State and federal school accountability programs hold schools to specific standards of academic performance and assume each school is given a fair shake at accomplishing the task of educating its students. But are schools, in fact, treated fairly, at least with respect to funding? Over the past 35 years, reforms adopted in most states have dramatically improved the equity of funding from one school district to another.

But in recent years a new concern has surfaced: What if it’s not the district but rather the specific school a child attends within a district that matters most for accessing educational resources? Mounting evidence suggests that districts commonly distribute different amounts of funding, even when schools serve the same types of students. Our research and that of others indicate that schools with predominantly junior teachers receive fewer salary dollars than do schools staffed with veterans. Further, districts often compound these inequities by distributing a smaller share of unrestricted funds to the same schools that are shortchanged in salary dollars.What we don’t yet know about school funding inequalities is whether and how these discrepancies have changed in recent years. Nor is there much information available about how spending differences within districts compare to differences between districts in the same state.

In this study, we address these questions by taking an in-depth look at funding differences between and within Texas school districts over the course of a decade, from the 1993–94 to 2002–03 school years. Within Texas, we focus our attention on large school districts, those with more than 25,000 students. In 1994, the state had 29 districts with an enrollment greater than 25,000, and that number increased to 39 by 2003. These districts serve about half of all Texas public school students.

Texas’s large districts are useful cases for two reasons. First, other studies of school funding equity have suggested that funding discrepancies are greatest in the largest and most urban school districts. By focusing on large districts, we are more confident that we are identifying the full extent of inequality that exists between schools. At the same time, we recognize that we may not be able to generalize our findings beyond such districts.

Second, the state of Texas has in recent years aggressively addressed funding inequalities between districts. In 1993, following a state supreme court order to equalize public school spending, the state’s school finance system adopted a provision known as the “Robin Hood” law that requires property-rich districts to subsidize poorer districts within the state. Studying Texas districts and schools allows us to assess whether and how policies designed to reduce inequities between districts affected inequalities between schools within districts.

Our findings demonstrate that, at least in Texas, funding decisions within districts currently have a greater impact on a school’s resources than inequalities in access to revenues across school districts. Although reforms have been successful in reducing inequalities between Texas districts, variation in funding within districts remains high. As a result, examining only data aggregated to the district level, still the standard practice in equity studies, misses much of the inequality in funding across schools.

Data and Methodology

We obtained financial and descriptive information about Texas districts with more than 25,000 students and the schools within those districts from a large database published by the Texas Education Agency. The database reports financial allocations to schools by district. For each school, we know the nontargeted, or noncategorical, allocations made for each student who attends the school as well as how much the school received for five targeted groups of students: students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, students eligible for bilingual education programs, students with disabilities, gifted students, and students in vocational education programs. We exclude charter schools from our analysis, as their funding levels are not determined by the same policies that affect traditional public schools.

We first examine the differences between schools in noncategorical resources by comparing each school’s per-pupil funding to the average per-pupil funding in the district. We make this comparison by calculating the ratio of each school’s per-pupil noncategorical expenditure to the district’s average per-pupil noncategorical expenditure. For example, if School A receives $4,000 per pupil in noncategorical funds but the district average per pupil is $5,000, then the ratio for School A is 0.8 (or 80 percent of the district average). Since the ratio compares individual school funding to the average for the district, we know that any funding differences we see are entirely the product of intradistrict rather than interdistrict variation.

Next, we compare total spending, including funds allocated specifically for students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and bilingual, vocational, or gifted education. We exclude special education funds from this analysis because of large variations in funding depending on disability type.

For each district, we compute the district’s average expenditure for each student-need group. For example, one district may allocate an average of $500 on top of the nontargeted allocations for each gifted student, while another district might allocate only an average of $200. This average is effectively an implicit spending weight unique to each district, determined by dividing the sum of all allocations made on behalf of each student type by the number of students in that category.

We then calculate a ratio, called a Weighted Student Index (WSI), of the actual funding received by each school to the funding we would expect if schools received the district’s average allocation for its particular mix of students. The WSI allows us to compare per-pupil funding in schools while accounting for the types of students a school serves. A school with a WSI of 0.7 receives 70 percent of what we predict the school would be allocated, given its student population, if all the schools in the district received the same amount for each student of each type enrolled in the school.

We follow standard practice among school finance researchers who are interested in studying potential inequality at both ends of the spectrum, and calculate for each school year in our study the coefficient of variation for the differences in funding within districts. We define the coefficient of variation as the standard deviation of the population divided by its mean. Since the mean value of our two spending indexes is 1.0, the coefficient of variation is actually equivalent to the standard deviation in our analysis. The value of 0 indicates perfect equity, with larger values signaling greater disparities in the allocation of funds. Researchers studying spending differences between districts have established 0.1 as an acceptable level of equity, and we follow this convention in our analysis of between-school spending differences.

As an additional point of comparison, we also examine spending inequalities between districts. In this analysis, we adjust spending figures to reflect differences in district size and in the costs of providing education before calculating the coefficient of variation. For both the between-schools and between-districts analyses, the dollars analyzed include total operating funds from federal, state, and local governments, and use real-dollar teacher salaries.

The Funding Picture

Throughout the decade we study, the 1993–94 to 2002–03 school years, noncategorical funding between schools within Texas districts was considerably less equal than between districts. The coefficient of variation calculated in the between-school analysis was consistently higher than that calculated in the between-district analysis. We removed the state’s four largest urban districts from the sample and found between-school inequities were still much higher than inequities between districts.

