The accepted wisdom is that private schools serve the privileged; everyone else, especially the poor, requires public school. The poor, so this logic goes, need government assistance if they are to get a good education, which helps explain why, in the United States, many school choice enthusiasts believe that the only way the poor can get the education they deserve is through vouchers or charter schools, proxies for those better private or independent schools, paid for with public funds.

But if we reflect on these beliefs in a foreign context and observe low-income families in underprivileged and developing countries, we find these assumptions lacking: the poor have found remarkably innovative ways of helping themselves, educationally, and in some of the most destitute places on Earth have managed to nurture a large and growing industry of private schools for themselves.

For the past two years I have overseen research on such schools in India, China, and sub-Saharan Africa. The project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, was inspired by a serendipitous discovery of mine while I was engaged in some consulting work for the International Finance Corporation, the private finance arm of the World Bank. Taking time off from evaluating an elite private school in Hyderabad, India, I stumbled on a crowd of private schools in slums behind the Charminar, the 16th-century tourist attraction in the central city. It was something that I had never imagined, and I immediately began to wonder whether private schools serving the poor could be found in other countries. That question eventually took me to five countries—Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, India, and China—and to dozens of different rural and urban locales, all incredibly poor. Since the data gathered from Lagos, Nigeria, and Delhi, India, are not yet fully analyzed, this article reports on findings only from Gansu Province, China; Ga, Ghana; Hyderabad, India; and Kibera, Kenya. These are in vastly different settings, but my research teams and I found large numbers of private schools for low-income families, many of which showed measurable achievement advantage over government schools serving equally disadvantaged students.

 

Myth One: Private Education for the Poor Does Not Exist

Undertaking this research was disheartening at first. In each country I visited, officials from national governments and international agencies that donate funds for the expansion of state-run education denied
that private education for the poor even existed. In China senior officials told me that what I was describing was “logically impossible” because “China has achieved universal public education and universal means for the poor as well as the rich.” At other times, in other places, I met with polite, if embarrassed, apologies that always went something like, “Sorry, in our country, private schools are for the privileged, not the poor.”

In each venue, however, I struck out on my own and visited slums and villages and there found what I was looking for: private schools for the poor, usually in large numbers, if sometimes hidden from view. In the slums of Hyderabad, India, a typical private school would be in a converted house, in a small alleyway behind bustling and noisy streets, or above a shop. Classrooms are dark, by Western standards, with no doors hung in the doorways, and noise from the streets outside easily entering through the barred but unglazed windows. Walls are painted white, but discolored by pollution, heat, and the general wear-and-tear of the children; no pictures or work is hung on them. Children will usually be in a school uniform and sitting at rough wooden desks. Generally, there are about 25 students in a class, a decent teacher-to-student ratio, but the tiny rooms always seem crowded. Often the top floor of the building will have various construction work going on to extend the number of classrooms. The school proprietor will usually live in a couple of rooms at the back of the building.

In rural Ghana, a typical private school might consist of an open-air structure, often no more than a tin roof supported by wooden poles, on a small plot of land. To find these schools you’ll have to wander down meandering narrow paths, away from the main thoroughfares, asking villagers as you go. If you ask simply for the “school,” they’ll send you back to the public school, usually an impressive brick building on the main road. You’ll have to persist and say you want the “small” school to get directions.

In the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, private schools are made from the same materials as every other building: corrugated iron sheets or mud walls, with windows and doors cut out to allow light to enter. Floors are usually mud, roofs sometimes thatched. Children will not be in uniform and will usually be sitting on homemade wooden benches. In the dry season, the wind will blow dust through the cracks in the walls; in the rainy season, the playground will become a pond, and the classroom floors mud baths. Teaching continues, however, through most of these intemperate interruptions.

In order to conduct research in five countries from my base in Newcastle, England, I recruited teams of researchers from reputable local universities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). While fielding the research crews, I visited dozens of likely study sites, always in low-income areas, and always found private schools for the poor. I also visited government offices to gain permission to conduct the research. In the end, all of the chosen countries, apart from China, were rated by the Oxfam Education Report as countries where education needs were not being met by government systems. Though China is ranked relatively high on the Oxfam index, we wanted to include it in our study because of the dramatic political and economic changes there in the past several decades. (Because of the threat of SARS, however, our first research team spent a long period in quarantine and thus our research there is not yet complete.) Other countries
were chosen for a mixture of practical and substantive reasons. I was particularly interested in Kenya, where free elementary education had just been introduced to much acclaim. How would this affect private schools for the poor, should they exist? I had conducted research earlier in Hyderabad, India, was familiar with the terrain, and had many contacts in government and the private sector, so it seemed sensible to continue the project there. And because of a chance meeting with the Ghanaian minister of education at a conference in Italy, we were invited to that western African nation.

Many difficulties emerged that I had not taken account of as the project progressed. Heavy rains prevented the research teams from moving around in both Ghana and Nigeria for weeks at a time; intense heat delayed work for days in Hyderabad; early snowfalls hampered movement in the mountains of China. But above all, a major difficulty was getting the extended research teams to take seriously the notion that we really were interested in the low-key, unobtrusive private schools that apparently were easily dismissed. In each of the settings, on unannounced quality control visits, I found unrecognized private schools that had not been reported by the teams.

 

Hyderabad, India

Visit the ultramodern high-rise development of “High Tech City” and you’ll see why Hyderabad dubs itself “Cyberabad,” proud of its position at the forefront of India’s technological revolution. But cross the river Musi and enter the Old City, with once magnificent buildings dating to the 16th century and earlier, and you’ll see the congested India, with narrow streets weaving their way through crowded markets and densely populated slums. For our survey, we canvassed three zones in the Old City (Bandlaguda, Bhadurpura, and Charminar), with a population of about 800,000 (about 22 percent of all of Hyderabad), covering an area of some 19 square miles. We included only schools that were found in “slums,” as determined by the latest available census and Hyderabad municipal guides, areas that lacked amenities such as indoor plumbing, running water, electricity, and paved roads.

In these areas alone our team found 918 schools: 35 percent were government run; 23 percent were private schools that had official recognition by the government (“recognized”); and, incredibly, 37 percent slipped
under the government radar (“unrecognized”). The last group is, in effect, a black market in education, operating entirely without both state funding and regulation. (The remaining 5 percent were private schools that received a 100 percent state subsidy for teachers’ salaries, making them public schools in all but name.) In terms of total student enrollment in the slum areas of the three zones, with 918 schools, 76 percent of all schoolchildren attended either recognized or unrecognized private schools, with roughly the same percentage of children in the unrecognized private schools as in government schools (see Figure 1).

