From a distance, it probably looks as if Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is about to take control of his city’s schools, giving him the kind of clout over education that the mayors of New York, Chicago, and Boston have enjoyed for years. The California legislature, with the enthusiastic support of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, passed a bill last summer that seemed to grant the dynamic mayor significant new powers over the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the nation’s second-largest, with 873 schools spread across 700 square miles and 27 cities. And Villaraigosa has told his constituents that he wants to be held accountable for the schools’ performance.

“The buck needs to stop at the top,” Villaraigosa said in a speech last year. “Fragmentation is failing our kids. Voters need to be able to hire and fire one person accountable to parents, teachers, and taxpayers—a leader who is ultimately responsible for system-wide performance.”

But Villaraigosa, for better or worse, will not be that person. Because the closer you get to Los Angeles, the murkier this picture becomes. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, the mayor’s plan for reforming L.A.’s schools is more like a horse designed in the dark. Indeed, the plan, nailed down in a late-night negotiating session in a Sacramento hotel, was fashioned to appease powerful interest groups—mainly the teachers union—that opposed the mayor’s first proposal to overhaul the district. Rather than centralize accountability in one person, it fragments power further. Rather than ending years of divisive finger-pointing, the plan’s most likely result is probably more finger-pointing than ever. Chances are, parents, community leaders, and educators will be left years from now with an even greater sense of uncertainty about who really runs the district and to whom they should turn, or assign blame, when things go wrong.

Yet all of this could happen and there is still a decent chance that the plan will improve opportunities for at least a share of Los Angeles children. And if that happens, Villaraigosa might emerge as a political winner, with his leadership on the issue having paved a path to the governor’s office or the U.S. Senate by 2010. To understand why, you have to look at the details of the plan that the legislature approved, and consider how it will likely play out in the years ahead.

The Devil Is in the Details

Los Angeles Unified, with its nearly 730,000 students, in many ways reflects the sprawl that has come to define the region, as well as its emerging demographics. Nearly three-quarters of the students are Latino, while fewer than one in ten are non-Hispanic whites (see Figure 1). Almost 300,000 students, or 40 percent of the enrollment, are classified as English-language learners, which means they have not yet been certified as fluent in the language.

By most measures of academic performance, the district’s students are struggling (see Figure 2). Less than one-third are reading and writing at grade level, and barely more than one-third are performing at grade level in math, according to results on California’s standardized tests. A freshman entering the district today has less than a 50 percent chance of graduating four years from now, according to one study, and the odds are even worse for Latinos.

Roy Romer, the former Colorado governor who retired last year after six years as superintendent of L.A. Unified, tried in vain before leaving his job to convince the mayor, state legislators, and the governor that the district was not failing. His own aggressive reform program of centralizing curriculum decisions, adhering closely to state standards and providing intensive care to the lowest-performing schools, Romer said, was beginning to pay off. He cited progress on the state’s Academic Performance Index, which he said showed the average LAUSD school improving at a faster rate than the rest of the state’s schools. And he produced independent research that showed L.A. students outperforming those in most of the state’s other large districts when poverty and language acquisition numbers were taken into account.

“We want to be much more successful,” Romer said in a speech to educators last year. “But to single us out in legislation and say, ‘We’re uniquely a failing district and, therefore, we need to legislate,’ is really an excuse to hide political motive.”

 

But Romer’s pleas fell on deaf ears. Relying on data that showed L.A.’s progress would still leave about 40 percent of students performing below grade level by 2014, Villaraigosa pushed at first for complete control over the district. That proposal met stiff resistance not only from Romer and the independently elected school board, but also from the leaders of the district’s other cities and from the teachers union, which has real clout in Sacramento. The result was a hybrid plan that satisfied no one, but which the mayor embraced as his best opportunity to create change.

Under the plan, the mayor is to get more or less direct control over three low-performing high schools and the elementary and middle schools that feed into them. He was also, in theory, supposed to have a role in the selection of the district’s superintendent, through a council of mayors made up of the elected leaders of the district’s 27 cities and members of the county Board of Supervisors. That council, which Villaraigosa will dominate by virtue of a voting system weighted by each city’s population, is also supposed to review the district’s annual budget, though final control would still rest with the school board.

The new law also changed the balance of power between the board and the superintendent. Lawmakers, at the mayor’s urging, sought to reduce the clout of the board and make the superintendent more of a true executive. So the law prohibits board members from hiring personal aides, leaving them with only a pool of staff answering to the full board, and it gives the superintendent full control over most personnel decisions and contracts, other than the collective bargaining contracts with district employees. It also gives the superintendent control over the individual line items in the budget and limits the board’s ability to change those decisions.

A provision in the law further diffuses the lines of authority by requiring the school board to consult with parents and teachers on the district’s curriculum and mandating that classroom teachers elected by their peers be in the majority on curriculum and textbook selection committees. Greater power over the curriculum and the choice of texts has been a long-standing goal of the California teachers unions, which have sought, unsuccessfully, to pass state legislation that would have placed the issue squarely into collective bargaining negotiations. They will now have that influence in Los Angeles Unified.

The end result is that, instead of a school board accountable to the voters and a superintendent accountable to the school board, the district now has multiple power centers. The board will still be elected and will choose the superintendent, but the mayor is supposed to have veto power over that decision, and the superintendent is supposed to have more power to act independently of the elected board. The board is still responsible for passing the budget and for setting the district’s priorities, but Villaraigosa, acting with his fellow mayors, will review the overall budget. The superintendent will have more control over how it is spent. The teachers, meanwhile, will have power over curriculum decisions that used to be left to the board.

A Rocky Start

The approach was so muddled that one of Villaraigosa’s most important allies in the reform battle, billionaire real estate developer and philanthropist Eli Broad, abandoned the effort. Broad, whose nonprofit foundation has pushed for mayoral control in urban districts around the nation, criticized the Los Angeles plan because it would force the mayor to share power with the school board and the teachers union. He urged that the superintendent, under the direction of the mayor, be given control over the budget and all hiring and firing in the district. The compromise Villaraigosa fashioned, Broad told him in a letter last summer, would be worse than the status quo. “If significant changes are not made,” Broad said, “we may be better off having the bill fail.”