There has been modest progress toward equity of noncategorical funds across districts and schools in Texas over the last decade (see Figure 1a). At the district level, the coefficient of variation in 1994 was 0.09, dropping to 0.07 in 2003. The coefficient of variation among schools for the 1993–94 school year was 0.17, dropping to 0.14 by the 2002–03 school year. The good news is that in 2003, the coefficient of variation across schools in 24 of Texas’s 39 largest school districts was less than 0.1. The average coefficient of variation across schools, however, exceeded this benchmark in each year.

When we examined noncategorical per-pupil funding in the state’s four largest school districts—Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston—the levels of inequity were even higher and each district was remarkably different from the others. In Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, the coefficients of variation were nearly always more than 0.15, meaning that one-third of the schools in these districts had spending levels that deviated from their district’s average by 15 percent (or $225,000 for a school of 500 when average spending is $3,000 per pupil). In contrast, Austin had a coefficient of variation near 0.15 for most of the decade, but dipped to the 0.1 level for three years, from 1997–98 to 1999–2000. Houston ranged between 0.2 and 0.25, except for one year, while Dallas had the highest levels of inequality, hovering around 0.3 until the 2000–01 school year, when it experienced a dramatic drop in the level of inequality in the district, indicating that a greater percentage of schools were funded at or near the district’s average allocation per pupil.

During the decade we studied, Fort Worth made steady improvements toward equity in noncategorical funding across its schools, while Austin’s allocations became less evenly distributed over the last five years in our study. And while there appear to be some equity gains in these four districts over the last two years of this analysis, there is no clear long-term trend toward improvement.

Figure 1b shows the equity picture for total funding over the period. While inequities both between and within districts have decreased over the past 10 years, there is still greater variation across schools than across districts. Taking into account resources expended for particular student types, then, does not change the patterns in noncategorical spending described above in any meaningful way.

The Impact of School Characteristics
Of course, we should not assume that all inequalities in spending between schools are necessarily perverse. District officials in Texas might point out that there are reasons aside from special student needs that could legitimately prompt uneven funding among schools. School level, school size, and academic performance are often cited as factors that shape strategic funding allocations to schools. Districts might, for example, allocate a relatively larger share of resources to high schools because they are expected to provide a diverse curriculum. Similarly, a district could be spending more on its lowest-performing schools to support improvement efforts. As discussed above, though, previous research documents spending differences resulting from less intentional factors, primarily differences in teacher salary costs due to different levels of teacher experience.

In order to investigate the role of both the intentional and unintentional factors, we explore the extent to which various school characteristics explain variation in the allocation of resources within a school district. We look at level of school (high school, middle school, or elementary school), total enrollment, percentage of the student body that is white, average experience of teachers, and school performance, as measured by the school’s academic rank within the state. Using data from the 2001–02 school year for our sample of large Texas districts, we estimate the amount of variation in total per-pupil funding, measured by a school’s WSI, that we can attribute to such school organizational characteristics.

We find that, as expected, high schools tend to receive more funding. On average, a high school’s WSI is 0.18 higher than an elementary or middle school, indicating that high schools received 18 percent more than elementary or middle schools within the same district with similar student populations. There is some indication that the lowest-performing schools in a district have higher WSI scores, and additional analyses reveal that this pattern is concentrated among elementary schools. Unexpectedly, we do not find a clear or strong relationship between school size and WSI values. Nor do we find that schools with a larger share of white students have a meaningful increase in their WSI.

Schools with more experienced teachers and the lowest–performing schools receive slightly more funding from the district, with higher WSI by 0.01 and 0.04, respectively. In other words, these schools typically received 1 to 4 percent more than the district average, or $15,000 to $60,000 per school of 500 students in a district where the average school expenditure is $3,000 per pupil.

These findings aside, it turns out that relatively little of the differences in funding by schools is explained by these school and district characteristics. We can account for only slightly more than one-third of all the variation between schools in the same district. If spending is not strongly influenced by observable school characteristics, we have to question whether it is driven by a district strategy at all. What we haven’ within and outside the district, organizational habits, and de facto policies at play in the system that can and likely do affect how districts distribute resources among schools.

Weighted Student Formulas
There have been calls for district policies that would transparently and equitably allocate district resources among schools, with the use of an explicit formula. Districts that adopt a weighted student formula (WSF) for funding schools allocate funds according to the specific student types enrolled. Spending increments, or weights, are deliberately determined for each student need. Were the districts in this analysis to allocate funds using a strict WSF system, we would not have found any inequities between schools. Each school would receive exactly the average allocation for its mix of students, and the coefficient of variation for each district would be 0.

To date, only a handful of districts have implemented WSF, and certainly not in the strict sense described here. In 1998, Houston implemented a modified version of WSF, known as student-based budgeting, in which a base amount is set per student and a percentage added for each special need, such as bilingual education. While we would not feel comfortable claiming, based on the analysis here, that student-based budgeting has been the cause of greater equity in Houston’s school funding system, our findings do show that despite an initial increase in the coefficient of variation, Houston schools have over the longer term made modest improvements in equity since the strategy was put into place.

There are reasonable concerns about the consequences of WSF funding. First, district leaders may not select appropriate weights. They may choose, for instance, to allocate too little for each student in bilingual education or too much for each student in gifted programs. Second, some inequality is likely to remain even with a WSF system. WSF models typically ignore the effect of differences in teacher experience levels and, therefore, teacher salary across schools by adjusting the allocations for real salaries after the weighted formula has been applied.

Regardless of whether WSF systems are the answer, there is a clear and simple policy lesson in the experience of large Texas school districts. We should not assume that school finance reforms directed at resolving resource inequalities between school districts will ensure those resources are equitably distributed among schools and their students.

