American children are gaining weight at an alarming rate. Since the 1960s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the percentage of American six- to eleven-year-olds who fall into the CDC’s highest weight classification for children has almost quadrupled. The fraction of adolescents in this category, called “overweight” by CDC rather than “obese” in an attempt to avoid stigmatizing children, has skyrocketed from 4.5 percent to 15.5 percent (see Figure 1).

What may not be as well known is that physical education (PE) requirements in schools have been shrinking at the same time that the waistlines of America’s school children have been expanding. From 1991 to 2003, the percentage of high-school students enrolled in daily PE classes in America plummeted, from 42 percent to 28 percent. Sounds like simple math: less time in gym class plus increasingly easy access to snack food and soda in school equals more youth obesity.

The solution seems straightforward. Medical, public health, and education organizations, including the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the National Association of State Boards of Education, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all called for students to spend more time in PE classes. In 2005 alone, legislatures in 44 states introduced bills to increase or reform school physical education. Alabama proposed hiring an additional 289 PE teachers in each of the subsequent 2 years. Kentucky, like several other states, would require 30 minutes of PE a day for its students. Maryland decided to hire a full-time state director of physical education.

Jumping through Hoops and Caveats]

Requiring more PE seems like a logical response to the childhood obesity epidemic, but will mandating more time in gym classes actually result in more exercise for kids? Will it help them lose weight? Surprisingly, studying the relationships between PE classes and actual physical activity presents some research challenges, as does judging the connections between PE and student weight.

To begin, requiring more PE does not mean that students actually spend more time in the gym. According to a 2000 study by sports researchers Ken Hardman and Joe Marshall, an estimated 26 percent of PE classes in the United States today fail to comply with state regulations. And even when schools do play by the rules, gym classes may do little to promote exercise. The U.S. Department of Education has criticized PE for too often consisting of “roll out the balls and let them play,” unstructured and unmotivated class time involving little vigorous activity. One study of a county in Texas found that elementary-school students are vigorously active only 3 minutes and 24 seconds per 40-minute PE class. (See “Don’t Sweat It,” features.)

Even that may exaggerate the impact of a physical education program, as students may circumvent the best intentions of state lawmakers. PE classes may generate an increase in exercise at the moment the class is held, for instance, but students may decide to exercise less at other times during the school week. And even if overall exercise levels jump upward, that will not lead to weight loss if students increase their caloric consumption. Evaluations of innovative PE curricula designed to encourage exercise suggest that PE classes do increase physical activity but have no noticeable effect on student weight. Still, relatively little research has systematically examined how much PE (as it is currently constituted) contributes to weight loss or lowers the risk of obesity, and what little research there is finds no association between PE and weight loss and obesity.

To investigate the matter further, we examined how differences in state requirements for PE affect the amount of time students spend exercising in PE class. Then we looked at how much that increase in PE exercise time affects the levels of overall physical activity and the weight of high-school students. Our results in a nutshell: when states raise their PE requirements, girls become more active, as indicated by their reports of the total number of minutes per week they say they are exercising vigorously. There is no similar effect on boys.

When it comes to less-vigorous physical activity, however, increased PE exercise actually decreases the number of days in which girls report light physical activity. Apparently, when girls exercise in class, they become more sedentary during the discretionary hours of their week. Unfortunately, this propensity occurs predominantly among girls who are less active in the first place. Perhaps because PE has so little impact on physical activity, we found little effect on weight loss or the likelihood of obesity, as measured by the BMI, which is derived by dividing weight (in kilograms) by height (in meters) squared. The only suggestion of an effect is among the most-sedentary girls, and the evidence there is weak at best.

Those are the main findings. To obtain them was more complicated than it might seem, simply because studying the relationships between PE, physical activity, and weight is complex. Students can be thin, active, and engaged in their physical education, but figuring out which of these attributes came first is another matter. Or students can be couch potatoes, overweight, and laggards in the gym, but exactly what caused the obesity may be quite unclear. If physically active students of healthy weight enjoy PE and elect to take extra PE classes, we will likely find a correlation between PE and healthy weight, even if extra PE has no impact on weight. Similarly, if the school offers more, and higher-quality, PE classes, and if the students living in those districts come from advantaged homes and are healthier as a result, then one could find, once again, a correlation between PE and healthy weight.

One can try to get around these problems by looking at changes in school or district physical-education requirements. But once again, one could be led astray by any simple analysis that ignores the possibility that schools and districts raise PE requirements in response to high obesity rates. Unless one took this possibility into account, tougher PE rules would appear to make students gain weight.

Making the Target Stand Still

We address these research problems by using a measure of PE time that is beyond the control of students and individual districts and schools: state laws that mandate minimal PE requirements. Information on state laws was gathered from “The Shape of the Nation Report” (SONR), a 2001 survey of all states and the District of Columbia conducted by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. The purpose of SONR was to document the state mandates for, and availability of, physical education programs at each school level in every state. Only about 40 percent of the states have a requirement stated in minutes of PE instruction. Among those that do, the average requirement is slightly over 40 minutes per day. Other states have unit or credit requirements that mandate a certain amount of coursework in PE, but the number of “course minutes” equating to a unit of instruction varies. We standardized the data so that one unit of PE has the same meaning across states. After standardization, the amount of PE required by state varied from 0 (no requirement) to 4 years in half-year increments (see Figure 2).

Next, we used the standardized units to study the link between the amount of time children spend exercising in PE class and their overall activity levels and weight. We obtained information on student physical activity and weight by taking advantage of the student data available from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), a nationally representative survey of high-school students (grades 9–12) that was established by the CDC to monitor the prevalence of risky youth behaviors, including those relating to physical activity and obesity. The YRBSS has been conducted biennially since 1991. We combined the YRBSS data from the 1999, 2001, and 2003 surveys, the years for which the study asked about weight and height. The result is a sample of almost 37,000 high school students containing information on PE time, exercise, height, and weight.

The YRBSS asks students two questions about PE: the number of days per week that the student has PE class and the number of minutes per class that the child is actually engaged in sports or other exercise. Since the latter question asks students to report minutes in one of several intervals, we multiply the number of days per week the student has PE class by the midpoint of the interval to calculate the total active time in PE class per week. (We also recalculated active PE time per week using the lowest number of minutes in each interval instead of the midpoint. This change did not affect our findings on physical activity or weight.)

In general, estimated active time in PE class is low, with an average reported level of 16 minutes per day and only 2 minutes per day for the median student. Median active time is low because many school districts only require PE for one or two years of high school, many schools offer PE class fewer than five days per week, and many PE classes fail to provide much actual exercise.

Our three measures of physical activity are those chosen by the CDC to monitor progress toward the goals of their Healthy People 2010 campaign. The YRBSS asks how many days out of the past seven respondents participated in three different types of exercise: 1) at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise (activities that made the student sweat or breathe hard); 2) at least 30 minutes of light activity; and 3) strength-building exercise (no minimum number of minutes). These questions cover all exercise and activity, whether in or out of PE class; as a result, we measure the impact of PE on total activity.

We study two outcomes concerning student weight: BMI and whether or not the student is classified by the CDC, according to their BMI, as obese.

