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A year ago, we first sought to quantify this discrepancy (“Johnny Can Read … in Some States,” features, Summer 2005), showing which states were upholding rigorous standards and which were not.

We return to the subject now, with the latest available data, to update our ratings. The standard we again use is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation’s “report card,” and still the only metric that allows strict comparisons between states. For each state where both NAEP and state accountability measures were available, we computed a score based on the difference between the percentage of students said to be proficient by the state and the percentage identified as proficient on the NAEP in years 2003 and 2005.

We are not evaluating state tests, nor are we grading states on the performance of their students. Instead, we are checking for “ truth in advertising, ” investigating whether the proficiency levels mean what they say. We are thus able to ascertain whether states lowered the bar for student proficiency as the full panoply of NCLB provisions took effect.

When we conducted the first of our checkups on the rigor of the standards, we gave each state the same kind of grade students receive. Where the requisite information was available, states with the highest standards were given an A; those with the lowest standards, an F. Last year, the requisite data were available for only 40 states. This time around, 48 states have been graded, including nine “ new” states providing the necessary information for the first time (see Figure 1). While the fact that these nine are now in compliance with NCLB is a laudable accomplishment, it is not clear how committed they are to the enterprise: among the nine, only the District of Columbia and New Mexico scored a grade higher than C, and Nebraska, Utah, Iowa, Oregon, and Nevada could do no better than a mediocre C or D. The first grades garnered by Alabama, Nebraska, and West Virginia were D minuses. Clearly, student proficiency has entirely different meanings in different parts of the country.

Grading Procedure In 2003 and 2005, both state and NAEP tests were given in math and reading for 4th and 8th-grade students. The grades reported here are based on the comparison of state and NAEP proficiency scores in 2005, and changes for each are calculated relative to 2003. For each available test we computed the difference between the percentage of students who were proficient on the NAEP and the percentage reported to be proficient on the state’ s own tests for the same year. We also computed the standard deviation for this difference. We then determined how many standard deviations each state’ s difference was above or below the average difference on each test. As with last year, the scale for the grades was set so that if grades had been randomly assigned, 10 percent of the states would earn As, 20 percent Bs, 40 percent Cs, 20 percent Ds, and 10 percent Fs. Each state’ s grade is based on how much easier it was to be labeled proficient on the state assessment as compared with the NAEP. For example, on the 4th-grade math test in 2005, South Carolina reported that 41 percent of its students had achieved proficiency, but 36 percent were proficient on the NAEP. The difference (41 percent – 36 percent = 5 percent) is about 1.4 standard deviations better than the average difference between the state test and the NAEP, which is 31 percent. This was good enough for South Carolina to earn an A for its standards in 4th-grade math. The overall grade for each state was determined by taking the average for the standard deviations on the tests for which the state reported proficiency percentages. — Paul Peterson and Frederick Hess

Meanwhile, five states that previously had their accountability systems in place are letting their standards slide. The biggest decline was in Arizona, with significant drops also found (in order of magnitude) in Maryland, Ohio, North Dakota, and Idaho. If parents in these states read that students are making great strides on state proficiency tests, they would be advised to consider the message with a healthy dose of skepticism. At least some of the reported student gains appear to be the product of gamesmanship.

In addition, states with already low standards have done nothing to raise them. Oklahoma and Tennessee once again share the cream puff award, with both states earning Fs because their self-reported performance is much higher than can be justified by the NAEP results. States with nearly equally embarrassing D minuses included Mississippi, Georgia, and North Carolina. Once again, we discover that Suzy could be a good reader in North Carolina, where standards are low, but a failure in neighboring South Carolina, where standards are higher.

Still, there are happier stories to tell. Montana is the most improved state. Others that have significantly boosted their proficiency standards relative to the NAEP include Texas, Arkansas, and Wisconsin.

Best of all, a handful of states continued to impress for a second consecutive year, grading their own performance on a particularly tough curve. Massachusetts, South Carolina, Wyoming, Maine, and Missouri all once again earned As.

Shining a light on the standards that states set is crucial, as it helps remind state officials that there is a right way and a wrong way to ace a test. Of course, having high standards is not enough. It is the crucial first step, but the next, and more difficult one, is to make sure that a high percentage of students reach that standard. In that regard, all states need to do much better, if no child is to be left behind.

Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess are editors of Education Next. Mark Linnen provided research assistance.

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You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether collective bargaining in education hasn’t become something more like collusion. In fact, the best evidence to support that position may be the steady decline in labor unrest. Despite some high-profile incidents–like the teacher “sick-out” which shut down 53 of Detroit’s 235 schools last spring–strikes by teachers have become increasingly rare since 1975, a high-water mark, when there were 241 nationwide. By 2004 there were just 15. During this same period, the number of public school teachers rose from 2.2 million to more than 3.1 million, several times the rate of increase of the students they serve, whose numbers edged up only slightly, from 44.8 million to 48.4 million.

The current era of labor peace is typically attributed to laws in 31 states barring teachers from striking and mandating mediation or binding arbitration procedures. In addition, both sides have gained negotiating experience. However, that’s not the whole story. Superintendents in cities like San Diego, Milwaukee, and Houston have reported being urged by civic officials, business leaders, and philanthropists to seek “consensus” and to “partner” with the local union.

Has all this labor peace actually been good for education? Is it perhaps time for some discord?

The suggestion at first seems absurd. Parents and the voting public frown on labor conflict and teachers’ strikes for good reason, not least among them the disruptions for family and schooling that are caused by even temporary school closings. Yet the public’s aversion to conflict, combined with the political heft of teacher unions, can make school boards unduly deferential to union demands.

Despite the National Education Association’s claims to be an advocate “for children and public education,” we should not expect unions at the bargaining table to be for anything but their own interests. Naturally enough, those interests favor existing arrangements, which protect jobs; limit the demands placed on members, including their accountability for student performance; and safeguard the privileges of senior teachers. Teachers who entered the profession under these rules and patiently served their time, waiting for the rewards of seniority, are understandably resistant to measures that would significantly alter pay scales, job protections, or work rules.

As Robert Barkley, former executive director of the Ohio Education Association, explained, “The fundamental and legitimate purposes of unions [are] to protect the employment interests of their members. It is the primary function of management to represent the basic interests of the enterprise: teaching and learning.”

These roles have been too often conflated.

What’s Good for the Goose … Is Good for the Goose

Collective bargaining agreements demonstrate the failure of school boards to fight for the interests of students and taxpayers, not to mention the prerogatives of sensible management. The contracts are long, complicated, and replete with both tediously detailed and needlessly ambiguous restrictions on administrators. The 199 collective bargaining agreements for teachers on file at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in January 2005 averaged 105 pages in length. And the topics covered in those pages extend far beyond bread-and-butter questions of salary and benefits; there are dozens of clauses covering a district’s ability to evaluate, transfer, terminate, and manage the workload of teachers, all having potentially serious effects on the management of schools and student achievement.

The Jefferson County, Kentucky, contract, for example, mandates that the district may not use student test scores “in any way to evaluate the work performance of employees unless they agree voluntarily.” Restrictions on matters as important as evaluations of teachers can also be maddeningly ambiguous. The Little Rock, Arkansas, contract, for instance, specifies: “An individual teacher’s lesson plan book shall be subject to the review of the principal at any time.” But then it clarifies: “Teachers shall not be required to make their lesson plan books available on a scheduled basis.”

Collective bargaining agreements also typically restrict the amount of time that teachers may be required to spend working with students, the number of students a teacher will instruct, and the number of lesson plans a teacher will prepare. In some cases they stipulate, as in Multnomah County, Oregon, that professional development “funds will be allocated based upon seniority of the unit members who make application,” thus converting these expenditures from a lever for school improvement into a perk for long-serving faculty.

Similarly, when it becomes necessary to fill a classroom vacancy or to remove an ineffective teacher, district officials are often hobbled by contract language. A 2005 study by the New Teacher Project, the national nonprofit organization that works with school districts to recruit high-quality teachers, examined five urban districts and concluded that seniority-based transfer privileges written into contracts often force principals “to hire large numbers of teachers they do not want and who may not be a good fit for the job and their school.” All but five states have laws giving teachers lifetime tenure after three years or less. While procedures for removing tenured teachers for “just cause” appear in most contracts, the available procedures are so burdensome that they are rarely used. A recent study of Illinois public schools found that, since 1986, an average of just two tenured teachers a year have been removed–in a state with more than 95,000 tenured teachers. The New Teacher Project report cited above found just four tenured teachers out of 70,000 fired for poor performance in the five districts studied.

Tellingly, teachers themselves agree that current policies on termination protect those who should not be in the schools. According to Public Agenda, 78 percent of teachers nationwide report that there are at least a few teachers in their school who “fail to do a good job and are simply going through the motions.” The same Public Agenda study quoted one New Jersey union representative: “I’ve gone in and defended teachers who shouldn’t even be pumping gas.” A Los Angeles union representative bragged, “If I’m representing them, it’s impossible to get them out. It’s impossible. Unless they commit a lewd act.” While such admissions may be startling, they highlight an important aspect of the union’s role: having been granted the exclusive right to represent teachers in the district, the union is legally bound to advocate for all of them. This obligation limits the capacity of unions to serve as partners in reform.