Marguerite Roza is research assistant professor, Kacey Guin is research associate, Betheny Gross is senior research associate, and Scott DeBurgomaster is research assistant at the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

Checked: Charles Murray, “Intelligence in the Classroom,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2007; Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Economic Policy Institute, 2004)

Checked by Jay P. Greene

Welfare critic and American Enterprise Institute fellow Charles Murray and former union organizer and New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein don’t usually have much in common. But one thing on which they agree is that there is little that schools can do to improve educational achievement, particularly for poor and minority students. Both Murray and Rothstein contend that schools face severe constraints that hinder their ability to alter student outcomes. The net effect of their arguments is to provide aid and comfort to those who would resign themselves to the educational status quo and explain away the school system’s shortcomings.

The Argument against Reform

While both Murray and Rothstein argue that schools are operating under severe constraints, they disagree about what those constraints are. According to Murray, in a recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal and his controversial book, The Bell Curve, the major factor hindering school improvement is the cognitive potential of students. No matter how hard they try, Murray argues, schools cannot get students to achieve more than their intelligence will allow. As he puts it, “Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings.”

According to Rothstein, in his book Class and Schools, the major factor hindering school improvement is poverty and its attendant social ills. Rothstein argues that “the influence of social class characteristics is probably so powerful that schools cannot overcome it, no matter how well trained are their teachers and no matter how well designed are their instructional programs and climates.” It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Rothstein views demography as destiny, at least in the aggregate. In his words, “No matter how competent the teacher, the academic achievement of lower-class children will, on average, almost inevitably be less than that of middle-class children.”

Given their convictions about the severity of the constraints facing schools, both Murray and Rothstein have a defeatist attitude about school reform efforts. Murray warns against false hope: “Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position.” The first problem, he suggests, is that the high percentage of students performing below the basic standard on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) may not be inconsistent with the upper bounds of achievement, given the cognitive constraints of students. “The second problem,” Murray continues, “with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder—the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone.” Accept the facts, he urges, as little can be expected from school reform.

Rothstein is similarly gloomy about the prospects for school improvement. He admits that some reforms may be well designed and have limited success, “but a careful examination of each claim that a particular school or practice has closed the race or social class achievement gap shows that the claim is unfounded.” In most cases, he argues, claims of effective reforms are based on either a misanalysis of test scores or the selection of advantaged students into reform programs. His thesis is that school reform by itself can hardly make a dent in the achievement of low-income and minority students.

The argument that schools face constraints, whether cognitive or social, that significantly hinder progress has some superficial plausibility to it. We can all understand limits and the futility of trying to exceed them. If, for example, there is a constraint on the human life span, then efforts to extend life expectancy beyond that duration would obviously be unproductive. But before we give up on investing in medical research and improving our health, we might want to be convinced that we are already approaching the limits of how long humans can live. We wouldn’t want to be deterred from making improvements unless we believed that we had reached the point where limitations made advances virtually impossible.

Evidence on Constraints

What evidence do Murray and Rothstein provide that we are already at the upper bounds of what schools can do? Not very much. Murray points to the fact that national gains in educational achievement, particularly for those beginning on the lower end of the distribution, have been very hard to come by in the past few decades: “If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement.” If educational progress has stalled, Murray suggests, it must be a sign that we are bumping up against the cognitive limits of students.

This argument is not very compelling. The stalled growth in educational achievement could be the result of diminishing returns on reform efforts, as Murray suggests. But the stall could also have been caused by a failure to adopt new, effective reform strategies. We wouldn’t want to give up on trying to improve the school system in the absence of convincing evidence that no more gains could be wrought.

Similarly, observers of Russia would note that gains in average life expectancy have been very hard to come by in recent decades. In fact, the average age of Russians at death has declined in recent years. But it would be completely wrong to conclude from this that no reforms could be pursued to improve life expectancy among the Russian populace. Simply observing a delay in progress and pointing out that there is a limit to the human life span (it is a matter of ceilings, you know) would blind one to the obvious reforms that the nation could adopt that might improve life expectancy, such as reducing rampant alcoholism, bringing its AIDS epidemic under control, and cleaning up its environmental messes. Murray’s reasoning is no more persuasive in advocating against improving Russian public health than it is against bettering American public schools.

Of course, an astute observer might also note that Russian life expectancy is considerably lower than in other countries. Unless Russians are genetically cursed with a shorter life span, shouldn’t the fact that people can live longer in other countries prove that Russian life expectancy is not hitting the limit? The same could be said of American education (see Figure 1). U.S. students perform significantly worse than students in many developed countries, according to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and other international comparisons, trailing the leaders by more than half of a standard deviation. Shouldn’t that prove that U.S. achievement has considerable room to improve before it hits the ceiling of cognitive constraints?

Unless we believe that (as Murray suggests in The Bell Curve) Singapore, Korea, Japan, and the Benelux countries demonstrate higher achievement because they are genetically blessed with higher IQs, then the existence of higher and still increasing achievement elsewhere in the world suggests considerable potential for school reform (see Figure 2). And we can’t attribute the success of other developed countries simply to higher performance of their best students. Even their lower-achieving students outperform ours. The fact that the entire distribution of students in other developed countries outperforms the entire distribution of U.S. students suggests that there is a difference in the effectiveness of school systems across countries that school reform could remedy.

Rothstein’s tack differs from Murray’s in that Rothstein tries to provide evidence of the limited potential of school reform by debunking specific claims of successful efforts. For example, Rothstein contends that KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), a network of charter schools that have produced impressive results with disadvantaged students, isn’t as effective as it seems. KIPP’s success, he argues, is largely attributable to the selection of more advantaged students into their schools, the investment of significantly greater resources, and the unusual motivation of their staff. These sources of KIPP’s success, he suggests, cannot be replicated on a larger scale, so imitating or expanding KIPP cannot meaningfully reform the school system as a whole.