When dealing with self-reported data, there is always the risk that survey respondents will misreport, accidentally or intentionally. To determine the extent of reporting error in weight among high-school students, researchers at the CDC surveyed high-school students and collected data on both self-reported and measured weight and height. They found that self-reported values of height and weight were highly correlated with their measured values (0.90 and 0.93, respectively), but students did tend to overreport their height and underreport their weight. The average student overreported height by 2.7 inches and underreported weight by 3.5 pounds, resulting in an underreported BMI of 2.6 units. However, this tendency to underreport will only disguise a true effect of PE on weight if students who live in states with lower PE requirements underreport their weight by a larger amount. Since there is no reason to believe that, we consider the self-reports to be acceptably accurate measures of student height and weight.

A limitation of the YRBSS data is that we are unable to separate private school from public school students. This is relevant because public schools are legally bound to comply with state regulations concerning physical education, but private schools are not. However, it should be kept in mind that 90 percent of all students in the United States attend public schools.

Asking the Right Questions
We pursued three main lines of inquiry in order to find out what happens when states require students to spend more class time in the school gym or on the athletic fields:

1. Do students living in states with higher PE credit requirements spend more time physically active in PE class than those living in states with lower PE credit requirements?

2. Does this additional active PE time improve overall levels of physical activity?

3. Does this additional active PE time lead to lower weight, as measured by BMI?

To measure the impact of state-mandated PE requirements, we compared the self-reported PE activity times, overall physical activity levels, and BMI of students who are subject to state PE requirements. We also accounted for the students’ age, gender, and race/ethnicity, as well as the region in which they live, in order to isolate the effect of PE requirements from other factors that may be correlated with activity, body weight, and obesity.

Since states choose their PE policies, it is possible that those with high rates of youth obesity enact higher PE requirements. If this were the case, we would actually see a positive relationship between PE requirements and BMI. In an effort to identify this relationship if it did occur, we account for the prevalence of obesity in the state among adults.

We also address the concern that we will see a false negative relationship between PE and weight if wealthier states have lower rates of obesity and higher PE requirements. To account for the possible influence of state socioeconomic status, we control for state per capita income, the percentage of the state population with a bachelor’s degree or higher, and the percentage of the state’s children participating in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). We also include two additional, more-focused measures of the resources made available for education in a state: average teacher salary and average pupil-teacher ratio.

More PE time = More exercise. Maybe.

When an additional unit of PE is required, which translates roughly into an extra 200 minutes per week, boys report they spend 7.6 minutes more per week actually exercising or playing sports in gym class. However, that additional time spent exercising in school did not result in clear improvements in students’ overall levels of physical activity. Boys report no increase in the number of days they engaged in vigorous, light, or strength-training exercise.

The effect of increasing PE requirements on girls is slightly larger; requiring an additional unit adds 8 minutes and 6 seconds per week of exercise in PE. One possible explanation for the gender difference is that girls are less likely to take PE as an elective, so their amount of PE time is more readily affected by minimum course requirements. That additional 8 minutes and 6 seconds in active PE time seems to have some more general payoff, even when one takes into account what happens outside school, as it results in a small increase in the number of days per week girls report they are engaged in vigorous exercise.

An extra 100 minutes of active PE time raises the number of days with vigorous exercise reported by girls by 1.2 days. Put another way, for girls to spend an additional day with at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise requires an extra 83 minutes of active PE time per week, or roughly 17 minutes per school day. This 17 minutes is not simply extra PE class time; it’s extra PE class time spent being physically active.

However, these positive impacts are accompanied by offsetting effects. An extra 100 minutes of PE exercise per week causes a decrease of 0.75 days with light activity among girls. In other words, one less day with light activity is reported for every 133 additional minutes of PE exercise (or 27 additional minutes of PE exercise per school day). There appears to be no effect of additional active PE time on frequency of strength-training activity among girls.

The reason for the reduction in light activity days among girls? We suspect that girls may be offsetting the additional amount of PE exercise by decreasing physical activity outside of class. Girls may have a target amount of time they wish to spend physically active. If they are required to spend more time exercising in PE, they may respond by cutting back on discretionary light activities outside of school.

It is not clear, however, why this substitution exists only for light activity and not for vigorous exercise or strength-building activities. Perhaps this pattern of behavior is a result of different effects of state requirements on physically active girls as compared to their relatively sedentary classmates.

We identified the sedentary and more-active girls by turning to the YRBSS question that asked each student whether they participate in team sports. While this is not a perfect measure of a girl’s tendency to be active, we consider it to be at least a rough indicator. Consistent with our expectations, offsetting behavior is evident only for girls who do not play team sports. Among these girls, an extra 100 minutes of active PE time results in 1.6 fewer days with light exercise.

All this still leaves us wondering why PE requirements make a difference for the more-vigorous physical activity for girls but not for boys. Just as minimum PE requirements may have different effects on students with different initial overall activity levels, additional PE may affect girls more than boys because girls on average engage in less strenuous exercise and fewer strength-building activities than boys. For example, the average number of days per week with vigorous exercise is 3.0 for girls and 4.2 for boys. The average number of days with strength-building activity is 2.4 for girls and 3.5 for boys. This difference in overall activity levels means that the same amount of PE time represents a bigger fraction of girls’ total physical activity.

Overall, the evidence on whether exercise in PE promotes exercise for girls is mixed. When required by state law to attend more gym classes, adolescent girls, unlike their male counterparts, do engage in vigorous physical activity more often, but engage in light exercise less.

Quantity and Quality

The results of our study suggest that the effect of increased state PE requirements is mixed at best. Although we found no effect on boys’ overall physical activity or weight, increased active PE time does raise the number of days that girls report at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise. The improvement for girls is important because these types of exercise have significant health benefits, even aside from weight loss. Yet the positive effect on girls’ behavior is tempered by a decrease in the number of days girls engage in 30 minutes or more of light physical activity. This offsetting behavior is most prominent among girls who are not otherwise active in team sports. The results, combined with the lack of a clear effect of PE on BMI or obesity among adolescent youth, lead us to doubt the effectiveness of education reforms that merely target time spent suited up for gym class.

It is possible that some of the additional PE time that students classified as devoted to exercise or sport was, in fact, relatively sedentary. If this is what explains the lack of association between active PE time and most measures of physical activity and obesity among boys and girls, then improvements to the PE curriculum should precede mandated increases in PE time. Some of the organizations that have called for more PE time qualified their recommendation by stating that there should be an increase in “quality” PE, in addition to more time in PE, but as yet there is no agreed-upon, scientifically determined “ideal” PE curriculum.

Even if PE curricula are strengthened to include more vigorous exercise, the effects will be reduced if students become more sedentary during their discretionary time, the net effect being that weight may remain unaffected. Public health officials and educators should consider ways to reduce or eliminate such offsetting behavior.

John Cawley is an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Chad Meyerhoefer is an economist at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. David Newhouse is a technical assistance advisor at the International Monetary Fund. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors, and no official endorsement by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Department of Health and Human Services, International Monetary Fund, or Cornell University is intended or should be inferred.