But few changes were made after that, and already some of the problems about which Broad warned have begun to surface. The first was in the selection of a superintendent to succeed the retiring Romer. Romer and the school board timed that decision to happen before the reform law took effect, and the board, defying the mayor, chose a new district leader without his participation, while he was out of the country on a trade mission. Villaraigosa and the new superintendent, retired Navy admiral David Brewer, have since established a civil relationship, but Brewer was clearly not his first choice, and the selection process only created more bad blood between the mayor and the school board.

The mayor, meanwhile, has begun to raise private funds to support the schools he will eventually take over. He has collected pledges of $1 million from Verizon and another $1 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. But as those millions began to add up, school district officials complained that the mayor’s schools would have favored status over those left behind in the main district.

Kevin Reed, the district’s general counsel, called the donations a “shift away from the partnership ideal, where the money goes to the kids who need it most.” The mayor’s schools, Reed told the Los Angeles Times, will be “haves,” while district schools will be the “have-nots.”

The schools that Villaraigosa may eventually take over are likely to be showered not only with new money but with attention, and they will almost certainly benefit from the mayor’s need to show immediate progress to validate his approach to the issue. To run the schools, he has recruited a solid team of advisers, beginning with Ramon Cortines, a former LAUSD superintendent who has also been head of the New York City and San Francisco schools. Also onboard is Marshall Tuck, former president and chief operating officer of Green Dot Public Schools, which has built a chain of charter schools in the district while organizing a parents’ “union” and constantly pushing district officials to take bolder steps to improve the performance of children from poor families. Villaraigosa also hired a former Long Beach Unified School District assistant superintendent, a veteran teacher, and the former president of the Riordan Foundation.

The mayor’s team is to choose three high schools from among the district’s lowest-performing, and from different geographic regions, for him to run. Each cluster will include middle and elementary schools as well, giving Villaraigosa control over about 30 schools in all.

Villaraigosa’s Master Plan

Even before identifying the schools he would run, Villaraigosa sketched out the approach he would take to reform them and, he hopes, to overhaul the rest of the district while he is at it. The program ranges from requiring school uniforms and community service to asking parents to sign compacts committing them to participating in their children’s education. He wants to cut administrative bloat and plow the money into the classroom, raising teacher salaries while giving the faculty more responsibility over instructional materials, peer review, and other matters.

The mayor also wants to reduce the size of the schools—or schools within schools—to no more than 500 students, and he wants to create “community partnerships” that would draw the private sector and nonprofit groups into the job of educating the city’s kids. He also pledged to lengthen the school year, improve safety on school campuses, and reinvent vocational education. Finally, once all those changes are implemented, he said, he might be willing to ask taxpayers to pay more to support the schools.

But Villaraigosa will not have free rein, even over the schools that are nominally in his control. Under his compromise with the teachers union, the districtwide collective bargaining agreement will still apply, limiting his flexibility. The membership of the United Teachers Los Angeles, the district’s teachers union, voted to oppose the plan even after the union’s leaders endorsed it, suggesting that quick changes to the rules governing the mayor’s schools will be unlikely. He will also have to negotiate with district headquarters over provision of janitorial, cafeteria, transportation, and other support services. Unlike charter schools, which in California have considerable freedom from state and local laws and regulations, Villaraigosa’s schools will have their hands tied on many issues.

Still, it’s not hard to imagine him making some improvements. The schools he takes over will be among the worst-performing in the district, so they will have nowhere to go but up. The publicity surrounding his takeover is likely to improve morale, attract energetic teachers, and engage parents in the project. The extra money he raises from the private sector will help to improve school facilities, buy better equipment, and perhaps even raise teacher salaries.

But even if the handful of schools that fall within the mayor’s orbit improve, the question is what will happen to the other 800-some schools in the district. The mayor under the new law has little to say about their fate, and even less since he was cut out of the selection of the superintendent. He and his council of mayors will find it hard to influence the budget, the curriculum, or how the district spends nearly $20 billion in new construction money that has been raised through recent bond measures. The broader district will probably continue along its recent path. And even if it is slowly improving, as former Superintendent Romer contends, that improvement will be difficult to discern amid a sea of conflicting statistical measurements.

It is not hard to imagine, then, a scenario under which Villaraigosa a few years from now will cite some dramatic if narrow improvements in the test scores of the students in the schools under his control, while ducking responsibility for the problems that remain in the broader district. Having asked for full control over the entire district, he might say that if he had been given such powers, those schools would be getting better, too. While that might not be a realistic argument, given the nature of the reform plan, it will be difficult to refute.

Daniel Weintraub is the public affairs columnist for the editorial pages of the Sacramento Bee. He has covered California politics and public policy for more than 20 years.

Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s attempt to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) can be seen as an act of pure political hubris: a charismatic, progressive newcomer running with the big dogs of urban politics. Daley did it in Chicago and Bloomberg in New York, so why not? In this conventional view, the mayor is a political opportunist advancing under a cobbled-together, best-we-could-do-on-a-Thursday-night piece of legislation of questionable constitutionality. But history reveals another context in which to understand the mayor’s educational activism. It also provides a ray of optimism about the future of public education in the nation’s second-largest school district.

If we focus the lens of history back half a century, Villaraigosa’s school takeover attempt looks like the epitaph for an institution of public education founded by California’s political Progressives in the first decade of the 20th century. In 1903 the Los Angeles city charter was changed to take school governance away from a corrupt city government. Following that era’s Progressive ideal, civic-minded citizens would raise the schools above politics and a corps of trained professionals would operate them. As historian Judith Raftery noted, “Los Angeles schools became a paradigm of Progressive reform.”