He makes similar arguments about how efforts to improve teacher quality, instructional approaches like Success for All, and high-expectation techniques practiced by educators like Jaime Escalante and Rafe Esquith are not promising models for reform because their success is due to the selection of students or other factors that cannot be replicated on a broader scale. By undercutting these reform strategies and presenting evidence on the powerful influence of social class on student achievement, Rothstein hopes to convince us that we can expect little from focusing on reform within the school system.

Leaving aside the merits of Rothstein’s critique of these specific reforms, the general problem with Rothstein’s argument is that he attempts to demonstrate the limited potential of all school reforms by attacking a handful of them. So he picks a few prominent reform models that have not demonstrated large gains using the most rigorous evaluation techniques. Mind you, he doesn’t produce any evidence to demonstrate that these reforms are ineffective; he only raises plausible doubts given their lack of convincing proof.

But what about reforms that have produced significant gains for students, according to evaluations adhering to the highest social science standards? He doesn’t address those. Studies have evaluated several reforms using random-assignment research designs, also used in most medical experiments, in which subjects are randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Random assignment helps eliminate concerns that program outcomes result from the selection of students, to which Rothstein attributes the apparent success of many reform claims.

Expanding school choice has been shown to improve achievement for minority students by about one-third of a standard deviation after a few years of intervention, according to seven of eight random-assignment evaluations (the eighth showed positive but statistically insignificant effects). The famous Tennessee STAR random assignment study evaluated class size reduction, which also produced about a one-third of a standard deviation improvement in achievement for minority students. The What Works Clearinghouse, which the U.S. Department of Education operates, lists more than a dozen school interventions that have shown significant effectiveness in rigorous evaluations, several of which used random assignment.

We don’t just have evidence of effective school reforms from well-studied pilot programs; we also have such evidence from large-scale initiatives that have produced improvements for low-income and minority students. For example, when Massachusetts began to require passage of a 10th-grade exam for a regular diploma, the percentage of African American and Hispanic students passing more than doubled. When Florida threatened to offer vouchers to students at chronically failing public schools, those schools made significant gains. These achievements in Massachusetts and Florida aren’t simply improvements on state tests, which could be subject to manipulation, but are confirmed by progress on national tests administered in those states.

We may not all agree on which reforms have been proven effective, but we could all agree that at least some of these reforms, perhaps used in combination, could make a large difference in the academic achievement of low-income and minority students. To dismiss the potential of significant change through school reform is to dismiss a large collection of rigorous social science and the bulk of experience.

Rothstein may feel justified in downplaying hopes for school reform because of the evidence he presents on the large influence social class has on academic achievement. He is entirely correct in observing the strong evidence showing that family income, parental education, family composition, housing stability, and other social factors have a substantial effect on student achievement. But it does not follow that we should therefore hold little hope for results from school reform.

Similarly, it is well established that health behaviors, such as diet, exercise, smoking, and drinking, have a very large influence on health outcomes. But almost no one uses this evidence to reduce our expectations for health improvements from medical interventions. We still (rightly) believe that doctors can and should make a difference in our health. Why shouldn’t we expect the same from teachers, even if we acknowledge the strong influence of factors outside their control?

Comments in Context

Murray and Rothstein are likely to contend that I have made a caricature of their views. They can point to portions of their writings that affirm their commitment to school reform. For example, Murray writes, “This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful.” And Rothstein observes, “Readers should not misinterpret this emphasis as implying that better schools are not important, or that school improvement will not make a contribution to narrowing the achievement gap.”

But these are throwaway lines, completely at odds with the clear, overall thrust of their arguments. For example, Murray immediately follows his acknowledgment that there might be some potential in school reform with a stern warning not to expect much: “But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.”

Rothstein makes more concessions to the possibility of progress in schools, but his pessimism about reform is also patently obvious. Although his book contains a chapter of suggested reforms that might help close the achievement gap, reforms within schools are noticeably absent. The chapter does include the need to integrate schools, which is not presented as a reform in how schools operate but as a change in the societal composition of schools. The chapter also advocates addressing income inequality, providing stable housing, expanding access to health clinics, and strengthening preschool, afterschool, and summer school programs. The only in-school reform that Rothstein mentions is the need to stop invoking slogans like “no excuses” to raise expectations for results because it undermines teacher morale. He adds, “‘no excuses’ slogans provide ideological respectability for those wanting to hold schools accountable for inevitable failure.” With phrases like “inevitable failure” and a complete focus on out-of-school reforms, it is clear that Rothstein believes we can expect little from school reform.

Politics of Inaction

Both Murray and Rothstein have large constituencies for their views. Murray’s following is less visible, largely because his views on these matters lost respectability in polite company after the publication of The Bell Curve. But don’t let his low profile on this issue fool you into believing that there aren’t a significant number of influential people who share Murray’s perspective. Believing that race and class differences in education outcomes can largely be explained by differences in cognitive limitations reinforces many people’s private prejudices. Murray draws strength from his marginalized status, playing the role of the man brave enough to tell us the truth. Unfortunately, not every heretic is Galileo; sometimes they are just cranks.

Rothstein has a much larger and more vocal constituency. Everyone wishing to shift attention (and blame) away from schools pays heed to Rothstein’s arguments. Saying that we cannot expect significant progress in schools until we first address a host of social ills outside of school is a recipe for inaction. Waiting for society to fix all of its injustices before we can really fix schools is like waiting for Godot. It will never come.