It’s April 9 and the Mediterranean Manor is rocking. As a large bus outside the downtown Newark reception hall cranks out B-list disco hits, hundreds of low rollers coming to the $50-a-plate Cory Booker fundraiser inch through a maze of velvet rope to sign in and pass before a pair of unidentified “consultants” standing at the door with a television camera. When asked by the campaign, “Who are you guys?” they just answer, “Security.”

Inside, scores of waiters and busboys are setting up the buffets of macaroni salad, barbecued chicken, yellow rice, and other delectables. Within an hour the place is jammed well beyond capacity with supporters of Booker’s mayoral bid lucklessly searching for open seats. Tables of elderly black matrons in their Sunday finest buzz with neighborhood gossip, while just a few feet away union reps pass the inexpensive red wine to their wives, and elsewhere unreserved tables of strangers make nice with college students, entrepreneurs, government workers—white, black, and Hispanic—all bonding over their common hopes for the city.

It seems more like a wedding banquet than a fundraiser, especially since the event will actually lose money. But this is Newark, New Jersey, once called “The Worst American City,” a city that has lost 36 percent of its population since 1930 (from 442,000 to 280,000) and is now more than half black and nearly 40 percent poor. It’s a city, reported the New York Times, where “budgeting is a Rube Goldberg morass with a deficit looming,” and where the school system, the state’s largest, with 43,000 students, was so bad that it was taken over by the state more than a decade ago. Today the schools are still a mess, with 70 percent of 11th graders and 65 percent of 8th graders unable to pass the state’s math tests. This is the Newark that Booker says needs more policing, more comprehensive child-welfare policies, school vouchers, and more charter schools.

Supporting charters was a relatively safe bet. Although the number of charters in New Jersey was declining at the end of the 1990s, due in part to the state takeover, the number in Newark was growing, to 10. In fact, according to a 2003 Rutgers University report, “Newark’s charter movement has flourished.” Today, 12 of the state’s 55 charter schools are in Newark.

Booker’s support for vouchers was not so assured. Indeed, he now says that vouchers are not a key part of his education plan. Still, he has not ruled them out. “My determination is to reform the public school system,” said candidate Booker, who was opposed by the state’s powerful teachers union, with 192,272 members, in part because of his support of vouchers. For many of the same reasons, state senator and mayoral opponent Ronald Rice called Booker a proxy for “ultra-white, ultra-conservative” outsiders.

Proxy or not, Booker defeated Rice and two other candidates by a healthy margin. And he now has the opportunity—some might call it the unenviable task—of effecting education overhaul in one of America’s most troubled and beleaguered cities. Can he succeed?

A Silver-Spoon Childhood

Many people thought that Cory Booker was too good to be true—especially for Newark. Booker pieced together an unusual but winning coalition of high society—Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, publisher David Bradley, and the Heinz family among them—and reform-minded Newarkers like those who turned out at the Mediterranean Manor with their $50 and, after listening to a brief stump speech, rushed to the dance floor to do the electric slide.

Until now, Cory Booker was famous for being famous. A one-term Newark city councilman who made an impressive but finally unsuccessful bid for mayor in 2002, he nevertheless had the unmistakable air and bearing of someone ready for the big time. Friends are convinced he will be the first black president of the United States. It’s characteristic of his well-publicized ascent through life that his one major political race—the 2002 attempt to be mayor—became the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, Street Fight, directed by Marshall Curry. To persuade Booker to cooperate with the film project, Curry reportedly asked him, “What would it have been like if someone had filmed Bill Clinton’s first campaign?”

Actually, Cory Booker probably had it much easier than Clinton, who was raised by his waitress mother after her husband died in a car accident. Booker’s parents were upper-class executives who, though they were civil rights activists, spent their careers working for IBM and looking after their two sons. Born in a New Jersey suburb, Booker was a star student at Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan and a high-school All-American football player, known for being not the most gifted athlete but the most determined, one who never choked under pressure. He went to Stanford on a football scholarship and there became class president before winning a Rhodes scholarship to attend Oxford. An overachiever with what would seem to be a genuine heart of gold, he then enrolled in law school at Yale before moving to Newark in 1996 to become an advocate for housing for the poor.

Getting Gritty

As Booker tells the story, the inspiration to become a leader in Newark came the day he knocked on the door of Virginia Jones, head of the tenants’ association at Brick Towers, one of the city’s worst housing projects. Booker, then a tenants’ rights lawyer for the Urban Justice Center in New York City, introduced himself and said he wanted to help. She told him to follow her. They went outside, to the street, and there Jones demanded to know what the young lawyer saw around him. Drug dealers, a crack house, rundown projects, responded Booker.

“Well, you can’t help me,” she said and started to walk away. Booker caught up with her and demanded an explanation.

As Booker would tell the story at the 2005 annual summit of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), a nonprofit that supports public school alternatives, Jones then said, “Boy, you need to learn something. The world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you. If you’re one of those people who see problems, darkness, and despair, that’s all there’s ever going to be. But if you’re one of those people who see hope, opportunity, love, and even the face of God, then you can help me.”

Booker was so inspired by Jones that he moved in to Brick Towers determined to run for city council. His innate political gifts were obvious as he defeated a 16-year incumbent and, on taking office, refused the standing perk of a city car to drive him to council meetings. He also opposed generous pay raises for council members as well as the mayor. In 1998, he went on a hunger strike and lived in a tent outside the Garden Spires housing complex to draw attention to the flagrant open-air drug trade in the projects. He was the most visible of a handful of young Turks who dared to criticize Mayor Sharpe James and the city’s system of financial cronyism.

A Call to Vouchers

Though Mayor James called him “a grandstander,” Booker proved to be that and more when he announced his support for school vouchers in 2001. Complaining about the shocking absence of fiscal accountability in Newark’s well-funded but ill-managed school system, Booker told a Manhattan Institute audience that private and charter schools in Newark often spent half as much per pupil as traditional public schools, but were achieving much greater results.

Vouchers, Booker argued, were a matter of civic empowerment. “Public education is the use of public dollars to educate our children at the schools that are best equipped to do so—public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, Baptist schools, Jewish schools, or other innovations in education. That is where public dollars should go.” His one major caveat: vouchers can’t be used as an excuse to pull funding from the public school system. Booker has since become associated with several prominent school-choice organizations, including the Newark-based E3 (Education Excellence for Everyone), as well as Clint Bolick’s Alliance for School Choice and the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

Howard Fuller, the national board chair of BAEO, says he met Booker some seven years ago when he gave a talk at the North Star Academy charter school in Newark. (Booker is also on North Star’s board of trustees.) Fuller says Booker’s support of vouchers was highly significant to the school choice movement. “He’s like a true Democrat, a young black Democrat who says, ‘I’m a Democrat but I believe that vouchers and other forms of parental choice are very important for trying to make a difference for low-income parents of children who are not being well served by the current system.’ The fact that he had the courage to do that meant a lot.”

Taking on the Mayor

Controversial as it was, in Newark Booker’s support for vouchers was not even a close second to the notoriety he invited by challenging four-term mayor James, a politician whose administration was equal parts charisma and corruption.