Passive Implementation

Once negotiated, collective bargaining agreements do not implement themselves. And the manner in which superintendents, school boards, and district personnel interpret and apply the often ambiguous contract language has significantly aggravated the problem. As one former school-board member from a large urban district noted, “Too often school boards and superintendents complain that they cannot do something because of the teachers union contract. Often what they complained was restricted wasn’t actually prohibited … but might cause some political difficulties or raise some public issues.” Boards and their appointed administrators seemingly find it easier to sink into this “zone of ambiguity” than to take stands that may provoke visible unrest, negative publicity, or a work stoppage.

Some of management’s reticence is understandable. When a union believes that management actions violate contract terms, it typically files an appeal or a grievance in accordance with procedures spelled out in the contract. Critics of teacher unions assert that resources and specialized expertise give the union a pronounced advantage in the ensuing proceedings. A striking example of union capacity is the National Education Association’s UniServ system, a nationwide network of 1,650 full-time and 200 part-time NEA employees who provide guidance to local affiliates on matters such as negotiations and grievance resolution. The NEA itself touts the UniServ program as “a vast cadre of human resources,” on which it spent some $50 million in 2001, but it also attempts to downplay the system’s impact, saying that each employee has multiple responsibilities and works with multiple districts. What UniServ offers, union proponents claim, pales beside the legal, staff, and budgetary resources available to school boards.

In truth, unions seem to navigate the grievance process more adroitly than district officials, but that is only partly due to resources. It is also because they aggressively exploit contract language, while school boards and superintendents are often more interested in avoiding confrontation than in asserting managerial prerogatives.

More Pay and Benefits, Less Quality

If we assume that better salaries attract better candidates, it would initially seem that compensation is an area where collective bargaining advances the interests of students as well as teachers. However, while unions have fought to increase salaries and to improve benefit packages, they have resisted efforts to ensure that this spending recruits, rewards, and retains the most essential or effective teachers.

Virtually all teachers’ collective bargaining agreements establish salary schedules based strictly on years of experience and accumulated graduate credits. These “step-and-lane” schedules, which legislatures and school boards have accepted, reflect union preferences for wage agreements that increase member solidarity and benefit the most union members. Unfortunately, there is good reason to believe that they have contributed to the well-documented decline in the aptitude of new teachers and to shortages in high-need subject areas. At a minimum, the rigidity of existing salary schedules restricts superintendents’ options for remedying these problems.

Nearly all contracts also still call for defined-benefit retirement plans, which provide a traditional pension and disproportionately reward educators who stay in place for 20 years. As Matthew Lathrop of the American Legislative Exchange Council has noted, “The guaranteed benefit is only good for those who spend a substantial part of their career with one employer. That’s an enormous drawback in today’s economy, when even public employees are less likely to stick with a single employer.”

Evidence similarly suggests that teachers’ benefit packages are poorly equipped to deal with the rising costs of health care. A 2005 study by the Rhode Island Education Partnership, for example, found that public school districts in that state uniformly allowed employees to select their own health carrier and plan design and that 73 percent of districts offered no-cost health benefits for retirees; not one of the private-sector firms in the state the study examined offered these perks. In short, much like troubled industrial-era firms General Motors (GM) and United Airlines, many school districts are sinking enormous sums into benefit plans that are poorly designed to attract new talent and may ultimately prove unaffordable.

Unions and Education Politics

One reason school boards are hesitant to take a stronger stance in negotiations and in contract implementation may be the firm hand that unions exercise in education politics. Quite simply, school-board elections offer teacher unions the unusual opportunity to influence the makeup of the management team they will face at the bargaining table. (See Terry Moe, “The Union Label on the Ballot Box.”) It is as if the board of directors of General Motors were not selected by its shareholders, but by the residents of Detroit. The result of such a scenario would be a management team focused on workers’ concerns more than on holding down costs or chasing efficiencies.

Actually, it is worse than that, as GM is ultimately subject to the discipline of the marketplace. If the company allowed efficiency to decline too far, it would be driven into bankruptcy by competitors, domestic or foreign. In public education, however, such market pressures are muted by the lack of market competition and organizational inertia. A union official in Cleveland offered a telling insight when discussing a negotiator who was demanding concessions after a state takeover. The union official recalled: “We looked at [the negotiator] and said, ‘Why do we have to do that?’ His background was in the private sector, where he can threaten, ‘If you don’t do this, we’re moving the factory to Mexico.’ Well, we knew the school system wasn’t moving to Mexico, so we just said, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’”

And since school-board elections are typically low-turnout affairs, organized and energized interests, like teacher unions, can exert even more influence on the outcome than their raw numbers would suggest. Almost 60 percent of board members nationwide say the teacher unions are “very active” or “somewhat active” in their local elections, according to research published by the National School Boards Association. By comparison, fewer than one-third of the board members reported that business groups were “very” or “somewhat” active in elections in their districts.

Unions are also active in state and federal legislatures, using their lobbying clout to safeguard their collective bargaining muscle and to ensure that negotiations unfold on a hospitable playing field. Union dues provide resources to pursue ever more favorable laws. And the dues are augmented by dollars deducted from the paychecks of nonmembers as a result of state laws that allow unions to collect funds from all teachers covered by the contract. Ironically, even the No Child Left Behind Act offers a telling example of union influence as the first federal law to recognize explicitly, and ultimately defer to, collective bargaining’s role in education governance. In theory, the law empowers districts to replace staff members at persistently low-performing schools. This provision was promptly eviscerated at the behest of the unions: the Department of Education sheepishly allowed that the authority can be exercised only if the district’s contract allows it.

The False Promise of “New Unionism”

The case for reforming the collective bargaining process has become so strong that even some union supporters have sought to persuade union locals to abandon an industrial model of contract negotiations for a more collaborative “new unionism.” Thoughtful, well-intentioned advocates such as Charles Kerchner and Adam Urbanski call for unions and districts to work together to foster professionalism, create pleasant working conditions, and involve teachers in governance and decisionmaking (see “Reform or Be Reformed,” forum, Fall 2001). The “new unionists” point to the 1996 formation of the Teacher Union Reform Network and to widely touted collective bargaining agreements in Dade County, Florida; in Seattle; and in Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio.

Many union sympathizers contend that new unionism has already changed the character of the nation’s major teacher unions. Wayne Urban, professor of education and an expert on teacher unions, notes that NEA president Robert Chase gave a pivotal address on behalf of new unionism at the National Press Club in 1997, calling for “the transformation of his organization away from the adversarial stance institutionalized in collective bargaining toward one that was more professional.” He says for the next half decade, Chase “tirelessly advocated his new union agenda.” Likewise, a handbook written in 2006 by Linda Kaboolian, a respected academic proponent of reform unionism (see also Kaboolians’ essay “Table Talk,” forum), asserts that “a great deal of collaborative innovation exists and has been ongoing for many years.” In short, serious voices believe that the teacher unions have already committed themselves to new unionism.

In reality, sustained attempts to instill new unionism have occurred in just a handful of districts, and the results have been fairly disappointing. This bleak track record should be no surprise. Union leaders are elected by current members to protect their interests, and most teachers remain highly satisfied with their unions’ conduct of collective bargaining. A national poll of teachers conducted by Terry Moe in 2003 revealed that 84 percent of union members report that they are either somewhat or very satisfied with the job their unions do in representing their interests in collective bargaining. Predictably, incumbent union leaders who have embraced a strategy of collaboration or have simply been regarded as too cooperative have been voted out of office by teachers seeking more combative leadership. (See sidebar.)

Unions in any industry are loath to contemplate givebacks. Even when firms have declared bankruptcy or are on the verge of doing so, as in the airline and auto parts industries in recent years, union leaders frequently resist concessions on wages, benefits, or work conditions. Historically, unions have agreed to concessions only when the leadership calculates that the costs of holding firm outweigh the losses they’ll be giving up at the table–and when they can convince their members that is the case. Sometimes, as when the United Steel Workers chose to watch the American steel industry sink rather than accept concessions, this moment never comes–or comes far too late. In such cases, the only option is to watch the Titanic slowly go under and then repair to a shipyard with new blueprints. That option is not available in public education, at least not without disruption on a scale that would dwarf the fallout of even the most bitter teachers’ strike.

Getting Serious

Those looking to reinvent American schooling for a new century must recognize that unions are holding fast to contracts designed to address the challenges and inequities of an earlier era. Union leaders often invoke norms of justice when seeking to ensure that veteran teachers continue to enjoy the same perks and protections they were implicitly promised when they entered the profession a quarter century ago–despite intervening changes in the larger world, in the needs of students, and in management and organizational practice. One can sympathize with union locals and simultaneously see the contracts they’ve negotiated as enormous obstacles to retooling schools for the 21st century.

The answer, then, is not in fond hopes that union leaders will be sweet-talked or shamed into embracing change. With rare exceptions, their position simply won’t permit it. At the same time, eliminating collective bargaining is not a useful goal. Not only is it politically hopeless, but evidence from other industries suggests that unions can be a constructive force given the proper conditions.