SOURCE: Author’s calculations based on original research and local government figures. SOURCE: Author’s calculations based on original research and local government figures.

What is clear from our research is that these private schools are not mom-and-pop day-care centers or living-room home schools. The average unrecognized school had about 8 teachers and 170 children, two-thirds in rented buildings of the type described above. The average recognized school was larger and usually situated in a more comfortable building, with 18 teachers and about 490 children. Another key difference between the recognized and unrecognized schools is that the former have stood the test of time in the education market: 40 percent of unrecognized schools were less than 5 years old, while only 5 percent of recognized schools were this new. Finally, tuition in these schools is very low, averaging about $2.12 per month in recognized private schools at 1st grade and $1.51 in unrecognized schools.

While these fees seem extremely low, they must be measured against the average income of each person in the student’s household who is working for pay. For students in unrecognized schools, this was about $23 per month, compared with about $30 per month for students in recognized schools and $17 for government schools. Since the official minimum wage in Hyderabad is $46 per month, it is clear that the families in the private schools we observed are poor. Fees amount to about 7 percent of average monthly earnings in a typical household using a private unrecognized school. For the poorest children, the schools provide scholarships or subsidized places: 7 percent of children paid no tuition and 11 percent paid reduced fees. In effect, the poor are subsidizing the poorest.

Ga, Ghana

The Ga district of southern Ghana, which surrounds the country’s capital city of Accra, is classified by the Ghana Statistical Service as a low-income, urban periphery, and rural area. With a population of about 500,000, Ga includes poor fishing villages along the coast, subsistence farms inland, and large dormitory towns for workers serving the industries and businesses of Accra itself. Most of the district lacks basic social amenities such as potable water, sewage systems, electricity, and paved roads. In Ga’s towns and villages our researchers found a total of 799 schools, 25 percent of which were government, 52 percent recognized private, and 23 percent unrecognized private. In total, 33,134 children were found in unrecognized private schools, or about 15 percent of children enrolled in school (see Figure 2).

The average monthly fee for an unrecognized private school in Ga is about $4 for the early elementary grades, about $7 in recognized schools. With a minimum wage of about $33 per month in the area, monthly fees in the private unrecognized schools are thus about 12 percent of the average monthly earnings of an adult earner. However, many of the poorest schools allow a daily fee to be paid so that, for instance, a poor fisherman could send his daughter to school on the days he had funds and allow her to make up for the days she missed. Such flexibility is not possible in the public schools, where full payment of the “levies” is required before the term starts. (Fees for “public” schools are common in many countries throughout the Third World, especially at high-school level. Thus the cost of private schools, we found, can sometimes be less than that of government ones.)

Unlike India, where there are restrictions on private-school ownership (private schools must be owned by a society or trust), in Ga the vast majority of private schools (82 percent of recognized and 93 percent of unrecognized) are run by individual proprietors; most of the rest are owned and managed by charitable organizations. Sometimes, as is common in other African countries, such schools rent church buildings or use Christian-related names, but only in a few cases are the schools run by churches. Often it is the school that subsidizes the church rather than the other way around!

Gansu, China

With 25.3 million people spread out over an area the size of Texas, Gansu province is a remote and mountainous region situated on the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River in northwest China. It has an average elevation of over 3,000 feet and 75 percent of its population is rural, with illiteracy rates among people aged 15 or older at nearly 20 percent for men and 40 percent for women. Roughly half of its counties, with 62 percent of the population, are considered “impoverished.”

Figures from the Provincial Education Bureau show only 44 private schools in the whole province, all of which are for privileged city dwellers. Given the paucity of information on private schools, I asked my research teams to survey each major town in each of the counties designated as impoverished (more than 40 of them) and to visit as many of the outlying villages accessible to them as they could. In the early stages I wasn’t worried about getting precise estimates of the numbers of schools or the proportion of children in them, but rather wanted to see if such schools even existed.

In the major towns and the larger villages, all of them crowded and bustling, there is always a public school, usually a fine two-story building that sports a plaque marking it as a recipient of some kind of foreign aid. But researchers had to abandon their cars and either walk or hitch a ride on one of the ubiquitous and noisy three-wheeled farm vehicles to travel up the steeper mountain paths to clusters of houses in smaller villages to find the private schools. And there, nestled on mountain ridges, were stone or brick houses converted to schools, with the proprietor or headmaster living with his family in one or two of its rooms. Occasionally, the school had been built, by the villagers, to be used as a school. Over and over again, researchers followed these trails high into the arid mountains and, in the end, discovered a total of 696 private schools, 593 of them serving some 61,000 children in the most remote villages.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of Gansu’s private schools were set up by individuals, or the villages themselves, because government schools are simply too far away or hard to get to. Significantly, the majority of the private schools found were in the three poorest regions of Gansu, where average net income per year ranges from $125 to $166. These private schools are serving some of the poorest people on the planet. But surprisingly, the schools, which depend on tuition, are also cheaper than government schools. Average fees for a first-year, elementary-school student are about $7.60 per semester, compared with about $8.00 in the public schools, not an insignificant difference to someone living on $125 per year.

Kibera, Kenya

In Kenya we conducted our censuses in three urban slums of Nairobi (Kibera, Mukuru, and Kawangware), where, according to Kenyan government officials, there were no private schools. The picture in each was similar; here I describe the findings for Kibera only.

The largest slum in all of sub-Saharan Africa, Kibera has, according to various estimates, anywhere from 500,000 to 800,000 people crowded into an area of about 630 acres, smaller than Manhattan’s Central Park. Mud-walled, corrugated iron-roofed settlements huddle along the old Uganda Railway for several miles and crowd along steep narrow mud tracks until Kibera reaches the posh suburbs. In Nairobi’s two rainy seasons, the mud tracks become mud baths. In this setting, we found 76 private elementary and high schools, enrolling more than 12,000 students. The schools are typically run by local entrepreneurs, a third ofwhom are women who have seen the possibility of making a living from running a school. Again, many of the schools offered free places to the poorest, including orphans.

When I first visited Kibera, many private-school proprietors were feeling the effects of so-called Free Primary Education (FPE), introduced by the Kenyan government in January 2003 with great fanfare and a $55 million grant from the World Bank. In fact, when asked by ABC anchorman Peter Jennings which one living person he would most like to meet, former president Bill Clinton told a prime-time television audience that it was President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, “Because he has abolished school fees,” which “would affect more lives than any president had done or would ever do by the end of this year.” Indeed, official sources estimated that an extra 1.3 million children would be enrolled in public schools after the introduction of FPE: all of them children, it was said, not previously enrolled in school.