That mayoral battle showed America how the new politics of identity could be very much like the blood prejudices of old. Calling Booker a “carpetbagger,” James systematically tried to strip Booker of his identity, questioning his blackness by calling him white, his Christianity by calling him Jewish, and his political affiliations by calling the Democratic Booker a Republican. And as if that weren’t enough, the mayor accused his black challenger of being a tool of the Ku Klux Klan. As one Capitol Hill veteran said after watching the documentary about the battle, ” Street Fight?! That’s putting it mildly!” The James campaign succeeded in drowning out Booker’s idealistic vision for the city and James earned a fifth term. The margin, however, 3,500 votes out of more than 50,000 cast, was slim enough to give James some doubts about the durability of his reign.

Two years later, about to turn 35, no longer on the city council but still living in the projects, Booker was taking a walk with his father near his tenement apartment when something happened that in almost any other city would have landed him on the front page of the local paper. As he told the story in a 2004 speech, he heard gunshots ring out and “saw a sea of kids running toward me.” He raced past the children in the direction of the gunshots just in time to see a young man stumbling off a set of stairs in a housing project. “I caught him from behind, laid him down, and looked onto his chest. And blood was just cascading and soaking his T-shirt.” Booker put his hands to the boy’s bloody chest and tried to speak as the youth coughed and gasped. “I felt for his pulse, his eyes started rolling back. His pulse got weaker and weaker. I tried to cover the holes in his chest. And eventually there was nothing.”

Had this happened just a few miles away, in Manhattan, one could expect a photograph of the shocked politician, his shirt bloodied, on the cover of the New York Post. But in Newark, the Star-Ledger published a short article in the next day’s edition on page 21. This was Newark.

But was this Cory Booker? A vegetarian teetotaler, an avid self-improver who exercises regularly and seems to read everything? His guilty pleasure, he once told the New York Times, is watching Star Trek. While the African American community struggles to come to terms with its own overachievers, he is the epitome of “acting white.”

Booker is also preternaturally polished. It is easy to picture him, with his athletic build and clean-shaven head, cast in bronze. His speaking style is a throwback to a golden-tongued politics of old. “You have to have poetry and prose,” he says. “The prose is management, competence, doing the job of public administration. The poetry is inspiration, calling on people to achieve more, to love more, to be more.”

“He Smells Like the Future”

Will this be Booker’s formula for education reform in Newark? Successful leadership, he believes, depends on internal ideals so powerful that they make the leader see the world not as it is, but as he wishes it were.

Booker speaks extensively of what he calls “crazy love,” the “unreasonable, irrational, impractical love that sustained African Americans through slavery, inequality, and the civil rights movement.” And listening to his speeches, one can identify with the little girl shown in Street Fight who, after meeting Booker, acts as if she’s just encountered a movie star. She smells her hand, which he has just shaken, and says, “He smells like the future.” Indeed, it is an understatement to say that Cory Booker excels at the poetry part of politics.

But it will take more than poetry to fix Newark’s schools. The district is a classic example of well-funded failure. According to the New Jersey D.O.E., the city’s public school district spent almost $17,000 per pupil in 2005, while the rest of the state spent about than $11,000 (see Figure 1). And it still lagged far behind the state’s average academic outcomes. Fifty-three percent of Newark’s 4th graders are proficient in English and 43 percent are proficient in math, while the state boasts proficiency percentages of 78 and 68, respectively. Newark’s 8th graders do even worse (see Figure 2).

In 2005, more than 60 percent of 11th graders failed the state math test. In 2003, 28 percent of seniors failed to graduate, while 42 percent graduated with only an alternative diploma. And all this is after being under state control for ten years. Back then, in 1995, Newark schools ranked second among 30 special-needs districts in teacher pay, and second to last in the percentage of 11th graders passing the high-school proficiency test. Questionable hiring practices were prevalent, and it was discovered in 1993, during an external review by a team appointed by the state commissioner of education, that the district was siphoning off “a significant portion of its resources into noninstructional personnel to provide employment to many Newark citizens.”

The state’s final comprehensive study of the district leading up to takeover found that it had been “at best flagrantly delinquent or at worst deceptive in discharging its responsibilities to its students.” School buildings were “filthy, unsafe, and in disrepair.” Public transportation was “hazardous.” Schools lacked decent food service and “sufficient, appropriate instructional materials.” Wilbur Rich, who studied Newark for his book Black Mayors and School Politics, called it “the strangest system I ever investigated.” Some schools lacked even chalk, while all the money went to teachers’ salaries and the school board operated as “a patronage-dispensing system.”

According to the state, the political system running the show smacked of corruption and self-dealing. “Uncovered in the district were conflicts of interest, falsification of reports, willful violation of New Jersey’s election and bidding laws, misused and mismanaged federal, local, and state monies, mismanaged personnel matters, loose control over cash. …”

The view of the schools from inside the classrooms was just as troubling. In her book Ghetto Schooling, Jean Anyon, former chairperson of the education department at Rutgers University–Newark, describes administrators at a typical school in 1992 and 1993 as buck-passing incompetents and teachers as tough and resentful of outsiders (especially white ones) looking to tell them how to do their jobs. Anyon’s analysis went far beyond her own impressionistic reporting, but no part of her sociocultural analysis spoke as loudly as the teachers she quoted, one telling a student her breath “smells like dog [expletive],” another telling a student her mother was “a [expletive],” and one 5th-grade teacher saying to his class, “If I had a gun, I’d kill you. You’re all hoodlums.” To repeat: this was a typical Newark school.

A Practical Politician to the Rescue?

In an interview with Education Next during the closing weeks of the campaign, Booker said he wanted to improve relations between the mayor’s office and the state-appointed superintendent when he became the city’s chief executive. But he also said that his first priority would be to make the schools safe, an uncontroversial but essential promise. Citing a newspaper article that described children being afraid to stay for afterschool programs, Booker says, “We’re going to come in immediately and secure all of our school zones and put in whatever necessary personnel in and around our schools to protect [children as they travel] to and from school.”

He also hopes to expand tutoring and afterschool programs and create more “linkages” between students and potential employers. Health, well-being, nutrition, and early child development are other areas where he sees possibilities for mayoral leadership. “We want to make sure that every child, by the time they’re six years old, arrives in school healthy and ready to learn.”

Booker says he will also pursue mayoral control of the school system after the state returns control of the schools to Newark in 2007. And with a new slate of Booker-friendly members elected to the city council—”Team Booker” won all nine seats—he will have a good chance of getting it. He is critical of “school boards that are elected with a fraction of the vote in voter turnout” and “special-interest groups” that lack a “unifying vision” to reform the system. “To really leverage change,” says Booker, it is necessary to “centralize control under one person.” This is something Anyon and other local education experts oppose, so it will be interesting to watch the new mayor maneuver his way through this minefield.

An Agenda for Reform

The question of vouchers will also surely resurface, but it will not be one of Booker’s top priorities. Candidate Booker created the Institute for Urban Excellence, a nonprofit whose sole mission has been to develop a report of best urban practices to guide policy in post–Sharpe James Newark. And it has been soliciting advice from education researchers on a reform package. In March, Bo Kemp, director of the institute, met with Alan Sadovnik, the current head of the education department at Rutgers–Newark, and others from the Institute on Education Law and Policy, also at Rutgers–Newark. Says Sadovnik: “We advised caution with regard to the issue of vouchers. It is not in our view the primary or most important thing the new mayor should do in Newark.” Vouchers may even “detract” from plans to improve the public schools, says Sadovnik, given the limited capacity of private and Catholic schools in the city.