Established practices in negotiating teachers’ compensation and the rules governing hiring, termination, and work routines need to come of age. The challenge is not in deciding what changes are needed, as there is already broad agreement on many of the desirable modifications. The challenge is making them happen. Changing collective bargaining means changing the environment in which it is conducted. A crucial first step, already under way, is establishing meaningful competition and accountability for schools–creating pressure on management and giving union leaders the cover to say to their members, “We need to deal, because if the schools don’t improve, all the alternatives are going to be uglier still.” But we also need more transparency, accompanied by a big change of heart.

Promoting Transparency

The habits of district-union collusion are due in large part to the public’s ignorance of what collective bargaining agreements say and to a strong desire for tranquility and smooth school operations. Experience suggests that when parents, policymakers, or civic leaders are made aware of the costs, rules, and protections the agreements impose, they are much less willing to accept the status quo and more willing to back hard-nosed district leadership.

The failure of the general public and more than a few policymakers to understand the stakes is largely due to the scant attention the media give these dealings. A 2005 study of how newspapers cover collective bargaining revealed that in 12 out of 20 large school districts, the local daily newspaper printed no more than one article on the contract negotiations. A national union official explained, “Bargaining is conducted behind closed doors. Neither side ‘goes public,’ even to its own members, until the entire contract is done.” While productive negotiations require the confidence to float ideas without fear that they will appear in tomorrow’s headlines, greater transparency would force both the union and management to justify their demands in the face of public scrutiny.

Local officials could take a page from the playbook of former New York City councilwoman Eva Moskowitz (see forum) and hold hearings on the local contract, inviting public scrutiny and media coverage. The Moskowitz inquiry was especially valuable in providing reporters a context for writing about the contract’s implementation and its impact on district operations. Officials and civic leaders should also ensure that influential members of the local media are aware of the contract’s provisions and have information on the nature, conduct, and outcomes of grievance and arbitration proceedings. While beat reporters and education editors may not be in a position to redirect coverage or to invite controversy on their own authority, publishers and editorial writers are able and willing to do so when convinced the matter is a pressing issue of broad public concern.

Acting Decisively

Most managers prefer to avoid conflict. However, when nimble competitors, irate stockholders, and the need for self-preservation demand it, executives in the private sector take a deep breath and accept the inevitability of painful fights over staffing, operations, and work rules. Only a similar firmness of purpose will enable school boards and superintendents to do what must be done. In particular, they need to:

Negotiate hard. If you haven’t missed an airplane recently, management consultants tell us, you’re spending too much time in airports. Considering the contracts that school boards have come to accept, one might similarly conclude that boards that don’t provoke a work action once in a while aren’t pushing hard enough at the table. In the short run, schools may need more, fiercer, and uglier contract disputes. That would show that school boards and superintendents are fighting hard for the children, the community, and the taxpayers. Superintendents and board members are not independent agents, however. They can’t do it alone.

Rally the public. Newspaper editorial boards, civic leaders, local chambers of commerce, and parent groups have made it eminently clear that they want everyone to find a way to “get along,” and they expect district leaders to find a way to avoid upsetting the apple cart. These stakeholder groups need to rethink their belief that labor unrest is uniformly a sign of leadership failure. Labor unrest can be a good thing when the alternative is to continue to accept an anachronistic, stifling, and perversely constructed status quo. Taking back prerogatives and language that unions have won in previous rounds of negotiations will inevitably be a bruising, unpleasant struggle–one that only the staunchest district officials will undertake, and one that they will win only if the community is committed to seeing it through. As long as they cannot count on community support in the face of labor unrest, sensible board members and superintendents will continue to fold on the important questions.

Make arbitration work for students. Some states, like New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, have well-defined mediation or arbitration procedures that kick in when the parties can’t reach agreement. These policies can effectively take the bat out of a school board’s hand, sometimes imposing mandatory settlement terms on even those boards willing to drive a hard bargain. There is surprisingly little systematic research on the outcomes of the arbitration process. However, arbitrators and mediators, who must be approved by both sides, tend to be risk-averse consensus seekers who  frown on calls for radical changes to existing provisions. This tendency is undoubtedly aggravated in some cases by “past-practice” contract clauses, which treat established routines as controlling. The availability of arbitration therefore highlights two additional considerations for would-be reformers: the need to scrutinize state laws governing a contract impasse to ensure that they do not stack the deck in favor of union interests and the importance of raising public awareness of contract provisions that arbitrators might otherwise leave untouched.

Implement smart. It’s not enough to stand firm at the table. District officials must also aggressively exploit existing language or interpret ambiguous language in whatever way provides the most flexibility to respond to student needs. With their hands stayed by the desire to maintain a cordial working environment, a fear of negative publicity, and concern about costly and time-consuming grievance proceedings, administrators frequently treat the absence of clear managerial prerogatives in contracts as an excuse for inaction. This suggests that district leaders need a new mindset about implementation. It also shows how important it is to thrash out at the bargaining table language that minimizes the “zone of ambiguity” regarding managerial rights on issues like compensation, termination, teacher transfer, and work rules. Ultimately, however, district leaders must ensure that their staff members know how to take advantage of management rights, and school boards must charge the superintendent and senior staff with actually making full use of managerial prerogatives.

Increasing Capacity

Finally, we must recognize that school boards are relatively weak governing bodies, composed of part-timers with other obligations, limited expertise, and little incentive to engage in contentious negotiations. A 2001 National School Boards Association survey found that most school-board members are unpaid, devote fewer than ten hours a week to board-related business, and have served on the board for five years or less. It is asking a lot to expect these part-timers, even with the aid of experienced attorneys, to go toe-to-toe with seasoned union leaders in the kind of public controversy engendered by a contract standoff. Board positions need to be made more attractive and augmented with research and staff support, or districts need to move toward alternative forms of governance in which the costs of inefficiency and lagging achievement become intolerable.

Above all, school-board members and those who elect them must never lose sight of the fact that collective bargaining is an adversarial process. Ironically, the current crop of teacher union leaders seem less like such labor lions as Samuel Gompers and Walter Reuther and more like Charlie Wilson, the imperial president of General Motors. “What’s good for GM is good for the country,” Wilson blithely remarked in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee a half century ago. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have long argued that what is good for America’s teachers is good for America’s children–and, by implication, for America itself. The willingness of too many superintendents, school boards, and legislators to act as if this were true has been a crippling handicap for America’s schools. It is time to move beyond utopian dreams, or overwrought efforts to goad unions into good behavior, and to recognize that labor strife may be the birth pains of real school reform.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI. Martin R. West is a research fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and the research editor of Education Next.

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The discussion, encompassing as it did such explicitly religious ideas, might not have taken place in a typical high-school classroom, but Jordan is for all intents and purposes a typical high-school student. He has California blond hair, sports a well-worn Eagles T-shirt, is active in student government and his church, and says that he rarely gets to bed before midnight because of homework. Looking to the future, he hopes to attend the nearby University of California at Riverside (to be close to his family and save money), where he plans to major in business and political science. Eventually, he wants to become a stockbroker and then run for Congress. As much as Jordan likes the evangelical atmosphere at Calvary, he doesn’t think a Christian college campus would challenge him in the same way as UC, for example. “I want to be in a setting where I can stand up for what I believe in and not back down,” he says. “If I want to be a politician someday, I’ll have to start somewhere.”

Jordan is already getting a sense of just how hard he will have to fight to reach his goals. His high school is now engaged in a battle over whether students who attend Christian high schools will be given the same opportunity as their public school counterparts to attend California’s state universities.

A year and a half ago, Calvary approached the University of California’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools with the curricula of some new courses it wanted to offer. The board must ensure that the classes given in California’s high schools are sufficiently rigorous to be counted in UC admissions decisions. Calvary submitted three courses for approval in the areas of history/social science and English/literature. It also made inquiries about curricula it wanted to offer in the natural sciences and religion/ethics, in an effort to clarify the board’s policies. In the end, the three courses were officially rejected, and the remainder would have been if they had been submitted.

The decision was a slap in the face to Calvary, which prided itself on educating kids in religious and secular knowledge, but the school didn’t turn the other cheek. It sued. And because the University of California action was perceived by many religious educators as a possible precedent for action elsewhere, Calvary was joined in its suit by the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), an umbrella group for four thousand Christian education institutions.

Rejection on Grounds of Religion

The science classes from Calvary were rejected by the UC with a simple form letter, one apparently sent to all schools that proposed to use Christian high-school science textbooks published by the two biggest Christian publishers, A Beka Book and Bob Jones University. “The content of the course outlines submitted for approval is not consistent with the viewpoints and knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community,” said the letter. “As such, students who take these courses may not be well prepared for success if/when they enter science courses/programs at UC.” UC’s general counsel, Chris Patti, notes that these texts have many “scientific errors,” and the “biggest one is [the way they describe] evolution.”

Evolution, intelligent design, and creationism are all presented in the Christian biology books. But even if the last two were left out, UC still wouldn’t be satisfied. According to Burt Carney, ACSI’s legal-affairs director, in a meeting held after the rejection of the textbooks, Barbara Sawrey, a professor of chemistry at UC San Diego, explained that there was nothing wrong scientifically with the proposed physics textbook. She simply objected to its including a verse from scripture at the beginning of each chapter.