Not surprisingly, the teacher unions don’t mind waiting. For example, the February 2006 issue of NEA Today features an article by David Berliner, the former head of the American Educational Research Association and professor at Arizona State University, that repeats Rothstein’s argument with greater force and fewer reservations: “So why, when we have as much credible research making connections between poverty and school success, do we keep looking for other answers? (For example, it must be the low expectations of teachers!) What’s surprising is, in the face of that research, we still concentrate our attention and resources on what happens inside low-performing schools when the real problems are outside those schools.” In an appearance on C-SPAN, Berliner observed that students spend only 1,000 hours a year in school and another 5,000 waking hours with their families and friends. How are schools supposed to counter these larger influences, he wondered? Of course, we spend even less time each year with our doctor than we do in school, but we still have very high expectations for medicine to make a difference.

And to whom does Berliner credit his ideas? “These musings could have been written also by Jean Anyon, Bruce Biddle, Greg Duncan, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Gary Orfield, Richard Rothstein, and many others whose work I admire and from whom I borrow.” So Rothstein’s views reflect a broad and deep tradition within education circles. Preceding him are the likes of Jean Anyon, for example, who writes in the Teachers College Record, “The structural basis for failure in inner-city schools is political, economic, and cultural, and must be changed before meaningful school improvement projects can be successfully implemented. Educational reforms cannot compensate for the ravages of society.”

To be sure, Anyon, Berliner, and Rothstein are right to warn us that social forces play a significant role in educational achievement. And Murray is right that at some point cognitive limits do place a ceiling on student outcomes. But without strong evidence that ours are the best of all possible schools, we should reject attempts to shift attention from efforts to improve schools. Recognizing constraints is not the same as being paralyzed by them.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform, University of Arkansas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and a contributing editor of Education Next.

Put foreign policy first, theorist Niccolò Machiavelli once advised his 16th-century Florentine prince. It’s not bad advice for 21st-century presidential candidates, either. National security, not education, will be the overriding issue in the 2008 campaign, even if the Gates and Broad Foundations succeed with Strong American Schools, their $60 million quest to place education front and center.

Still, schools will not be missing from the political agenda altogether. So long as the economy perks along and no one wants to cut Social Security or raise taxes on more than a few, then health care and education will be the top domestic issues. Clearly, no presidential issues kit can afford to be without an education page.

Too often candidates let vested interests and insistent advocates provide the content for that document. Many Democrats, for example, are currying favor with union interests by insisting on less student testing and more federal funding. “While the children are getting good at filling in all those little bubbles, what exactly are they really learning?” Senator Hillary Clinton asked delegates at a meeting of the New Hampshire chapter of the National Education Association late last May. “How much creativity are we losing? How much of our children’s passion is being killed?” Meanwhile, one is hearing in Republican circles a great deal about getting Washington off the states’ backs.

That may make political sense in the early days of a campaign when the opinions of the few count more than those of the many. Eventually, though, the next president must win support from a broad cross-section of voters across the country.

On education matters, a heap of valuable information can be found in the poll results presented in this issue. Shrewd candidates will scrutinize the hundreds of numbers set forth on pages 13 to 26 to extract the political truths buried within. To guide their search, I offer five basic themes that percolate through many of the answers potential voters have given:

1. Although the public supports its public schools, it finds them mediocre at best, deserving no more than a grade of C.

2. People want to remedy that situation but are not nearly so doctrinaire as powerful interests and political elites. Ordinary voters are pragmatists, willing to try many different things, whether it be accountability, school choice, smaller classes, more spending, or rewarding good teachers.

3. More people support accountability than any other single education reform. If they do not trust all of the utopian promises offered by NCLB, neither do they want the federal government to abandon its efforts to hold state and local school officials to account. On the contrary, the public would expand accountability systems in several directions:

a. Create national standards to replace state-specific ones.

b. Demand that students pass high school exams before graduating.

c. Evaluate and reward teachers according to how much their students are learning.

4. The public wants schools, students, and teachers to be treated fairly. Money should be spent equally on different types of schools, different types of students, and across the board on all teachers, unless there are convincing reasons to do otherwise. Even extra rewards to effective teachers win only a moderately positive endorsement.

5. The public does not oppose school choice, but doesn’t know much about charter schools. A charter platform will need a lot of explaining.

All this is good news for responsible aspiring leaders. From among the options available, the correct policies can be selected, and if persuasively described, perhaps even implemented post-election. May the best leader win.

Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-city Education
By Kathryn M. Neckerman
University of Chicago Press, 2007, $29; 252 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

The most urgent issue in American education for the last half century has been the failure of large numbers of African American children and older students to complete their education and reach an average level of competence. It is 10 years since the publication of The Black-White Test Score Gap, the collection of studies edited by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, in which the education deficit was labeled starkly as the single most important obstacle to black advancement. Progress since then has not been marked.

At the beginning of Schools Betrayed, Kathryn Neckerman cites psychologist Kenneth Clark, who 40 years ago wrote in Dark Ghetto, “The dominant and disturbing fact about ghetto schools is that the teachers and the students regard each other as adversaries. Under these conditions the teachers are reluctant to teach and the students resist learning.” Clark’s research had been cited in the key Supreme Court decision banning state-imposed segregation in public schools, but one suspects on the basis of this quotation that he was already doubtful that desegregation alone would solve the problem of an adequate education for urban blacks. Not, of course, that desegregation was simple: it turned out to be awfully complicated and has never been substantially achieved in northern and midwestern cities.

Neckerman explores the origins of the black-white education gap in Chicago between 1900 and 1960, and for half of its length her book reads like a detective story. She examines three explanations of why inner-city schools failed blacks, and to each she says, no, that’s not it.

The first is the economic decline of northern and midwestern cities, which heightened financial pressures on the schools. In a word, they simply didn’t have enough money to deal properly with growing numbers of poor and black students. The second is racial barriers to employment in the North, “more subtle but no less real” than in the South. The third possibility is the rise of an “oppositional culture,” in which “academic effort [was framed] as a betrayal of racial identity—‘acting white.’”