However, for the last four decades, Los Angeles Unified has been subjected to huge system shocks that have betrayed the Progressive Era ideal and hollowed out the district’s authority over its own operations. Desegregation and school finance lawsuits painted the district as discriminatory and racist. The desegregation suit itself, filed in 1964, dragged out for more than a quarter century. The remedy of mandatory busing brought about a backlash, and racial politics dominated the district. By the end of the 1960s, the storied “walkout” and the beginnings of Chicano activism joined the desegregation issue. In the midst of the controversy over busing, the middle class, particularly the white middle class, took a moving van to the suburbs. Since 1950, enrollment shifted from about 85 percent white to about 90 percent students of color. Some 80 percent of students are poor enough to be eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

In 1976, collective bargaining legislation bolstered teachers as an interest group, toughened an already hearty United Teachers Los Angeles, and limited principals’ unchallenged authority over teachers. Other employee groups, including the principals themselves, also organized. An image of self-interest replaced the view of educators as dutiful and self-sacrificing.

A successful tax equity lawsuit and a property tax limitation initiative, Proposition 13, removed the school board’s taxing authority and effectively moved fiscal governance of the district to Sacramento in 1978. Although current board chair Marlene Canter may complain that the mayor’s actions threaten the legitimate authority of an independent school board, the reality is that the board lost control of the purse strings long ago.

Just as political realists predicted at the time, when taxing control moved to Sacramento, so, too, did the momentum for school reform and control. In 1982, Bill Honig defeated a 12-year incumbent to become state school superintendent. Education reform became political currency that was exchanged for dollars. Over the next 20 years, a series of laws used the power of the purse to shape the budgets of local school districts: graduation requirements, academic standards and testing, lengthened school days and years, and class size reduction. The link between capitol and classroom had become much stronger and the hand of the local school board weaker.

LAUSD has not gone quietly into the institutional twilight. The administration itself initiated two reform plans in the 1980s. The second of these, The Children Can No Longer Wait, was remarkable in its self-criticism and in its analysis. It called the district’s failure to educate Latino and African American students “racist,” and it said more than $400 million in reforms would be needed. By the 1990s, reform momentum had moved outside the district. LEARN (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now) created what looked like an unbeatable political coalition of business, civic, and labor leaders including former mayor Richard Riordan and teachers union president Helen Bernstein. In 1993, its plan to decentralize schools gained board approval and the support of Superintendent Sidney Thompson. The Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project followed and bankrolled LEARN, creating what it called families of high schools and their feeder elementary and middle schools.

Both these projects began with great celebration and disappeared amid a cloud of disappointment. Riordan concluded, “LEARN failed.”

A Better Plan

Why, then, any optimism? First, despite all the criticism, the district is actually getting better. Elementary reading and math scores have increased faster than those in most large California cities. A massive construction project, larger than Boston’s “Big Dig” and one hopes better managed, will relieve overcrowding and allow a larger variety of schools. Second, the political fight over who should control the schools has now broadened into a discussion over what the school district should do and how it should work. In January 2007, Villaraigosa’s education team issued a reform plan called The Schoolhouse, aimed at all schools in Los Angeles Unified. The Los Angeles Times labeled the mayor’s report a fallback bully pulpit in case the courts overturn the 2006 legislation giving him control over three clusters of low-performing schools. It’s much more than that. Many of the mayor’s ideas raise tough operational issues that the school district either has not dealt with or has persistently rejected. Third, four central reform ideas—decentralization, choice, high standards, and grass-roots participation—have persisted for more than two decades along with increasing sophistication about how to get them to mesh.

Decentralization turns the Progressive Era ideal of a well-ordered hierarchy on its head. The idea of moving decisions “close to the customer” originated in research on effective corporations in the 1980s and the Effective Schools movement of the same era reflects that research, so there’s nothing novel in the mayor’s plan. But the plan displays an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what is necessary to decentralize school operations effectively.

Earlier systemic reform plans failed to link decentralization and accountability for results. The mayor’s plan does not shy away from restructuring chronically underperforming schools and moving employees if necessary. (Some 305 LAUSD schools already face intervention under the federal No Child Left Behind Act sanctions.) He wants to strengthen peer review and “provide additional compensation for those teachers that take on substantial additional responsibility and deliver results at schools.” By linking decentralization to accountability for outcomes, the mayor reinserts teachers into the reform process. As teachers who have read the plan realize full well, it has implications for their jobs as well as for relationships with their union. It may well be that because of his impeccable political credentials Villaraigosa is the best-positioned leader in Los Angeles to connect reforms in the schoolhouse to the house of labor.

If decisions about employment, budget, and program move to the schools, as the mayor advocates, this threatens everything else in the school bureaucracy, too. The instinct to decentralize, which began as an escape from bureaucracy, is becoming an imperative to design a different kind of system. Autonomy is linked to accountability and support mechanisms.

Villaraigosa’s plan is silent about expanding charter schools and other options, but his planning team has drawn strong support from charter operators. As Times columnist Bob Sipchen wrote, “If the board continues to reject the mayor’s advances, his team could simply work from the outside in and start trying to convert district schools to charters.”

Ironically, even while Los Angeles Unified has tightened central controls over the last six years, it has allowed 104 charters. There are more than 50 magnet schools, and there is a virtual charter district composed of a high school and surrounding elementary schools in the Pacific Palisades. Like decentralization, the idea of providing variety and choice has been part of every reform plan. Much of the energy behind charter schools has come from the leaders of earlier reforms.

High standards are the first pillar in the mayor’s plan and have been part of every reform of the last 20 years. What’s different now is that higher expectations of all students have been hard-wired into educational policy. State standards and the federal No Child Left Behind Act provide the mayor with an achievement cudgel that earlier reformers lacked. (California actually abandoned its assessment program during part of the 1990s reforms.) LAUSD has adopted what is called an A though G requirement that would place all high-school students in courses that would give them the basic entrance requirement for public colleges, but it is behind schedule in implementing it. The fact that fewer than 15 percent of students complete a college-ready curriculum has become a political issue that is already rallying reformers and civil rights advocates.