While controversy over the science requirements turned this lawsuit into another story about evolution and intelligent design for many in the media, the case is, in fact, about much more. The college also objected to one of Calvary’s history courses, “Christianity’s Influence on America,” because, as the UC letter said, the focus was “too narrow/too specialized” and because it is “not consistent with the empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community.” The curriculum of the course seems broad enough—covering the role of Christianity in the founding, the abolitionist movement, civil rights, the fall of communism—but it seems downright all-encompassing when compared, as it was in the complaint, with approved classes like “Modern Irish History” and “Armenian History.”

Calvary’s literature class, “Christian Morality in American Literature,” was rejected because it “does not offer a non-biased approach to the subject matter.” But, as Calvary and ACSI pointed out, the UC approved courses such as “Feminine Perspectives in Literature” and “Ethnic Experiences in Literature.” UC counsel Patti would later try to clarify the rejection by saying that the Calvary course relied solely on works from an anthology. Never mind that the anthology included works by Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman.

Ultimately, Patti argues that it is irrelevant whether the UC rejects such courses since other entry methods are available to the Calvary students. UC, he explains, will admit students who score at a certain level on standardized tests, and they may also be admitted by “exception.” Calvary students would thus have to perform in the top 4 percent on exams like the SATII (being in the top 15 percent usually gets you into one of the university campuses). Admission by “exception” is used mostly for home schoolers. The UC system has more than 200,000 students. “Exception” was made for only eight students in the entire system last year.

What’s Wrong with God?

Why place this burden on Christian-school students? A UC statement explains that the school’s requirements are there to ensure “that students coming to the University are conversant with accepted educational and scientific content and methods of inquiry at the level required for UC students and typically expected of educated citizens in the competitive workforce.” But Patti acknowledges that there is no evidence that students admitted from schools using these textbooks or offering these courses are performing any differently from their peers in secular high schools. Indeed, juniors at ACSI schools performed between 8 and 27 percentage points above average on the Stanford 10 subject tests in the 2004–05 school year (see Figure 1).

Though UC’s rules aren’t affecting a great number of students right now, because they apply only if a school submits proposals for new curricula, ACSI’s Burt Carney believes it is only a matter of time before the university goes after the 150 or so schools in California that already offer these classes. “Right now, ACSI has distinctively religious schools, which have endeavored to integrate faith and learning in all the subjects,” Carney explains. “If California prevails, the only way for students to go from our schools to university would be to strip out the religious elements of their education.”

Indeed, a list of “helpful hints” from the university suggests stripping religion even out of the religion classes: “Religion and ethics courses are acceptable … as long as they … do not include among its [sic] primary goals the personal religious growth of the student.” This idea would probably sound odd to parents who send their children to any religious school—whether Catholic, Jewish, or evangelical—since character building is one of the foundations of the education excellence these institutions pride themselves on.

Of course, religious schools have always included personal growth among their goals. But just at the time when public universities seem to be taking more precautions against such knowledge (read: moral judgments) creeping into their curricula, evangelical high schools are being more aggressive in practicing what Carney refers to as the “integration of faith and learning.”

For instance, at Whitefield Academy, an evangelical school just outside Atlanta, the faculty is determined to bring faith into every aspect of the curriculum. Stacy Quiros, Whitefield’s band director and one of the school’s founders, explains, “Even though we may be doing algebra, we can say that the wonder of math and the beauty of numbers come from this creative God we serve. Even though we’re studying notes and rhythms, the end result is a sacrifice to God, a sweet aroma.”

But Quiros, who is also the parent of three current Whitefield students and one graduate, says she and the other parents who helped get the school off the ground, in 1996, did not want to sacrifice academic quality in order to have a true Christian school. “We believe that all truth is God’s truth. We were not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Until recently Quiros’s statements would have been considered heretical in many evangelical communities, where the faithful tended to subscribe to a creed that Christian historian Mark Noll in his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, says meant “that we, and only we, have the truth, while nonbelievers or Christian believers who are not evangelicals practice only error.” This led evangelicals to dismiss most secular ideas, explains Noll, a professor at the evangelical Wheaton College, and to fail “notably in sustaining serious intellectual life.”

The notion that faith and learning can coexist has spread to many evangelical colleges in the past few decades and could explain the growing popularity of Christian schooling (see Figure 2). Scholarly pursuits are now seen as a way of glorifying God, both in studying the greatness of God’s world and in developing one’s God-given faculties (an approach to religious education long practiced by Catholic educators). And now these ideas have trickled down to high schools, in part because many Christian-college graduates are choosing to teach at the secondary-school level. Current Christian high school students seem well-versed in the idea of using faith as an inspiration to pursue secular knowledge. Says Jordan Trivison: “Students here bring religion to their attitude toward academics.” As a poster in one of Calvary’s science classrooms puts it, “You need to do all things for the glory of God.”

A Cross-Section of Christian Schools

That students work hard is all well and good, but the question of how rigorous this kind of education really is will likely be raised many more times in the coming years. Burt Carney is worried not only that other public colleges might follow the University of California’s lead, but also that groups like the Educational Testing Service are considering classroom visits to make sure that teachers and curricula in AP courses, for instance, meet certain standards. If those standards turn out to be as hostile to religious content as those of UC, then ACSI schools have reason to worry.

What visitors to Christian high school classrooms would find, however, might surprise them. Though evangelical schools remain resolute in their adherence to Christian doctrine, they are also maintaining their academic rigor. I visited three fairly typical schools, Calvary, Whitefield, and Colorado Springs Christian School, and it was clear that much more was being taught than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Calvary Chapel, with a few stars like Jordan, resembles an academically average public high school. There is probably a little more order and discipline at Calvary than in a typical public school, but Calvary’s students work hard, and they learn math, history, and science from competent teachers. Most of Calvary’s college-bound graduates (about half the senior class) go to public colleges, and for most of those, UC Riverside is about as good as they get.

Whitefield, on the other hand, looks very much like a New England prep school. Both the campus and its 1,200 kids are clean-cut; uniforms are required. Though no one at the school was willing to say that Whitefield youth are perfect, there seemed to be a general agreement that, as biology teacher Christopher McDonald puts it, “You would find a much lower incidence of drug use and sexual promiscuity here” than at other local private and public schools.

McDonald is quick to say that that is not simply the result of Whitefield’s Christian bent or even because its students must sign on to a fierce honor and disciplinary code. Rather, he says, “This school is an extension of the family. They’re in this environment during the day and then they go home to strong Christian families at night, and on the weekends, they’re attending church.”
This is not just speculation. Whitefield considers itself a “covenant school,” meaning that, according to the school’s policy manual, “at least one parent or guardian (and preferably both parents or both guardians) professes faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as his or her personal Savior.” Indeed, at many ACSI schools it is not only the parent but also the student who must provide such Christian “testimony” in the application process. Without it, school administrators believe, the religious identity of the institution will be watered-down over time.

Whitefield has watched as many of the older Christian high schools in the area have become increasingly secular—largely indistinguishable from other private high schools. Whitefield wants to avoid such a fate. At the same time, though, it wants its students to be able to succeed in the secular world. And that is why it is so important to Whitefield parents and administrators for the school to gain a good academic reputation as well.

It seems to have succeeded on the academic front. An English teacher speaking about Huck Finn to a class of seniors compares Tom’s character to the Devil’s in Paradise Lost, a reference that the kids understand because they had read Milton the previous year. European history students are studying Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, because, as teacher Amy Seefeldt explains, even though Frankl is an atheist, “He says that at the core of human existence is the search for meaning.” In all of her history classes, Seefeldt tries to show students how this is “what every civilization has been searching for.” Students are doing well on AP and SAT tests and being accepted at top colleges, including Boston College, Baylor, Pepperdine, Duke, Washington and Lee, and Dartmouth.

Whitefield’s headmaster, Tim Hillen, acknowledges the difficulty in getting people to take a relatively new and strongly Christian school seriously. But, he says, “The proof is in the pudding. We have the actual statistics, and the education achievement is here.”

Colorado Springs Christian School (CSCS) falls somewhere between Whitefield and Calvary in the ranks of ACSI schools. It is bigger than both (with 1,700 students) and was founded in 1971, before either one. The school has a dress code, which prohibits such religious fashion no-nos as “excessive sagging” on men’s pants, but it is easy to spot boxer shorts, bra straps, and all sorts of other signs of immodesty among students strolling the campus. Though the vast majority of the students do go on to college, they generally go to less-impressive schools than students who matriculate from Whitefield. Many students plan to attend public institutions nearby, such as the University of Colorado. The environment is not heavily intellectual; the principal used to be an athletics coach. His office doesn’t have many books, but it does have a religious sculpture of two hands, palms facing heavenward, filled with manna for adolescents: miniature candy bars.

Part of what makes CSCS distinctive is a faculty whose members care deeply about their own faith and that of their charges. As history teacher Kris Walker notes, teachers are “definitely not in it for the money.” Students frequently mention how much the teachers at CSCS care about them (and how much they sacrifice to work there). Walker explains the decision she and her colleagues have made to teach at CSCS: “This is where God wants us. We’re here to make eternal differences in their lives, not just get them into college.”