On the issue of resources, she documents rising expenditure for the schools (in 1980 dollars) during this entire period; rising salaries for teachers, particularly in the 1950s; and declining numbers of students per teacher. Her conclusion is that “the urban decline thesis cannot by itself account for the problems of inner-city schooling that emerged…in the 1940’s and 1950’s.”

She notes that during most of the first half of the 20th century the issue in the Chicago schools was European immigrant children. Early on, black students had an advantage in enrollment over immigrant students, and a small advantage in graduation from high school. Immigrant parents often opposed continuing education for their children, as status could be earned in their communities through hard work and employment in small business. There were also routes to achievement through the labor union office, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Democratic Party, all hardly available for blacks.

In the postwar period she documents a widening education gap between black and immigrant students. Did insufficient or poor jobs for blacks give them less reason to stay in school? Neckerman points to the opportunities in the public sector and the civil service, where there was much less discrimination, and in the independent professions, namely law, medicine, dentistry, and the clergy, which “offered a chance to avoid some of the discrimination that private-sector employees faced,” and all of which required education. She does not dispute the widespread degree and depth of discrimination, but holds that in this situation education offered some advantage, some hope: “The economic returns to education…was [sic] similar for black and immigrant workers.” Yet the gap in taking advantage of educational opportunities grew.

We can measure urban decline and labor market discrimination to some extent through quantitative research. Tackling the “oppositional culture” explanation is harder. Neckerman asks why an oppositional culture should have arisen, as in black communities education was almost the only route to achievement. (She does not refer to the underworld, sports, and entertainment as alternatives routes to status in black communities, but surely they played a role in shaping attitudes toward education.)

So where does Neckerman find the answer? Her research into the Chicago schools leads her to three theories of her own.

First is the growth of segregation in the Chicago schools. Clearly, this was related to immigration from the South and the resulting areas of black concentration, which were shaped by residential and labor market discrimination. At the least, the Chicago school authorities countenanced this development, but in response to community pressures they also facilitated it through school assignment and school districting. She writes that “the public schools lost legitimacy in the eyes of the black community.”

The second is the failure of vocational education to do much for black children. Vocational education began as an effort to connect to the world of work those children not headed for college, but in time it diverged between a higher track that afforded training that led to jobs, and a lower track that was simply an alternative to expected academic failure. Access to the top tier required at least basic numerical and language skills. She writes that vocational education “offers one example of how black students could be disadvantaged by policies that were ostensibly race neutral.” One reason blacks were denied the upper tier was that discriminatory trade unions would prevent them from using the skills they learned.

The third is that the Chicago schools’ programs of remedial education, which developed during this period, were neither sufficient nor well enough funded. The black schools were worst off, overcrowded, and with large classes: “…the schools’ race-neutral remedial policies had racially disparate effects, because they were implemented in an environment that—both inside and outside the school—was profoundly unequal.”

Neckerman returns in her last chapter to Kenneth Clark’s quotation and the problem of “authority and engagement.” This theme will be familiar and sad to school observers. The head of the Chicago Teachers College said in 1940, the black “is warned to beware of the white man and many of his attitudes…are colored by this caution. Teachers ‘pick on him’ not because he misbehaves but because he is black.… The Negro boy is drilled on what his rights are. Every teacher…knows that the first reaction of a Negro when she threatens to punish him is to say, ‘The law won’t let you hit me.’” All this is long before the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s and the expansion of the rights of school children.

This volume is a deep and full exploration of the schools of our second largest city, as Chicago was during this period, drawing on bodies of research that go back a hundred years. I find Neckerman’s distinctions, between the explanations she finds less supported in the research and those she eventually alights on, less sharp than she does. Both sets are so dependent on the web of discrimination in employment, residence, and status that it is hard to differentiate among them.

Certainly, theories rooted in discrimination have lost a good deal of explanatory power in the years since the period she explores. Still, our progress in dealing with the education gap has not been encouraging in the last decade or so. Nevertheless there is no alternative to continued effort. Neckerman’s sober and intensive study offers us little new guidance, and the only available answer is more of the same, on a wider and deeper scale.

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

Cross-X: The Amazing True Story of How the Most Unlikely Team from the Most Unlikely of Places Overcame Staggering Obstacles at Home and at School to Challenge the Debate Community on Race, Power, and Education
By Joe Miller
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, $26; 480 pages.

As reviewed by Diane Ravitch

A genre of books and movies emerged in the past generation that portrays an inspired teacher who miraculously transforms a group of hard-luck students into champions. Outsiders say it can’t be done, but this great teacher does it. One thinks of Jaime Escalante, who taught calculus to poor Hispanic kids at Garfield High School in Los Angeles and was celebrated in a book by Jay Mathews and in a movie called Stand and Deliver. Or the movie about and books by Erin Gruwell, a writing teacher in Long Beach, California (see cultured, page 87), or the books by Rafe Esquith, who teaches Shakespeare to 5th graders in central Los Angeles.

The story has a familiar line: No one thinks much of these students; their life prospects are limited. Once they enter the classroom of the inspired teacher, however, something wonderful happens. Despite initial obstacles, the students amaze everyone with their achievements. The music reaches a crescendo, the story ends.

Cross-X is not that story, although the reader is led to believe that it will be. An assortment of students, all poor and black, join the debate team at Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri. Most of them speak the argot of the ’hood, not standard English. The coach, Jane Rinehart, who is white, is set up to be the miracle worker. We learn about the impoverished lives of the students and the struggles of their families. We expect that from this unpromising material, Coach Rinehart will fashion a championship debating team.

