The July 2006 deadline came and went for states to comply with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate to have a “highly qualified” teacher in every classroom. To meet the standard, teachers must have a bachelor’s degree, be state-certified, and prove they know the subjects they teach, either by satisfying minimum course-taking requirements or passing a test in the subject they teach. But will compliance ensure that students learn more? Does state certification make teachers better at fostering student learning?

It is now possible to provide some answers to these questions by exploring the relative effectiveness of recently hired New York City public school teachers who entered the profession through alternate routes. Using a large data set provided by the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE), we analyzed student test scores as well as information about the students, their teachers, classrooms, and schools. With this rich array of data, we compared the effectiveness of recently hired alternatively certified (AC) and uncertified teachers to that of their traditionally certified counterparts in improving student learning in math and reading during grades 4 through 8.

The results of our study of New York City public school teachers confirm a simple truth: some teachers are considerably better than others at helping students learn. For example, elementary-school students who have a teacher who performs in the top quartile of all elementary-school teachers learn 33 percent of a standard deviation more (substantially more) in math in a year than students who have a teacher who performs in the bottom quartile. Yet as we embrace this piece of conventional wisdom, we must discard another: the widespread sentiment that there are large differences in effectiveness between traditionally certified teachers and uncertified or alternatively certified teachers. The greatest potential for school districts to improve student achievement seems to rest not in regulating minimum qualifications for new teachers but in selectively retaining those teachers who are most effective during their first years of teaching.

New Routes to the Classroom

State laws were originally designed to regulate teacher quality by specifying minimum pre-service course-taking and exam performance. Reflecting these traditions, the majority of prospective public-school teachers have completed one or two years of full-time study in a university education program and passed exams such as the widely used PRAXIS tests to satisfy those requirements.

In the 1990s, that traditional system for regulating the flow into teaching began to break down. Faced with difficulties recruiting enough certified teachers, many school districts hired large numbers of uncertified teachers. When No Child Left Behind and state laws mandated a certified teacher in every classroom, districts turned to the growing number of teachers entering the profession through alternative certification (AC) programs. According to the National Center for Education Information (NCEI), 48 states and the District of Columbia currently have AC programs, and approximately 50,000 teachers became certified through alternative routes in 2004–05 NCEI estimates about one-third of all new teachers enter the field with alternative certification. Participants in the AC programs are usually required to possess a bachelor’s degree and pass state licensing exams before entering the classroom and to enroll in a teacher-education program, taking coursework at night, during their first years in teaching.

We wanted to know whether staffing classrooms with uncertified and AC teachers shortchanges students. In other words, are students essentially paying the cost of training these teachers on the job, in the form of lost academic achievement?

Knowing the relative merits of traditionally certified, AC, and uncertified teachers is particularly important because AC and uncertified teachers are more likely to work in urban areas with low-income and low-achieving students, those most in need of a high-quality teacher who can foster their learning. This is one reason the New York City public schools are an ideal setting to explore how a new teacher’s certification status might affect how much students learn. Besides being the largest and one of the most diverse school districts in the country, New York City is a major employer of uncertified and AC teachers. More than 50,000 new teachers were hired in New York schools between the 1999–2000 and 2004–05 school years. Uncertified and AC teachers accounted for, respectively, 34 percent and 20 percent of these new hires.

Teacher Certification in New York City

Recruiting a sufficient number of certified teachers has been a long-standing challenge for the New York City Department of Education. During the 1999–2000 school year, approximately 60 percent of all new teachers hired were uncertified. Recruiting difficulties have been more severe in schools with the lowest average achievement levels.

Since that time, the NYC DOE has taken a number of steps to decrease its use of uncertified personnel, one of which has been to expand its recruitment of alternatively certified teachers. Between the 1999–2000 and 2004–05 school years, uncertified hires fell from 60 percent to 7 percent of all hires, while the fraction who were alternatively certified rose from 2 percent to 36 percent. It is highly unlikely that this shift was a matter of previously uncertified teachers entering AC programs. The two populations—uncertified and AC teachers—differ in a number of ways: AC teachers are less likely to be black or Hispanic, tend to be several years younger when hired, and attended colleges with substantially higher median SAT scores (see Figure 1).

The major source of new AC teachers has been the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) program. Created in the summer of 2000, NYCTF is a partnership between the New York City Department of Education and The New Teacher Project (TNTP). TNTP is a national nonprofit organization, founded in 1997, that helps school districts recruit AC teachers. TNTP has also worked with school districts in Miami, New Orleans, Oakland, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and a number of other urban and rural communities.

The NYCTF program was created as a response to pressure from the state government to hire only certified teachers in the city’s lowest-performing schools. After the NYC DOE failed to hire only certified teachers for these schools in 1999–2000, it was sued by state education commissioner Richard Mills. In 2000, additional motivation to produce and hire AC teachers was provided by a New York State law that required all teachers in the state to be certified in their subject of instruction by the 2003–04 school year. The number of teaching fellows hired grew from 350 in 2000–01 (less than 5 percent of new hires) to 2,500 in 2003–04 (more than 30 percent of new hires) and 2,000 in 2004–05 (more than 25 percent of new hires). Teaching fellows represent the vast majority of all AC teachers signed on in New York City since 1999 Between the 1999–2000 and 2004–05 school years, some 9,000 teaching fellows were hired.

New York recruits AC teachers through several other sources as well: the high-profile, nationwide Teach For America (TFA) program, the Peace Corps Fellows Program, and the Teaching Opportunity Program Scholars. (The latter two programs are relatively small.) New York City hired 1,544 new TFA teachers during the 1999–2000 to 2004–05 school years. Here, we limit our discussion to the findings on teaching fellows and the substantial number of teachers who come from the TFA program.

Measuring Teacher Effectiveness

It is a complicated task to determine how much difference a teacher makes in student achievement and whether or not that difference depends on how she entered the teaching profession. We need to compare the effectiveness of teachers in each certification group while separating out each of their students’ baseline level of achievement (measured with test scores from the prior school year) and other characteristics of the student, classroom, school, and teacher that could affect student achievement.

We used data from the New York City Department of Education, which cover the 1998–99 to 2004–05 school years and grades 3 through 8, the grades in which students in New York City take standardized math and reading examinations. Because we need a prior year test score for each student in each grade in order to estimate the contribution made by the student’s teacher, we can only study 4th- through 8th-grade teachers.

The student data include test scores, race and ethnicity, eligibility for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program, and status as an ESL or special-education student. We know about a student’s prior attendance record and any suspensions from school. It is important to account for these student characteristics when evaluating an uncertified or AC teacher’s contribution to student learning compared to that of a certified teacher. Uncertified teachers, teaching fellows, and TFA corps members all tend to teach in schools that, relative to those employing more certified teachers, have a higher percentage of minority students; more low-income, ESL, and special-education students; and students with lower achievement levels. We can place each student in a classroom and school so we know about the demographic and educational characteristics of students’ schoolmates as well as the size of their class.

The NYC DOE data also include identification numbers for students’ math and reading teachers, which were often the same for elementary-school students. This is a crucial piece of information, enabling us to match a student to his or her teacher. The NYC DOE payroll system was the source of information about each teacher’s certification program and years of teaching experience. We are interested in evaluating teachers based on their certification at the time they are hired. Thus, uncertified teachers who later gain regular or alternative certification are still, in our study, considered uncertified. The study sample includes some 10,000 teachers in total, drawn from four groups: regular certified, regular uncertified, teaching fellows, and Teach For America.

Certification and Effectiveness

Simply put, a teacher’s certification status matters little for student learning. We find no difference between teaching fellows and traditionally certified teachers or between uncertified and traditionally certified teachers in their impact on math achievement. Classrooms of students assigned to TFA teachers actually scored 2 percent of a standard deviation higher than students assigned to traditionally certified teachers. In reading, students assigned to teaching fellows did underperform students assigned to traditionally certified teachers by 1 percent of a standard deviation. These are the only instances in which we find that a teacher’s initial certification status has statistically significant implications for student achievement. The picture of teacher effectiveness looked the same when we separately examined teachers in elementary schools, middle schools, and schools with above- and below-median test scores.

A Close Look at Teacher Experience

We also measured how teaching effectiveness improves with experience in New York City public schools. New York’s teachers are no different from other teachers around the country. Teachers make long strides in their first three years, with very little experience-related improvement after that. The students of third-year teachers score 6 percent and 3 percent of a standard deviation higher in math and reading, respectively, than students of first-year teachers.

Since the first few years of experience are so important, we decided to take a closer look at how uncertified and AC teachers fare against traditionally certified teachers at different levels of teaching experience. We compared the effectiveness of teachers from among the certification groups in their first, second, and third years of teaching.

We found that teaching fellows, TFA corps members, and uncertified teachers may fare slightly worse as rookie teachers than certified teachers, but they quickly make up the lost ground (see Figure 2). For example, first-year teaching fellows underperform traditionally certified teachers in their first year by 1 percent of a standard deviation in math, but third-year teaching fellows outperform third-year traditionally certified teachers by 2 percent of a standard deviation. In reading, rookie teaching fellows underperform first-year teachers with traditional certification by 2 percent of a standard deviation. Yet by their third year of teaching, teaching fellows are eliciting student achievement as well as third-year traditionally certified teachers.

How do AC and uncertified teachers manage to catch up to traditionally certified teachers? This improvement need not reflect on-the-job learning. It could be that the propensity for ineffective teachers to leave could be higher among those uncertified and alternatively certified. This would improve the average performance of these groups relative to traditionally certified teachers, even though individual teachers did not improve at higher rates.