Did Booker listen? During a candidates’ debate in April he seemed to, saying that vouchers had nothing to do with his education plan for Newark. Yet, when asked a week earlier if he had experienced a change of heart on vouchers, Booker denied it. He supports, he says, “any kind of choice programs that are targeted toward poor children who are trapped in failing schools.” He called it “morally wrong” for “the connected, the elected, the privileged,” who send their kids to private schools, “not to favor a system that creates options for parents that are now being enjoyed by those privileged elites in urban communities around our nation.”

One reason for the ambiguity may be that Booker’s position on vouchers has always been a practical one. “I don’t think he has any orthodox views either way,” says Howard Fuller of BAEO. “He’s not an ideologue on vouchers. He sees that as something that may be useful, but he sees other things. To me, what Cory would probably do as mayor is figure out what would work and what is politically possible to try to make a difference for the children in his city. And I personally would not expect him or want him to do anything but what he thinks is right and would make a difference.”

In any case, says Paul Hill, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, it takes more than a few vouchers or mayoral control to turn around a failing school system. “The hard part,” says Hill, “is finding a way to dispossess” all the groups, from teacher unions to local churches to political clubs, that have “embedded relationships” in the school system. “When mayors take over schools, they think they can just manage the same system.”

But what they need to do is change the system itself, by closing schools, opening new ones, and finding ways to bring in new teachers to get around the “generations of bad hires” that plague failing schools. “As somebody who believes in school choice and vouchers,” says Hill, “I think believing in them in a simple-minded way is worse than being against them.” Hill points to the Expect Success program in the Oakland, California, public schools as a “tremendous example” of what might be done in Newark if Mayor Booker pursues fundamental reform of the school system.

Wilbur Rich seconds this opinion, saying the “entrenched relationships” of the system’s employees will become the biggest stumbling block for a mayor bent on reinventing the system. Rich says he likes Booker, a lot even, but that “this guy is so smooth and so optimistic, almost to the point of being naive.”

Booker doesn’t seem to mind that kind of criticism. “Another big thing for us is helping charter schools,” he says, noting that the “biggest impediment to charter school expansion in Newark is often having the facilities to do so.” He wants the city to be in partnership with charter schools, helping them find facilities in order to build on the success of existing Newark charter schools like the Knowledge Is Power Program and North Star academies.

Booker says he will also focus on improving financial accountability to make sure “the money being spent is actually getting to the classroom and empowering young people as opposed to being sucked up by bureaucracies.” He wants the schools to do more to protect students from the culture of failure, which, he says, may involve extending the school day and implementing weekend and summer programs.

Booker as a “Post-Racial” Leader

In the end, Cory Booker may not be as liberal as some educators in Newark hope, nor as conservative as others fear. He is an explicitly religious, anti-bureaucracy politician who, when asked for his position on affirmative action, says, “there is still a place for it.” He praises the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the University of Michigan’s right to evaluate “the totality of an application” and consider a student applicant’s race as “a valuable informative tool.” If affirmative action is a racial identity litmus test, Booker passes.

But now that he is mayor, he begins the arduous task of making his wish list of education reforms a reality. Should he have even moderate success, it seems likely he will be in line to become a national figure representing the new generation of black leadership in America, a leadership that does not abandon race matters altogether, but seems less angry than previous generations and more in tune with the America of Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, and Oprah Winfrey.

Howard Fuller, when asked what it might mean for Booker to replace a man like Sharpe James, whom Booker has called “a race-based mayor,” says that “Cory understands how race works in America, but he also understands the class dimension to the problems in a city like Newark. So the solutions can’t be solely based on race. There are other dimensions to the problems that impact poor black people more than just race. And I don’t think Cory’s going to be the kind of person who’s going to shy away from dealing with things that are racial. But at the same time he’s not going to play the race card every time something happens, whether race is the basis for it or not.”

A “post-racial” black leader, an inspirational figure, a reforming, anti-corruption mayor? Cory Booker may prove to be all these. He will have to be, as he tries to save the children of Newark from ending up like the teenager who died in his arms. Or he may not. A few of his admirers worry that upon taking office he will “go native” in this city of the political machine. One of Booker’s ward captains expresses a version of this concern when she says her greatest hope for Mayor Booker is that he remain “unbought and unbossed.”

When asked if he’s already an insider, Booker laughs and says, “The short answer is no.” He insists that he won this election by convincing Sharpe James that he could not prevail again. Only then did the endorsements roll in, with the unions, developers, and everyone else around town trying to get in on the act. But he welcomes the newcomers, and says, “We’re leveraging that support for our agenda of reform and not for any agendas that are contrary to that.”

David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at the Weekly Standard and editor of Doublethink magazine.

This past spring, the U.S. Department of Education released data showing that approximately 1,700 public schools across the country were eligible for “restructuring” under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) for 2005–06. That’s up 42 percent since 2004–05, and the numbers are likely to continue to surge. After all, some 25,000 schools did not make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under the law last year; those that miss the mark for five years running will also find themselves facing an overhaul. Assuming a steady rate of growth in the failing category, there could easily be as many as 5,000 of these schools in need of restructuring, or at least eligible for it, by 2008–09, the earliest date that most observers believe the federal law will be reauthorized.

What can be done? What should be done?

One of the greatest frustrations for reformers so far has been the government’s eagerness to put these failing schools on life support rather than forcing them to radically change their ways. According to Center on Education Policy case studies in California and Michigan, officials are using an NCLB loophole, opting for superficial interventions—such as hiring improvement “coaches” or changing the curriculum—over implementing the bold reforms envisioned by the law’s crafters.

Which bold reforms? Two strategies are particularly attractive: reopening these schools as charter schools, or contracting with a for-profit or nonprofit manager to run their day-to-day operations. A combination of the two could be especially powerful. Imagine a school district shuttering a failing school for a year. Meanwhile, a company such as Edison Schools or a nonprofit such as KIPP applies for a charter to run a replacement school out of that very facility. A new, effective school has been transplanted into an old, failing one.

Of course, there are numerous impediments to that sort of fresh-start approach. Districts jealously guard their facilities, even when they are underused or decaying. Teacher unions fight to block new charters, especially the vast majority that do not fall under collective bargaining. And neither the feds nor the states are forcing districts to head down this promising but politically painful road.

But the biggest impediment may be that there aren’t enough school-management organizations to go around. Not by a long shot. Over the past five years, the number of schools operated by for-profit education-management organizations (EMOs) grew at an annual rate of about 9 percent. Nonprofit charter-management organizations (CMOs) are just now scaling up; the sector increased 30 percent over the past two years. With similar growth trends going forward, only 250 additional privately managed schools will come online by 2008–09, while more than 3,000 schools will likely enter restructuring.

Can philanthropy help close that gap? The Charter School Growth Fund, seeded by the Pisces and Walton foundations, among others, aims to create 100,000 seats in high-performing charter schools by 2015. Still, assuming 400 students per school, that only works out to another 250 schools—and not for almost a decade.