The reality may be very different. Private-school owners in Kibera alone reported a total enrollment decline of some 6,500 after Free Primary Education was initiated; some schools closed altogether. We estimated that about 4,500 children had been enrolled in 25 schools that we confirmed had closed as a result of FPE. At the same time five government primary schools on the periphery of Kibera that served the slums reported a total increase of only about 3,300 children during this period. That is, since the introduction of free elementary education, there appeared to have been a net decline in attendance of nearly 8,000 children from one slum alone! Clearly, these figures are based on the reported decline by school owners and may be exaggerated. But they also suggest the possibility that government and international intervention had the effect of crowding out private enterprise.

Myth TWO: Private Education for the Poor Is Low Quality

It is a common assumption among development experts that private schools for the poor are worse than public schools. This is not to say that they have a particularly high view of public education. Indeed, the World Bank’s World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People calls public education a “government failure,” with “services so defective that their opportunity costs outweigh their benefits for most poor people.” Yet this just makes the experts’ dismissal of private schools for the poor all the more inexplicable.

The Oxfam Education Report published in 2000 is typical. While the author acknowledges the existence of high-quality private providers, he contends that these are elite, well-resourced schools that are inaccessible to the poor. As far as private schools for the poor are concerned, these are of “inferior quality”; indeed, they “offer a low-quality service” that is so bad it will “restrict children’s future opportunities.” This claim of low-quality private provision for the poor has also been taken up by British prime minister Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa, which recently reported that although “Non-state sectors … have historically provided much education in Africa,” many of these private schools “aiming at those [families] who cannot afford the fees common in state schools … are without adequate state regulation and are of a low quality.”

However, these development experts have little hard evidence for their assertions about private-school quality. They instead point out that private schools employ untrainedteachers who are paid much less than their government counterparts and that buildings and facilities are grossly inadequate. Both of these observations are largely true. But does that mean that private schools are inferior, particularly against the weight of parental preferences to the contrary? One Ghanaian school owner challenged me when I observed that her school building was little more than a corrugated iron roof on rickety poles and that the government school, just a few hundred yards away, was a smart new school building. “Education is not about buildings,” she scolded. “What matters is what is in the teacher’s heart. In our hearts, we love the children and do our best for them.” She left it open, when probed, what the teachers in the government school felt in their hearts toward the poor children.

 

Facilities and Resources

The issue of the relative quality of private and public schools was at the core of our research, and we relied on both data on school resources and day-to-day operations and on student achievement scores. Our researchers first called unannounced at schools and asked for a tour, noted what teachers were doing, made an inventory of facilities, and administered detailed questionnaires.

Certainly, in some countries the facilities in the private schools were markedly inferior to those in the public schools. In China, where the researchers were asked to locate a public school in the village nearest to where they had found a private school, often many miles away, private-school facilities were generally worse than in those publicly provided. This was predictable, given that the private schools undercut the public ones in fees and served the poorest villages, where there were no public schools. In Gansu province, desks were available in classrooms in 88 percent of private schools, compared with 97 percent of public schools; 66 percent of private schools had chairs or benches in classrooms, compared with 76 percent of public schools. In Kenya, parallel results would be expected, given that the private schools surveyed were located in the slums, while the public schools were on the periphery, accommodating both poor and middle-class children. However, given that there were only 5 government schools on the periphery of Kibera, but 76 private schools within the slum, statistical comparisons would make little sense.

In Hyderabad, however, on every input, including the provision of blackboards, playgrounds, desks, drinking water, toilets, and separate toilets for boys and girls, both types of private schools, recognized and unrecognized, were superior to the government schools. While only 78 percent of the government schools had blackboards in every classroom, the figures were 96 percent and 94 percent for private recognized and unrecognized schools, respectively. In only half the government schools were toilets provided for children, compared with 100 percent and 96 percent of the recognized and unrecognized private schools.

Finally, in Ghana, the picture is mixed. For instance, 95 percent of government schools in Ga had playgrounds, compared with 66 percent and 82 percent of private unrecognized and recognized schools, respectively. Desks were provided in 97 percent of government schools, but only in 61 percent of private unrecognized; recognized private schools provided them in 92 percent of cases. However, only 54 percent of government schools provided drinking water to children compared with 63 percent of private unrecognized and 87 percent of private recognized schools. And 63 percent of government schools provided toilets, compared with 91 percent of recognized but only 59 percent of unrecognized private schools. A library was provided in 8 percent of government, 7 percent of private unrecognized schools, but 27 percent of private recognized schools. At least one computer for the use of children was provided in only 3 percent of government schools, but in 12 percent of private unrecognized and 37 percent of private recognized.

When it came to the key question of whether or not teaching was going on in the classrooms, both types of private schools were superior to the public schools, except in China, where there was no statistically significant difference between the two school types: 92 percent of teachers in private schools were teaching when our researchers arrived, compared with 89 percent in the public schools. When researchers called unannounced on the classrooms in Hyderabad, 98 percent of teachers were teaching in the private recognized schools, compared with 91 percent in the unrecognized and 75 percent in the government schools. Teacher absenteeism was also highest in the government schools. In Ga, 57 percent of teachers were teaching in government schools, compared with 66 percent and 75 percent in unrecognized and recognized private schools, respectively. And in Kibera, even though the number of government schools is too small to make statistical comparisons meaningful, 74 percent of teachers were teaching in private schools when our researchers visited them, and only one teacher was absent.

It was also the case that private and public schools in China had more or less the same pupil-teacher ratio, about 25:1. In Hyderabad, private schools, including the unrecognized ones, had significant advantages over the government schools: the average pupil-teacher ratio was 42:1 in government schools compared with only 22:1 in the unrecognized and 27:1 in the recognized private schools. In Ga the pupil-teacher ratio was superior in private schools, with a ratio of 29:1 in government, compared with 21:1 and 20:1 in unrecognized and recognized private schools, respectively.

Student Achievement

To compare the achievement of students in public and private schools in each location where we conducted research, we first grouped schools by size and management type: government, private unrecognized, and private recognized in Ga and Hyderabad; government and private in Kibera, where the private schools are all of a similar type. (China is not discussed here because research there is continuing.) As noted above, in Ga and Hyderabad we were comparing public and private schools that were located in similar, low-income areas, while in Kibera, private schools served only slum children, and public schools served middle-class children as well as slum children. But this makes the comparisons in Kenya even more dramatic. Although serving the most disadvantaged population in the region, Kibera’s private schools outperformed the public schools in our study, after controlling for background variables.