All the reform projects tried to find some way of engaging parents in their children’s education and in the operations of schools. Villaraigosa’s plan endorses a new breed of community organizations such as the Boyle Heights Learning Collaborative and similar organizations in the Belmont High School area, South Central, and the San Fernando Valley. These seek to combine increased direct parental involvement in education—parent as a child’s first educator—with increased advocacy that is pressuring the district for new construction and attention to both the A through G mandate and the achievement problems of English-language learners. Grass-roots pressure was key to bringing about a recent agreement for charterlike schools in what is called the Belmont Zone of Choice, a series of smaller schools that will gain wider autonomy over curriculum, staffing, and budget.

No one knows whether the mayor will be successful in hammering together political agreements that advance these four historic reform ideas. He may well, as others have predicted, tire of the battle and decide to pave potholes or fix LAX. But this much is known. Villaraigosa is not a one-trick pony whose education agenda will rise or fall depending on the court’s view of last year’s legislation. He has options at the ballot box, in the legislature, and with his considerable skill at bringing contending forces together.

The prize for success is huge. In Los Angeles, at the turn of the 20th century, a Progressive movement forged by businesspeople, philanthropists, and unionists created the school system that gained the reputation as one of the best in the country. At the start of the 21st, the city faces many similar problems: a changing economy, a population of immigrants, and institutions that do not perform as they should. The reformers of the last century transformed local and state government and provided the intellectual and policy foundation for the New Deal. The time is ripe for a new transformation.

Charles Taylor Kerchner is senior research professor at Claremont Graduate University. This research has been supported by a generous grant from the Annenberg Foundation.

Checked: Picus and Associates. 2006. An Evidence-Based Approach to School Finance Adequacy in Washington.

Checked by Eric A. Hanushek

Lawsuits aimed at compelling legislatures to increase school funding have been filed in some 42 states. Courts have found for the plaintiffs in more than half of the cases on the grounds that schools are not “adequately” funded (see Figure 1). These decisions have, in effect, changed the way education appropriations are made, moving decisionmaking from legislatures to the courts. Instead of flowing from the political process, determinations of adequate appropriations come from judges who are informed by paid consultants. Recently, adequacy plaintiffs have suffered some serious setbacks (see legal beat). Undaunted, they soldier on.

 

In the state of Washington, adequacy plaintiffs filed a new lawsuit in early 2007 that is expected to rely heavily on a report prepared at the request of a gubernatorial-appointed commission, Washington Learns. This report, “An Evidence-Based Approach to School Finance Adequacy in Washington,” claims to present scientific evidence of exactly what needs to be done to bring every child to proficiency as defined under state and federal law. The advance, if true, would go far beyond this specific court case and could revolutionize American education. For if, indeed, we now know how to create an effective educational system, and only the funds are lacking, then the country’s education problems can be solved.

The analysts who purport to have assembled this knowledge are led by two professors, Lawrence Picus of the University of Southern California and Allan Odden of the University of Wisconsin. The two formed a consulting group known as Picus and Associates and have become increasingly popular among groups seeking to expand school spending, be they plaintiffs in funding lawsuits, teachers unions, or state departments of education. The Washington Learns commission asked Picus and Associates to recommend policy changes that will place the state’s education system on a sound footing. Specifically, Picus and Odden answer the question, “What are the high-impact education programs and strategies that will allow every school to provide each Washington student with the opportunity to learn at or above proficiency on  state standards as measured by the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, with proficiency standards calibrated over time to those of NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress], or even the performance of students in other countries?”

Even if only the state of Washington were getting precise, scientific answers to such critical questions, the work of the Picus-Odden team would command the attention of national policymakers. But the consulting group has already established a national reputation for its ability to ascertain, scientifically, what needs to be done in education—and precisely how much it costs to do it—through prior studies along much the same lines prepared for policymakers in Kentucky, Arkansas, Arizona, and Wyoming.

Of course, the evidence base does not change very rapidly, as is evident from the various reports, which were carried out between 2003 and 2006. The 2006 study conducted for Washington Learns has an extensive bibliography, some 260 entries. But, since the production of the cost study for Kentucky in 2003, only 30 new references were added (including the obligatory reference to Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat). So similar are the studies that at times it seems the copy function of the Microsoft word processor deserves to be listed among the authors.

The ease with which one report can build on another does not seem to translate into efficiencies in the consulting group’s operations, at least as reflected in the fees charged. According to available records, the Kentucky study, conducted in 2003, was executed for $349,000. Arkansas’s original study, conducted the same year, cost about the same initially but rose to over twice that amount ($800,000) when the authors accepted a commission to ascertain whether districts used their extra money in a way consistent with the consultants’ evidence-based policies. Wyoming, a small but rich state, was asked to pay $1,260,000 in 2005 for a calibration of its finance formula along evidence-based lines and a subsequent implementation study. Washington, in 2006, managed to squeeze the price back down to the total Arkansas figure, although Washington could get only the original evidence-based analysis without the follow-up.

Even the Wyoming deal is a bargain, however, if the study can answer the question posed by the Washington Learns commission. After all, we spend some $500 billion nationally on K–12 education, and even small improvements applied to the nation’s schools could quickly cover the study costs.

The Picus-Odden Miracle

The frequency with which education policy initiatives of the past, though based on high hopes, have yielded disappointing results when implemented in the field has led to rather low expectations. As a general rule, in education discussions a policy is considered successful if an evaluation has shown it to have a statistically significant positive effect on student outcomes. Translated, there must be a high degree of certainty that positive results were not simply the result of chance. But just finding that some policy is likely to improve student outcomes does not mean that the improvement will reach the high levels sought by Washington Learns, or by others with similar views about what students should know. The research would have to provide evidence about the magnitude of improvements in achievement that can be expected, and these improvements would have to be large.

Such evidence is precisely what Picus and Odden purport to provide for their fees. They have combed the research evidence to provide rather precise, and remarkable, predictions about the achievement effects of programs whose power has apparently escaped the attention of almost all other researchers.

Picus and Odden convey the magnitude of achievement gains that can be expected from their evidence-based policies through a unit of measurement known as effect size. Effect size is the change in standard deviations of achievement that can be expected, according to the research, from the introduction of a given policy. In itself, that step is perfectly acceptable, as the unit is widely used in education research.

