” Responding to these urgent words, the National Governors Association, in 1989, pledged that U.S. students would lead the world in math and science achievement by 2000.

According to the latest international math and science assessment conducted by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (see Figure 1), the United States remains a long distance from that target. Rather than worrying about the consequences, some have begun to question what all the fuss was about. Education researcher Gerald Bracey, for example, has argued that no one has “provided any data on the relationship between the economy’s health and the performance of schools. Our long economic boom suggests there isn’t one—or that our schools are better than the critics claim.”

Truth be told, the Bracey critique is not entirely misplaced. Most commentators rely more on the commonsense understanding that countries must have good schools to succeed economically rather than presenting conclusive empirical evidence that connects what students learn in school to what subsequently happens in a nation’s economy. Even economists, the people who think the most systematically about the way in which “human capital” affects a nation’s economic future, have skirted the heart of the question by looking only at “school attainment,” namely the average number of years students remain in school.

Using average years of schooling as an indicator of a country’s human capital has at least two major drawbacks. First and foremost, the approach assumes that students in diverse school systems around the world receive the same educational benefits from a year of schooling. A year of schooling in Papua New Guinea and a year of schooling in Japan are treated as equally productive. Second, this measure does not account for learning that takes place outside the classroom—within families, among peers, or via the Internet, for example.

A more direct measure of a country’s human capital is the performance of students on tests in math and science, something that might be called the average level of “cognitive skills” among those entering a country’s work force. At one time, internationally comparable information on student performance was not available for a sufficient number of countries over a long enough period of time to allow for systematic study, which is why economists relied upon the less informative measures of school attainment. Now that test-score data for many countries over an extended period of time are readily available, it is possible to supplement measures of educational attainment with these more direct measures of cognitive skills.

In a series of studies conducted over several years, the four of us have explored the role of both school attainment and cognitive skills in economic growth. Beginning in the mid-1960s, international agencies started conducting tests of students’ performance in mathematics and science at various grade levels. We used performance on 12 of these standardized tests as rough measures of the average level of cognitive skill in a given country. With this information, we could assess how human capital relates to differences in economic growth for 50 countries from 1960 to 2000, more countries over a longer period of time than any previous study. We were also able to pay close attention to institutional factors that influence economic growth, such as openness of the economy and protection of property rights.

What we discovered gives credence to the concerns expressed in A Nation at Risk. The level of cognitive skills of a nation’s students has a large effect on its subsequent economic growth rate. Increasing the average number of years of schooling attained by the labor force boosts the economy only when increased levels of school attainment also boost cognitive skills. In other words, it is not enough simply to spend more time in school; something has to be learned there.

We also discovered that the size of the impact of cognitive skills depends on whether a nation’s economy is open to outside trade and other external influences. The more open the economy, the more important it is that a country’s students are acquiring high levels of cognitive skills. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent or “flat,” to use New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s familiar terminology, enhancing human capital will become increasingly critical. As the world continues to change, the United States can ill afford to rest easily on its past accomplishments.

Measuring Cognitive Skills

Reaching these conclusions required a multistep analysis. The first step was to use the 12 PISA and other international math and science assessments, dating back to 1964, to construct an index of cognitive skill levels for a large sample of countries at various points in time. Because the number of countries participating in the 12 test administrations changed from one administration to the next, and because testing agencies have made no attempt to link their results to one another, we needed to develop comparable scores for each test. This required a norm against which each test could be calibrated. Fortunately, we could construct that norm by using information from tests in the United States, the country that has had the earliest, most sophisticated, and most comprehensive system of testing. The United States has participated in all of the international tests since 1964, and it has also maintained a separate longitudinal testing system of its own, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). With that information in hand, it was possible to calibrate scores on each of the separate international tests to one another via the connection of those tests to the NAEP. To obtain further precision, we used the variation in scores across a subset of the more-advanced developed countries to obtain an estimate of the spread in scores across countries. By following these two steps, we were able to aggregate all available scores for each country into measures of average cognitive skill levels for each country.