We tested a total of roughly 3,000 students in each setting in English and mathematics; in state languages in India and Kenya; religious and moral education in Ghana; and social studies in Nigeria. All children were also given IQ tests, as were their teachers. Finally, questionnaires were distributed to children, their parents, teachers, and school managers, seeking information on family backgrounds.

Our analysis of these data is still in progress. However, in all cases analyzed so far—Ga, Hyderabad, and Kibera—students in private schools achieved at or above the levels achieved by their counterparts in government schools in both English and mathematics (see Figure 3).

SOURCE: Author’s calculations based on original research and local government figures

Moreover, the private-school advantage only increases with consideration of the differences in an unusually rich array of characteristics of the students, their families’ economic status, and the resources available at their schools. In Hyderabad, students attending recognized and unrecognized private schools outperformed their peers in government schools by a full standard deviation in both English and math (after accounting for differences in their observable characteristics). In Ghana, the adjusted private-school advantagewas between 0.2 and 0.3 standard deviations in both subjects. Finally, in Kenya, where the raw test scores showed students in private and public schools performing at similar levels, the fact that private schools served a far more disadvantaged population resulted in a gap of 0.1 standard deviations in English and 0.2 standard deviations in math (after accounting for differences in student characteristics). The adjusted differences between the performance of public and private sectors in each setting were highly statistically significant.

In short, it is not the case that private schools serving low-income families are inferior to those provided by the state. In all cases analyzed, even the unrecognized schools, those that are dismissed by the development experts as being obviously of poor quality seem to outperform their public counterparts.

Lessons for America

So the accepted wisdom appears to be wrong. Though elite private schools do exist in impoverished regions of the world, private schools are not only for the privileged classes. From a wide range of settings, from deepest rural China, through the slums of urban India and Kenya, to the urban periphery areas o Ghana, private education is serving huge numbers of children. Indeed, in those areas where we were able to adequately compare public and private provision, a large majority of schoolchildren are in private school, a significant number of them in unrecognized schools and not on the state’s radar at all.

Ironically, perhaps, the accepted wisdom does seem to be right on one point: private is better than public. Of course, no one suspected that private slum schools would be better. Yet our research suggests that children in these schools outperform similar students in government schools in key school subjects. And this is true even of the unrecognized private schools, schools that development experts dismiss, if they acknowledge their existence at all, as being of poor quality.

Clearly the evidence presented here may have implications for the continuing policy discussions over how to achieve universal education worldwide and for American development policy, especially programs of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank. William Easterly, in his Elusive Quest for Growth (see also “Barren Land,” Fall 2002), notes the ineffectiveness of past investments in public schools by the international agencies and developing country governments, pointing out: “Administrative targets for universal primary education do not in themselves create the incentives for investing in the future that matter for growth,” that is, in quality education. If the World Bank and USAID could find ways to invest in private schools, then genuine education improvement could result. Strategies to be considered include offering loans to help schools improve their infrastructure or worthwhile teacher training, or creating partial vouchers to help even more of the poor gain access to the private schools that are ready to take them on.

But does the evidence have any implications for the school choice debate in America itself? The evidence from developing countries might challenge the claim, made by school choice opponents, that the poor in America cannot make sensible and informed choices if school choice is offered to them. It may also stimulate debate about whether public intervention crowds out private initiative, a question raised by the findings from Kenya.
If a public school is failing in the ghettoes of New York or Los Angeles, we should not assume that the only way in which the disadvantaged can be helped is through some kind of public intervention. In fact, we have already embarked on programs that support private initiative, with government support, with vouchers and charter schools. The findings here suggest this alternative approach may be the preferable one.

Above all, the evidence should inspire those who are working for school choice in America: stories of parents’ overcoming all the odds to ensure the best for the children in Africa and Asia, stories of education entrepreneurs’ creating schools out of nothing, in the middle of nowhere. If India can, why can’t we?

 

James Tooley is professor of education policy, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. This essay is supported by a grant from the John M. Templeton Foundation.

Last February, in a speech in Washington, D.C. that drew 45 of the nation’s governors as well as a hefty sample of the nation’s education policy elite, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates issued a jeremiad on the state of the American high school, arguing that this venerable institution is obsolete and a threat to the nation’s economic and political well-being. Declarations that public education in general and high schools in particular turn out badly prepared graduates, perpetuate inequities, and generally operate in ways that run counter to the nation’s interests have become almost commonplace. But coming from Gates, whose prodigious wealth and aggressive tactics have become one of the nation’s best-known narratives of entrepreneurship, the words took on new meaning. Stories in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and many other newspapers, most written not by education reporters but by Washington-based political and legislative correspondents, reported Gates’s assertions in an unquestioning, almost awestruck tone that made one thing clear: if high schools are bad enough for Bill Gates to declare them a disaster, then it must be so.

It was publicity that even the world’s richest man could not buy.

But Gates’s standing to speak authoritatively on the issue rested on more than his wealth, celebrity, and business acumen, or even his company’s need to hire well-trained workers. Through the efforts of his richly endowed Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates has become an unparalleled force who is not only sounding the alarm about America’s high schools, but is also putting forth, and financing, a range of specific solutions. Since 2002, the Gates Foundation has allocated more than $1.2 billion toward creating about 820 new high schools and breaking down about 750 large, comprehensive high schools into smaller, more focused, more intimate academies that aim to send far more students off to college prepared to succeed. The foundation is also the lead partner in a $125 million experiment in “early college” high schools, which are designed to enable 9th graders to get their high-school diplomas as well as two years of college credit, all within four or five years. To increase the impact of its initiatives, the Gates Foundation has involved 13 other foundations and is working with more than one hundred intermediary organizations in two hundred cities located in almost every state. The foundation’s goal is ambitious: to improve the national graduation rate to at least 80 percent, from about 65 percent, while increasing the likelihood that all high-school graduates are college-ready. So, more spending, in more places, is likely on the way.

The Money Pours In

American philanthropy, by local and national foundations, corporations, and wealthy individuals, has played many important roles in K–12 education: creating new schools, underwriting research, funding scholarships, testing hypotheses, generating new curricula, invoking ideals, setting agendas, bolstering training, and building a case for policy changes. Foundation money is so widespread, and so sought after, that few in education are unaffected. Indeed, institutions with which both this author and this journal are affiliated receive support from several foundations mentioned here.

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau; Jay Greene, “Buckets into the Sea: Why Philanthropy Isn’t Changing Schools, and How It Could,” prepared for American Enterprise Institute conference, “With the Best of Intentions: Lessons Learned in K–12 Education Philanthropy,” April 25, 2005, Washington, D.C.