Where to Draw the Line

Other factors bring teachers to CSCS as well. Maryanne Brilleslyper, who has a Ph.D. in choral conducting and has just taken over as the school’s choir director, has taken a pay cut to come here from a public school. She is confident in her decision because, she says, “There’s nothing I can’t sing here. I don’t need school board approval to mention God. I can base my choices on musical merit.” The opportunity to share their religious beliefs in intellectual and emotional contexts is exciting to many of the teachers at Calvary, Whitefield, and Colorado Springs Christian. Their curricula are not censored, at least not for mention of God, and their interactions with students can include helping them through spiritual crises, not just academic ones.

Parents like this aspect of Christian schools, too. Randy LaPierre, who has two sons at Calvary Chapel, says that families are able to have “a certain bond with teachers,” which would allow him to go meet a new teacher, “and after a minute or two, say, ‘Hey, can I pray with you?’ And I can feel his heart will be lined up with my heart.”

In sum, these schools provide students, teachers, and families with a common cause, academically and religiously. One of Whitefield’s more surprising attributes is the school’s racial integration. With minorities composing 20 percent of the enrollment, the school could easily experience the kind of self-segregation that plagues many education institutions. Not only does the Whitefield student body seem cohesive, but the black students are achieving at high levels. An AP biology class of 12, for instance, has 5 black students.

A school’s willingness to define its boundaries, however exclusionary they may seem to outsiders, can have clear benefits for education. Perhaps the most interesting illustration of this idea comes from a story Stacy Quiros tells about a Buddhist woman who wanted to send her kids to Whitefield.

“I started talking to her about her faith,” says Quiros. “I said, ‘You’re going to have a hard time reconciling the fact that we believe that Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior and there is only one way to salvation with your own beliefs.’” When the woman told Quiros that her son could “learn that stuff too,” Quiros asked, “What are you going to do when your son comes home and says, ‘This is what I’m being taught?’ Isn’t that going to be a conflict?” The mother shrugged, “Well that’s just school.” With little fanfare, Quiros replied, “No it’s not.”

Perhaps there’s a lesson there for all schools, including universities, which try so earnestly to divorce the dissemination of knowledge from the shaping of character. Such distinctions are not so easily made. Students take their moral lessons where they can find them.

-Naomi Schaefer Riley is the deputy editor of the Taste page at the Wall Street Journal and author of God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America.

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Indeed, the NCLB legislation calls for “greater responsibility” from teachers and schools for student learning. Yet we know very little about whether a teacher’s own sense of responsibility for that learning makes any difference to student achievement. We know even less about how to nurture that sense of responsibility. I set out to explore both questions.

My study of a nationally representative sample of 1st graders and their teachers suggests that teachers who take personal responsibility for student learning can improve student achievement; specifically, children with teachers who have a greater sense of responsibility for student outcomes learn more in reading during the 1st grade. Unfortunately, the findings presented here also suggest that the teachers of economically disadvantaged students, the very students NCLB targets as most in need of teachers and schools that take responsibility for their learning, are less likely to take responsibility for student outcomes.

The way forward, however, should not be dedicated solely to the daunting task of identifying, hiring, and retaining more responsible teachers. I found that a teacher’s work environment has a strong relationship with her commitment to student learning. Teachers who report that their school’s leadership is supportive of their efforts in the classroom have a much greater senseof responsibility, as do teachers in Catholic schools. Improving the quality of school leadership could also be an effective means of staffing our nation’s classrooms with responsible teachers.

Teacher Responsibility and Student Learning

To find out whether a teacher’s sense of responsibility affects student learning, I first had to define the terms. I determined that a teacher has a sense of responsibility when she willingly accepts credit for students’ positive outcomes and also accepts blame for their negative outcomes. Rather than attribute poor grades or low test scores to faults within students or to deficits in their backgrounds, responsible teachers attribute much of the cause to their own efforts and behavior. At its best, responsibility represents a teacher’s commitment to make learning happen for her students.

And though student achievement is easily defined, I did have to account for a host of other potential influences on it, including other teacher characteristics (such as certification status, post-college coursework, and years of experience as a 1st-grade teacher), the student’s social background (family income), classroom characteristics (average family income, percent minority), and, most important, the student’s previous achievement (kindergarten test score). Accounting for such social and academic background characteristics does temper the concern that teachers with strong senses of responsibility are more likely to select high-achieving students.

To capture the strength of a teacher’s sense of responsibility for student learning, I took advantage of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS–K) prepared by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The ECLS–K is the only national data set that links information on teachers’ attitudes to student outcomes. It is based on periodic surveys that track information on a nationally representative sample of elementary-school students, their teachers, and the 1,280 public and private schools they attend. I focused my research on 1st-grade teachers of students who had been surveyed as kindergartners in 1998, the study’s first year. The study sampled students, not teachers, so my findings may be generalized to teachers of a nationally representative sample of 1st-grade students, but not a nationally representative sample of 1st-grade teachers. But the sample of teachers does look fairly representative. Nearly 20 percent of the 1st-grade teachers are of minority ethnicity, and more than one-third have earned a master’s degree.

A teacher’s answers to four survey items were summed to create an index of the strength of a teacher’s sense of responsibility for student learning. Teachers were asked to respond to certain statements by locating their attitudes on a 5-point scale, with 1 being strongly disagree and 5, strongly agree. In building the index, I reversed the values of the responses to the last three items: the more a teacher agreed with the statements that students were not capable of something, the lower she would score on the teacher responsibility index. Itracked teacher agreement with four statements:

• I make a difference in the lives of the children I teach.
• Many of the children I teach are not capable of learning the material I am supposed to teach them.
• The level of child misbehavior (noise, horseplay, or fighting) in this school interferes with my teaching.
• Routine duties and paperwork interfere with my teaching.

The latter two items focus on problems or costs in the school environment that teachers may believe prevent them from instructing children effectively. Unruly children or excessive paperwork, for example, can become a reason teachers do not feel responsible for achieving instructional goals; the problem, they may say, lies with the students or with the school. Routine duties and paperwork can also shift teachers’ perceptions of themselves as professionals in charge of, and responsible for, children’s learning to a perception of themselves as hassled paper-pushers. Teachers can thus attribute their failure to reach instructional goals to a lack of time and energy caused by being overwhelmed by chores that bear little relevance to their classroom. They become responsible for paperwork, not pedagogy.

Although they are not as highly correlated as most index items designed in advance for a particular purpose, the four items I use to construct the responsibility scale are all positively correlated with one another at statistically significant levels (0.09–0.28). Just a tenth of the 1st-grade teachers consider their very young students incapable of learning. Teachers’ responses to this question do not vary widely, and the modal response is “disagree.” However, these are very young children who have a relatively short history of achievement. The fact that 10 percent of teachers think that by age six these students cannot learn is significant. More than a fifth of the teachers in the sample consider children’s misbehavior somewhat of a concern in their attempts to teach. About 17 percent agree or strongly agree that misbehavior in the school affects their teaching. An overwhelming majority of teachers (95 percent) agree that they make a difference in children’s lives. Not surprisingly, the most variation exists in teachers’ answers to the paperwork question, with the modal response “agree” and the median response “neither agree nor disagree.” Agreement and disagreement are approximately equal on whether paperwork is a problem.

First-grade reading achievement was measured with scores on a standardized reading test given to students near the end of the 1st grade as part of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). I focus on the reading test because literacy skills are more heavily emphasized than arithmetic in school curricula for the early grades.

In an effort to measure more precisely each child’s performance, the test was tailored to each student. A first stage provided a rough estimate of a student’s achievement level, and students’ performance here determined the difficulty of the items in the second stage of the assessment. By giving students questions that were appropriate to their level of cognitive development, researchers could more accurately pinpoint a student’s achievement level. The most basic test items required students to identify upper- and lower case letters of the alphabet. The most advanced items asked students to determine the meaning of potentially unfamiliar words from context. The raw scores on the assessments were standardized to allow for comparison across grade levels.

Throughout my analysis of the test-score data, I accounted for differences in previous student achievement, according to ECLS results, by adjusting for each student’s achievement at the end of kindergarten. I also adjusted the 1st-grade achievement measure to account for differences in instructional time spent in kindergarten and first grade.

Responsibility Matters

My results show that a teacher’s sense of responsibility for student learning does seem to make a positive difference in a student’s reading achievement at the end of 1st grade. An increase of one standard deviation in the strength of a teacher’s sense of responsibility is correlated with an increase in a student’s 1st-grade reading skills of .04 of a standard deviation (see Figure 1).

This seemingly small amount is important. The data show that about 10 percent of the difference between teachers in 1st-grade reading achievement can be explained by characteristics of the teacher. Teacher responsibility alone can explain as much as 4 percent of this variation between teachers. I found this to be as large a relationship as two traditional indicators of teacher’s quality: whether the teacher holds a master’s degree and years of experience as a 1st-grade teacher. This result is particularly important in light of the fact that much of a teacher’s contribution to student achievement remains unexplained.