Discussion of effect sizes and standard deviations is something most policymakers, even when introduced to the concepts in their undergraduate statistics course, would rather avoid. But some heuristics will help to understand the essence of effect sizes and make clear the import of the Picus and Odden evidence. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) measures achievement in different grades and attempts to put it on a common scale. One full standard deviation (an effect size of 1.0) is roughly equal to the average difference in test score performance between a 4th grader and an 8th grader. In other words, it is a big effect, as the typical 8th grader has learned quite a bit since 4th grade.

By this perspective, any education strategy that in a single year can raise average achievement of a large aggregate of students by one full standard deviation must be taken very seriously. Pursued systematically, it could eliminate the persistent ethnic test-score gap (which is about one full standard deviation) or could vault the math and science performance of U.S. students beyond counterparts in Korea, Singapore, and Japan (who are about one-half of a standard deviation ahead now).

Picus and Odden identify strategies they claim can do that, and much more. They provide “scientific evidence” to support the claim that a specific set of policies can shift average student performance upward by three to six standard deviations, an extraordinary gain. The policies they identify include providing a year of full-day kindergarten, reducing class size to 15 students through grade 3, using multi-age classrooms, hiring classroom coaches, employing one-to-one tutoring for disadvantaged students, getting half of the students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch to attend summer school, embedding technology within the classroom, creating a gifted and talented program for the top 5 percent of all students, and accelerating instruction for the 2 percent of students capable of benefiting from it (see Figure 2). The range in claimed impact reflects the fact that they sometimes admit to uncertainty about the exact effect size from a specific program.

 

Most Americans would be extraordinarily satisfied with average gains of one full standard deviation for a school or district. Picus and Odden claim to be able to do that three or possibly even six times over for all students in Washington. After their policies are fully implemented in Washington, Albert Einstein, were he not participating in these programs, would find himself achieving at or below the state average.

This can all happen within one year of application of these policies, the consultants say. But they would not give these programs just a single year. They would apply them, where appropriate, across all years of schooling. (Full-day kindergarten, for example, happens just once for each student.) If one then assumes a cumulative impact from giving students not just a single application but continuing treatment through grade 12, the gains reach astronomical proportions, somewhere in the range of 23 to 57 standard deviations.

The Truth behind the Numbers

This, of course, is the stuff of science fiction novels, not research-based school policies. How does a well-funded study, conducted by scholars of national reputation, reach such startling conclusions? The procedure is roughly as follows:

1) Find a study, preferably one that has some surface credibility, that shows that a particular intervention had a certain effect on a particular group of students.

2) Ignore all the studies of that intervention that show a smaller effect or no effect at all.

3) Interpret the study as identifying a true causal relationship, not just a correlation or association.

4) Finally, assume that the conditions that produced the very large effect can be perfectly replicated throughout the state of Washington.

Take full-day kindergarten, for example, which Picus-Odden estimate to have by itself an impact of 0.77 standard deviations on student achievement for advantaged and disadvantaged students alike. (In NAEP terms, this by itself would be equivalent to three full years of later schooling.) Picus and Odden cite a 1997 meta-analysis by John Fusaro that shows such an impact. But they disregard Fusaro’s own strong warning: “A seductive conclusion from these results is that attendance at full-day kindergartens causes students to achieve at a higher level than attendance at half-day kindergartens. It is imperative, however, that we strenuously resist succumbing to such a seduction.” Meanwhile, Picus and Odden ignore a large body of literature that shows little impact on advantaged students and smaller impacts on disadvantaged ones, to say nothing of the empirical reality that the 56 percent of students currently attending schools that have full-day kindergarten do not surpass the remaining 44 percent attending schools without full-day kindergarten by anything like a 0.77 margin.  Note, for example, that black students and disadvantaged students are currently more likely to attend schools with full-day kindergarten than more advantaged students.

Or take summer school, which Picus and Odden estimate would have an effect size of 0.45 standard deviations. This policy recommendation is apparently based on a single study in 2000 of the Voyager summer learning program, although they note that a major meta-analysis suggests widely varying effect sizes from the evaluations of different studies. Note also that in Odden’s peer review in 2004 of William Driscoll’s and Howard Fleeter’s Ohio study of the costs of bringing all students to proficiency in math and reading in order to comply with NCLB, he castigates the study’s authors, who called for expanded summer school, because they “reference no research to support this assertion, when in fact most research shows that summer school as typically administered has little if any impact on learning.”

These patterns are repeated when one goes to the other “evidence-based” recommendations of Picus and Odden, including class size reduction and professional development. Their estimate of the benefits of professional development comes directly from the professional association representing those who supply professional development. And so on. There is little reason to believe that the effect sizes identified in their work indicate what can be expected from implementing any policy on a broad scale.

The approach of Picus and Odden to policies is simple: if a program shows a large positive effect in one study, it should immediately be implemented across the state. Indeed, they assert in public hearings that adopting anything less than the complete set of recommended programs would constitute an inadequate program, and that they would testify to the inadequacy in court.

Are Costs Important?

The primary purpose of reviewing the evidence on programs is to establish the cost of providing a new and improved (adequate) education. The various programs suggested by Picus and Odden have very different price tags associated with them. They make it hard to tell from their report what prices might go with each of the programs, because they bury the costs within the staffing of each prototypical school. It is, nonetheless, relatively easy to obtain reasonable cost estimates for each program.

The basic building blocks for calculating the cost per pupil of the various policies Picus and Odden propose are the approximate average expenditure of $7,800 per pupil and average teacher compensation (salary plus benefits) of $60,000 for the state of Washington. We can first translate these into the cost per recipient for each program based on resource demands and then take into account the proportion of all students who receive the program. The results show wide variations in costs. For example, full-day kindergarten would increase average spending in the state by $154 to $300 per student, while the K–3 class size reduction would increase average spending by $410 to $800 per student. Some programs have no obvious costs. For example, multi-age classrooms might reasonably be taken as free. Similarly, changes in curriculum do not in general have significant added costs (past, say, an initial teacher-training period). Other programs, such as skipping grades, would actually save money, since students would spend 12 rather than 13 years in the system.