Nothing about this is new. Thousands of schools for African American students across the Jim Crow South were built with the backing of the Rosenwald Fund, one of the earliest and most important foundations in education; philanthropist Grace Dodge founded Teachers College, now at Columbia University, in 1887, which led to training of teachers in pedagogy; the Ford Foundation was involved in promoting the employment of classroom aides, National Merit Scholarships, and the development of Advanced Placement curricula and tests; the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards grew out of work funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, which also funded the Educational Testing Service to develop objective ways of measuring academic merit, which led to the SAT. More recently, Ford and the Rockefeller Foundation supported the work that led to equity lawsuits, dramatically altering how schools are funded in many states. Even if the $1.5 billion that philanthropists spend on K–12 education is paltry compared with the $450 billion annual price tag for the system as a whole, all of these are examples of the huge impact that well-placed philanthropy dollars can have (see Figure 1).

Even though some foundations have reduced their involvement in K–12 education or shifted their education investment to prekindergarten or afterschool programs, far more philanthropists are entering the scene than are leaving, says Bill Porter, executive director of Grantmakers for Education.

Indeed, according to the Future of Philanthropy project, an analysis done by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, consulting group, the number of foundations involved in education is expected to swell. Over the next two decades, Americans will pass on to their heirs huge sums, approximately $1.7 trillion of which will go to charities and to endow foundations. And, typically, about 25 percent of philanthropic dollars goes to education, although more goes to higher education than to elementary and secondary schools. Gates, just to use one example, has a personal net worth estimated by Forbes magazine to be $46 billion, and he has vowed to give away 95 percent of his assets during his lifetime.

The New Philanthropists

Plenty of other heavyweights in the world of business are contributing heavily to education causes already. They include Jim Barksdale, the former chief operating officer of Netscape, who gave $100 million to establish an institute to improve reading instruction in Mississippi; Eli Broad, the home builder and retirement investment titan, whose foundation works on a range of management, governance, and leadership issues; Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers, whose family foundation is valued at $1.2 billion and is a major supporter of a program that boosts college going among students of potential but middling accomplishment; financier and buyout specialist Theodore J. Forstmann, who gave $50 million of his own money to help poor kids attend private schools; David Packard, a former classics professor who also is a scion of one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard and has given $75 million to help California school districts improve reading instruction; and the Walton Family Foundation, which benefits from the fortune of the founder of Wal-Mart, and which is the nation’s largest supporter of charter schools and private school scholarships (see “A Tribute to John Walton,”).

As is clear from this partial list, many of the newcomers are in the West, or otherwise far from the old-money power centers of the East. A number of the individual donors did not come from money, but attended public schools before amassing their fortunes. As a group, they share a belief that public education has not done well by immigrants or poor students, hardly a radical claim. But they are less likely than were donors in the past to think that the solution to that problem lies solely or even primarily in spending more money or even in making the allocation of resources more equitable, which has been a common thread in work that many better-established foundations have pursued.

The San Francisco-based Pisces Foundation, for example, was endowed by Donald Fisher, founder and chairman emeritus of the Gap clothing chain, and his wife, Doris. By 2005 Pisces was the biggest single supporter of Teach for America, a nonprofit that has, improbably, made teaching in poverty-ridden urban schools one of the most popular career choices of students at Ivy League colleges. Pisces also gave about $35 million to fund the national expansion of the instructionally demanding Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools, which serve mostly low-income students. Overall, the foundation is spending about $20 million a year to “leverage change in public education—especially in schools serving disadvantaged students—through large strategic investments in a small number of initiatives that bolster student achievement.” That rate of spending was about the same as that of the venerable Carnegie Corporation and would have put the foundation in the top ten or so givers to K–12 in 2002. (See Table 1).

SOURCE: Jay Greene, “Buckets into the Sea: Why Philanthropy Isn’t Changing Schools, and How It Could”

Like Fisher, other new philanthropists tend to believe that schools, in addition to securing adequate financial resources, need to embrace accountability and to overhaul basic functions. Many are personally involved in overseeing the grants they give and they insist on results from educators and schools. They believe good leadership, effective management, compensation based on performance, competition, the targeting of resources, and accountability for results can all pay dividends for education as well as for foundations. They tend to set ambitious goals for their own work and to be aggressive in pursuit of their agendas. That, too, is something of a departure for philanthropists, who have tended to stay in the background and let their grantees set their own goals while they bask in the spotlight.

“These are people who made money challenging the status quo,” says Barry Munitz, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, referring to the new givers. “These high net worth, first-generation folks…approach their gift-giving the way they approached their investing—due diligence, measures of accountability, a lot of involvement, each with an agenda. It’s very different from spending money on the system and standing back and letting it work.”

But it’s not always easy for foundations to manage the tradeoffs between aggressively pushing school districts in a certain direction and respecting the wishes of a community and its leadership; between demanding quick results and acknowledging the complexity of school reform and the intransigence of bureaucracies; between investing in something new and injecting operating resources into a project already under way. In thinking about these dilemmas, many in the philanthropic world continue to cite the 1993 Annenberg Challenge as an example of what they want to avoid.

The $500 million challenge issued by former ambassador and publishing mogul Walter Annenberg is still the largest philanthropic gift ever given to American public education. After being matched by more than $600 million in goods and services from the local communities that were recipients, the money was given to nine large city school systems, a consortium of rural schools, and two national school-reform groups, among others. In some ways, the amount of money involved was both too much and too little. Some have said the money was doled out with far too little oversight by the foundation. But others contend that, in the foundation’s effort to affect a number of communities, its impact was diluted.

“We spread ourselves too thin,” remarked Harold Williams, president emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Trust and a board member of the Los Angeles organization that was spawned by the Annenberg grant. “If we had taken on fewer school families and focused our dollars and human resources on those, we would have accomplished more.”

Guilbert C. Hentschke, dean of the school of education at the University of Southern California, one of the main partners in the challenge, is now studying the impact of philanthropy on education. He says that the Annenberg grant met “the classic definition of a professional reform,” meaning that it mostly paid for more of what already was going on in the schools. For the most part, he says, “The school districts and the schools gobbled up those grants like lunch, and they were ready for the next one.” What may have been needed instead, Hentschke says, was a “radical” reform that started with an empty slate and redesigned the most basic operations of the schools. Many of the leading donors today are trying to figure out how to do just that.

High Schools

The Gates Foundation has attempted some of that reimag­ining with its high-school initiative, which brought together other philanthropies, including Carnegie, the Open Society Institute, Annenberg, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Walton, and Ford. Carnegie alone has put in $60 million for its Schools for a New Society high-school redesign effort, which aims to overhaul all the high schools in a district. “We’re not ideological about attacking the problem,” says Tom Vander Ark, who is in charge of the Gates Foundation’s education work. “We’re trying to attack it in many different ways.”