Because this study was a snapshot in time of 1st-grade teachers and their students during one school year, I cannot claim with complete certainty that a teacher’s sense of responsibility causes increases in student achievement. It is a chicken-and-egg problem: did the teacher’s sense of responsibility improve student achievement, or do high-achieving students make a teacher more likely to take responsibility for her students? At least with respect to student achievement, however, the data do provide hints as to what is cause and what is effect. While a teacher’s sense of responsibility is not related to the average previous academic achievement level of a class, it is associated with the achievement gains individual students make while they are in her classroom. This strongly suggests that teacher responsibility affects achievement, not vice versa.

Identifying Committed Teachers

Since teachers who hold themselves accountable help students learn more, we should want to know who these teachers are and where they work. I measured the relationship between an individual teacher’s sense of responsibility and his or her personal and professional background, attitudes toward work (including job satisfaction), students’ social class (average family income), and the characteristics of the school in which she taught. I found that 70 percent of the variation in teacher responsibility can be traced to the background characteristics of the teachers and of their students, while the remaining 30 percent is attributable to school environment. A teacher’s gender or ethnicity makes no difference in her level of responsibility. When we look at professional background, teachers who have completed more coursework in education express a slightly weaker sense of responsibility than those with less coursework. Other professional background characteristics, however, are unrelated to teacher responsibility. Teacher certification and experience, two of the cornerstones of NCLB’s “highly qualified” teacher requirements, are not associated with having this commitment.

In contrast to the background characteristics, teachers’ attitudes are related to responsibility. As a teacher’s satisfaction with her work increases, her sense of responsibility for student outcomes rises substantially. An increase in job satisfaction of one standard deviation leads to a 0.35 standard deviations increase in responsibility. (See Figure 2.) But teachers who believe that children should know basic reading skills before reaching 1st grade are less likely to hold themselves accountable for student learning. An increase of one standard deviation in expectations about student preparation is associated with a 0.05 standard deviation reduction in responsibility.

Perhaps surprisingly, the same negative relationship exists between a teacher’s endorsement of daily homework for 1st graders and responsibility. First-grade teachers who expect students to
arrive at school with basic reading skills and who endorse daily homework may wish to downplay their responsibility and highlight parents’ and children’s responsibility for school success. Teachers with greater confidence in their instruction of learning-disabled students or students with limited English proficiency have a greater sense of responsibility (each associated with an increase of 0.06 standard deviations).

My findings also suggest that teacher responsibility is related to the characteristics of the students in the teacher’s classroom. Student characteristics may influence teachers’ expectations for student success and teachers’ attitudes toward responsibility for their learning. Previous research has shown that teachers tend to perceive students from lower-income families as inadequately prepared for school and to set lower achievement expectations for them than for students from higher-income families. In line with these earlier studies, I find that the less financially well-off a teacher’s students are, the less responsibility she takes for their learning (a decrease of 0.18 standard deviations in responsibility for each standard deviation decrease in family income).

School Environment and Teacher Responsibility

The characteristics of a teacher’s students matter, but they are less important than where a teacher works. After we adjust for the teacher and student influences, school environment explains almost one-third of the differences in teacher responsibility. Teachers who work in small schools (fewer than 300 students) and in schools with less than 50 percent minority enrollment had a greater sense of responsibility for student learning.

Regardless of the other characteristics of a school, supportive administrative leadership can make a substantial difference in whether teachers hold themselves accountable for student learning. If a school’s teachers think that school leaders set and support clear goals for teachers and have the ability to protect and encourage staff, individual teacher’s responsibility scores tend to be higher. It is interesting that teachers’ sense of professional community, faculty collaboration, and teacher empowerment, which could all reasonably be thought of as influenced by the school administration, were unrelated to teacher responsibility.

The Catholic School Advantage

Teachers in Catholic schools scored 0.28 standard deviations higher on the responsibility index than their public-school counterparts did. This could be explained by the commitment held by many Catholic schools to creating a strong community and to helping all students learn.

It is possible that the most responsible teachers may choose to work in Catholic schools, which can be selective in their student admissions, in order to teach children with more academic and social advantages. In fact, the Catholic-school students in this study have higher average academic abilities and higher average family incomes than students in public schools. Yet the Catholic-school benefit to teacher responsibility persists even after accounting for the measured characteristics of a school’s student body.

Of course, it may be that teachers who choose to work in Catholic schools are already committed to the respect, care, and other values that they know many Catholic schools espouse. The Catholic-school finding might also be disguising unmeasured characteristics of students—such as good behavior—that make teachers more likely to accept responsibility for the students’ outcomes. These possibilities make it difficult to sort out whether it is the Catholic school, the reason the teacher accepted employment at the school, the unmeasured student characteristics, or some combination of these that strengthens a teacher’s sense of responsibility for student learning.

A Prescription for Accountable Teachers

What can be done to staff classrooms with teachers who take more responsibility for student learning? Although NCLB requires that schools have “highly qualified” teachers, a category defined by certification and experience, my analysis indicates that responsibility is not linked to these characteristics. It is easy to see why the law’s authors chose the approach they did: academic qualifications are far more easily identifiable by principals making hiring decisions than intangible attributes such as a sense of responsibility.

Yet some organizations have sought out teachers with such characteristics as teachers’ enthusiasm for work and  sense of responsibility for student learning. Teach for America (TFA) administrators, for instance, consider these to be among the most important attributes in good teacher candidates. And the TFA application process has been shaped to tease them out, including a daylong interview session with 12 candidates, during which trained interviewers look for evidence of a prospective teacher’s responsibility quotient.

Public schools should incorporate some of these same recruitment and selection techniques. Currently, some school districts sift through résumés to hire personnel, or rely upon quick meetings with candidates at large job fairs. It is doubtful that district officials in charge of hiring decisions can tell if teachers possess the personal attributes to lead a classroom after such brief meetings. Even if the one-on-one, extended interview that TFA conducts is too time-consuming and costly for a school district, people with hiring power could meet with teacher candidates one-on-one and ask pertinent, piercing questions about the candidates’ approaches to solving problems that commonly arise in teaching. And analyzing a candidate’s answers to questions like the ones posed by ECLS–K investigators during their study, in addition to the routine résumé review, could give districts a much better idea which prospective teachers are willing to hold themselves accountable for a student’s progress.

In the meantime, we should look to the quality of school leadership to bolster a sense of commitment among teachers. Supportive school leadership seems to create the environment in which teachers willingly accept responsibility for students’ progress and in which students learn.

-Laura LoGerfo is a research associate at the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

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From the Capital to the Classroom,
Year 1 (January 2003)
Year 2 (January 2004)
Year 3 (March 2005)

State High School Exit Exams series:

A Baseline Report (August 2002)
Put to the Test (August 2003)
A Maturing Reform (August 2004)

States Try Harder, but Gaps Persist:
State High School Exit Exams 2005 (August 2005)
Pay Now or Pay Later: The Hidden Costs of High School Exit Exams (May 2004)

School Vouchers: What We Know and Don’t Know … and How We Could Learn More (June 2000)

Do We Still Need Public Schools? (1996)

Checked by Greg Forster

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the proliferation of high school exit exams, the success of school choice initiatives, and a dozen other smaller if more bitter battles, education has become one of the hottest policy topics in Washington. That means there’s a booming market for education experts, especially those who claim to speak with the disinterested voice of reason among the gaggle of partisan squawkers and interest groups. Jack Jennings, a one-time king of Capitol Hill education policy and now head of the Center on Education Policy (CEP), is one such expert.

Jennings and the CEP (he founded the organization in 1995) provide research and expert opinion on a variety of education issues. Jennings is one of the mainstream press’s favorite go-to guys on education. He and the CEP appear frequently in the New York Times and the Washington Post commenting on education issues and are variously described as “nonpartisan” (Times, January 27, 2004; March 14, 2004; “Post, March 16, 2004), “nonprofit” (Times, August 18, 2004; February 7, 2006), “a research group” (Times, April 4, 2005; May 11, 2005), and “independent” (Post, February 19, 2004; August 29, 2004; March 24, 2005). The Post’s David Broder called the CEP “an independent advocate for more effective public schools” (March 13, 2004). And on March 26 of this year, the Times turned over its most valuable piece of real estate—two columns on the top of the Sunday front page—to Jennings and CEP to announce, two days before it was even released, a CEP study on NCLB’s impact on curriculum, again calling the organization “nonpartisan.”

The media seem to see Jennings and the CEP as the voices of education research and reason, an enviable position at a time when nonpartisans are hard to come by. Jennings uses this highly desirable media perch to promote findings that he says are the result of empirical research conducted by the CEP. He says, for instance, that NCLB is too strict and is underfunded, that its more controversial requirements are unworkable and should be scrapped, that only big new state spending can help kids pass exit exams, and that school choice is unproved and dangerous. Is this nonpartisanship or something else?

Accidental Social Science

Jack Jennings wasn’t always a professional “independent,” “nonpartisan” researcher. In fact, for the better part of three decades (from 1967 to 1994) he was one of the most powerful education policymakers on Capitol Hill, as a Democratic staffer for the House Education and Labor Committee at a time when the Democrats completely controlled the House. His influence over federal education policy was enormous: he worked on every major education bill that went through Congress in those years. It is not surprising that education journalists would still turn to a prominent policymaker like Jennings for quotations. But how does a lifelong partisan congressional staffer change his spots and become a disinterested professional researcher who follows the evidence wherever it leads?