Although transplants for failing schools should be attempted and then perfected, reformers are going to need to come up with Plan B for the vast number of schools in restructuring; they are going to need to get healthy on their own.

I retired in 2002, after 29 years as a public-middle-school English teacher in Jackson Heights, Queens, a stable working-class neighborhood in New York City. During the course of my teaching tenure, I came to some conclusions about my beleaguered profession (more careworn as the years progressed), including that learning to use language could not be entirely unlike learning to dance, repair computers, or do brain surgery. I noticed that it required a rigorous, continuous sequence of concept building through listening, practicing, memorizing, and repeating, and that English teachers, like physics teachers or math teachers, had to be focused, well-prepared, and specific about what must be taught. Just telling teachers to “use their creativity” and hoping that all particulars would be covered was institutionalized wishful thinking.

Yet at no time during my 30 years in the classroom had I ever been informed what I was actually supposed to teach. Poetry? Transitive verbs? Letter writing? “Do what you want,” I was, in effect, told. “If in doubt, go to the language-arts book room and see if you can find a complete set of some textbook and use it as your guide.”

In my final year, the assistant superintendent dropped by my class with the principal and later told her that it was nice to see a teacher still teaching grammar. There was no hint that a curriculum policy might be re-examined—just a wistful comment about the winds of change. To get to the point, there is no sequential program of language development that can be assumed in the New York City public-school system. While the word “curriculum” is now in vogue, there is little awareness that this might require the actual specification of academic content to be taught in each grade.

That this near-anarchic approach to teaching English had repercussions was brought home to me in the year following my retirement, when I was hired by my union, the United Federation of Teachers, to teach two sections of a six-session course to prospective teachers. The class was designed to help them pass the essay part of the New York State Teacher Certification exam. My students—all college graduates—were generally bright, dedicated, decent people, but most of them had a lot of difficulty organizing their thoughts into the form of a short essay and a limited knowledge of the mechanics of writing.

In fact, most of my students had already failed the licensing exam. Why? This was not rocket science: sentence patterns, paragraph structure, punctuation, transitions. But, then, why should they have been expected to be capable writers when the Department of Education, which had these same folks as a captive audience for more than 2,400 days of schooling when they were students, had never considered that subject-verb agreement or use of the comma might have been squeezed in among the “activities” as essential requirements? And apparently nobody in their schools of “education” seemed to think that preparing a person to teach might include knowing how to write a paragraph. But now the real world loomed large. They had failed the teacher’s exam and the fluffy jargon about “enhancing group activities” had to be put aside so that I might prepare them to get a teaching job.

All of this was to be accomplished in six three-hour sessions.

Of course, this instruction should have been prescribed when they were in elementary school. There is now great pressure to lift scores in writing and reading, but still little interest in determining how.

Thomas Wagner is a retired New York City public-school teacher as well as a former taxi driver, debate coach, union leader, and member of the San Antonio Golden Gloves.

It was another body blow to education. In December of 2004, media outlets across the country were abuzz with news of the just-released results of the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests. Once again despite highly publicized efforts to reform American math education (some might say because of the reform efforts) over the past two decades, the United States did little better than average (see Figure 1). Headquartered at the International Study Center at Boston College and taken by tens of thousands of students in more than three dozen countries, TIMSS has become a respected standard of international academic achievement. And in three consecutive TIMSS test rounds (in 1995, 1999, and 2003), 4th- and 8th-grade students in the former British trading colony of Singapore beat all contenders, including math powerhouses Japan and Taiwan. United States 8th graders did not even make the top ten in the 2003 round; they ranked 16th. Worse, scores for American students were, as one Department of Education study put it, “among the lowest of all industrialized countries.”

During the clamor over the TIMSS results (released in December 2004), I heard Robyn Silbey, a math “content coach” from a Rockville, Maryland, public school, being interviewed by Ira Flatow for his Science Friday program on National Public Radio. Silbey worked at College Gardens Elementary. She explained that her school was one of four in the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) district experimenting with Singapore’s math program. And, according to Silbey, it was working. The Singapore texts and methods were so effective in College Gardens that the scores of students there on the math computation portion of the standardized Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS) rose from the 50th and 60th percentiles to the low 90s in the first 4 years they were used.

I later learned that an evaluation of the pilot program conducted by MCPS found that in the schools where Singapore Math (SM) was being used as a pilot program, students typically outperformed their peers in other district schools. Yet despite these positive results, three of the four pilot schools dropped out of the program after fewer than four years. Why, I wondered. If the county’s own evaluation found benefits from Singapore Math, why not continue using it? In view of America’s disappointing rankings in math and Singapore’s record of success, why wasn’t the Singapore Math program given a serious and extended try?

In the Beginning

While the story of Singapore Math in Montgomery County does not answer all the questions about the persistently poor math literacy of American students, the failure of the program to take hold there does provide disturbing clues about some of the institutional and governmental practices that impede improvement in education—and not just in Montgomery County.

In my early research into what happened in Montgomery County, I met John Hoven, then co-president of the Gifted and Talented Association of Montgomery County and now a national advisor to NYC HOLD (New York City Honest Open Logical Decisions on Mathematics Education Reform), a nonpartisan advocacy organization that provides information to parents, teachers, and others on math education issues. Hoven, an economist in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice by day, had discovered Singapore Math while waging a successful battle to get MCPS to forgo a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant worth $6 million. The grant would have trained teachers to use a middle-school program called Connected Math, one of several, Hoven learned, that was funded by the Education and Human Resources Division of the NSF and based on standards developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Though the NCTM is a private organization, it exerts enormous influence over the math standards and texts used by most states and districts in the United States—standards and texts that, in Hoven’s view, were failing.

During the campaign against the Connected Math grant, Hoven discovered Singapore Math. He learned that Singapore, whose population is half that of New York City, had begun modifying its education policies in the early 1980s to build up its labor force in such a way as to create technical skills unavailable elsewhere in the Third World. The Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore (now called the Curriculum Planning & Development Institute) had created the math program and the accompanying texts, called Primary Mathematics (which were published in English, Singapore’s official administrative language, in 1982), to help boost that technological prowess. The Primary Mathematics series was at the heart of Singapore’s national math curriculum as it achieved its successive TIMSS victories.

Many professional mathematicians, concerned with the decline of math education in the United States, took a hard look at the Singapore Math methods and texts and liked what they saw. The texts have been distributed in the United States by an Oregon company since 1998 and are used by many home-school parents and promoted by Internet-based parent and professional organizations. In addition, the private nonprofit Rosenbaum Foundation helped fund the implementation of Singapore Math programs in scattered sites around the United States and in Israel. A study of Singapore Math conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) for the U.S. Department of Education (released in January 2005) concluded, “What the United States needs overall are the sound features of the Singapore Mathematics system.” In studying several different American school districts that were experimenting with the program, including the Montgomery County Public Schools, AIR researchers found that “Singapore Mathematics textbooks can produce significant boosts in achievement.” But the AIR report also cautioned that making Singapore Math work in the United States “will require the same sustained commitment to developing a quality mathematics system that Singapore gave to its reform efforts.”