We can estimate the rate of improvement that is attributable to experience (as opposed to the departure of weak teachers) by following individual teachers and measuring the change in their performance from one year to the next. We can then see if these changes, say from year one to year three, tend to be greater or smaller for teachers from different certification groups.

There is some evidence that AC and uncertified teachers learn more from experience. Whether they teach math or reading, TFA teachers seem to learn at the same pace as traditionally certified teachers. The first two years of teaching bring substantially more improvement in both math and reading instruction for teaching fellows than for traditionally certified teachers. Given the same initial effectiveness as a traditionally certified teacher, our results indicate that, after two years on the job, a teaching fellow’s students would score 3 percent of a standard deviation higher on average in math and reading. Uncertified math teachers’ gains from experience also outpace those of traditionally certified teachers. Given the same initial effectiveness as a traditionally certified teacher, an uncertified third-year teacher’s students would score 3 percent of a standard deviation higher, on average, in math.

Attrition

In debates over certification standards, alternative certification programs have been criticized for high turnover. Alternatively certified teachers may be just as good as traditionally certified teachers, the critics say, but they are more likely to leave teaching just when they are learning the ropes. Teach For America programs have been the focus of much of this criticism, since they ask their corps members for only a two-year commitment.

The critics may have a point. When faced with the choice of two teachers of equal initial effectiveness but differing expected turnover rates, a principal or district recruiter ought to choose the teacher with lower expected turnover. However, the strength of this preference depends on two things: the actual difference in turnover rates and the difference in effectiveness between an experienced and a novice teacher. Fortunately, both of these differences can be estimated with the NYC DOE data.

First, we set out to determine the average rate of attrition, by year of teaching experience, among teachers hired since the 1999–2000 school year. We used a statistical procedure that allows us to adjust for factors that might affect attrition, such as teacher age and the characteristics of the school in which they taught. We also adjusted for the state-mandated departure of teachers who remained uncertified at the end of the 2002–03 school year, which artificially raised the attrition of uncertified teachers in that year. (Starting in the fall of 2003, school districts in New York State were no longer permitted to employ uncertified teachers, although in schools with severe teacher shortages some continued to teach with two-year Modified Temporary Licenses.)

Perhaps surprisingly, after adjusting for these factors, teaching fellows have attrition rates similar to those of traditionally certified teachers. In fact, teaching fellows have slightly lower attrition rates in the first two years than traditionally certified teachers. After five years, approximately 50 percent of both groups still teach in the New York City public schools. Teachers who were initially uncertified are a little less likely to stick around than teaching fellows or traditionally certified teachers. Given the estimated rates of attrition, 45 percent would remain with the district in their fifth year.

Teach For America corps members do have much higher exit rates. By the fifth year, only about 18 percent of corps members would remain with the district. Much of the attrition for TFA corps members comes after two years of teaching. Presumably, this reflects the fact that TFA corps members sign up for a two-year teaching commitment.

We used these attrition rates to estimate the proportion of each group of teachers who would be in their first, second, and third year of teaching and so on, up to 30 years. Roughly 45 percent of TFA teachers would be in their first or second year of teaching during any given school year. In stark contrast, traditionally certified teaching and teaching fellows would be less than half as likely to be so green, with only 20 percent in their first or second year.

Despite the higher attrition among TFA corps members, the implications are not nearly as dire as some critics of the program suggest. The impact on student outcomes is negative but rather modest. When we compare teacher effectiveness in our simulated teacher pool, we estimated that TFA teachers would need to produce about 2 percent of a standard deviation in additional math and reading achievement in their students to offset the impact of the higher turnover rates. At least in math, the size of the Teach For America advantage during the first years of teaching is just large enough to offset the cost of higher turnover. (Although TFA corps members’ effect on students’ reading scores is not as great, the payoff to experience is also considerably lower in reading achievement.) In other words, both the critics of Teach For America, who point to high attrition rates, and the supporters of Teach For America, who maintain that the corps members are more effective than other novice teachers, are right. But on net, it is a wash.

Teachers Matter Even If Certification Does Not

The above discussion should not be taken to imply that teachers do not matter. Although it may not matter much whether a child is assigned to a certified or uncertified teacher, it certainly does matter to which teacher a student is assigned. Interestingly, the range of effectiveness within each certification group is wide and the distribution of effectiveness is roughly the same.

There are a number of potential sources of error in measurements of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement data. For instance, because many classrooms have 20 to 25 students, a few particularly talented or particularly disruptive students can radically change the classroom average. Moreover, there may be other factors, unrelated to class size, that lead to swings in classroom performance, such as a dog barking in the parking lot on the day of the test or special classroom “chemistry” reflecting a good match between a particular classroom of students and a particular teacher. We wanted to measure the part of a teacher’s effectiveness that persists over time. We used a statistical method that separated our estimate of overall effectiveness into a fixed component, which is stable from year to year, and an idiosyncratic component that changes across classrooms and across years.

When we looked at the persistent component of teacher effectiveness, we found that the best teachers have a large positive impact on their students’ academic performance relative to that of a less effective teacher. For example, the top quarter of elementary-school teachers improve student achievement in math by 33 percent of a standard deviation more than the bottom quarter of teachers do. Among middle-school teachers, the difference is slightly less but still important, at 20 percent of a standard deviation. To put this in perspective, the advantage of being the student of a teacher in the top quarter of effectiveness rather than the bottom quarter is roughly three times the advantage of being taught by an experienced teacher rather than by a novice, and more than ten times any advantage created by teacher certification!

Another Look One can have special confidence in a finding when independent research teams, working separately and using state-of-the-art methodologies, reach similar results. Education Next received a second study that closely resembles the analysis by Thomas Kane and his colleagues from a team of five scholars shortly after we put the Kane study into the peer review process. Not knowing the outcome of the Kane peer review, we did the same for the second study. Both were found to be of high quality. The second study’s authors, Donald Boyd, Pamela Grossman, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff, also find few significant differences in effectiveness between traditionally certified New York City teachers and teachers entering through alternative pathways, such as Teach For America or the New York City Teaching Fellows program. More important, they find that the differences in teacher effectiveness within pathways far exceed the average differences between pathways. The similar methodology and findings in the two studies provide a rare example of replication in the social sciences. Following the principle that the first paper to arrive receives precedence, we include here only the Kane study, but we encourage the interested reader to access the second study, which was published in Education Finance and Policy, at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/edfp/1/2

 

Knowing When to Be Choosy

Traditionally, states and districts have regulated teacher quality by focusing on initial qualifications. In writing the No Child Left Behind Act, Congress followed that same logic, requiring states to live up to the minimum hiring standards they have established. But is a highly qualified teacher more likely to be a highly effective teacher? Our results suggest not. States and districts could learn a lot about teacher impacts on student achievement during the first few years on the job, as long as they assemble their student and teacher data to compare end-of-year performance among classrooms of students with similar baseline characteristics. That is an obvious first step. But states and districts also need to find ways to directly observe and rate in-class performance, using some combination of principals, peers, and external observers.

We believe states need to develop the infrastructure for assessing the performance of novice teachers during their first few years on the job. There are some models being developed, such as Connecticut’s Beginning Educator Support and Training (BEST) program, Charlotte Danielson’s performance evaluation rubrics, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. These approaches are only beginning to be validated against student performance on standardized tests. That is a process that will take time, and it is probably too early to say that there is one best approach to assessing teacher effectiveness.

Admittedly, not all private employers terminate their less effective employees. Employees who do not perform up to expectations may remain in entry-level positions, left in the proverbial “mailroom. ” Schools are very different organizations from most private firms. Notably, there is no equivalent to the corporate mailroom. Less effective teachers, when they earn tenure, are assigned classrooms of students just like more effective teachers.

Nevertheless, there are some labor markets that operate in the way we propose. The market for faculty at top universities is one such example. Arguably, colleges and universities have a lot more information at the time they hire faculty than school districts do. They have a copy of several papers someone has written; they have spoken with a candidate’s advisors, whom they often know personally; they invite the candidate to campus for a full day of interviews. Yet despite this intensive screening, the top departments remain at the top by selectively retaining only the most prolific researchers from among their junior faculty.

Ironically, current collective-bargaining agreements already give district leaders the flexibility to terminate ineffective teachers during their first two or three years on the job. For instance, in New York City, teachers’ contracts may not be renewed if they receive an unsatisfactory rating from their principal during their first three years of teaching. Our estimates suggest that just one year yields a substantial amount of information on teachers’ effectiveness. Three years would give a school district a lot of information.

Nevertheless, there are several potential impediments to districts’ implementing this kind of policy. Individuals who believe they may be dismissed will be less attracted to teaching in a district with selective retention. Districts may have to make other changes, such as increasing salaries for teachers clearing the tenure hurdle, in order to recruit enough teachers to fill available positions. The “highly qualified teacher” requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act already make it hard for districts to hire sufficient numbers of novice teachers. Our proposal would require districts to hire even more. Those provisions will have to be rethought during the law’s upcoming reauthorization.

By shifting the focus away from “qualifications, ” we are not proposing to open the floodgates into teaching. Nor are we intending to imply that teaching is based on innate talent rather than developed skill. Instead, we simply want to move the dam further downstream from the time of initial recruitment, and postpone assessments of teacher’s effectiveness for a year or two until districts have much more useful information about which teachers are performing well and which are performing poorly. Only then will we have hope of living up to the aspirations embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act.

Thomas J. Kane is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Jonah E. Rockoff is assistant professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School. Douglas O. Staiger is professor of economics at Dartmouth College.