The answer, in this case, is that he doesn’t.

One of the CEP’s most important publications, for instance, is an annual study of the effects of NCLB and its associated rules and regulations, “From the Capital to the Classroom.” These annual volumes make assertions about empirical facts (“students’ scores on the state tests used for NCLB are rising”; or “lack of capacity is a serious problem that could undermine the success of NCLB”) and provide policy recommendations (“some requirements of NCLB are overly stringent, unworkable, or unrealistic”; “the need for funding will grow, not shrink, as more schools are affected by the law’s accountability requirements”). On March 24, 2005, the Post carried a wire report hailing last year’s CEP study as “the most comprehensive review of the three-year-old No Child Left Behind law.” The story opened with the claim: “States will not come close to reaching all the struggling children unless the government spends more and lightens demands, according to an independent analysis.”

Education professionals looking for a detailed review of the policies, procedures, and regulations used under NCLB will find much that is useful in these annual studies and other CEP publications on NCLB. The CEP has also debunked some of the more intemperate claims about NCLB that have arisen from both sides of the political aisle.

The trouble with the studies is that they do not gather data about the issues they purport to examine. The authors have read large volumes of legal, regulatory, and administrative documents related to NCLB. This puts them in a good position to know, in detail, exactly what policies are being set. However, the CEP claims to be studying not what the policies are, but how they are implemented and how they are affecting education. To examine implementation the CEP relies exclusively on surveys of state education officials and interviews with public school staff. In other words, CEP researchers report as facts what the public school system says about how things are going in the public school system.

The CEP does not hide its methods. The studies quite openly attribute their findings to surveys and interviews. Phrases like “officials told us that…” and “according to the teachers we interviewed…” appear here and there. Nonetheless, both the studies themselves and Jennings’s public comments about them present the findings as scientifically confirmed facts, not merely as the claims made by public school officials and staff. They rely on the accuracy of these claims as a basis for policy recommendations.

Survey and interview data need not be dismissed across the board as unscientific. A survey using scientific methods—such as random sample generation and, where appropriate, credible assurances of anonymity for interviewees—can produce legitimate empirical data on many subjects. But the CEP is investigating the merits of an accountability system by asking the opinion of the institution that is being held accountable.

The CEP also claims that its annual NCLB reports include “case studies” of numerous districts. Use of the term case studies creates an impression that some kind of scientific data gathering was involved in at least some localities. But at the back of the study, we find out that the case studies are simply a more extensive set of interviews, including site visits to conduct in-person interviews. “Other research” was involved, though not identified or described, and there is no sign that it involved any independent collection of data.

What the CEP does when it studies NCLB implementation is barely distinguishable from public relations work. It ascertains the public schools’ party line and then broadcasts it as fact.

Partisan Assumptions, Predictable Conclusions

The party line has been fairly consistent: public schools support the goals of NCLB, but they need more money and more “flexibility” from Washington to accomplish these goals. Sure enough, the CEP consistently finds that NCLB’s goals are laudable and that schools are refocusing their efforts on raising achievement among disadvantaged groups. This finding is always followed by claims that schools need lots more money to produce real improvement and that the most challenging NCLB requirements are unreasonable and need to be relaxed.

In the foreword to the first report in the series “From the Capital to the Classroom,” Jennings compares NCLB to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). “Some critics of the original ESEA say that it failed because it provided money without accountability, and that the NCLB Act will succeed because it requires strict accountability,” he wrote. “The ESEA of 1965 may have offered money without
much education accountability, but the NCLB Act demands heavy accountability without much greater federal financial and technical assistance—an approach no more likely to succeed.”

The trouble with this reasoning is that the school system still has all the extra resources we have been pouring into it since 1965. In other words, schools now have both very high spending levels and accountability. Isn’t this exactly the combination Jennings says he wants?

The dynamic that’s really at work in these studies becomes particularly clear as the studies are read in succession. The first came out in January 2003, when state fiscal crises had been in the headlines. The CEP found, “The fiscal crisis in most states, coupled with the prospect of limited additional federal aid, could threaten the successful implementation of this very ambitious law.” In 2004 and 2005, the CEP made no more mention of fiscal crises, but left unchanged its finding that states can’t implement NCLB without large spending increases. The later studies also acknowledge that NCLB is producing academic improvements, yet the schools still need more money and relaxed requirements. “Some supporters of the Act contend that early gains in state test scores mean that the Act is being administered effectively and is succeeding, so no changes are needed. Our intensive study of the Act for the last three years leads us to disagree.”

These studies’ factual claims and policy recommendations, which are their main purpose, have no scientific basis. They should be taken for what they are: the public school system’s party line, not valid empirical research.

Quality Babysitting: Teaching Costs Extra

The CEP’s other major line of research concerns high-school exit exams, on which it also produces an annual study, titled “State High School Exit Exams,” and other publications. As with its NCLB research, the CEP’s work on exit exams has useful aspects, including detailed information on state policies and regulations. Again, this will satisfy the wonks. The CEP has contributed reasonable discussion on secondary issues such as giving students who fail exit exams alternative ways to prove their academic proficiency. And it has been commendably principled on the question of whether exit exams increase dropout rates: The 2003 edition of its annual study snidely commented, “Exit exams are certainly not helping to keep students in school.” However, as subsequent research produced new evidence that exit exams do not in fact increase dropout rates, the CEP moderated its stance to one of reasonable agnosticism.

But the exit exam studies are no more scientific than their NCLB cousins. In 2004 the CEP published its largest study of these exams, “Pay Now or Pay Later: The Hidden Costs of High School Exit Exams.” The title sums it up: schools need more money to cover the “hidden” costs of living up to the expectations set by exit exams.

The CEP’s central thesis is that while exit exams may appear to be inexpensive, they actually create the need for new spending by imposing on schools the burden of educating students to pass the test. “The direct costs of developing and administering the tests themselves represent a small share of the total costs of implementing a mandatory exit exam policy,” says “Pay Now or Pay Later.” “A realistic estimate of exam-related costs must also take into account the costs of remediation for students who fail exit exams or crucial state tests in earlier grades, as well as the ‘hidden’ costs of services needed to give students a substantial chance of passing these tests.”

The assumption here is that exit exams impose new responsibilities on schools. In fact, exit exams are only holding schools accountable for teaching basic skills, always assumed to be their primary responsibility. The CEP view implies that schools are a babysitting service. You pay them $9,000 a year for 12 years to watch your child during the day. Teaching reading and math is an extra service, and it costs more.

Professional Judgment: Spend More

In “Pay Now or Pay Later,” the CEP calculates the alleged hidden costs of exit exams using what is known as the “professional judgment” method. It assembled panels of educators and asked them what education services, in their professional judgment, a typical school district would need to reach two benchmarks: the current level of student performance on exit exams and a higher level of student performance that represents a desired goal. The CEP then calculates the costs of providing those services.

The professional judgment method does not rely on empirical data gathering or analysis of actual budgets. It is analogous to the method the CEP uses to study NCLB: ask the system what it thinks it needs, then report that figure as the amount needed. The calculations produced by the professional judgment method are more or less just speculation: expert speculation, to be sure, but speculation. Even the cost estimates for achieving current outcomes are speculative; the CEP asks its panels of experts to judge what “a hypothetical average school district” would have to spend to produce the current outcome levels.

The problem is that the experts have an overwhelming incentive to inflate their cost estimates, even if only unconsciously. It is only natural for education practitioners to believe that exit exams entail the need for lots of new, additional education services. And education practitioners know that higher cost estimates for complying with exit exams will produce a political impetus to spend more money on education practitioners.

One justification the CEP offers for the professional judgment method is that it “best reflects the experiences of people who are actually responsible for delivering education services” and “reflects the views of actual service providers.” But that is exactly the problem: because they are the “actual service providers,” the experts sitting on these panels cannot help but be affected by the financial incentives they face as employees of the school system.

Another justification the CEP offers is that the professional judgment method is “the most commonly used” for studying education resource needs. Unfortunately, this is all too true. Following the proliferation of “adequacy” lawsuits, studies using the professional judgment method to calculate how much it costs to provide an adequate education have become an explosive growth industry. (See “Pseudo-Science and a Sound Basic Education,” check the facts, Fall 2005). The reason adequacy studies tend to prefer the professional judgment method is clear enough, and it does not seem like a stretch to suggest that the CEP might prefer that method for the very same reason.

“Pay Now or Pay Later” also states that “the cost estimates appear to be reliable within approximately 5–10 percent.” How do they know this, given that their method involves no empirical data collection? “Panels in the same state with the same task but different members and a different moderator on a different day will often differ from the average by between 5 and 10 percent.” In other words, the expert panels all reach results that are similar to one another, so therefore the results are “reliable.”

Looking the Other Way

In the end, too many of the CEP’s publications reflect poorly on the organization’s ability to treat controversial issues fairly and face the empirical evidence squarely, the very qualities that induce major media outlets to seek Jennings and the CEP for their opinions.