That was a lesson still to be learned in Maryland.

A Long Way from Singapore to Montgomery County

John Hoven and his allies persuaded the Montgomery County Public Schools to try Singapore Math instead of pursuing the Connected Math grant, but instead of receiving $6 million, the district would have to spend its own funds. And that wouldn’t be $6 million. “The initial plan was for a $50,000 pilot spread out over two years,” Hoven recalls. “It was $50,000 in a $1 billion budget. The money would pay for textbooks and nothing else—no teacher training, nothing.” Hoven knew it was just a drop in the bucket for the district, but he was sure that the Asian math program would sell itself.

MCPS selected four middle-class, ethnically diverse, suburban schools—College Gardens in Rockville, Charles R. Drew and Highland View in Silver Spring, and Woodfield in Gaithersburg—to participate in the pilot. But few teachers at the schools realized how different Singapore’s approach to math was from what they had been used to; it was nothing less than a total shock to the schools’ systems.

Unlike many American math textbooks, such as Math Thematics, published by Houghton Mifflin, which are thick, multicolored, and multicultural, Singapore’s books are thin and contain only mathematics. There are no graphics (other than occasional cartoons pertaining to the lesson at hand), no spreadsheet problems, and no problems asking students to use a calculator to find the mean number of dogs in a U.S. household. With SM, students are required to show their mathematical work, not explain in essays how they did the problems or how they felt about them. While a single lesson in a U.S. textbook might span two pages and take one class period to go through, a lesson in a Singapore textbook might use five to ten pages and take several days to complete. The Singapore texts contain no narrative explanation of how a procedure or concept works; instead, there are problems and questions accompanied by pictures that provide hints about what is going on. According to the AIR report, the Singapore program “provides rich problem sets that give students many and varied opportunities to apply the concepts they have learned.”

Another key difference is the number of topics covered by Singapore’s texts for a single grade. The AIR study frequently criticizes American math texts for being an inch deep and a mile wide, covering a great range of topics with little time spent on developing the material, including mastery of math facts. (One of the texts with which the AIR study compares Singapore’s Primary Mathematics series is Everyday Mathematics, a program developed with NSF funding and used widely in Montgomery County.) The MCPS 1st-grade curriculum goals, for instance, contain a number of nonessential topics, such as sorting concrete objects (like Post-its with names of favorite pets on them) into categories, activities that take up instructional time which, critics of the MCPS curriculum argue, could be better spent laying the foundation for algebra in 8th grade.

Singapore’s texts also present material in a logical sequence throughout the grades and expect mastery of the material before the move to the next level. In contrast, mainstream American math texts and curricula frequently rely on a “spiral” approach, in which topics are revisited and reviewed. The expectation of that approach is that not all students achieve mastery the first time around. One Ohio school teacher familiar with the spiral approach summed up much of the criticism of the method on an Internet math forum, saying, students “can’t remember how to do it when [they] do return—or if they do remember it, it’s now being taught in a different way.”

The most important feature of Singapore’s texts is an ingenious problem-solving strategy built into the curriculum. Word problems are for most students the most difficult part of any mathematics course. Singapore’s texts help students tackle them through a technique called “bar modeling,” in which students draw a diagram to help them solve the problem. Typically, in U.S. texts, students are taught to use a method called “Guess and Check”—trying combinations of numbers until the right numbers are found that satisfy the conditions of the problem—a method that many professional mathematicians consider inefficient (see sidebar). The bar-modeling technique not only provides a powerful method for solving problems, but also serves as a link to algebra. Symbolic representation of problems, the mainstay of algebra, emerges as a logical extension of the bar-modeling technique.

What Happened in Montgomery County?

Given all of the mathematical strengths of the Singapore program, why was the pilot abandoned so quickly in Montgomery County? The simplest answer is that where Singapore Math worked the best, in College Gardens, it is still being used; where it didn’t work as well, it was dropped. But that does not begin to explain what happened.

All four Montgomery County schools used the Singapore Math texts in 2000–01 and 2001–02, but only College Gardens and Highland View kept the program in 2002–03. The “math computation” scores at College Gardens show a dramatic improvement for both 2nd and 4th grades (see Figures 2a and 2b), but in “general math” there is no discernible pattern; all four schools had either no change or a decrease in scores.

Additional results from the pilot were detailed in the evaluation conducted by the MCPS Office of Shared Accountability after the second year of the experiment. The county evaluators found that students in the four Singapore Math pilot schools generally progressed through the curriculum at an accelerated pace compared with their peers in control schools. But while the school district’s evaluation was positive in tone (Singapore Math “helped prepare students for higher-level math placements in middle school”), it reported mixed results and offered no recommendation for expansion.

Because the effectiveness of a program as sophisticated and multidimensional as Singapore Math cannot be thoroughly evaluated in just two years of testing, the story of its failure in Montgomery County says more about school politics and finances than about math programs. (It would help, for instance, to track students who went through Singapore’s program through their 8th-grade tests to ascertain how well they were prepared for algebra.) The mixed math results of the county’s evaluation should have been seen for what they were: an interim assessment. Instead, the county ended the funding for the program after the second year. If schools wished to continue, they had to pay for the materials out of their own budgets, which they didn’t need to do if they used district-approved texts such as Everyday Mathematics.

Detailing the many reasons for dropping support for the pilot by Montgomery County without waiting for long-term results would take more space than is available here. But we can get a sense of the thing by examining some of the reasons that the three schools gave for quitting Singapore Math and those given by College Gardens for staying with it.

The first problem was lack of planning and preparation. The depth and breadth of the differences between Singapore Math and American math were not appreciated. The decision to use Singapore Math was made in 1999, for instance, but textbooks and other teaching materials did not arrive at the four schools until late spring the following year, giving teachers just three months to prepare to introduce the program to students in the fall of 2000.

The Singapore Math manuals were another problem: they provided very little guidance on how to teach a particular lesson—because they are written for teachers who, for the most part, have a deeper understanding of mathematics than most U.S. teachers do. That dilemma was compounded by the lack of experience with Singapore’s program by Montgomery County and its delay in training teachers to use it. The Montgomery County Public Schools eventually developed a training program, but some people believe it was too little, too late. College Gardens and Highland View found funds to hire Singapore Math specialists (like Robyn Silbey) to help get the program off the ground and coordinate the training within their schools. Scott Baldridge, a Louisiana State University mathematician who provides professional training to teachers in implementing the Singapore program, believes that such training helps. “Some teachers get it on their own,” he says, “but many need professional development to see how the curriculum interacts with the students over several years.”

Even with adequate training, the two-year span of the pilot resulted in three of the pilot schools (all except College Gardens) introducing Singapore Math all at once, across all grades, which put older children at a severe disadvantage, since Singapore Math concepts build on one another. This helps to explain the difference in the math test results.

Another complaint expressed by teachers and administrators in all four schools was that Singapore Math was not in line with state standards. Indeed, the state’s academic standards include data analysis, statistics, and probability, which Singapore’s texts do not address. But it is more complicated than that since, by state law, each school district has authority over its own curriculum. Although required to administer the state tests, school districts are not required to align their curriculum with the state standards. That means, says Hoven, that “they can choose to aim for world-class standards instead, which at one time was one of the goals of the MCPS Long-Range Plan.” But the plan was revised to be aligned with state standards instead—a move, say some, that was, in effect, a decision to lower Montgomery County’s standards.