In just the last ten years, goaded by broad and still unsettled cultural shifts, education practices have changed dramatically. Schools are no longer just recording and analyzing inputs—dollars spent, number of days of instruction, numbers of students per teacher—but pushing their data-gathering and analysis efforts into the brave new world of outcomes. Who is dropping out and why? Which students are reading at grade level, and which are not? How are 4th graders doing on fractions and decimals? Today’s educators are deciphering, and using, the results of student assessments better than ever. And it is not a reform at the margins. “Nearly all states are building high-tech student data systems to collect, categorize and crunch the endless gigabytes of attendance logs, test scores and other information collected in public schools,” reported the New York Times in a front-page story last May, confirming the scope of the trend.

Hundreds of state education departments and school districts, driven in part by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate to demonstrate “adequate yearly progress,” are retooling their assessment regimens and technology systems to use outcome data to drive instructional and policymaking decisions (see Figure 1). A study of 32 San Francisco Bay Area K–8 schools released in 2003 by the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (now Springboard Schools) found that “what matters most [in closing the achievement gap] is how schools use data.” In fact, those schools that had accelerated the progress of their low-performing students—who were catching up with high-performing students—were those that regularly captured data for the purpose of improving results.

What follows is a close look at three schools that have integrated data into their instructional decisionmaking. Each has concluded that the practice has helped improve student achievement. I examine a traditional public school, a district-turned-charter school run by an education management organization, and a relatively new charter school. The experiences of these schools illustrate the benefits of mining both internal assessments and standardized test results for data to guide curriculum decisions and inform classroom instruction.

Four Stars in the Lone Star State

Evelyn S. Thompson Elementary School is located in a Texas district that has been nationally recognized for improving student achievement over the last decade. The state’s accountability measures, on which No Child Left Behind was modeled, have grown increasingly stringent. Even as the district’s percentage of low-income students has risen, student achievement in the Aldine Independent School District (AISD)—a mid-sized urban district with 66 schools and 56,000 students on the northwest edge of Houston—has kept pace. But it wasn’t always so.

In 1994, the first time the new Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) tests were given to all 4th-, 8th-, and 10th-grade students, half the kids in the district failed. Until then, Aldine thought it had a decent school system; its students often received awards and scholarships and the local press wrote favorably about them. But when the district received an “academically unacceptable” label that year, it got a wake-up call as well. “Our educational philosophy had been all about self-esteem as our key goal,” recalls Superintendent Nadine Kujawa, a Texas native who had worked in the district since the early 1960s and in 1994 was the deputy superintendent of human resources and instruction.

Over the next decade Aldine undertook major structural reforms that emphasized academics and student achievement. “Now,” says Kujawa, “we believe that if students are successful academically, self-esteem will take care of itself.”

The right data, provided at the right time and in the right way, can be a powerful driver for school improvement.

The key to this new emphasis on achievement was the TRIAND data-management system, developed in partnership with a local software vendor to capture, analyze, and share specific student achievement data among administrators, school leaders, teachers, and even parents. Over the last eight years, the district has spent $32 million on the hardware systems necessary to track student demographic and performance data districtwide, and another $2 million on additional computers that allow teachers to access the system; much of this funding has come from the federal E-Rate program, which has allocated more than $10 billion toward Internet infrastructure in K–12 schools and libraries since 1996 (see “World Wide Wonder?” research, Winter 2006).

At Thompson Elementary, set in a quiet working-class neighborhood, this top-down push was welcomed by teachers like Cherie Grogan, a math teacher and self-described “data geek.” For years Grogan has been creating forms in Microsoft Excel to help teachers better understand their students’ annual test results. She is one of the school’s “skills specialists,” four experienced teachers who support classroom teachers in specific subjects, including math, reading, writing, science, and bilingual education. In addition to modeling lessons for teachers and working with small groups of students, the skills specialists also regularly analyze student scores on diagnostic, formative, and standardized tests across classrooms, subjects, and grades. It is a responsibility they have always held and that has consumed an increasing amount of their time over the last decade as the district continues to emphasize the regular use of student assessment results to guide instruction.

This support begins even before the school year does: the week before students arrived last year, Thompson’s skills specialists sat down with teachers to review the prior year’s test scores (known as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, the successor to TAAS) for 3rd and 4th grades (the only grades currently tested at Thompson) in order to identify gaps in skills and knowledge, and to develop preliminary plans for addressing those problems throughout the year.

Once the school year begins there are weekly meetings between the school’s principal, Sara McClain, and the skills specialists to review data and plot strategies for supporting those students and teachers who need help. For example, when reviewing reading scores across the 4th grade, they found that many of the students were struggling with the concept of summarization. In the following weeks, two of the skills specialists with experience in teaching reading went into the 4th-grade classrooms to model additional lessons on summarization and worked separately with small groups of students who still weren’t grasping the skill.

In addition to TAKS scores, the data gathered at Thompson Elementary come from diagnostic tests like the Texas Primary Reading Inventory, which is designed to measure students’ skill levels and needs. As soon as scores from these beginning-of-year diagnostic assessments are available (usually in mid-September), the skills specialists sit down with McClain and a stack of printouts from TRIAND in one of their weekly meetings and assess which of their “kiddos” are struggling to read at grade level. As they flip through the spreadsheets, the skills specialists flag the students having trouble and bring the numbers to life with anecdotes about those students’ work in the classroom. McClain encourages the specialists to follow up with each teacher to share the data and ensure that teachers have created small reading groups based on learning needs, as well as lunchtime or afterschool tutoring for those students still reading at low levels.

Like other schools in Aldine, Thompson Elementary also regularly administers its own tests to measure whether students are mastering the district’s standards as well as the school’s benchmarks. And although grading, analyzing, and discussing interim assessments takes an estimated three to four hours per month, even veteran teachers seem to consider the new responsibilities a help to their teaching, rather than a hindrance. “It’s great to see where kids are performing, where my gaps are, and what I need to do,” says Debra Bingham, a 16-year veteran teacher who now specializes in 3rd-grade reading.

Sara McClain, who has been principal at Thompson for eight years, says that despite some teacher turnover in the early years, as the district’s instructional reforms took hold the remaining teachers came to embrace the new, more rigorous approach. “Teachers tend to come in early and stay late,” she notes. They see the use of data “not as additional but as a part of instruction, their professional responsibility, and their high expectations.”

The increased attention to the data seems to have paid off. Between 1994 and 2002, the percentage of Thompson students passing the state’s math assessment rose from 65 to 98 percent. And even with the more rigorous state standards, the school has maintained a passing rate in the 90s since then. Principal McClain attributes this to a consistent, constant, schoolwide focus on student results. “Previously we were very scattered,” she says. “We needed to increase expectations and get everyone going in the same direction around student achievement.”

A Better View in Chula Vista

Fed up with years of dismal performance from its 1,100 K–6 students (four out of five of them poor), in 1997 administrators at Mae L. Feaster Elementary School in Chula Vista, California, just south of San Diego, decided to partner with members of the community and convert the school into a charter school. They gave management of the rambling block of “portable” and permanent buildings to Edison Schools.

Over the next eight years the reborn Feaster-Edison Charter School showed a steady improvement in student achievement, increasing average scores on the Stanford Achievement Test (or SAT-9) from the 19th to the 34th national percentile between 1998 and 2001 and from 17 percent to 32 percent proficient on English language-arts tests between 2001 and 2005.

A large part of the secret to Feaster-Edison’s success, say the school’s teachers and administrators, is its use of data. Feaster-Edison relies heavily on both standardized test scores and Edison’s own benchmark assessments to inform and adjust instruction throughout the year. Before school starts each year, all the school’s teachers are taught how to work with data as part of a weeklong “teacher academy.” Also before the school year begins, teachers review student assessment results from the prior spring, both by student and by “strand” (groups of standards), on the California Standards Test, the state’s annual standardized test for grades 2 through 11 The analysis is both retrospective, identifying instructional strengths and weaknesses, and prospective. Test scores are reorganized according to new classroom assignments so that teachers can use those data in preparing for the year ahead.

Reviewing student performance on the prior year’s standardized tests can also highlight critical schoolwide issues. “Data start the conversation,” says Principal Erik Latoni, who noted that one priority was to improve English-language development among all students, a decision prompted by data showing lack of improvement, or in some cases a decline, in students’ English language skills. Latoni and his teachers decided that all lead teachers would attend two training programs that year to help them supplement student reading and writing skills with listening and speaking skills. He also asked lead teachers to discuss tactics for addressing the problem with other teachers in their upcoming “house meetings,” daily gatherings in which all teachers within each grade level (or “house”) gather in an empty classroom to discuss curriculum, instruction, and administrative matters. As a result of those meetings, for instance, 3rd-grade teachers created a writing rubric to regularly assess students’ English-language skills and ensure that they are continuing to make progress.

These house meetings are also where teachers collaborate to analyze their students’ results on Edison’s monthly benchmark assessments. Edison uses state standardized assessments to create these tests; each month, students are tested on a sampling of the standards they will be expected to master by the end of the year. At Feaster-Edison, benchmark assessments are administered on laptop computers wheeled into each classroom on a cart and connected wirelessly to Feaster-Edison’s main system, making results available immediately to teachers and administrators. Before meeting with others in their grade, teachers are expected to examine their students’ results and fill out a benchmark analysis form, provided by Edison, which asks what standards are not yet mastered, which students are not proficient in those areas, and what teachers plan to do about it. “You have to give teachers time to analyze data, and link the conclusions back to instruction, so that [using data] isn’t just an activity. There should be a change in instruction,” says Francisco Escobedo, the school’s former principal and now a vice president of achievement for Edison.