The 50 countries for which we were able to develop a comparable measure of cognitive skill levels include the 30 democracies that have market economies and have been accepted as members of the OECD, most of which are at a relatively high level of economic development. The other 20 countries are at lower levels of economic development. In Figure 2, you can identify top performers like Finland and Japan, average performers such as the United States and Germany, and low performers that include Albania, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Impact on Economic Growth

We wanted to use this new information to compare the economic benefits of higher levels of just school attainment with the benefits of higher levels of cognitive skills. We therefore took measures of average educational attainment and average cognitive skill levels for as many countries as possible and examined their relationship to the average annual growth rate in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita from 1960 through 2000.

First, we looked just at the impact of average school attainment on the economic growth rate. (An adjustment was made for the initial level of GDP because it is “easier” to grow if you are starting out at a lower level; that is, it is easier to copy more productive technologies than to initiate progress on your own.) When we performed this analysis, we found, as other economists before us, that when the average number of years of schooling in a country was higher, the economy grew at a higher annual rate over subsequent decades. Specifically, we found that, across the 50 countries, each additional year of average schooling in a country increased the average 40-year growth rate in GDP by about 0.37 percentage points.

That may not seem like much, but consider the fact that since World War II, the world economic growth rate has been around 2 to 3 percent of GDP annually. Lifting it by 0.37 percentage points is a boost to annual growth rates of more than 10 percent of what would otherwise have occurred, a significant amount.

But the impact of improved cognitive skills, as measured by the performance of students on math and science tests, is considerably larger. When we performed the analysis again, this time also including the average test-score performance of a country in our model, we found that countries with higher test scores experienced far higher growth rates. If one country’s test-score performance was 0.5 standard deviations higher than another country during the 1960s—a little less than the current difference in the scores between such top-performing countries as Finland and Hong Kong and the United States—the first country’s growth rate was, on average, one full percentage point higher annually over the following 40-year period than the second country’s growth rate. Further, once the impact of higher levels of cognitive skills are taken into account, the significance for economic growth of school attainment, i.e., additional years of schooling, dwindles to nothing (see Figure 3). A country benefits from asking its students to remain in school for a longer period of time only if the students are learning something as a consequence.

Another indication of the importance of education quality to economic growth lies in our ability to explain global variation in GDP growth. When we tried to account for economic growth with information only about school attainment levels and the level of a country’s GDP in 1960, we were able to explain only one-quarter of the differences we saw among countries. But when we also included cognitive skills in our statistical models of economic growth, we were able to attribute nearly three-quarters of the differences among countries to these three factors. In other words, higher levels of cognitive skill appear to play a major role in explaining international differences in economic growth.

Of course, the initial level of economic development, schooling attainment, and cognitive skills are not the only factors that affect economic growth. Could it be that some other factor we have overlooked is responsible for the close connection between test scores and economic growth?

Other economic research has identified two additional factors that affect a country’s economic growth rate: the security of its property rights and its openness to international trade. When those two factors are taken into account, the positive effect of cognitive skills on annual economic growth becomes somewhat smaller, but is still 0.63 percentage points per half of a standard deviation of test scores. This is the best available estimate of the size of the impact of cognitive skills on economic growth.

Other commonly discussed determinants of economic growth are fertility and geography. However, when we took into account the total fertility rate and common geographical proxies, such as latitude or the fraction of the land area of a country that is located in the tropics, neither of these additional variables was significantly associated with economic growth. Once again, the strong effect of cognitive skills remained clear.

We performed a variety of additional tests to assess the validity of these basic results. For example, we estimated the relationships over shorter periods of time, used different subsets of international tests, and compared smaller groups of the 50 countries.

One of our tests was particularly interesting. We thought it possible that the effect of cognitive skills could be the result of the presence in our sample of East Asian countries, most of which have both high levels of cognitive skill and rapidly growing economies. To see whether the inclusion of those countries in our study influenced our results, we excluded them from one of our models. The impact of cognitive skill remained very powerful, albeit diminished.

We also looked at cognitive skills as measured in the 1960s through the mid-1980s to see what their impact was on growth between 1980 and 2000, ensuring that the cognitive skills themselves were not caused by the economic growth. Again, our basic findings remained intact. Finally, we looked at whether a country’s estimated cognitive skills affected the earnings of immigrants working in the United States. Higher home country cognitive skills translated into higher earnings if the immigrants were educated in their homeland but not if educated in the United States.