Once program costs are separated, one can immediately see the variation that exists and can make judgments about where money is better (more efficiently) spent. A simple cost calculation gives the improvements in student achievement (measured again in standard deviations) that could, by the Picus and Odden estimates of benefits, be expected for a $100 addition to spending per pupil from each of the separate programs. By their low-end estimates of benefits (which total to just three standard deviations), each $100 spent on classroom coaches would be expected to yield at least a 0.25 standard deviations gain in achievement, very similar to the expected gain for full-day kindergarten. Their class-size reduction proposal would yield only one-sixth that gain, or 0.04 standard deviations, an effect very similar to that for one-to-one tutoring.

Using the upper range of their effect size estimates, $100 spent on classroom coaches would yield a gain of over one-half standard deviations in student achievement, and one-to-one tutoring would yield a one-quarter standard deviations improvement. According to their estimates, some of their favored programs (such as classroom coaches) are more than 10 times as cost efficient as others, such as class size reduction for K–3.

Picus and Odden contend that all programs, regardless of cost, must be simultaneously undertaken. But it is clear that the programs they identify have very different expected returns on spending. Their method of distributing costs through their prototypical schools provides no information on the relative efficiency of investing in the various components. Nor does it say anything about the costs of improving outcomes if done efficiently. Unless there are unlimited funds to spend on educational programs, it would not make sense to put the money into all the programs without regard to cost.

What Are States Paying For?

Cost estimates are an important component in the politics of court and legislative deliberations on schools. The adequacy debates are typically motivated by obvious and real shortfalls in the achievement of a state’s students, but a combination of naive concerned citizens and self-interested parties invariably pushes to translate these debates into a simple dollar figure. Such translation is salient for courts and legislatures and both simplifies and focuses the issue for the media.

What Picus and Odden provide in their reports is essentially a selective review of the published literature on program effects. Why do different states and organizations pay ever-increasing amounts to see this research review when Google would bring up the most recent version immediately and without expense? The answer is simple. Clients want a bottom-line statement about how much spending would provide an adequate education, and they want this cost estimate attached to their specific state. Few people care about the “studies” on which consultants base their reports, or even their validity, because nobody really expects schools to implement these specific programs if given extra funding. Clients simply want a requisite amount of scientific aura around the number that will become the rallying flag for political and legal actions.

Summing the added cost of the separate programs suggested by Picus and Odden, I estimate that the overall plan, if fully applied, would increase average spending in Washington by $1,760 to $2,760 per student, or 23 to 35 percent. This estimate of the increased spending necessary to achieve “adequacy” is very similar to the percentage increases they have recommended to other states, and numbers like these will presumably become part of the headlines surrounding the new court case.

But pity the poor states that actually implement the Picus and Odden plan. They are sure to be disappointed by the results, and most taxpayers (those who do not work for the schools) will be noticeably poorer.

Eric A. Hanushek is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a member of its Koret Task Force on K–12 Education.

The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids
By Alexandra Robbins
Hyperion, 2006, $24.95; 448 pages.

As reviewed by Diane Ravitch

When I was in public high school about a thousand years ago, life was very different. Half of my classmates at San Jacinto High School in Houston didn’t have any interest in going to college. Most of the rest aimed to go to the University of Texas or other local universities. I was one of the few who wanted to enroll in an Ivy League college, so I did not experience peer pressure for grades (although there was plenty of peer pressure associated with clothing, dating, popularity, and looks). At that time (the mid-1950s) students never learned their SAT scores; the guidance counselor knew, but she wasn’t allowed to tell. With her help, we somehow managed to figure out which college might be the best fit, even without knowing our scores.

Many other things were different about the world of American teens half a century ago. Television was a recent technological innovation and most of the programming consisted of reruns. The news came on about dinnertime, and we were generally unaware of most stuff that was happening outside our community and city. After school, we had time to drive around town and to hang out with friends at a drive-in hamburger place. The biggest danger we faced was driving recklessly, since we were on the whole irresponsible and believed like all teenagers in our immortality. Drinking was a problem, but drugs were nonexistent. And there was almost always a grownup at home. All of this, of course, was before Sputnik, before the various crises of the 1960s. It was, in retrospect, a halcyon time.

Reading Alexandra Robbins’s The Overachievers, I was struck by the contrast between the relatively peaceful world I lived in and the frantic, high-pressure world of the young people she describes. Robbins returned to her alma mater, Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, to follow several high-achieving students as they negotiate their way from high school to college (one of the students she tracks is a freshman at Harvard). The storyline seems to be that she, an overachiever, wants to reveal through anecdote and insight, the brutal stress that today’s schools, tests, and parents exert on students who are just a bit younger than she.

Robbins tends to generalize from the experiences of her gallery of high school stars, forgetting that they represent a tiny sliver—perhaps 1 percent—of students their age. Consequently, she makes sweeping statements about an entire generation when her evidence is drawn almost entirely from the unusual lives of an elite population.

These are extraordinary young people, to be sure. Julie has an unblemished record of straight As through junior and senior high school. She took at least eight Advanced Placement courses. She is an excellent athlete and was co-captain of the school’s track team. In addition to a long string of other activities, she was a buddy to a child in a homeless shelter. Each of the students featured has an equally impressive resumé, which they have apparently been building since 6th grade, or maybe since birth.

Here are students in one of the nation’s most affluent districts and most successful high schools, yet in Robbins’s telling they are on the verge of falling apart. In response to the pressure to compete and succeed, they succumb to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, even thoughts of suicide. Young people in the United States today, she says, are suffering because of “school stress, the college admissions process, high-stakes testing, cutthroat competition, the emphasis on stardom rather than on enjoyment of activities, sleep deprivation, parental pressure, the push for perfectionism, the need for escapism, the Age of Comparison, [and] the loss of leisure and childhood…” Among her favorite culprits for this state of affairs are testing in general, the SAT in particular, the “Nation at Risk” report, and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which she believes turned elementary schools and junior high schools into testing factories.