But the conventional story line never happens. The first inkling of the counternarrative occurs when the coach tells her recruits that the greatest joy of debate is to make the other team cry. Early on, it becomes clear that the book is implicitly (and often explicitly) a narrative about racism, oppression, segregation, and poverty. The reader picks up the theme early on, when Coach Rinehart tells the debaters to discard their infantile notions that the purpose of education is (as a student put it) “to give you a chance to be what you want to be” or “to make money.” No, says the coach, the purpose of schooling is to perpetuate the status quo. She tells them that “one hundred families control 80 percent of the wealth,” and none of them went to Central High. She is not one to encourage belief in the American dream of opportunity.

Later in the book, the author, journalist Joe Miller, decides to stop observing and reporting on the story and to become part of it; he grows so intrigued with the game of debate and so deeply involved in the lives of the students that he becomes an actor in the story, watching as they engage in risky personal behavior, then joining up as a debate coach.

Miller describes the many debates that the team from Central High participates in, often in mind-numbing detail. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but Miller leads the reader to believe that racism is behind many, if not most, of their losses to teams from prestigious suburban public schools and elite private schools. Large portions of the book consist of the students’ conversations, which are usually so studded with expletives and sloppy language that it is hard to imagine how these students were able to succeed on the debate circuit against better-educated kids. To read this book, one must have a high tolerance for four-letter words and various forms of misbehavior, some of it involving illicit drugs. The reader also needs a great deal of patience, as the book is twice as long as it needs to be.

Just when the reader thinks it is impossible to endure another detailed description of yet another debate, Miller has an epiphany. He discovers Paulo Freire and The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and shares it with his young charges. The light goes on in his head and in theirs, too. The students suddenly realize that debate is a form of institutionalized racism, and they change their presentation at debates to raps about racism and oppression. Some opposing teams are insulted, but the kids from Central win a few competitions with their new format.

In the background of the story looms Central High, a depressing institution with low achievement, low aspirations, gangs, fights, and a prisonlike atmosphere. Miller briefly relates the tale of the $2 billion court-ordered desegregation plan in the mid-1980s for Kansas City, in which teachers’ salaries were raised, class sizes slashed, and beautiful facilities created. A new Central was built at a cost of $32 million, with special programs in computer technology and classical Greek studies. The federal court hoped that the low-performing, segregated district would have such splendid facilities and programs that suburban whites would enroll and that test scores would rise along with integration. Although Central attracted some white students, it remained a predominantly black school. And at Central High School and in the Kansas City district, achievement remained low, despite the substantial additional spending by the state of Missouri.

Certainly, much more should be written about what went wrong in Kansas City. But Joe Miller’s book is not the place for that sort of in-depth analysis. Miller is outraged by the poverty and terrible circumstances of the young men (they are all young men) that he befriends. He frequently contrasts the dismal material circumstances of their lives with those of affluent white students who live elsewhere. He rages against racism, poverty, and inequality, which he believes (like Coach Rinehart, Paulo Freire, and another hero, Jonathan Kozol) is designed into the American social system.

At the end of the book, after the debaters begin presenting their arguments about racism in rap format, he happily reports that the debate circuit has begun to take notice. Somehow, Coach Joe Miller has become the center of the story, not Coach Rinehart. He sees hope that a revolution will occur, as Jonathan Kozol predicted in a visit to Central, after the affluent white oppressors in privileged schools are enlightened by their encounters with the rapping Kansas City debate team.

One wonders: Will those privileged white students lead the revolution that Miller, Freire, and Kozol long for? Or would the students at Central be better off believing in the American dream, the one that says that hard work, clean living, and a good education is the key to rising out of poverty?

Diane Ravitch is research professor of education, New York University, and a member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The movie scene has become familiar—the American high school class close to rioting, the racial tensions boiling, the curses flying across the room—and then, the breakthrough moment. Through an inspired gesture, the teacher connects: he uses an apple, she uses karate, he the doping of a mouse, she a student-drawn cartoon. The connection made, the trajectory is clear. The classroom gradually becomes a haven, a precious space of bonding and learning set against a sea of social violence and family tragedy. The teacher as hero or heroine pays a price—loss of a less heroic lover or spouse, disdain and opposition from colleagues and school administrators (always portrayed as cynical and patronizing), even, in one case, martyrdom for the cause.

Too often formulaic, these are not great movies. In Freedom Writers, the latest product of the genre, Hilary Swank looks continually uncomfortable in the leading role. Based on events in the 1990s at a high school in Long Beach, California, the movie tells how a teacher evokes the Holocaust to connect her students with the universality of human suffering. The result is a life-changing experience in which her Hispanic and African American students and the Jewish Holocaust survivors they encounter bear witness to a common humanity and hope. As educators in a pluralist democracy, we are tempted to forgive the film’s weaknesses and celebrate the heroic teacher as she fights for the souls of her students. Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, 187, and now Freedom Writers continually tap into our need to believe in the narrative of the “great teacher,” capable of saving students in need. (187, alone in the genre in lacking final hope, was a commercial failure.)

The exemplar of the great teacher, past and present, is a staple of Western European culture. Among the many, Socrates remains the seminal figure. In the 12th century, Abelard, known to us today through his tragic love affair with Heloise, became a legendary teacher, gathering students from throughout Europe. A century later, St. Thomas Aquinas, offering lessons at the University of Paris, became recognized as the master teacher of Catholicism. In the 16th century, the Maharal of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, founded the Talmudic Academy known as the Klausen; he defined Torah and kabbalistic studies for generations. Centuries later, as rector of the Nuremberg Gymnasium, Hegel would begin his epochal rethinking of the history of philosophy, a project Heidegger would continue in Freiburg, achieving, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “the kingship among teachers.”