Our commonsense understanding of the importance of good schools can thus be documented quite precisely. A highly skilled work force can raise economic growth by about two-thirds of a percentage point every year.

More Rocket Scientists or Basic Skills for All?

To gain additional insight into the relationship between cognitive skills and economic growth, we examined the separate impact of improvements at different levels of a nation’s distribution of skills. Loosely speaking, is it a few “rocket scientists” at the very top of the distribution who spur economic growth, or is it “education for all” that is needed?

To address this question, we measured the share of students in each country who reach a threshold of basic competency in mathematics and science, as well as the share of students who perform at very high levels. To estimate the importance of basic competency, we identified the share of students performing at least at a very basic level, that is, no more than one standard deviation below the international average of all OECD countries. In the average OECD country in our study, 89 percent of the students achieved at least at this very basic level. The share of students with at least basic skills ranged widely among countries, from as low as 18 percent in Peru to 97 percent in the Netherlands and Japan. To show a country’s ability to develop a large cadre of high-performing students, we identified the share of students performing at very high levels—at or above one standard deviation over the OECD average. On average across all countries, 6 percent of students performed at that high level. Once again, countries varied enormously in this respect, the percentage ranging from as low as 0.1 percent in Colombia and Morocco to 18 percent in Singapore and Korea and 22 percent in Taiwan.

Which is more important for growth—having a substantial cadre of high performers or bringing everyone up to a basic level of performance? The answer, it seems, is not one or the other but both! When we estimated the importance of each within the same model, we found each of them to be separately important to economic growth. That is, both the performance of countries in ensuring that almost all students achieve at basic levels and their performance in producing high-achieving students seem to matter.

The reasons that a substantial cadre of highly skilled citizens and near-universal basic skills matter are not difficult to imagine. Even if a country is simply making use of new technologies developed elsewhere, as is often the case in developing parts of the world, the more workers that have at least basic skills, the easier it will be for them to make use of those new technologies. Some workers need a high level of skill so they can help adapt the new technologies to their countries’ particular situation. In countries on the technological frontier, substantial numbers of scientists, engineers, and other innovators are obviously needed. But so is a labor force that has the basic skills needed to survive in a technologically driven economy.

But even if the results seem intuitively correct, they should be taken as suggestive rather than definitive, because the two measures of cognitive skills are closely related to one another and our models have difficulty in separating out the precise impact of each individually. Most countries that have a high percentage of students with very high cognitive skills also are ones in which basic skills are near universal. Conversely, countries with a substantial percentage of students lacking even basic skills tend to be those that have only a small percentage of highly skilled students. Still, that pattern is not a perfect one, so we are able, at least tentatively, to identify the impact of each type of human capital, and we are quite confident that we can recommend that countries both concentrate resources on their “best and brightest” and make sure that “no child is left behind.”

The Impact of Becoming a World Leader

What would it mean for economic growth, then, if a country like the United States, currently performing somewhat below the average of OECD countries, managed to increase its performance by 50 points (or 0.5 standard deviations) so that it would score alongside the world leaders? (On average on the PISA 2006 math and science exams, countries such as Canada and Korea scored about 50 points higher than the U.S., Hong Kong and Taiwan about 60 points higher, and Finland as many as 74 points higher.) That increase of 50 test points is exactly what George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors together promised in 1989 the United States would achieve by the year 2000.

Unfortunately, no such gains were realized. But had the promise been fulfilled by 2000, our results suggest that GDP would by 2015 be 4.5 percent greater than in the absence of any such gains (see Figure 4). That 4.5 percent increment in GDP is equal to the total the U.S. currently spends on K–12 education. In other words, had that money effectively raised cognitive skills by the 50 test points that would have brought the United States close to world leadership, the economic returns to the country would probably have been enough to cover the entire cost of education in 2015 and after.

Figure 4 shows that the benefits of successful reform grow even more vivid when we look farther out. Over 75 years, even a reform that takes effect in 20 years (instead of the governors’ 10 years) yields a real GDP that is 36 percent higher than it would be if there was no change in the level of cognitive skills.

None of this is meant to suggest that schooling is the only factor contributing to a society’s cognitive skill development. Family, individual ability, and health combine with school quality to determine a student’s level of achievement. Yet there is every reason to believe that the single best route to higher levels of cognitive skill is strengthening a country’s education system. After all, most people think that is the system’s primary purpose.