In grade-level meetings, teachers compare data across the grade, looking for patterns and opportunities to borrow strategies from one another. The steps they take next vary according to teacher and grade. Fifth-grade lead teacher Joshua White looks at student performance on each “strand” of standards in reading, writing, and math, both within his own class and across the grade. He then takes a highlighter to the printout of results, marking strands on which a majority of the class struggled. In addition to covering the material again and making sure students understand the vocabulary used in those questions, he will often put some of the test items up on an overhead transparency and walk students through techniques for answering them.

Teachers also work together to determine how to cover standards that were missed the first time. For example, in the 3rd grade, all of the teachers use the same math curriculum at the same pace, so they are able to coordinate their reteaching where necessary. At the January benchmark assessment, data showed that many 3rd-grade students missed the test’s two questions on statistics, so 3rd-grade teachers created new lessons on the subject and added them to the February calendar.

Such regular use of student achievement data at Feaster-Edison—and at all Edison schools, since the company’s national office is also reviewing the data—reinforces the sense of accountability for student performance that is shared by teachers, principals, and Edison itself. “You have to see data as helping you be accountable for something that’s really important to you,” says John Chubb, chief academic officer of Edison Schools. “We are responsible for student achievement outcomes and scores. We are literally hired and fired on that basis.”

Pioneering on the East Coast

Elm City College Preparatory School is located near New Haven’s Wooster Square, an Italian neighborhood just a stone’s throw from Yale University. The charter school opened its doors in the fall of 2004, with an elementary and a middle school crammed into a small building that had housed a Catholic school. The school is part of Achievement First, a nonprofit charter school management system founded in 2003 by two University of North Carolina graduates (Class of 1994), Doug McCurry and Dacia Toll. McCurry and Toll wanted to replicate the success of Amistad Academy, a high-performing charter middle school they opened in New Haven in 1999. Achievement First now runs 10 schools, serving nearly 1,700 students; five are in New Haven and five in New York City.

It was at Amistad that cofounder McCurry, who was also a teacher at the school, began to develop interim assessments to track his students’ progress in math over the course of the year. “As a charter school, we were accountable for results, but there was confusion about whether we were getting there,” says McCurry. Using the Connecticut state standards and previously released test items from the state’s standardized test, the Connecticut Mastery Test, McCurry worked backward to develop a scope and sequence for the curriculum, as well as cumulative assessments that would be administered every six weeks.

Today, teachers at all Achievement First schools use a consistent scope and sequence of instruction, and progress is measured using interim assessments, modeled on the ones McCurry developed, to inform ongoing instruction in reading, writing, and math. Principals and Achievement First staff look at these and other student data to make initial plans, allocate resources, and make instructional decisions throughout the year. As with many other successful data-driven schools, at Elm City the work begins before school starts, when teachers and principals—both Dale Chu, who heads up the elementary grades, and Marc Michaelson, who oversees the middle school—use a variety of diagnostic tests to understand the ability and achievement levels of their incoming students.

So far, the Connecticut Mastery Test has been of limited use to Elm City because scores arrive after the school year is in full swing. Though the test is being revamped, Elm City is not convinced that standardized tests will ever add much value at the classroom level.

“Our number-one data point for driving instruction is the interim assessment,” says middle-school principal Michaelson. These assessments are given manually, with paper and pencil, mirroring the testing conditions in which students take the state test, and hand-scored by teachers. Teachers analyze their own class results by completing a “reflection form,” similar to Edison’s benchmark analysis form, that requires them to list the questions and standards that were not mastered, the names of students who missed each question, and how they plan to work with those students to address those areas. The cost of these interim assessments to Achievement First is not insignificant: McCurry estimates that each one costs $500 to $1,250 to develop. With 12 separate assessments needed for each grade—6 for math and 6 for reading—and sometimes additional tests in subjects such as writing and grammar, the school could easily spend $20,000 for a single grade’s tests; fortunately, each assessment can be used in all Achievement First schools in a given state.

Administering, grading, and analyzing these assessments is also time-consuming, especially as the cumulative assessments get longer over the course of the year, covering all material taught to date. Michaelson estimates that the process of administering the test to a class, hand-grading each one, analyzing the class results, and discussing them with him takes each teacher anywhere from three hours for the reading assessment in the early part of the year to seven hours for math near the end of the year. For teachers, though, the value of this regular, specific data analysis seems to outweigh the hassle. “I am okay with the time it takes to grade and analyze the data because it’s ultimately for my kids’ benefit and mine as a teacher,” says Seisha Keith, who teaches 6th-grade reading and writing.

Elm City has now created a data-collection culture that affects all aspects of the school, including how teachers are recruited, prepared, and supported. “Teachers have to be data-driven to get in the door,” says Michaelson, who looks for evidence that prospective teachers have a quantifiable history of student achievement gains and are able to provide thoughtful explanations of how they have helped students improve. All new Achievement First teachers receive training on how to use interim assessments, while all new principals learn about how to analyze assessment results and have effective one-on-one conversations with teachers about the data.

The evidence so far suggests that Elm City is working for students. In its first year, 2004–05, the percentage of kindergarten and 1st-grade students reading at or above grade level increased from 26 to 96 percent; in the same period, the percentage of 5th graders reading at or above grade level increased from 18 to 55 percent. What’s more, if the experience of Amistad Academy is any indication of Achievement First’s potential here, then Elm City’s improvement is likely to continue. Students in the class of 2004 at Amistad Academy went from 38 percent mastery in reading in 6th grade to 81 percent mastery in 8th grade. Their peers in New Haven public schools during this same period climbed slightly, from 25 percent mastery in 6th grade to 31 percent mastery in 8th grade. In math, Amistad students went from 35 percent mastery in 6th grade to 76 percent mastery in 8th grade, while their New Haven peers’ performance declined from 24 percent mastery in 6th grade to only 19 percent mastery in 8th grade.

Lessons Learned

As the experiences of these three schools make clear, the use of data can help teachers and leaders stay focused on student achievement. These schools have all managed to achieve impressive results by using data on student performance in subjects like reading, math, and science, and yet all still manage to deliver a well-rounded curriculum that includes art, music, and physical education. They also discovered that not all data are the same, that data collection and analysis are only tools, and that the tools must be properly used to be effective.

Results from annual standardized tests can be useful for accountability purposes, but student progress must be measured on a far more frequent basis if the data are being used to inform instruction and improve achievement. To be useful in this way, interim assessments must be tied to clear standards. Another lesson is that ample time must be taken to analyze the implications of student assessment results, to plan for how instruction should be modified accordingly, and to act on those conclusions; otherwise, the data become more information that gathers dust on the shelf. Data should launch a conversation about what’s working, what’s not, and what will be done differently as a result. Administrators and principals must make explicit the time commitment necessary for capturing, analyzing, and acting on data, and support the work by scheduling time and allocating resources for it. In Aldine, district officials are looking at ways to build time for reteaching into the school year, based on feedback from teachers.

The results shown by these schools, however preliminary, were not achieved overnight. They are the product of steady and open analysis of student and school performance over many years. All of these schools have become collaborative, transparent communities in which information is shared freely and regularly as a means of focusing the entire school on improving instruction and increasing student achievement. Some, like Aldine and Feaster-Edison, have found that some teachers embrace these practices readily and that those who do not choose to work in other schools. Elm City, meanwhile, recruits teachers who are comfortable using data, so they are committed to this approach from the beginning.

Despite the progress made by these and other schools, there are still barriers to more widespread adoption of these practices. For example, the time and effort that teachers and administrators must spend on manual processes should be addressed by more streamlined technology systems. Technology could make a powerful difference by administering tests, automating their grading, and displaying data—to district leaders, principals, teachers, and students—in a timely way  that makes strengths and weaknesses clear and next steps more obvious. The right data, provided at the right time and in the right way, can be a powerful driver for school improvement.

Julie Landry Petersen is communications manager at NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm based in San Francisco, California.

Democrat Tim Kaine, the current governor of Virginia, campaigned on a platform that included universal pre-K education. In Hartford, Connecticut, Mayor Eddie Perez established an Office for Young Children within his cabinet. At the federal level, perhaps the most prominent early-childhood initiative that has come from the Bush administration is “Early Reading First,” a national effort to deliver effective reading instruction to young children. Providing early learning experiences to children has found a place on political agendas nationwide. Why? Increasingly, early childhood education is viewed as a point of leverage for addressing low levels of, and gaps in, K–12 achievement.

What do we know about the quality of existing early-childhood programs? What does the research tell us about designing public policies to improve outcomes for children? Two recent large-scale studies of the early education system provide a contemporary perspective: the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD) and the National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL) Multi-State Pre-K study.

The Research The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD) collected detailed information on achievement, social development, family experiences, child-care quality, and schooling for roughly 1,300 children at regular intervals from birth on, yielding data that have resulted in numerous influential papers on child care and family background effects on early achievement and social adjustment. The National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL) work involved assessments of 750 pre-K classrooms and 2,500 children in 11 different states, with a focus on children’s achievement and social competence in pre-K with follow-ups to 1st grade. (The NCEDL sample represents 80 percent of pre-K programs serving 4-year-olds in the United States.) Both studies relied on direct, live observations in child care, preschool, and the early grades using standardized, objective measurements that provide a window on classroom settings and teachers in more than half the 50 states. The statistical meth ods employed to analyze these data are among the more sophisticated quasi-experimental approaches to isolating cause and effect in nonexperimental data. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), a study of a nationally representative sample of children in the United States, also provides insight into variations in achievement among children as they go through school. The findings described here are drawn from published, peer-reviewed empirical papers.