This brings us to the question of money. Eileen MacFarlane, principal at Drew, said that her school initially supplemented Singapore Math with additional material on statistics, data, and probability to cover the misalignment, but the cost of purchasing Singapore’s materials from their own budget became a problem.

Joanne Steckler, now retired as principal of Highland View, said, “No one told us to drop the program.” But being required to buy its own materials had the same effect. “For one year we did purchase our own Singapore materials,” said Steckler. “But we did not want other curriculum areas to suffer because of lack of funds to purchase materials, so we gave up Singapore Math.”

Shawn Miller, principal of Woodfield Elementary, also cited the cost of the texts. Once the county stopped funding Singapore Math, Miller made the decision to go with the county-approved program, Everyday Mathematics, which, he said, “was better aligned with the state curriculum.”

With such standards-alignment and budget concerns, the schools had a safe way to bow out of the pilot.

A Culture Shock to the System

But budget questions were hardly fundamental. Taking on a program like Singapore Math meant going against what many teachers believed math education to be about; surely, it was not what they were trained for. Since the success of Singapore’s programs relies in many ways on more traditional approaches to math education, such as explicit instruction and giving students many problems to solve, in some ways its very success represented a slap in the face to American math reformers, many of whom have worked hard to eliminate such techniques from the teaching canon.

Gail Burrill, a former president of the NCTM, suggests quite bluntly that the success of Singapore Math cannot be imported. “These are books used by a different culture, a culture that is more homogeneous, and a culture that has a consistent way of thinking about mathematics.” And Cathy Seeley, a former president of the NCTM, hints as much by arguing that Singapore’s success (as well as that of other Asian countries) is not about the textbook. “We have to look beyond their textbooks to determine what these lessons are.”

The logic of the argument that it is the Asian culture or something “beyond their textbooks” that produces math success leads to the conclusion that, as NCTM adherents often contend, content doesn’t matter nearly as much as the teacher or the culture that produces the “proper conditions for learning.” Eileen MacFarlane maintained that the teachers in the Singapore pilots drew from the texts, but then quickly added, “The text is a resource, not a curriculum.” She said this despite her enthusiasm for Singapore’s program.

But the belief that the difference between Singapore Math and American math is just in the teaching or, as some suggest, the culture, is a rationalization, says David Klein, a mathematician at California State University, Northridge. “Math reformers assume that math education is bad in the United States because the NCTM reforms were not properly implemented nor understood by teachers,” he continues. “They never consider the possibility that the NCTM standards themselves and the textbooks written for those standards are one of the causes of poor math education in this country.”

The only person I heard openly disagree with the “teacher not text” argument was Dr. Sherry Liebes, then the principal of College Gardens, the only school that kept the program. While she said that teacher training is important, she added that Singapore’s texts provide a structured curriculum, and thus “It’s one less thing for teachers to worry about.” This notion was echoed in the AIR study, which quoted a teacher in one of the pilot schools in Montgomery County: “Having to explain Singapore Mathematics made me understand that I never really understood the mathematics I was teaching.”

Another stumbling block for the Maryland teachers was their concern that the Singapore Math program did not contain “real-world” activities. The term, as used by those who follow the ideas supported by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and education schools for teaching math, generally means a problem for which American students have not received much instruction or preparation. This is intentional, it turns out, because it is believed to be good for students to learn to approach problems for which they have not received explicit preparation. The National Education Association (NEA), for instance, in its online version of “A Parent’s Guide to Helping Your Child with Today’s Math,” gives an example of a “real-world” problem:

A farmer sends his daughter and son out into the barnyard to count the number of chickens and pigs. When they return the son says that he counted 200 legs but the daughter says she counted 70 heads. How many pigs and chickens does the farmer have?

The NEA then suggests that some students may solve the problem using algebra (those who know how to do so, that is), while others might solve it using Guess and Check. Still others may choose to draw pictures to solve it. The NEA admits that some methods might be considered more efficient, but points out that the correct answer can be found using multiple methods and that “by allowing students to think flexibly about numbers, we encourage them to ‘own’ the math forever, instead of ‘borrowing’ until class is over.” That this real-world problem depicts an approach that no sensible person would use in counting pigs and chickens is beside the point.

This kind of real-world math is indeed missing from Singapore’s program—apparently, if TIMSS tests mean anything, without much harm. Rather than waste students’ time with inefficient methods for solving problems, Singapore’s texts provide instruction that eliminates trial and error, one of the goals of mathematics. Bar modeling is a powerful pictorial technique that results in one answer, deduced by using mathematical principles that students have learned rather than by employing the haphazard trial-and-error method of Guess and Check.

For One Brief Shining Moment

An exact description of which differences in math instruction matter most is perhaps impossible. For instance, an emphasis on sequential mastery of skills that builds on previously acquired skills is a key component of the Singapore Math program and not important in the American approach, where activities don’t require such skills. While the latter creates the illusion of equal achievement, international tests like the TIMSS would seem to provide a reality check on that illusion.

The struggle to make math instruction work, of course, is not limited to Montgomery County. In the state of Washington, parent protests against the adoption of several standard math curricula (like Connected Math) led a state representative to introduce a bill earlier this year to put Singapore Math in all the state’s elementary schools. And in New York City, Elizabeth Carson, who heads NYC HOLD, has led a battle for years to rid the city’s schools of programs like Everyday Mathematics. She calls it a “tragedy for our children and our nation” that American attempts at math reform “bear no resemblance to the programs and standards of the highest-achieving nations.”

Having watched as three of the four schools dropped Singapore’s program in Montgomery County, John Hoven shared Carson’s concern. Discouraged, he resigned a year ago from the county’s Gifted and Talented Association. “I had stopped believing I could make a difference,” he says. “I felt it was time for someone else to try.”

In the meantime, the decline in the numbers of U.S.-trained scientists and engineers, compared with the increasing numbers of those trained in Asian countries, has not gone unnoticed. In this year’s State of the Union address, President George W. Bush stated: “We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations.” He proposed “to train 70,000 high-school teachers to lead Advanced Placement courses in math and science … bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms … and give early help to students who struggle with math, so they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs.”

A few months later, President Bush created the National Mathematics Advisory Panel to advise the White House and the secretary of education on the best use of scientifically based research to advance the teaching and learning of mathematics. The panel includes several people who have actively fought against the NCTM-led “fuzzy math” trend in this country.

While the goal of bolstering high-school math is a laudable one, the success of high-school students in math depends on what they’ve learned in the lower grades. If those foundations are weak, the addition of Advanced Placement courses in math and science in high schools will prove to be a weak enhancement. Unfortunately, changing the way math is taught in the lower grades appears to threaten an education philosophy and method that is pervasive in our schools, and does not move us towards academic excellence.

Barry Garelick is an analyst for the federal government and lives in the Washington, D.C., area. He is a national advisor to NYC HOLD, an education advocacy organization that addresses mathematics education in schools throughout the United States.