An American Exception?

The United States has never done well on international assessments of student achievement. Instead, its level of cognitive skills is only about average among the developed countries. Yet the country’s GDP growth rate has been higher than average over the past century. If cognitive skills are so important to economic growth, how can we explain the puzzling case of the U.S.?

Part of the answer is that the United States may be resting on its historic record as the world’s leader in educational attainment. In addition, the United States has other advantages, some of which are entirely separate and apart from the quality of its schooling. The U.S. maintains generally freer labor and product markets than most countries in the world. There is less government regulation of firms, and trade unions are less powerful than in many other countries. Put more broadly, the U.S. has generally less intrusion of government in the operation of the economy, including lower tax rates and minimal government production through nationalized industries. Taken together, these characteristics of the U.S. economy encourage investment, permit the rapid development of new products and activities by firms, and allow U.S. workers to adjust to new opportunities.

Those economic institutions seem to matter on their own and in conjunction with cognitive skills. Our analyses suggest that the value of a high-quality education system is substantially diminished in closed economies. We estimate that the effect of a one-standard-deviation improvement in cognitive skills on annual economic growth is 0.9 percentage points per year in closed economies, identified by heavy restrictions on international trade, but 2.5 percentage points in open economies. It may be that rich human capital combines with a laissez-faire economy to foster robust economic growth.

It is also the case that, over the 20th century, the expansion of the U.S. education system outpaced the rest of the world. The U.S. pushed to open secondary schools to all citizens. Higher education expanded with the development of land grant universities, the GI Bill, and direct grants and loans to students. The extraordinary U.S. higher-education system is a powerful engine of technological progress and economic growth in the U.S. not accounted for in our analysis. By most evaluations, U.S. colleges and universities rank at the very top in the world.

Although the strengths of the U.S. economy and its higher-education system offer some hope for the future, the situation at the K–12 level should spark concerns about the long-term outlook for the U.S. economy, which could eventually have an impact on the higher-education system as well. The U.S. higher-education system may also be challenged by improvements in higher education across the world. Other countries are doing more to secure property rights and open their economies, which will enable them to make better use of their human capital. Most obviously, the historic advantage of the U.S. in school attainment has come to an end, as half of the OECD countries now exceed the U.S. in the average number of years of education their citizens receive. Those trends could easily accelerate in the coming decades.

Not Just a Matter of Money

Our evidence of a clear, strong relationship between cognitive skills and economic growth should encourage continued reform efforts. Improvements in mathematics performance called for by No Child Left Behind would matter, contrary to what critics sometimes suggest. Yet reformers should bear in mind that money alone will not yield the necessary improvements. Many expensive attempts around the world to improve schooling have failed to yield actual improvements in student achievement.

Economic growth flows only from reforms that bring actual improvements in cognitive skills. Identifying what works and how to implement it on a society-wide scale remains a challenge, not only for the U.S. but also for many nations across the globe. But, if we are to remain economically competitive, we need to solve the puzzle of our schools and meet the governors’ challenge. We should not, simply because we have failed to meet them in the past, decide that the goals were not legitimate or important.

Eric A. Hanushek is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Dean T. Jamison is professor of health economics in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Eliot A. Jamison is an investment professional at Babcock & Brown. Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich and heads the Department of Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of their employers.

Why aren’t schools an issue in the 2008 election? Results from the latest international tests arrived just as Education Next was going to press. In math and science, the United States again trailed the average international score achieved by students in the 57 test-taking nations that together comprise 87 percent of the world economy. Embarrassingly, the United States now lags behind Poland, which lifted its scores more than any other nation. Meanwhile, Finland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and our next-door neighbor, Canada, won high marks.

So why hasn’t the condition of the nation’s schools become a top issue in the 2008 election? Why is lagging student performance going unnoticed so far, undiscussed by candidates, questioners, and commentators alike?

In this issue, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann (“Education and Economic Growth”) demonstrate the critical contribution to economic growth that good schools can make: If the United States were to join the world leaders in math and science this coming year, the country’s Gross Domestic Product, within a couple of decades, could be expected to rise by an extra 5 percentage points—enough to cover the full cost of its education system.