It is no surprise, then, to discover that the CEP’s take on school choice is as compromised as its views on other hot-button education issues. It does not produce a big annual study on school choice, but early in the debate it released a review of the existing research, “School Vouchers: What We Know and Don’t Know … and How We Could Learn More.” The review found the evidence on vouchers to be “inconclusive,” a result achieved only by throwing out all research on privately funded voucher programs, then declaring that the rest of the research produced “varying findings.” In fact, there have been seven scientifically valid random-assignment analyses of voucher programs, and all seven found either that all voucher students perform significantly better than their nonvoucher contemporaries, or at least that most of them do (in some studies the results for black students, the majority of participants, are positive, while the results for other students fail to achieve statistical significance). There is room for legitimate discussion on the limits of the existing research on vouchers, but to describe the research as “inconclusive” is a gross misrepresentation.

The CEP has even published a history of public schooling, titled “Do We Still Need Public Schools?” that does to history what its other publications do to current events. For example, the report uses quotations from the American founders about the importance of education to suggest that the founders were “early supporters of public schools,” which they were not. Public schools as we know them today didn’t exist at the time, and the historical record makes clear that most of the founders would not have supported a government-owned and government-run school system.

If Jack Jennings and the Center on Education Policy want to publish their opinions and call them “research,” that’s their right. But social scientists, commentators, and journalists have a responsibility to distinguish between unfounded opinions and serious empirical research and to warn people when a study doesn’t adhere to scientific standards. There’s no hope for improving education policy if we don’t keep the facts and evidence distinct from the public-school system’s party (and often partisan) line.

-Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.

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In one of several essays in this issue addressing relations between unions and school boards, George Mitchell and Howard Fuller (“A Culture of Complaint,” page 18) propose that bargaining be subject to the same sunshine laws that apply to other public business. And, in fact, in Salem, Oregon, to prevent a renewal of charges of bargaining in bad faith that both sides leveled at each other the previous year, that idea is now being tried.

But most everywhere else, the public is shut out of the conversation. Only when strikes occur do people glimpse what is going on. And strikes occur less often now than ever before. In 1975, when teacher unions were just getting themselves into the collective bargaining game, teacher labor disputes nationwide numbered 241. In 2004 that number was no more than 15.

Don’t be misled. Strikes have not decreased in number because the unions are now docile, but because, apart from excessive salary demands, they have grown accustomed to getting nearly everything they want at the bargaining table. And school boards are accustomed to giving it to them.

Even after the negotiations are done, the agreement, supposedly a public document, can be tough to get a look at. Our office thrice asked New York City’s Department of Education for a copy of the current contract, only to be directed each time to the union, which eventually mailed one to us. As a public service, we direct readers to the contract posted on the union’s website (http://www.uft.org/member/rights/contracts/current_teachers_contract/), buried far from both Google’s and the union’s own search reaches.

New York City is one of the more accessible education redoubts. In more typical cases, school boards and local school administrators simply refuse to make the contract available. Even then, however, making sense of these mammoth documents is almost impossible for citizens who are not trained labor lawyers, which is why hearings on the New York City contract held by New York City councilwoman Eva Moskowitz were so important.

In politics, the insiders usually win the battles, and so it is with collective bargaining. Nationwide, weekly pay for teachers exceeds that of computer programmers, registered nurses, social workers, and lab technicians. Teachers’ health-care and pension benefits are well above average.

If these provisions are beneficial to union members, other contract terms have clear, adverse consequences for the education of students. Agreements typically require that the worst teachers be paid the same as the best (since pay differentials are based on credentials and experience, not merit). They usually prevent principals from removing ineffective teachers without working through prolonged, tedious, arcane procedures. And the featherbedding that has been all but abolished from private industry continues within big-city school systems.

Unions make no apology for this unhappy state of affairs. “The fundamental and legitimate purposes of unions [are] to protect the employment interests of their members,” says one former Ohio union official.

His point is well taken. It’s the school board’s responsibility to bargain with at least as much firmness as those across the table. Unfortunately, most boards are negotiating wimps, too influenced by their need to win their own reelection and keep peace in the community.

Most of all, boards hate the publicity that comes with a strike, for then they must explain to irked parents why their children are not in school. It’s easier to take the broad, easy road than the narrow, conflict-ridden one.

Some say open negotiations will make it harder for union leaders to make concessions. Perhaps. But at least they would give the public a chance to know what’s going on.

— Paul E. Peterson

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As reviewed by Diane Ravitch

What would Jane Austen write if she were chronicling life in an affluent suburb of New York City? How would  she probe the social dilemmas of modern life among striving families? This is a problem neatly solved in Paula Marantz Cohen’s new novel, Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death, and the SATs,which is loosely based on Austen’s novel, Persuasion. (Cohen’s novel, Jane Austen in Boca, a modern-day Pride and Prejudice in a Florida retirement community, is outrageously funny.) How better to investigate and satirize contemporary mores than through the eyes of a high-school guidance counselor who is juggling the demands of status-hungry parents and their anxious children?

In the Austen novel, the central character is Anne Elliot, the daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a widower who has spent his family into near poverty; Anne is a spinster who years earlier had been persuaded by her snobbish family to abandon her true love because he was not up to their elevated social standards. In the Cohen novel, the central character is Anne Ehrlich, whose own family and personal history reflect the story of Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot.

The big difference between the two novels, of course, is that Anne Ehrlich has a day job, which puts her in charge of college admissions at Fenimore High School. This is the process that stands at the very nexus of parental strivings and ambitions. To her office troop hordes of angry parents, insisting that she raise their child’s grade-point average by a fraction of a point or that she classify their daughter as learning disabled so she can have extra time on the SATs or that she push their son to apply to the father’s alma mater even though the boy lacks the grades to get in.

The Secret: Push and Package

Anyone who has any awareness of the pressure on high-school students to get into Ivy League colleges will enjoy this novel. I laughed out loud frequently as I read her fictional description of life in the guidance office at Fenimore High. Cohen has hit a bull’s-eye in describing the lengths to which parents (and sometimes students) will go to gain entry to the best colleges, where applicants often have only a 10 percent chance of being admitted as freshmen.

Parents at Fenimore listen raptly as Curtis Fink of Fink and Fink Educational Consultants advises them on how to get their son or daughter into a top school. The secret, he says, is “push and package.” Push them to study and do their work, but that’s not enough. The real trick is packaging. Like the boy who was a couch potato who got into Haverford; the consultant said, I “gave him a political spin and turned him into the Westchester Gandhi.” It is not good enough, he warns parents, for your child to be a music genius. If he makes all-state orchestra, that’s still not good enough. He has to “cluster his assets” by joining a regional wind ensemble or a rock band that opens for Bruce Springsteen or tutoring underprivileged children in music or writing a music column for Slate. What about the child who has never won an honor or an award, asks a parent? Easy, says the consultant: get on the Internet and find contests in small literary magazines that no one reads. “Dig up the kid’s old papers and submit them. If nothing else, you’ll get a certificate of recognition that you can put down on the application. Admissions officers don’t read these things too closely. If you’re lucky, they’ll think the kid won.”

Anne Ehrlich has to contend with ambitious parents who want their children to get into top colleges regardless of the students own ability or interest. She keeps rocking chairs in her office, hoping that they will calm emotional supplicants. Some wealthy professionals try to bully her into writing letters that will help their children’s chances at colleges they are unlikely to be admitted to. Others threaten litigation. This is a constant fear, since the previous head guidance counselor lost his job after he miscalculated a student’s grade-point average and the parents sued and extracted a six-figure settlement from the school district.

The school principal is a decent man, but he too feels the pressure from parents and knows that his tenure depends on their good will. He is not above asking Anne to write a recommendation to Georgetown for a student whose parents are important in the local community, even though a more highly qualified student also wants to go to Georgetown but has “no parental muscle behind her.” Both the guidance counselor and the principal know that Georgetown “has a habit of taking only one a year from Fenimore,” and Anne absolutely refuses to undercut the deserving student.

As the book unfolds, we learn about “helicopter moms,” who “hovered above [their] progeny ready to make a rapid, vertical landing at the slightest provocation,” and “ripple kids,” the ones whom third-tier colleges eagerly seek out because their “coolness” and their aura as trendsetters will attract other students. The guidance counselor’s office is stuffed with identical gorgeous brochures, all pitching “a unique educational experience.” The community is brimming with franchise offices of Princeton Review, Stanley Kaplan, SAT tutors, and other purveyors of special courses to prepare students to beat the SATs. Students learn principles, strategies, and commandments. “The key to SAT taking is to skim,” says one successful tutor, who has a line of Mercedes-Benzes and Lexuses outside his door. “If you start to concentrate on what the questions really mean, you’ll realize how stupid they are and never get anywhere.”

When Anne is not dealing with parents who want their child labeled as ADD (attention deficit disorder) to get extra privileges or with a student who is thinking of transferring to a nearby high school to improve her class ranking, she is coping with the shock of once again meeting her lost love, who has enrolled his nephew in Fenimore High School. As in a Jane Austen novel, all things work out for the best for the deserving, and Anne Ehrlich eventually gets the man she had lost 13 years earlier. And we, gentle readers, get many opportunities not only to enjoy a good story, but to laugh at the absurdities of the college admissions process and to ponder the wreckage of academic values.

-Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

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