What We Know

1. Prior to entering kindergarten, American children spend time in a wide assortment of settings. Enrollment of 3- and 4-year-olds in early education programs now approaches 70 percent of that population and is growing annually. The disparities in educational opportunity before kindergarten are dramatic and easily explain many of the achievement gaps seen later on.

2. Despite extensive participation, too few of the students who are in the greatest need of high-quality early education experiences receive them, and the few who do are unlikely to receive them consistently once they enter the K–12 system.

3. Demand for early childhood education has grown far faster than the system’s capacity to staff expanding programs. Universal pre-K programs for 4-year-olds will require at least 200,000 teachers, with estimates of 50,000 additional teachers needed by 2020. If high-quality services are to be provided, many more early-childhood educators need to be attracted into the profession and trained appropriately.

4. Rapid enrollment growth is intensifying the need for evidence-based training and ongoing support of early childhood educators. The approach that appears most promising provides teachers with extensive background in child development and focused, regular, individualized feedback about their classroom interactions with children.

5. Nearly every single piece of legislation, policy, or program design requirement involving early education and child care states that such programs must be of high quality. But the measures of quality are often limited to program components; they are seldom direct assessments of children’s instructional and social experiences in classrooms. Estimates of “quality” that rely on these proxies may not correspond to the experiences that produce social and academic skill development.

How Can We Best Measure Quality in the Early Education Classroom?

The evidence is quite clear that it is the teacher’s implementation of a curriculum, through both social and instructional interactions with children, that produces effects on student learning. Classroom observations thus provide the most valid information on the educational experiences of young children. Structural indicators, such as the curriculum being used, teacher credentials, and other program factors, are only proxies for the instructional and social interactions children have with teachers in classrooms. Yet many states and localities measure program “quality” only in terms of proxies—the credentials of teachers, the size and spaciousness of the facilities, the amount of learning material available, and the length of the preschool day. Except for the last characteristic, these “quality indicators” do not measure what programs offer young children that is educationally important. Still, these indicators often drive program design and policy.

Even the value of experimental studies of program quality can be limited, especially when going to “scale.” For example, experimental work can identify effective approaches to teaching literacy for the relatively small group of teachers who participate in such studies. Yet when these approaches are disseminated to large groups of preschool teachers through districtwide training or college courses, such approaches typically have a much-reduced effect on outcomes, often because the quality of implementation is low. In short, teachers’ implementation of instruction through their interactions with children is a critical and typically underemphasized aspect of early childhood program quality. Judging accurately the quality of implementation requires observing what is happening in classrooms.

What Does a High-Quality Early-Childhood Education Classroom Look Like?

The best early childhood teachers are opportunists—they know child development and exploit children’s interests and their interactions with them to promote developmental change—some of which may involve structured lessons and much of which may not. To be effective, teachers of young children must strategically weave instruction into activities that give children choices to explore and play. Several aspects of teachers’ interactive behaviors appear to uniquely predict gains in young children’s achievement:

• explicit instruction in certain key skills

• sensitive and emotionally warm interactions

• responsive feedback

• verbal engagement/stimulation

• a classroom environment that is not overly structured or regimented.

My colleagues and I examined whether children at risk of low achievement in the early grades would benefit from being exposed to high levels of observed instructional and emotional support from teachers. We studied the effects on two groups of at-risk children: those whose mothers had less than a four-year college degree and those who had displayed significant behavioral, social, and/or academic problems. Both groups were, on average, behind their peers at age 4 and further behind by 1st grade. When the children at risk were placed in high-quality classrooms, these gaps were eliminated: children from low-education households achieved at the same level as those whose mothers had a college degree, and children displaying prior problem behavior showed achievement and adjustment levels identical to children who had no history of problems. At-risk children who did not receive these supports did not show these gains.

The results are consistent with other studies that show a substantial return (up to 50 percent of a standard deviation on standardized achievement tests) to achievement from observed classroom quality, with greater effects often accruing to children with higher levels of risk and disadvantage. (The size of the well-known racial gap in test-score performance is between one-half and one standard deviation.) Experimental studies, although few and involving small numbers of children, show similar effects. In fact, findings are almost uniform in demonstrating significant and meaningful benefits for enrollment in early education settings in which teacher-child interactions are supportive, instructive, and stimulating. These “effects” studies, however, do not provide information on the prevalence and distribution of supportive, “gap closing” classrooms within the system of early education and care, or how to produce gap-closing settings.

How Good Is the System We Have?

Most children in pre-K, kindergarten, and grade 1 classrooms are exposed to quite low levels of instructional support and only moderate levels of social and emotional supports—levels that are not as high as those in the gap-closing, effective classrooms described above. The quality of instructional interactions, particularly the dimensions that appear to matter most for children’s achievement, is particularly poor (see Figure 1).

In nearly every study that includes a large number of classrooms, there is also wide variability in the opportunities that contribute to improved achievement. Observations of child-care settings and pre-K, kindergarten, and 1st-grade classrooms show that some children spend most of their time engaged in productive instructional activities with caring and responsive adults who consistently provide feedback, challenges to think, and social supports. Other children, even in the same program or grade, spend most of their time passively sitting around, having few if any interactions with an adult, watching the teacher deal with behavior problems, exposed to only boring and rote instructional activities. While children in some classrooms are exposed to few, if any, literacy-focused activities, youngsters in other classrooms receive more than an hour of exposure to literacy-related activities, including narrative storytelling, practice with letters, rhyming games, and listening. In some cases, even in classrooms right next to one another that share the same materials and curriculum, the exposure of children to high-quality learning and social supports is so dramatically different that one might conclude the difference was planned.

Among the state-funded pre-K classrooms in the NCEDL study, we found that only about 25 percent of classrooms serving 4-year-olds provided students with the high levels of emotional and instructional support that are needed. No less troubling is the equally strong evidence that preschoolers lucky enough to have such support in pre-K are not likely to be enrolled in similarly high-quality classrooms in kindergarten or 1st grade. In those grades as well, only about one-quarter of classrooms are providing the instructional and emotional nurturing that young children require. Unfortunately, exposure to gap-closing classroom quality, although highly desirable from nearly every perspective imaginable, is not a regular feature of early schooling and even less likely for children in poverty. In other words, the odds are stacked against children getting the kind of early education experiences that close gaps. This is not to say that early education does not work—evaluations of universal pre-K in Oklahoma, for example, show that enrollment produced gains for children’s achievement. The challenge is determining how to strengthen and improve the early childhood education system as it expands.

Training the Teachers

The uneven distribution of high-quality early education classrooms in the United States reflects several factors. First, teaching young children is often difficult and uniquely challenging. Second, teaching in early education programs that target children who live below the poverty line can be even more challenging, especially if the class includes many youngsters who need extra support. Teachers in these programs may require even more assistance than is generally assumed. Third, the system of early education operates on a shoestring of support: it is for the most part less well funded than K–12, with classrooms housed in trailers, basements, or makeshift locations with fewer resources. Finally, early childhood teachers describe themselves as alienated from and lacking the supports available in K–12 This is a fragile and vulnerable system that is increasingly being asked to ameliorate social, economic, and educational disparities.

Given the early education system in place, what can be done to make sure those children who most need high-quality experiences will have them? An obvious place to look for leverage is in the preparation teachers receive. Unlike the K–12 system, in which the supply chain for teachers is regulated by a single state entity, training of the early education and child-care workforce is widely distributed and loosely regulated. Ninety-five percent of the workforce in formal preschool and early education programs come from four-year and two-year early childhood training programs or are certified teachers from the K–12 system. Much less is known about the training and skills of adults who staff family-based child care and informal care. In short, there is no easily identifiable and easily regulated pipeline for training the early education workforce, a clear challenge for policymakers.

Further, as with program quality, the standard measures of teacher quality (degrees, experience) are not reliable proxies for what teachers do in the classroom. So policies that mandate the accumulation of course credits, advancing in terms of degree status (e.g., from A.A. to B.A.), or attending workshops, by themselves are not likely to produce teachers with high-quality classroom skills or necessarily contribute to children’s achievement. In fact, the NCEDL 11-state pre-K study demonstrated that even in state-sponsored pre-K programs with credentialed teachers with bachelor’s degrees (many of which are located in school buildings), variation in observed curriculum implementation and quality of teaching was considerable. Similar conditions prevail in K–12. Even if the entire early education workforce had four-year degrees, classroom quality would remain uneven.

What we do know is that pre-K teachers’ training in child development, experience in working with young children, and support systems focused on their instructional behaviors and classroom management do matter—for the quality of both of teachers’ social interactions with children and their implementation of curricula. Knowledge of child development and application of that knowledge in preschool settings are emphasized as much in two-year training programs as in four-year programs, if not more. Thus, when teacher training focuses on knowledge and skills involved in interacting with young children, it will likely have more beneficial consequences than simply requiring teachers to add a course here or there.

Regardless of how they get into the classroom, or whether they meet state certification, teachers in early education programs will continue to require training and support if these programs are to live up to their promise. Thoughtful and effective policies for developing a professional workforce will have to include a mix of incentives for pre-K teachers that may be different from those designed for teachers in K–12; provide training that is focused on classroom practices and the specific challenges of teaching young children; and improve the alignment of early childhood education with K–12.

The Challenges Ahead

Findings about the nature and quality of children’s experiences in early education settings should spark an interest in raising the quality of classroom supports broadly available to young children, particularly in settings funded with public dollars. One option is to focus on structural features of schools and classrooms, such as teacher education and certification, class size, and curriculum, and enact policies to ensure that these proxies for quality are uniformly in place. The available data do not provide compelling support for this strategy, although it should not necessarily be discarded altogether. Some core components of the infrastructure may be essential to a system of educational programming that is both accountable and linked to K–12.