She tosses out statistics to buttress her arguments, but most of them seem to be collected from newspaper articles. Though she castigates the “Nation at Risk” report, she seems never to have read it, nor to have read the many serious studies that take a deeper look at the issues that concern her. She ignores the fact that many of the statistics she cites were compiled before NCLB was passed. She handily dismisses those who worry about our students’ poor performance on international tests, saying, “So what? So what if a continent produces more scientific papers than the United States? So what if a country isn’t ranked number one going into the next educational season? Students shouldn’t be governmental pawns in a race for global superiority. Why can’t a country be good at what it’s good at and not panic if it’s not the best at everything? Why should education be a competition?”

Near the end she pretty much defines the tone of her book when she writes, “But stories are more important than statistics.” Thus, she tosses off somebody’s number about the wide-scale elimination of recess after the passage of NCLB or the many hours of homework that American students must do every night. She does not seem to realize that government data and reputable scholars do not share her impassioned views. It may be that the rather small proportion of very high performing students have too much homework, but studies by Tom Loveless of Brookings, for example, indicate that most American students still do not spend much time on school work. TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) reported a few years ago that most American high school students spend at least 20 hours per week in part-time jobs, unlike their counterparts in other nations.

Robbins has a long list of solutions to the problem of pressure on high school teens: Start the school day later, so kids can sleep later; drop class rankings; de-emphasize testing and rely instead on portfolios and projects; offer more activities that are noncompetitive; limit the number of AP classes. She advises colleges to boycott rankings like those done by U.S. News & World Report, drop the SAT as a tool for admissions, and eliminate early decisions.

None of these is a bad idea, although one wonders what measures will be substituted by highly selective colleges for the SAT and class rankings. As Robbins points out in the book, the number of students who want to go to prestigious colleges has soared, but the number of places in those colleges has not changed much over the past few decades. Those colleges that have 10 or more applicants per place need some way to choose one of the 10. If they drop the SAT, will they rely instead on high school grades, which are notoriously unreliable? Or will they ignore four years of coursework and rely instead on students’ essays?

We should all want students (and their parents) to live in ways that are fulfilling without unnecessarily inflicting anxiety, depression, and despair on them. My guess is that the world is being changed by technology in ways that inflict pressure on all of us. We are bombarded 24/7 by more information than we can absorb. The scramble for the greatest rewards in the most elite professions has grown more intense than ever. Parents clearly want their children to get the highest-status credentials (not necessarily the best education, but the best credentials) to advance them in the competition for the top of the greasy pole.

Even if schools started an hour later and even if all tests were abolished, it is unlikely that any of us has the power to roll back the trends and competitive pressures that have become so much a part of all of our lives.

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

Why We Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape Our Civic Life
By David E. Campbell
Princeton University Press, 2006, $39.50; 267 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Why We Vote is a provocative interpretation of the factors that determine participation in our democratic processes, and specifically voting, the form of participation available to almost all. Campbell begins with the story of Traci Hodgson, the only person of 275 registered in her precinct who voted in Boston’s 1989 City Council elections. She was 21, had lived in Boston for only two months, and was not very familiar with the candidates. So why did she vote? “I just think it’s important to vote. If you have the right, you ought to exercise it—whether you are going to make a difference or not.”

Campbell has structured his book to explain the case of Traci Hodgson. It is a theoretically sophisticated and statistically demanding examination of who votes and why. The United States stands at the bottom among democratic countries in the percentage of the population voting. Theories and analyses abound as to why this is so.

Campbell notes that the dominant interpretation in the political science literature of why people vote doesn’t explain this voter: Hodgson was not protecting or advancing her interests, since she was new to the area and didn’t know where various candidates stood on the issues that might affect her. He offers an alternate interpretation: “If, in Federalist 10, Madison has written the quintessential statement on political participation as ‘protecting one’s interests,’ then perhaps Tocqueville has written an equally quintessential statement on political participation as driven by ‘fulfilling one’s duty’…. ‘What had been calculation becomes instinct. By dint of working for the good of his fellow citizens, he in the end acquires a habit and taste for serving them.’”

Traci Hodgson moved to Boston from Little River, Kansas, population 693. In 1992, voter turnout in Little River was 67 percent, 12 percentage points higher than the national turnout, 27 points higher than Boston’s. Little River is clearly different, much smaller, undoubtedly much more homogeneous on any measure than Boston. Which raises the question even more sharply: Why should there be more voting when people are more alike, and presumably in agreement with each other on many issues, than when (as undoubtedly in Boston) they aren’t?

Campbell argues there are two very different kinds of motivations for voting, those consistent with a homogeneous community, in which people are likely to agree with each other, and those operative in a heterogeneous community, in which interests diverge widely and conflict is greater. We might expect more voting in the second kind of community. But the percentage is uniformly high in the homogeneous communities. When voting reaches equally high levels in areas with more heterogeneity and more conflict, it is because much effort and money are expended in such areas to bring out the vote. These two motivations work to produce our voting pattern, a U-shaped curve, in which the most heterogeneous and the most homogeneous counties have the highest percentage voting, and this is elegantly demonstrated here. It is easy to understand why people vote to defend their interests. The greater part of the book is devoted to trying to understand the opposite and harder case: why people see voting as a duty and how we can instill that notion more effectively. It is Campbell’s contention, on the basis of ingenious mining of many data sources—longitudinal and other large-scale studies from which we can extract voting behavior, political attitudes, and various background factors that might explain them—that it is community, place, that plays a central role in cultivating the idea of voting as a duty. The key concept connecting the homogeneous community to a high participation in voting is “social capital,” as developed by James Coleman and his colleagues 20 years ago in their studies of schools and more recently by the important research of Robert Putnam. “Fundamentally, social capital refers to the mechanisms by which social norms are enforced.” It points to the kind of community in which what your neighbors think and say will affect your behavior, rather than the kind in which neighbors are too disparate for their opinions to be known or matter to you.