In the much briefer history of the United States, the teacher as a great cultural or philosophical voice is largely absent. Leo Strauss, whose influence is now hotly debated by analysts of American foreign policy, was European-born. John Dewey is a rare example of an educator whose thinking about pedagogy and engagement with broader political issues achieved national status, but he was not a great teacher. Writing about France, my father could cite the high school teacher Émile-Auguste Chartier, commonly known simply as “Alain,” as “a commanding presence in European moral and intellectual history” from 1906 to the late 1940s; there are no American equivalents.

Moreover, American literature has little place for the great teacher: in Washington Irving and J.D. Salinger, the schoolteacher is largely weak and useless. Whereas in Europe, great teaching is grounded in the power of their ideas, in America it is a matter of ideals: the lone warrior who overcomes the odds, who triumphs over the socioeconomic and cultural conditions of the urban public school. The heroes depicted—Jaime Escalante (Stand and Deliver), LouAnne Johnson (Dangerous Minds), and Erin Gruwell (Freedom Writers)—shine against backcloths of deprivation and despair. This is an ironic form of heroism, dependent as it is on conditions for which we all bear continuing responsibility. Heroism is surely a virtue. To depend on public school teachers to display it is not.

David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College, CUNY. He is former director of arts education at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C.

The baby is screaming. My wife is tapping its back. It keeps screaming. She shakes it. More high-pitched baby screams.

Finally, I shout, “Throw it in the freezer!”

My wife laughs. She turns the little black doll over and fiddles with, yes, the key.

I was first introduced to Baby Think It Over® several years ago, when the 13-year-old babysitter arrived carrying—my God!—a baby and promptly tripped on the steps, flinging the little bundle onto the bluestone sidewalk. I gasped. The babysitter screamed. The bundle went Waaah!

My son’s school paid $300 apiece for a dozen or so of these computer-assisted dolls. According to his teacher, Ms. Ferraro, they are meant to teach prepubescent kids how difficult it is to take care of a baby and thus make them “think it over.” And for the past few years it has been a ritual of fall to see 8th graders in the supermarket, in church, at football games, carrying their “little babies,” which Waaah! at the appropriately inappropriate times and embarrass the kid.

But this is serious business. On the Baby Think It Over web site (www.realityworks.com), you’d think you were shopping for a new car:

“As of July 1, 2007 Realityworks will discontinue support for older models…Standard Baby (Generation 4) released in 1996, Realistic Head Support Baby (Generation 5) released in 1998, Original RealCare Baby released in 1999…. Please consider the Trade-In Program.… We’ll give you a $50 discount toward the purchase of the latest Realityworks infant simulator.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

The students must take the “babies” for a weekend, everywhere they go. They fill out a chart, noting when it cried, what the student was doing, how long it cried, how the student felt, and how others were affected. My son was reading a book (good for him) at 3:46 p.m. when the baby started crying. “I felt fine,” he wrote.

The next entry is in my wife’s handwriting. Crying started at 4:55 and ended at 4:55. And what was she doing at the time? “Talking to our dog.” How did she feel? “Anxious.” Her next entry, 20 minutes later, is “Key breaks.”

She elaborated in her own journal (I refused to keep one): “In order to let our son attend his first snowboarding night with the City Youth Department, I volunteered to babysit. Trying to stop the baby’s crying, I broke the plastic key. I drove to the Middle School and threw myself on your mercy.”

She got a new key (for $6), and our son took over later that night. He made another dozen or so entries; he was, variously, sleeping, riding in the car, watching TV, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, brushing teeth, when the baby cried, and he always felt “fine.” The crying never affected anyone else except once, in church. “It scared my dad,” he noted.

After my son turned in his baby, he came home from school dejected, with a note. “I had it 66 hours. Let neck down 13 times. 5 neglects. 2 rough handling. Let cry 37 minutes.”

My wife was incensed. She penned “an addendum” to her journal. “I think that a piece of the missing broken key could be a cause of the result. Please advise.”

I could have advised: a piece of broken logic got stuck in the educational cerebellum.

Later that year, on the way to my son’s 8th-grade graduation, we stopped at the hospital to visit his classmate, Katlyn, and her new baby boy. “Did he come with a key?” I asked. She laughed, beaming, as any new mother would. Of some 80 girls in the class, 4 were pregnant that year. They were barely 14.

I recently called Ms. Ferraro to ask how things were going. She explained that she probably wouldn’t get any new babies. “I was chaperoning at a football game, and these kids had the babies in shopping bags. They had figured out how to put duct tape over the babies’ heads and on to their chests so the head wouldn’t move.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that some kids play football with the babies.

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

Congress hopes to finish work on the reauthorization of the No ChildLeft Behind Act (NCLB) before the presidential primary season beginsin January 2008, though it is unclear whether that deadline will bemet. The six-year-old law was originally passed by Congress with strongbipartisan support, but now faces opposition from both the right andthe left. Can the law be saved? The editors of Education Next join inthe debate on NCLB’s future, assessing the law’s shortcomings andprescribing what Congress should do to avert a disaster.

Crash Course
Frederick Hess and Chester Finn argue that NCLB was bound to crash andburn, since the machinery of the law is not powered by a coherent model ofeducational change or a sound view of the federal role in education.

A Lens That Distorts
Paul Peterson defends NCLB-style accountability but challenges Congressto fix the measuring stick used to evaluate schools.

Testing the Limits of NCLB
The real problem with NCLB, says Michael Petrilli, is that it wrongly assumesthe federal government can force recalcitrant states and school districts todo their job well.

Basically a Good Model
NCLB is a groundbreaking civil rights law that has already improved thenation’s schools, counters Dianne Piché , who offers a vigorous defenseof the statute.