Another option is to focus on what teachers do in classrooms and find direct ways to measure and improve the instructional and social interactions teachers have with children. A first step in that direction would be to standardize descriptions of teacher-student interactions. A second step would be to design more-effective professional development and training systems for teachers, a project that could also benefit K–12. Such systems, if organized around direct assessments of teacher and classroom quality, based on strong and valid metrics and tied to new or existing incentive systems, could be a cost-effective means of producing real change for teachers and children.

Recent work suggests that direct training methods, such as mentoring and coaching and constructive feedback based on observation of teachers, can improve early education practice and children’s performance. My colleagues and I are developing technologies for conducting classroom observation at scale—in many hundreds of classrooms. This research involves measurement of settings to provide data that can support decisionmaking. For example, we find that repeated observations of the same teacher are highly consistent from day to day and hour to hour. Thus we suspect any given classroom and teacher may only need to be observed for a few hours to achieve a reliable description of practice that could serve as the basis for a professional development plan. We are also experimenting with alternatives, such as remote observation, that may keep costs down while ensuring a high degree of reliability in measurement. It may soon be feasible to observe teachers and classrooms on an annual basis using an instrument that assesses the dimensions of classroom experience that contribute to child achievement. Because these measurements are predictive, we can create video-based models of “high-quality practices.” These can serve as the basis for courses, coaching, and mentorship of teachers within systems of professional development designed specifically to improve teachers’ interactions with children.

Along with observing classrooms and measuring social and instructional interactions, it is essential to design and test models for improving teachers’ provisions of opportunities to learn. My colleagues and I plan to conduct a program of experimental research through the new National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education. Although limited at present, such efforts can systematically build knowledge of the factors that contribute to teachers’ skills in providing strong instructional and emotional support in the classroom. Daunting challenges remain, but the science of early education holds considerable promise for further development and scaling up of effective approaches for training and supporting the teachers of our youngest, and often most vulnerable, citizens.

Robert C. Pianta is professor of education at the Curry School of Education and director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, the University of Virginia.

The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001 brought new urgency to the task of turning around low-performing schools. Under the law, states must evaluate schools according to the standard of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Schools that do not meet AYP are identified as needing improvement and subject to a series of escalating interventions. These interventions begin with school choice and supplemental tutoring for students in the low-performing school. They culminate in possible closure, state takeover, privatization, or conversion to a charter school—controversial consequences highlighted in newspaper articles about the law.

While many schools have been identified as needing improvement under NCLB, only a small percentage have failed to make progress for long enough—six years—to be subject to restructuring, the most serious consequence for schools under the law (see Figure 1). In the 2005–06 school year—the fourth year since passage of NCLB—there were some 1,750 schools in 42 states in NCLB restructuring. That number is expected to grow dramatically over the next few years. As schools move along the school improvement timeline and standards rise toward the goal of having all students proficient, states and school districts face questions about how aggressively to act when schools persistently fail to perform.

The Roots of NCLB

The No Child Left Behind Act was not the first federal legislation that sought to catalyze change in chronically low-performing schools. It builds on school improvement provisions in its predecessor, the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 (IASA), which first required states and school districts to identify schools in need of school improvement. Schools that continued to perform poorly were identified for corrective action, a more aggressive intervention. Later Clinton initiatives targeted federal resources to improve low-performing schools.

IASA’s school improvement measures proved disappointing to many reformers. By 2001, it was increasingly clear that many schools were stagnating on school improvement and corrective action lists with little change. In fact, some did not even know they were on the lists at all.

The authors of the No Child Left Behind Act wanted to force districts and states to take more aggressive steps to improve low-performing schools. They added a third layer of consequences—restructuring—for schools that continue to perform poorly even after several years of school improvement and corrective action. After a school fails to make AYP for five consecutive years, it must develop a restructuring plan, which goes into action if the school fails to make AYP for a sixth consecutive year. NCLB provides several options for schools in restructuring:

• Close and reopen as a charter school

• Replace relevant school staff

• Turn the school’s governance over to the state

• Contract with a private management company to operate the school

• Any other major restructuring of the school’s governance designed to produce major reform.

The Early Record

Because it takes five years for a school to get to restructuring, few schools faced this consequence in the years immediately following NCLB’s passage. Many states that had established accountability systems under IASA already had schools in improvement or correction when NCLB passed. Some of these schools have since become subject to restructuring. California and Michigan, for example, have been dealing with school restructuring under NCLB for multiple years.

Results have varied widely. The Center for Education Policy has closely studied the restructuring efforts in Michigan and California. Of 133 Michigan schools in restructuring in 2004–05, 113 were able to make AYP that school year. Of these, 26 made AYP for a second consecutive year, moving out of restructuring and resetting the clock for school improvement. While these results seem impressive, they must be taken with a substantial grain of salt. Michigan made changes to its accountability plan that year, which made it easier for schools to make AYP. California, by contrast, increased its AYP targets for the 2005–06 school year. The number of California schools in restructuring grew from 271 in the 2004–05 school year to 404 in 2005–06

Taking the Easy Way Out?

During the 2004–05 school year, 13 states had schools in restructuring: Alabama, California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Instead of takeovers, closures, and other dire options mentioned in press coverage of the law, most states and school districts have chosen less aggressive interventions.

According to analyses by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) and the Center for Education Policy, the most popular restructuring option chosen by schools, across all these states, was “any other major restructuring.” The only other option taken by a significant number of schools was to replace or remove staff, which most schools did in a limited way—in many cases simply replacing the principal—rather than undertaking the broader staff reconstitution NCLB suggests. The most drastic restructuring options—conversion to a charter school, state takeover, or contracting with a private management company to operate the school—were used by few schools, and not at all in many states.

It is not surprising that many schools chose to develop their own options rather than select from the restructuring options NCLB offers. Some of these are quite controversial and potentially painful for schools and their employees. Many of the activities undertaken by schools under the guise of “other major restructuring,” however, seem far less aggressive than what the law’s authors probably had in mind (see Figure 2). The state of Michigan allows schools to meet NCLB’s restructuring requirements by hiring a state-trained “coach” to advise the school’s staff and implement improvement plans. While this approach seems to help some Michigan schools, it hardly makes major changes to a school’s governance or carries serious consequences for its employees. In fact, the coaching strategy sounds strikingly similar to the less intrusive options offered to schools in the corrective action stage that precedes restructuring. A number of schools appear to have responded with whole-school reform models or a new curriculum—also options for schools in corrective action. An ECS report notes in some cases that “corrective measures end up serving as the restructuring plan.”

For example, two chronically low-performing K–5 elementary schools in Harrison, Michigan, were targeted for NCLB restructuring. The district’s response was to reconfigure the grades. One school now serves all the district’s kindergarten and 1st graders, and the other is divided into two “schools within a school” that serve students in grades 2–3 and 4–5. The district created grade-level teacher teams in each school and hired a coach to provide professional development to teachers. It appointed a governance committee of community members and outside educators to advise the principal.

Willow Run Middle School, also in Michigan, responded to the restructuring mandate by moving to a new building, replacing the principal and some staff, and implementing a comprehensive school-reform model.

Clearly many school and district leaders would rather not undertake governance changes that could spark controversy or have negative consequences for them. But in truth, these are not always real options. States including California, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, and Nebraska have ruled out state takeovers for schools in restructuring, because either state law does not permit it or the state department of education lacks the capacity to manage a significant number of schools. Charter conversion is not an option in the 11 states that lack charter laws, nor is it a practical possibility for more than a few schools in the several states with caps on the number of charters available (see “The Cure,” what next, Fall 2006).

Political realities can also take restructuring options off the table. In spring 2006, Maryland state superintendent of public instruction Nancy Grasmick sought to take over 11 chronically low-performing Baltimore schools that were subject to restructuring and convert them to charters or contract their management with private companies. Maryland would have been the first state in the country to take over schools for NCLB restructuring, but Grasmick’s efforts met with intense political opposition from Baltimore’s mayor and other political leaders, and the state legislature passed a bill blocking the takeover. The response surprised state board of education member David Tufaro: “We did not envision the level of hostility to the point of obscuring the facts about the abysmal state of these 11 schools.”

 

Dramatic Intervention Isn’t Always the Best Course

Are state, district, and school-level policymakers and educators generally avoiding the hard steps needed to improve chronically low-performing schools? Certainly, the history of school accountability and efforts to improve low-performing schools under IASA would justify such suspicions, and some examples of what schools are doing in response to NCLB restructuring sound very feeble.

But there are some legitimate reasons for schools to stop short of NCLB’s more punitive restructuring options. For some schools, less aggressive restructuring steps may be appropriate and may improve student achievement. Some schools that fail to make AYP for years are not performing poorly across the board. NCLB holds schools accountable for performance of subgroups—major racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, and English-language learners. Interventions targeting parts of the education program may be more appropriate than full-scale restructuring. In addition, schools are in corrective action for only a year before they must begin planning for restructuring. Continuing corrective action reforms may be better than replacing them with another set of reforms so quickly.

Nor does converting a school to a charter guarantee better performance. Overall, charter school performance is undercut, nationally and in many states, by a subset of low-performing charters that face the threat of NCLB restructuring themselves. Funding inequities for charter schools that persist in many states also mean that schools may have fewer resources after converting to charter status than before—hardly a circumstance conducive to improvement. Some national charter-school leaders fear that school districts may view charter conversion as an easy way to remove low-performing schools from their books without taking the responsibility to actually improve them. Such conversions could lower average charter-school test scores and become a black eye for the charter movement.