Ah, there’s the rub. Most of the economic payoff does not fall within the four- to eight-year horizon of our duly elected public officials. If a country fails to educate its young, the nation does not suffer until all those candidates are writing their memoirs or become subjects of posthumous biographies.

Candidates must worry about the present—and the present requires that one pay close attention to interest groups, especially to powerful teachers unions that pour vast sums into political campaigns. Between 1989 and 2006, the National Education Association (NEA) came in fourth among all entities contributing to national campaigns, right behind the National Association of Realtors. With the NEA opposed to meaningful accountability, genuine school choice, and anything resembling merit pay, politicians have little to gain from trumpeting reforms that might get schools back on track.

When the special interests get control of policy, the consequences can be disastrous, as the housing credit morass reveals. Realtors loved the free-flowing credit, so politicians had every reason to ignore the risks.

It was not always this way. The United States once led the world in its commitment to education. From the earliest days of the Republic, the United States invested heavily in its human capital, more so than any other nation. Those investments contributed to the extraordinary growth rate that propelled the nation to the world’s pinnacle by World War II.

Around 1970, the educational-industrial complex, long under construction, was finally hammered into place. Legislatures gave teachers collective bargaining rights, the courts began instructing the schools on disciplinary procedures, regulations multiplied, the United States gained a national department of education, and state and federal dollars poured into the system.

Despite the cash flow, education itself was put on pause. Grades inflated, learning faltered, graduation rates stagnated.

Forty years later, the impact on the well-being of the country is becoming increasingly obvious. As the world becomes “flatter,” the importance of human capital escalates, say Hanushek and his co-authors. The nations of South and East Asia are on the march. Corporations move operations offshore in order to find appropriately educated workers at the going price. Universities are finding it easier to recruit top-level scientists and sophisticated social scientists from abroad rather than try to grow them at home.

At least New Orleans’s new superintendent, Paul Vallas, and New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, are beginning to address the issues (see “The Vallas Effect” and “New York City’s Education Battles”). After jump-starting schools in Chicago and Philadelphia, Vallas is giving new hope to the hurricane-battered city on the Mississippi. Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s education boss, Joel Klein, is deconstructing New York City’s educational-industrial complex, while giving merit pay, charter schools, and student accountability a chance. If Vallas, Bloomberg, and Klein have made mistakes, at least they are trying. May their spirit catch on.

Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Columbia University Press, 2007, $29.95; 552 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

“Madman or Visionary?” reads the publicity material that accompanies this biography of Albert Shanker. The dust jacket describes the paradigmatic moment in Woody Allen’s 1973 movie, Sleeper, in which a future Rip Van Winkle awakens to learn that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.” Five years earlier, Shanker, leader of the New York City teachers union, shook the city with a series of strikes to defend the rights of teachers who had been dismissed from Brooklyn schools. The schools were part of an experiment in “community control,” an approach to school reform then favored by liberals and black activists. The community in this case was black, and those governing the schools under the experimental program demanded black teachers and black principals. There were few in the New York City public schools at the time. Many teachers and principals were Jews, and members of that religious group, as schoolteachers, social workers, shopkeepers, and small landlords, were seen by black militants as the exploiters of African Americans. These Jewish occupational specialties were hardly at the heights of the economy, or the power structure, but from the perspective of the black ghetto, they were the power structure. Among whites with whom poor blacks came into contact, the book notes one observer saying, only the policeman was not Jewish. Community control over city schools pitted blacks against Jews. When, during one of these disruptive strikes, an anti-Semitic leaflet appeared, Shanker did not hesitate to reproduce it in the hundreds of thousands to paint his black opponents as Jew-haters. He was denounced for exacerbating group tensions in a difficult time.

In the early 1960s, Shanker had played a leading role in organizing 50,000 of New York City’s public school teachers. He was one of a group of tough union leaders who in defiance of state law led strikes by public employees, disrupted the lives of millions, and went to jail as a result. Mike Quill, the leader of the transit workers union, shut down the subways, to the outrage of millions of commuters, and went to jail as a result. Who remembers Quill? But everyone remembers Al Shanker, who once said in response to a question about the rights of schoolchildren, “they don’t pay the dues in this union.” Despite the similarities and the similar headaches they gave Mayor John Lindsay, Shanker was very different from Mike Quill. He was drawn from a radically different milieu, the Jewish working class, and those origins foreshadowed his transformation. Alongside his defense of teachers’ rights, there was always a larger vision, which made it possible for him to escape from the execration that liberals heaped on him in the 1960s.