Campbell is particularly interested in the experience of adolescents. Traci Hodgson has been shaped by the community in which she was raised and went to school, and it is to those norms and expectations that she is responding. Campbell demonstrates that the more homogeneous the community or the school, by various measures, the greater the degree of participation in voluntary civic activities. And the greater the expectation that students when adults will vote. They will do so not because of political partisanship, but because the sense of duty has been instilled. “If I left the story here,” Campbell writes, “it might appear that homogeneous communities have it all—utopias where homes and schools combine to inculcate in their young people the ‘habits of the heart’ [the phrase is Robert Bellah’s, from Tocqueville]… that lead to a lifetime of civic involvement. But, as you might expect, there is more to the story. Politically homogeneous communities have other social consequences that many people might find troubling.” Whereas many good things seem related to an increasing degree of homogeneity, others are not. For example, tolerance declines with homogeneity. (I should note that “tolerance” and other variables of large scope and meaning are measured in this study, perforce, by the response to a single question in complex data sets, and one often feels one is being led through a chain of reasoning from data to the interaction of large concepts that may not bear up, but that is the inevitable consequence of extracting large concepts from large data sets.) Apparently, the sense of efficacy in the public sphere—“voice,” as Campbell labels it—also seems to increase in politically heterogeneous environments.

Campbell worries about this, but his heart is with Traci Hodgson, not her (possibly) more tolerant but nonvoting neighbors. He regrets, with Alan Ehrenhalt in his book The Lost City, “the fraying of civic bonds in America” and cites other “declensionist” writers, as he labels them—Michael Schudson, Theda Skocpol, David Gelernter, Francis Fukuyama, Gertrude Himmelfarb—to similar effect. “You knew who was from the neighborhood and who wasn’t; you knew who could be trusted…. [H]owever, …these same neighborhoods are also characterized by an unreflexive suspicion of the ‘other.’”

Campbell is torn between his appreciation of what has been lost and his acceptance of the reality of an ever more heterogeneous society in which tolerance is essential, but firmly insists that schools have an obligation to raise civic consciousness and voting participation. He does not dispute the research that says that more formal civics education wouldn’t help much, but he does argue that schools can do more for the civic development of students: “The challenge … is to build the sense of ‘we’ within our schools in order to nurture civic norms, including the encouragement of voting as a civic obligation.” Campbell contends it is a task that we should study as seriously as we do programs to raise test scores in reading and mathematics. A less technical version of his case for teachers and administrators would be a help in promoting this eminently worthy objective.

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

The History Boys
By Alan Bennett
Broadhurst Theater, New York, June 2006.

As reviewed by David Steiner

Characterized by dry syntactical puns, flat humor, and a bested Socrates, the Euthydemus is not one of Plato’s better-known works. Yet it is here that, for the first time in the history of the West, one of the great education debates of the subsequent 24 centuries is laid out in print. On the one side are the Sophists: their teaching aims at mastery of grammar, fluency of expression, agility of vocabulary use, and the ability to manipulate facts. Locked in combat with them (the dialogue is replete with images of force) is Socrates, demonstrating the techniques of dialectical reasoning and ultimately of metaphysical and ontological questioning.

The debate is about the fundamental purpose of education: for the Sophists, the goal is power—economic, political, and social. They are paid for demonstrable results, and their techniques of drilling, testing, and redrilling give ancient proof that assessment indeed drives instruction. Their nemesis is Plato’s Socrates, offering not the seduction of power, but that of truth, beckoning to the student’s soul, appealing to the hidden thirst for the transcendent and the beautiful, for the “kingly art” that is the philosopher’s alone. Socrates takes no payment, for the education he offers has no utilitarian payoff in the here and now, a teaching immortalized by the nature of his own demise.

Intertwined in this foundational struggle over educational ends is a second, scarcely less bitter struggle over the relationship between teacher and pupil. For the Sophists, there is nothing very mysterious going on: they know, whereas the student does not; the student needs to be encouraged, cajoled, and entertained to learn. For Socrates, the core of the relationship is erotic, and tragic. The master and the pupil lay bare their souls; together, they risk all for knowledge and truth. Ultimately, Socrates imagines a student with deeper, better answers than he possesses; always, he will find only disappointment.

While Alan Bennett’s Oxford education may not have led him to the Euthydemus, his highly successful play The History Boys embodies a reprise of that ancient text. Two teachers—Irwin and Hector—dominate the play. Irwin teaches the students how to manipulate, dazzle, and succeed. They will learn to divest themselves of such lines as “The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom” while defending Stalinism, for to criticize Stalin would be just boring, while defending him without the tools of rhetorical paradox would risk ridicule. Hector is Irwin’s nemesis: hopelessly unfashionable, he exhibits what the headmaster acknowledges is passion and commitment “but not curriculum.” Hector instructs his pupils that they cannot look at a Rembrandt and then say “in other words”; an encounter with genius is non-negotiable. Predictably, Hector “counts examinations as…the enemy of education.”

The boys—Oxford- and Cambridge-bound—are no fools. Less in anger than in tolerance for Irwin’s limitations and necessary pedagogic mission, they inform him that Hector’s idiosyncratic teaching is “higher than your stuff…nobler.” In the same breath, they reassure Irwin that Hector’s lessons are “Not useful, sir, not like your lessons.” In the defining denouement of the play, Hector dies and Irwin becomes a chairbound TV peddler of cultural kitsch.

Marx famously wrote that everything in history happens twice, first as tragedy then as farce. In the United States, the ancient debate that Bennett revisits has reinvented itself as a struggle between the standardized assessors, anxious to inject knowledge into students, most especially those most in need of social and economic advancement, and the constructivists, eager to coach, to discuss, to explore the “natural” learning instincts of every child. Both sides in this debate have betrayed their forefathers: the Sophists knew that what they taught was techne, not knowledge, and Plato knew that the instincts of the soul require the most rigorous teaching of all.

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., and former chair of the education policy department at the School of Education at Boston University.