Gates Foundation officials are also aware that, unless public money takes over when private money goes away, the innovative approaches the foundation is fostering will disappear with little impact. “In the narrowest sense, it’s a $10 billion to $20 billion problem that we’re attacking, and over time we might contribute a tenth of the solutions it will require,” Vander Ark says. “It would be difficult, impractical, expensive, and ineffective for us to do this work ourselves.”

Leadership, Management, and Governance

By the end of 2004, the education foundation established by Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, had assets worth $540 million. The foundation has already committed some $135 million to overhauling fundamental aspects of urban school districts: identifying new sources of talent for positions of authority; developing alternative training methods for managers, principals, and teachers union leaders; creating new tools for analyzing performance data; and working with school boards to help those sometimes obstructionist bodies become more focused on student learning than on petty power plays. Broad, whose fortune is variously estimated at between $4 billion and $6 billion, is in his 70s, and he too plans on giving away most of that amount during his lifetime. Most of it will go toward K–12 education causes, according to Dan Katzir, the education foundation’s managing director.

The foundation supports a number of what Katzir calls “branded flagship initiatives,” such as the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems or the Broad Institute for School Boards. Its largest investment is a $20 million-plus stake in SchoolMatters.com, a project of Standard & Poor’s School Evaluation Services unit that marries information about how schools spend their money with academic indicators.

Another major foundation that has invested heavily—even more so than Broad—in improving the skills of principals and superintendents is the Wallace Foundation, which was established by DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace, the founders of the Reader’s Digest Association. In 2000 the foundation committed $150 million over five years to improving leadership at the school and district level and is now underwriting in 24 states a wide variety of programs: leadership academies, university-school district partnerships, research, changes in what it takes to become certified as a principal, and superintendent training. Wallace and Broad, as well as Annenberg and Gates, also are underwriting the New York City Leadership Academy, a very expensive undertaking that pays aspiring principals full salaries as they train for a year to take jobs heading up schools in the city.

The Wallace Foundation’s Richard Laine emphasizes that it is not enough just to improve the training of principals. Put a well-trained leader in a bad system, he’s fond of saying, and “The system will win every time.” What’s needed, he says, are policy changes, giving the best teachers incentives to go into the most demanding schools and allowing principals to have more control over hiring and evaluating teachers and more flexibility and control over their budgets.

Teaching

Improving teaching has long been high on the agenda of many foundations. “It really all boils down to good teaching,” says Janice Petrovich of the Ford Foundation. “If you can figure out how to do that, you’ll make a difference.”

That, however, turns out to be difficult for foundations to do well and even more difficult to sustain. Foundations actively working on this front today have a wide variety of strategies for making a difference. Some of these might be categorized as efforts to build the capacity of the current system by simply paying for professional development sessions on particular topics; others might be thought of as attempts to change the system by developing new approaches to hiring, compensating, and evaluating teachers. Ultimately, Petrovich says, increasing the capacity of the system changes the system. But foundations often are reluctant to work inside classrooms to help teachers, for fear that they won’t have a systemic impact; at the same time, to make a difference broadly, foundations have to fund projects over which they have little control.

One of the most ambitious efforts to improve teaching is called Teachers for a New Era, a $65 million project underwritten by four venerable foundations: Carnegie, which initiated the effort and has the largest stake; Annenberg; Ford; and the Rockefeller Foundation. As of 2003, 11 education schools had received five-year grants to develop teacher-preparation programs that mimic the kind of clinical training that doctors receive as residents and that pay more explicit attention to the effect of the training on student learning. The grants must be matched locally.

The Milken Family Foundation has spent well over $100 million to make teaching more attractive by recognizing achievement and pushing districts to base pay on performance. The foundation’s Teacher Advancement Program, which provides training opportunities to help teachers climb a career ladder toward higher salaries based on their performance, is now in place in 85 schools and is poised for a major expansion, with states and the federal government offering financial support.

“We are hell-bent on figuring out a way of creating the proper incentives and putting them into practice to attract talented people into the profession,” Lowell Milken says.

Another foundation committed to improving teaching is the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where Marshall Smith, a former acting deputy secretary of education in the Clinton administration, heads up education reforms. The former dean of the Stanford University School of Education, Smith is perhaps the leading proponent of what’s known as “systemic” reform in education. He says that about half of the $36 million or so he has to spend on K–12 education annually goes to “trying to figure out ways of improving instruction in inner-city schools.”

Academic content and performance standards are now well ingrained in American public education, Smith believes. But the standards movement that he had a hand in launching “really doesn’t touch the classroom in a deep way. What’s arisen in the past five or six years as an issue is the quality of the teacher and whether we have the capacity and smarts and knowledge to improve that.”

School Choice

During the past decade, the nation’s foundations have become major champions of school choice, supporting the development of charter schools and, to a lesser extent, the financing of vouchers to pay for private school tuition for low-income students. Indeed, it seems that many of the major foundations involved in education are backing charter schools in one way or another, either by supporting individual sites or by financing research or advocacy designed to promote policies friendly to charters.

Broad has nine separate school-choice initiatives. A significant number of the high schools Gates is supporting are charter schools. The Annenberg Foundation gave more than $10 million to underwrite an architecturally daring building for the Accelerated School, a highly successful charter school south of downtown Los Angeles. Financier Theodore J. Forstmann, along with the late John Walton (see “Tribute”) each gave $50 million to start the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which subsidizes private school tuition for low-income students. In 2001, according to the Foundation Center, the Fund was the ninth-largest recipient of charitable donations in the area of K–12 education, and in 2002 it was the top recipient. Forstmann and Walton helped raise another $70 million for scholarships from donors that included Broad, former Hollywood super agent Michael Ovitz, and supermarket mogul Ronald W. Burkle.

Since 1998 the Walton Family Foundation started by Sam and Helen Walton, the founders of Wal-Mart, has given an estimated $284 million to K–12 education, the bulk of that to support charter schools and private school scholarships for low-income students. The foundation is by far the biggest donor to school choice-related causes and has helped support, by one estimate, 10 percent of all the nation’s charter schools. “Our theory is that competition in a high enough degree will eventually create competitive pressures to encourage the existing systems to really try and compete,” says Buddy Philpott, the foundation’s executive director.

Can Philanthropy Make a Difference?

It is often difficult to tell whether a foundation is making a difference. Outside of evaluations paid for by the foundations themselves or even done internally, philanthropy often receives little scrutiny, and philanthropists are often treated like celebrities. Frederick M. Hess, an editor of this journal, analyzed press coverage of leading philanthropies involved in education for the publication Philanthropy. He concluded that journalists rarely criticize foundations on substantive issues and are far more likely to laud them than to question their strategy or their impact.