The probability of this threat materializing is decidedly slim, as schools and districts hardly seem eager to choose charter conversion. Michigan has a robust charter sector and 5 percent of its students in charters, but not a single Michigan school in restructuring has converted to a charter. Only 2 percent of the 271 California schools in restructuring have done so. Colorado passed much-noted legislation requiring any school that receives three consecutive “unsatisfactory” ratings under the state accountability system to convert to a charter. The criteria for schools to receive an “unsatisfactory” rating are different from AYP, so schools in restructuring are not necessarily rated “unsatisfactory.” The charter conversion option was not applied to any of the schools that the state had in restructuring under NCLB in 2004–05 Denver’s Cole Middle School reopened as a charter in fall 2005, too recently to judge the results.

So far, no states have taken over schools as part of NCLB restructuring, and the number of charter conversions or privatizations is still quite small. Separate from NCLB, however, many states and cities have undertaken high-profile and often controversial initiatives to take over, reconstitute, or turn around low-performing schools. The record of these efforts is decidedly mixed and hardly encouraging. In a 2003 study for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Ronald C. Brady surveyed school turnaround efforts implemented by states and districts and did not find any intervention approaches with success rates of more than 50 percent. Further, the political drama that surrounds takeovers, privatization, and similar efforts can itself become an obstacle to improving student achievement.

There is an odd tension running through many of NCLB’s accountability provisions between creating serious consequences that hold educators and schools accountable and the law’s goal of improving student achievement. These goals are not always aligned. Clearly, there are circumstances in which reconstitution or new governance will be essential to extricate a school mired in dysfunction and allow its employees to work effectively to improve student learning. But when, for example, a school is failing to make AYP only for some subgroups, targeted interventions may serve children’s interests better than closing or reconstituting the school. State and local leaders need some flexibility to make the right choice. Instead of focusing on the severity of the strategies applied to schools in restructuring, a more significant question is whether they are aligned with the areas in which the school needs to improve and implemented well.

Looking Ahead

As the number of schools subject to restructuring increases, so will pressures on states and school districts to look for easy ways out. All of the restructuring options NCLB offers can be implemented in ways that circumvent the law’s intent. Whether countervailing forces—federal pressure, political pressure from organized parent groups, or conscientious officials committed to the law’s goals—are strong enough to force states and districts to implement meaningful turnaround efforts remains to be seen, but the evidence so far is not encouraging.

There are also important questions about NCLB itself and the limits of federal legislation to compel states and school districts to undertake significant reforms. Under NCLB, school improvement and corrective action provisions were strengthened, and restructuring provisions added, to compel states, districts, and schools to intensify efforts to turn around low-performing schools. This has clearly been successful on some counts—at least schools now know if they are on school improvement or corrective action lists.

But is the law compelling states and districts to fundamentally overhaul chronically failing schools? That’s unclear. The quality of schools in restructuring varies greatly. The same flexibility that allows states and school districts to use less-punitive restructuring approaches when they are appropriate could also allow them to avoid applying tough consequences to schools that really do merit them. Is it even possible for federal policies to compel state and local officials to make controversial and painful reforms? Are there new levers with which federal officials can better encourage states and districts to make difficult choices? Can NCLB’s accountability mechanisms be made more precise, so that they would compel significant reconstitution in chronically dysfunctional schools without catching in the net schools that, while in need of improvement, do not require dramatic reconstitution? Or will NCLB’s restructuring provisions provide another example of the futility of intergovernmental accountability? These questions should be at the heart of debate over NCLB’s upcoming reauthorization, and their importance will only intensify as the number of schools in restructuring grows in the coming years.

Sara Mead is senior policy analyst with Education Sector.

The restructuring provisions in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are a Rorschach test for charter supporters. To the Market Optimists, the six brief paragraphs of NCLB Section 1116 look like the greatest growth opportunity ever. “Reopening the school as a public charter school” is Option #1 on the list of NCLB’s restructuring alternatives. All those dysfunctional schools, “needing improvement” for years, all prior remedies exhausted—where else would parents turn but to charter schools?

The Glass-Half-Empty crowd has worried deeply, fearing that under the guise of restructuring, district officials would take their worst-performing schools and slap a charter label on them. Think about it: You’re a superintendent with some pretty good schools and a dozen lousy ones. Invoke NCLB, charter them out, and in one fell swoop you have moved the bottom feeders from the district column to the charter column. Your district scores skyrocket, and all those that failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) 0.. well, you know, they’re charter schools.

A third faction, let’s call them the Prudent Expansionists, have thought it just dandy that NCLB would invite bad schools to close and reopen as good ones, but doubt that the charter sector has the capacity to restructure vast swaths of failing public schools. Despite the increasingly impressive performance of many charter schools nationally and some stunning charter-driven turnarounds at Sacramento High in California and other sites, the Prudent Expansionists doubt that charter folks know any more than traditional educators do about turning around failing schools en masse.

As luck would have it, these theories have not gotten much of a test drive in the past five years. The vast flowering of NCLB charters is still sitting there in the subjunctive case. With so many schools in need of improvement and so many parents demanding more public school options, how is this possible?

A Lesson in Restructuring: Try Something Different Margaret Fortune gained renown as founding superintendent of St. Hope Public Schools, a California charter district that emerged from the closure of Sacramento High School. When she became director of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Initiative to Turn Around Failing Schools, the first thing she did was to look at how the state had traditionally dealt with failing schools. California’s state education department had a long-standing program called Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools. What did she find? Over the course of eight years, the department had used the same strategy for every turnaround attempt: send in more resources and a state technical-assistance team. Fortune understood that a big part of her job was to get local and state officials to try something—anything—different.

One explanation is that states have driven some statistical Mack trucks through NCLB’s precise-sounding text. Schools don’t qualify for mandatory restructuring until they fail to make AYP, the state-determined proficiency target, for five consecutive years. All schools must reach the 100 percent proficiency mark by 2014, but can do so by an assortment of trajectories. Most states chose a very long takeoff, with the bar staying low for the first six or eight years, followed by a sharp upward thrust, with breathtaking gains required after that. (Some cynics thought the timetables were designed to defer the day of reckoning until current officeholders had retired, or until the law itself was gutted or repealed.) In any case, state accountability plans have delayed any spike in NCLB-driven restructuring that might have generated demand for charters.

… And the Last Shall Be First

Maybe there’s some naiveté in the act as well. NCLB made the bold assumption that states and districts would voluntarily turn over the reins to charter operators. The authors of the legislation must have thought, with so many sticks beating on the backs of schools (test-disaster headlines, parents leaving in droves), the carrot of fundamental change would be irresistible. And it might have been—if it weren’t for Option #5

Scroll down, past all those tough, unrelenting sanctions, and Option #5 says, Whew! You can also try “Any other major restructuring of the school’s governance arrangement that makes fundamental reforms.”

Game over. As researcher Rebecca Dibiase reported in a September 2005 review for the Education Commission of the States, “Most school plans call for activities that fall under ‘any other major restructuring of the school’s governance arrangement,’ or Option #5 in the legislation…. This option covers an array of activities, such as modifying curriculum, altering the school’s management structure or choosing a school reform model.”

Sure, the reforms must be “fundamental,” but once any other appears, you know that “fundamental” will start to include things like creating a parent advisory committee or freshening the place up with a really nice coat of paint.

Paths of Least Resistance

So far, states are enthusiastically ignoring the opportunity for fundamental reform. According to two recent reports by the U.S. Department of Education, the early returns on NCLB restructuring are none too promising. A study of Title I accountability shows that as of 2004, only 1 of 12 states with Title I schools identified for restructuring reopened a school as a public charter: 1 turned over operations to the state, 2 states replaced school staff, and 8 took no action.

A separate report on implementation of Title I up to 2005 found similarly slim effect, with by far the most common “restructuring” action being hiring a new principal. Indeed, some 24 percent of the 1,065 Title I schools identified for restructuring replaced the principal. (Hold the applause. Researchers noted that “this may partly reflect normal principal turnover….”)

Leaders in only one state have stepped boldly forward and included chartering among sanctions for low-performing schools. Maryland’s state superintendent of schools, Nancy Grasmick, proposed the takeover of 11 Baltimore schools, all of which had sat on the state’s watch list for at least a decade. Some would have been chartered; others would have been operated by a third party with charterlike autonomy. The proposal kicked up howls of protest from Baltimore politicos, who wrapped themselves in the mantle of local control. By far the best commentary on this spectacle was provided by my colleague at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Andy Smarick, in a biting April 2006 Baltimore Sun op-ed: “If the city’s leadership has the right answers, it has the opportunity to prove it by turning around its 43 other failing schools.”

Traditional districts may have even less incentive than states to embrace chartering. The numbers suggest that chartering is an unwelcome responsibility for many. According to a Thomas B. Fordham Institute study, roughly 90 percent of authorizers are districts, but districts oversee only 52 percent of charter schools. Most do one or two charters and never develop the skills and attitudes of first-rate authorizers.

Exceptions to the Rule

There are some important exceptions. Chicago Public Schools has authorized a cluster of remarkably high-performing charter schools. Through its Renaissance 2010 program, the city is methodically closing its lowest-performing schools and then reopening them as charters, contract schools, or Performance Schools, which are highly autonomous but run by the district. The two processes—close and reopen—are quite separate. To ensure a supply of new school options, the city conducts an RFP process rather than trying to convert existing public schools.