Shanker graduated from fierce union leader to education statesman and leader in the world of education reform. Indeed, he does warrant a biography; no trade-union leader of the last 40 years, in the age after John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, Walter Reuther, David Dubinsky, and other shapers of American unionism, is so worthy of one.

Shanker came from a world that no longer exists, one in which bright young people with political interests were divided between Socialists and Communists. The conflicts between the two—in school arguments, in college organizations, in trade unions, in local politics—shaped a generation that was defined by two dominant traits, an unbending anti-Communism and a defense of unions and worker’s rights. One can only understand Shanker, and the paradoxes he presents to contemporary liberalism, from the point of view of those origins.

Shanker attended New York’s Stuyvesant High School, an examination school for the gifted, where he excelled in debate, and the University of Illinois, where he joined the Young People’s Socialist League and showed his organizational talents by drawing unexpectedly large audiences for Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist candidate for president. His heroes were John Dewey and Sidney Hook, and he went on to study for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia. But he ran out of “money and patience,” and at the age of 24 took a job as a teacher in a “tough East Harlem elementary school.” At the time, 1952, we are told, there were 106 teachers’ organizations in the New York City school system. The Teachers Guild, which Shanker joined, was part of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). John Dewey held card #1 in the New York City local. The Communists were at the time powerful in New York City’s white-collar unions of teachers, social workers, and the like. The Teachers Guild and the AFT were fiercely anti-Communist, demanded collective bargaining (then controversial for teachers), and held a larger progressive social vision than most unions. For example, the AFT refused to charter segregated locals and filed an amicus brief in support of desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Shanker rose rapidly in the union ranks, becoming president in 1964. Liberals (and Socialists, as Shanker was) were then united around the issues of civil rights, workers’ rights, and anti-Communism. In the wake of the community control struggle, this unity dissolved. Affirmative action split the liberals: Shanker was for affirmative action, but always against quotas. At the time, he even had important black allies, such as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. Complicating the anti-Communist cause was the war in Vietnam. Shanker supported the war; to him it was a means to prevent the expansion of Communist totalitarianism, but to many other liberals and Socialists it was a doubtful effort at American hegemonism. Even workers’ rights divided liberals: with the rise of identity politics, and the shift of blue-collar voters to Nixon in protest of liberals’ anti-Vietnam war and pro–affirmative action stance, trade union issues lost their pristine value to many liberals. Shanker thought of himself as a liberal, indeed a Socialist; but for many liberals he seemed a racist conservative, as he maintained his fierce anti-Communist stance, supported American military power in defense of democracy, and insisted on the primacy of the trade-union movement in making a better society.

One detects in this complex of attitudes the seeds of present-day “neoconservatism,” which evolved among Socialist anti-Communists, and in time became the intellectual footing for a militant American foreign policy. Shanker was deeply committed to this orientation and defended strongly the AFL-CIO’s international work in support of free trade unions and against Communism. But that was only one of the roles he played. More significantly, he began to look at the problems of education from a larger perspective than that of organized teachers’ rights. He was an early proponent of charter schools, but turned against them as he saw some launched by black militants or religious conservatives. He wanted to implement a professional model for school teachers and supported peer review and tests for veteran teachers, which were not popular with the rank and file. Influenced by E. D. Hirsch, he supported a national curriculum and serious and high-stakes national tests and was a major figure in the painful evolution of this effort. In these enterprises, he became close to leading businessmen, governors, and presidents. For more than two decades as the leader of the smaller but more energetic and enlightened of the two major national teacher organizations, he became perhaps the single most important figure in the difficult effort to improve American schools.

Richard Kahlenberg is well known for his advocacy of affirmative action on the basis of economic criteria rather than racial identity, which was also Shanker’s strong preference. Kahlenberg has written a richly detailed and well-researched account of Shanker’s development, the positions he adopted, the influential roles he played. He finds little to criticize in Shanker’s career, and it was indeed for the most part an admirable one. It has no equal in American teacher unionism, or in the world of organized labor generally, and his story is an important contribution to the history of American education reform.

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