Were journalists or others to attempt it, though, it is probably easier now than in the past to determine the impact of philanthropy. That’s because, in response to the national push for academic standards and accountability, movements fueled by philanthropy, states now are required to test students and report on the results. When the Annenberg Challenge was being evaluated, for example, the use of test scores as one measure of the grant’s effectiveness met resistance in many cities where it operated. Today, it is expected that changes in test scores will be factored into the evaluations of interventions.

But some worry that demanding rapid test-score gains from foundation-backed reforms could lead to the abandonment of promising practices before they have a chance to prove themselves. That is why foundations such as Gates and Broad and others are trying to be strategic in the degree to which they rely on test scores as indicators of progress and are also monitoring a number of other changes including graduation rates, attendance, and qualitative changes.

Needless to say, there is a rich history of success and failure to learn from. In 1972 the Ford Foundation published a remarkably frank critique of its own education reform efforts during the 1960s. Called “A Foundation Goes to School” and written by Ed Meade, Ford’s longtime education program officer, the report observed that the projects the foundation supported “underestimated the complexity of improving schools” and did not fully account for the difficulty of working with unions, community leaders and parents, or the effect of broader social conditions. Foundations can’t impose their view of how the district should operate, in what Marshall Smith calls a “mega-reform.”

The challenge for foundations, then, is not to create the initiative that will work precisely as planned. The challenge is to use a variety of strategies—investment, capacity building, the creation of competition, parallel structures that challenge the status quo—to help the schools and districts themselves do a better job.

Tom Payzant, the veteran superintendent who heads up Boston Public Schools, says large school districts get funding from a variety of philanthropic organizations, but he has had to work hard to persuade these funders to align their efforts to support a system-wide vision of how to improve education and avoid contributing to what he calls “project-itis,” which is just a series of ad hoc donations that make givers feel good but have little impact on students.

“It’s been very hard for educators to stand up and say, ‘I don’t want the money unless it’s aligned with what we’re doing,’ without being snooty about it,” he says.

Lowell Milken says that one way to judge the work of foundations is whether other givers get on board and whether a project changes the way the district does business. “Is the district willing to adjust its budget and, if a project meets its goals, will they take on the whole cost? All those issues are critical to us, in looking at how we should proceed.”

Despite the sometimes gloomy assessments of philanthropy’s impact, there is reason for hope. Giving to K–12 education will surely increase. Foundations are working together much more than in the past. They seem to recognize that public policy has to change if their projects are to be sustained, and foundations are becoming more active in the policy arenas. The philanthropists are funding outside evaluations, and they seem to be more transparent and forthright about the shortcomings of what they’re funding as well as their successes. Vander Ark of the Gates Foundation openly acknowledges that 10–20 percent of the foundation’s grants are not working, and another 10–20 percent are working out differently than planned. If it were otherwise, he says, one would suspect that the foundation was only placing safe bets, and safe bets are unlikely to produce the major improvements that are needed in education.

Richard Lee Colvin is director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, based at Teachers College, Columbia University. This article is adapted from a chapter in the forthcoming book The Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping the Landscape of K–12 Education.

Chicago’s school district wants the federal afterschool dollar. So do many other districts. And more than two thousand private providers, for-profit and nonprofit alike, are making their own claims.

More than $2.5 billion is at stake, a figure scheduled to increase considerably if budgetary trends continue. How should the money be distributed? Will parental choice and competition among service providers determine the outcome? Or will school districts capture the resources for themselves? Can schoolchildren be the winners this time?

These questions have grown in import as afterschool programs, the heart of the supplemental service provision of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), take on increasing significance in the implementation of the historic federal law. As more and more schools fail to make their NCLB-mandated Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals, the demand for supplemental education services, such as tutoring, summer school, or, most often, instruction after the end of the regular school day, is skyrocketing. Especially within big cities, where the largest concentrations of disadvantaged students reside, these afterschool programs are becoming one of the most popular features of the Bush administration’s school reforms.

The supplemental services program has major potential, but it is freighted with an inherent conflict of interest that could prove its undoing: the same school districts that are failing to make AYP are the gatekeepers for these afterschool funds. As the stakes increase, so does the funding, and so do the incentives to control those dollars.

The Legislative Compromise

To appreciate the current predicament, one need only understand that when NCLB was being hatched, afterschool was just an afterthought. The main thrust of the legislation was and remains the need to meet state proficiency standards by 2014.

But what happens when students fail to meet their AYP targets? Not much, really. For all the dire talk about the strictures NCLB places on states and localities, two of the three consequences thus far have amounted to little or nothing. Twice-failed schools (those NCLB calls “in need of improvement”) must offer parents a choice of sending their children to another public school within the district, but that option is being exercised by no more than 1 percent of eligible families. After five failing years, schools are to be “reconstituted.” Despite the dramatic verbiage, reconstitution, while it has in a few cases led to major change, usually means little more than hiring a new principal and asking teachers whether they would like to remain on the staff or move somewhere else in the district.

That leaves the third consequence, the requirement that students must be given access to supplemental services if a school fails for three years’ running. It was not supposed to be the most important result. In fact, it was born of a compromise between frustrated Capitol Hill conservatives, who saw vouchers as the accountability lever of choice, and liberals, who wanted anything but vouchers. Republicans, particularly in the House of Representatives, tossed the idea of supplemental services out as a last desperate card to avoid losing all choice options. While this seemed a backdoor way of bringing outside providers—nonprofit and for-profit, secular and religious—into the school, the legislators neglected one thing: they left the keys with the school districts. The districts could control access to students and parents and the terms of the contracts with private providers, and in many cases they could supply their own supplemental services. Even failing districts, nominally prohibited from providing such services, can divert the afterschool monies to their own use simply by suppressing parental demand for the programs, which are voluntary. Since the school districts get to keep every dollar not spent on the afterschool program and deploy those dollars for programs of their own, they have a clear financial disincentive to encourage student participation in the program.

The Growth of the Afterschool Program

Despite disincentives to school districts, parental response has been surprisingly strong. Admittedly, fewer than 100,000 students participated in afterschool programs during the 2002–03 school year, according to Department of Education records. But the following year, that number doubled to 218,031, or 11.3 percent of all eligible students. As more students become eligible for afterschool services, and as word of the program spreads throughout disadvantaged communities, federal officials expect that number to continue to soar, with big gains expected as soon as the 2004–05 tally is made.