Other good examples of using the charter option for district-wide sponsored restructuring are regrettably scarce. Under the leadership of former superintendent Alan Bersin (now California’s secretary of education), San Diego witnessed a real blood-’n’-guts struggle for three schools to reopen as charters after they were among eight identified for NCLB restructuring. The effort drew fierce opposition; the next school-board election produced an anti-charter majority and cost Bersin his job. Ironically, it was the school communities themselves—parents and kids—who fought hardest to get the three charter petitions approved, and in the end the new school board relented.

Sadly, the best current illustration of all-out charter-led restucturing has little to do with NCLB. The New Orleans school system was closed, in toto overnight, by Hurricane Katrina. Local and state leaders, prompted by generous federal funding, used the charter law and gubernatorial orders to start reopening schools with dramatically higher standards for teacher hiring, freedom from the famously dysfunctional central office, and a determination to end the ugly local tradition of have/have-not public schools.

It’s important to note that in these cases, we’re not talking about charter “conversion.” In fact, that term doesn’t appear in NCLB.

This is more than semantics. In a charter conversion, the reform impetus is internal to the school community. A majority (or supermajority) of teachers and/or parents, fed up with low achievement and system hassles, files a petition for a charter conversion. The charter is granted, and this same group, unshackled, gets to try all sorts of innovations. But when no one inside the building is asking for a change, and when the insiders may in fact be the problem, the option to reopen as a charter is something else altogether: the kids and parents stay, but a new team, with wholly new assumptions, expectations, and powers, takes command.

State laws often bog charter conversions down with excess baggage, such as keeping the school under the district’s collective bargaining agreement, or requiring that it have a higher percentage of certified teachers than other charters. If the point of restructuring is a fresh start, a blank slate, a New Deal—well, that ain’t it.

Making the Case for Charters

It’s a mathematical certainty that in the next year or two, massive numbers of schools will start populating the Year Five column. Now is the time to help district and state leaders understand why a charter-based new-schools policy is a sound response to NCLB sanctions.

Good conceptual groundwork has already been laid by Ted Kolderie, Joe Graba, and their colleagues at Education/Evolving, who argue convincingly that “we can’t get the schools we need just by changing the schools we have.” And NACSA, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, has embarked on a Starting Fresh campaign, urging districts and states to opt for close/reopen rather than retread.

But the case must be empirical, too; why else should state and city leaders even think about replacing worn-out district schools with new charter schools? Happily, there is increasingly impressive achievement being reported for charters that have been welcoming hordes of families fleeing dysfunctional, unrestructured urban schools in Washington, D.C., Buffalo, New York City, and elsewhere. It is performance, not just promises, that is causing leaders like New York City’s Joel Klein to make charter schools a vanguard for broader system reform.

The Feds

Think tanks and lobbying groups are already buzzing about what they want in the reauthorization of NCLB, nominally due in 2007 But word in the congressional cloakrooms is that the big bill might wait until after the next presidential election. Between now and 2009 we may be stuck with that “any other” language, which means that regulation, guidance, and jawboning are needed to make restructuring happen on a faster track for the kids who need it most.

Education secretary Margaret Spellings and her crew play the pivotal role here. Spellings is showing commendable backbone on choice, warning states that they can lose Title I megabucks if they fail to provide students with escape options from failing schools. She should do the same on restructuring.

Specifically, the Department of Education (DOE) should wallop states that play games while kids remain trapped in lousy schools. DOE should issue firm guidance that states must not evade clear congressional intent by allowing weak-kneed responses to chronic school failure. States needn’t mandate the charter route, although it provides the best hope of truly starting fresh. But they do need to galvanize fundamental change.

My own hunch is that whether federally urged or not, whether formally embraced by district and state officials or not, fundamental change is coming to underperforming schools and systems. As long as charter schools aren’t kept from opening or expanding because of arbitrary state caps, parents will continue flocking to them. The charter market share in big cities will continue growing. NCLB gives traditional systems a way to jump-start reform by capitalizing on this powerful trend. If they ignore the opportunity but continue to lose customers, they invite a far less orderly kind of restructuring.

Nelson Smith is president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Let’s Kill Dick & Jane: How the Open Court Publishing Company Fought the Culture of American Education
By Harold Henderson
St. Augustine’s Press, 2006, $26; 168 pages.

As reviewed by Diane Ravitch

This book tells the story of Blouke Carus’s heroic but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reform American education. Carus founded the Open Court Publishing Company in 1962 with two aims that did not seem to be at all contradictory: first, to teach children to read, and second, to do so while introducing them to classic children’s literature.

Carus was an engineer, not a professional educator, which may explain why he thought that he could revolutionize the schools and overturn the publishing industry merely by creating a superior product. He proved to be hopelessly idealistic and naive, traits not usually associated with engineers. Even though his company’s elementary reading textbooks achieved superior results, at best, according to this account, they garnered 2 to 3 percent of the national market for reading books. The company died struggling to find the formula that would make the Open Court readers acceptable to the nation’s teachers and administrators. Few seemed to care that reading scores soared in the districts that used the books, nor did anyone notice that the contents of the books were richer and more substantive than the competition.

Carus became active in school reform activities in the 1950s, first as a parent who ran for the local school board and joined the Council for Basic Education. In 1959, he and his wife Marianne spent some time in Germany, where their son, Andre, attended 1st grade; later that year, he entered the same grade in LaSalle, Illinois. The parents were “horrified” to discover the contrast between the two schools: the boy’s German textbooks contained stories and poems; his American schoolbooks were richly illustrated but had almost no text.

A few years later, while he was hospitalized for a stomach ailment, Carus read Arther Trace Jr.’s What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t, which compared the rich content of Russian textbooks to the vacuity of Dick and Jane readers in American schools. By 4th grade, Trace wrote, the Russian children’s reading vocabulary was nearly 10,000 words, while their peers in American schools had been exposed to a carefully controlled vocabulary of fewer than 1,800 words. Carus was inspired; he knew what he had to do: he would take on and break the monopoly of the dumbed-down Dick and Jane–style readers. His determination was fueled by the belief that it should be possible to “educate our masses as rigorously as Europeans do their elites …”

At the time that Carus got his inspiration, the public schools were thoroughly infested by a deeply rooted spirit of anti-intellectualism. The life-adjustment philosophy was the reigning paradigm, which decreed that 60 percent of all students were fit for neither an academic nor a vocational education and needed to be adjusted to their lowly role in society. The dominant reading philosophy was the whole-word (“look-say”) method, enshrined in the simple-minded Dick and Jane–style reading books, which taught children to memorize the shape of words through repetition and ignored phonics altogether. That was the mountain that Carus planned to climb.

Carus’s wife Marianne became his partner in assembling the readers. They disregarded the controlled vocabulary that was a staple of the look-say readers. The first year, readers began with intensive phonics, then offered excellent children’s stories and poems. Instead of grouping children by ability, the Open Court readers advised teaching the whole class and encouraged student chanting.

In the 1963 Open Court reader, titled Reading Is Fun, which was designed for the second semester of 1st grade, at least half the entries were classics, including Aesop’s fables (“The Fox and the Grapes,” “The Hare and the Tortoise,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”); Mother Goose rhymes; folk tales (“The Little Red Hen,” “The Gingerbread Boy,” “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” “The Three Bears”), and poems (by Vachel Lindsay, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Christina Rossetti). Henderson points out that the best-selling reader published by Scott Foresman for the same grade contained only 7 folk tales out of 48 selections, and they were watered down because of restrictions on vocabulary.

Districts that tried Open Court reported outstanding success: more children were posting higher reading scores. Nonetheless, the complaints poured in from “the field”: the readers were too hard; they were too different; they didn’t have the worksheets that teachers expected; they didn’t have the comprehension questions that teachers needed. At one point, feminists blocked their adoption in textbook hearings because they included more stories about males than females. The company spent enormous resources responding to the complaints, revising the reading books, hiring academic consultants, trying to reach out to a market that was entirely satisfied with the usual pap from the major publishers.

When the whole-language movement began its meteoric rise in the 1980s, Open Court was demonized because of its emphasis on phonics. When the company failed to win adoption by the state of California in 1988, which was in thrall to the whole-language faction, the outlook for Open Court was bleak indeed. In 1996, the company was sold to SRA/McGraw-Hill, which revised the books to meet the market’s demands, enjoyed the right political climate, and saw the healthy sales that eluded the Carus family.

Henderson goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the Open Court readers did not deserve their reputation as “traditional” and “conservative,” although they were indeed traditional and praiseworthy for their inclusion of large amounts of classic literature. And if the inclusion of excellent literature means “conservative,” then there is no reason to run from the label.

Henderson tries to persuade the reader that the books should have been congenial to whole-language teachers because of their superior literature selections and should have been embraced by progressive educators because they blended the best of both approaches, including workshop activities, so-called reciprocal teaching (where the teacher and the students take turns as teacher), and other practices that were embraced by progressives. He never adequately explains why progressives did not see the obvious virtues of the Open Court readers (my guess is that any reader that paid any attention to explicit phonics was doomed in the eyes of progressives, at that period in history).

Henderson even buys the canard that the Caruses’ efforts to promote “high culture” were doomed by mass enrollments, as though it were an obvious truth that the children of the poor could never appreciate classic fairy tales and myths, a rather questionable assumption. Even so, Let’s Kill Dick & Jane is a fascinating and rather depressing read, explicating for all the world to see how an ambitious textbook series with rich content and beautiful illustrations died the death of a thousand cuts, administered by ideologues, bureaucrats, and the dumbed-down culture of American education.

Ultimately, the life and death of the original Open Court readers demonstrate that American education is a challenging environment for the industry that supplies its needs. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Blouke and Marianne Carus learned that this is not true, that the market is shaped more by fads and ideology than by evidence about what works best for children.

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