The supply of service providers is growing to meet the demand (see Table 1). Nationwide, more than 2,000 private entities now offer supplemental services. In most cases they teach small groups of students after the end of the regular school day. The degree of competition varies from one place to the next, the most intense being within big cities that have large numbers of eligible students. Some states, such as Florida and Idaho, report no students in thrice-failed schools and so have no one eligible to receive supplemental services. Other states, like California and New York, report hundreds of thousands of eligible students. Although boutique providers limit themselves to one or two locales, the largest companies, such as Kaplan, Princeton Review, and Plato Learning, are extending their reach into a majority of the states. Their energetic moves make good economic sense. Providers are finding that they can recruit quality teachers, develop effective curricula, put into place strong management systems, and still make a reasonable profit.

Given the still pent-up demand (in Illinois, for instance, only 5 percent of eligible students are getting supplemental services), the competition for the afterschool dollar will no doubt intensify dramatically with the passage of time. Only 2 percent of the $2.5 billion available for the supplemental services program has so far been tapped. With per-student costs averaging between $700 and $2,500, depending on location and other special circumstances, the number of students served could exceed 2,000,000.

In short, if private providers build on their initial successes, if school districts are unable to stop program growth, and if Title I funding continues its steady growth (see Figure 1), the afterschool program could expand to more than ten times its 2004 size. Just as Head Start began on a limited scale but has now spread to the point where well over half of all four-year-olds are in some kind of nursery or preschool program, so the afterschool program can be expected to take on a life of its own.

Many low-income families have quite practical reasons for finding afterschool services attractive, and they can be expected to seize this new opportunity to enjoy the same outside help as middle-class families have for their afterschool needs. For one thing, they provide a safe haven for a child during hours when most parents are still at work.

The Academic Potential

The afterschool option has educational attractions as well. Traditionally, after school has been considered a time for play, sports, or extracurricular activity, as well as for latchkeys, television, PlayStation, or life on the streets. Organized afterschool programs serving the disadvantaged have tended to focus more on snacks and recreational activities (basketball, roller skating, and gymnastics) than on reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Predictably, such programs have had little impact on academic progress. Both a review of traditional afterschool programs by Swarthmore economist Rob Hollister and a recent federally funded study conducted by Mathematica found little in the way of educational benefit from traditional afterschool activities. Only 50 percent of the directors surveyed in the Mathematica study saw “enhancing students’ ability to meet specific academic goals” as one of their top three program objectives. As Hollister concluded, “There is a tremendous struggle between those who believe that afterschool programs should be focused on skill development … and those who stress the need to provide an atmosphere for growth and adult contact for children who are too often ‘home alone.’”

Presumably, by explicitly identifying afterschool programs as a way of bringing all students up to the state-determined proficiency standard, NCLB has given after school the academic focus previous programs lacked. And by introducing a measure of choice and competition into the equation, providers place themselves at risk if they do not have educationally credible programming.

At this point, we don’t know what kind of academic lift these programs can offer. On the one hand, many of the afterschool programs are limited to only one to two hours a day over a three-month period. On the other hand, education providers have strong incentives — and few impediments — to make these moments educationally rewarding. Unlike the regular school day, the afterschool program is voluntary, not compulsory. Education providers, to secure their revenue flow, must find ways to persuade students to attend. Fortunately, voluntary attendance greatly reduces the problem disruptive students pose for inner-city teachers during the regular school day, when attendance is compulsory. And the afterschool teachers themselves can be hired outside the usual union rules and grievance structures. Providers can recruit regular public-school teachers for afterschool duty if they wish, but ineffective teachers can be readily dismissed. Meanwhile, the teachers enjoy the opportunity to work with those students who are motivated enough to sign up for the program. The conditions are such that the afterschool experience should, in most cases, be educationally positive.

Nor is there any inherent reason to think students cannot learn late in the day. After all, researchers have discovered that the biological clock of young people ticks faster later in the day than at the crack of dawn. (For older adults, it is just the opposite.)

We also know that privately run afterschool programs have long been key components of effective education in other countries, especially those that score high on international math and science examinations, such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Those countries have a widespread system of private, academically rigorous “cram” schools to which middle-class families send their students in order to enhance their opportunities for admission to college.

In short, strong parental demand, coupled with new suppliers entering an intensely competitive market, could boost the performance of those low-income students who are seeking ways to overcome their education disadvantages. Should that happen, the afterschool initiative could turn out to be the most important NCLB reform after all.

The Chicago Factor

For all their potential, and perhaps because of their potential, afterschool programs are fast becoming an arena for acrimonious political debate. And what better place to witness the rancor than the City of Broad Shoulders and Demo­cratic dynasties: Chicago. In fact, under Mayor Richard Daley’s strong direction, the Windy City has, since the late 1990s, anticipated much of what would be included in NCLB. It has, for instance, required that 3rd graders pass an end-of-the-year exam (or boost poor scores by attending summer school) in order to advance to 4th grade.

One would expect Chicago to be among the strongest supporters of the new federal law on the question of afterschool academic programs except for one thing: despite some gains in student test scores in recent years, the Chicago school district, like many other big-city districts (see Figure 2), still has so few students making AYP that, under the federal law, the district has been designated as failing and thus cannot offer its own supplemental service programs.

The outcry from big-city school officials has been bitter. “When push comes to shove, we’re talking about children in desperate need of help,” a Chicago school administrator told an Education Week reporter last September. “Should we just cross our fingers and wait? These children need these services. They need these services yesterday.” Federal officials argued in response that if the school district can’t educate students during the regular school day, it’s time to let others have a chance after the bell rings.

Eventually the two sides reached a short-term compromise that allowed the Chicago school district to provide services itself in 2005 without suffering any serious financial penalty. But for future years, the issue remains on the table, with the feds, at least for now, continuing to insist that no failing school district be allowed to provide supplemental education services.

The federal focus on failing districts is understandable, given the way the law is currently phrased. But in terms of public policy, the central issue is not whether a district is failing but whether school districts should both offer services and control the terms of access by private providers.

The Financial Conflict of Interest

Though ignored in most of the public discussion, the financial conflict of interest is clear: school districts are given the authority to monitor afterschool education vendors even while acting as vendors themselves. If this arrangement were used in the banking industry, the Securities and Exchange Commission would also be a brokerage firm.

Admittedly, a district, if designated as failing, cannot offer the services itself. But that does not eliminate the conflict of interest. If parents are demanding afterschool services, then up to 20 percent of Title I funds given to that district must be used to fund the private providers offering the services. If parental demand for such programs is slight, then the failing school district may use the money for other purposes.

School districts have powerful weapons that can be used in the battle to limit the scope of the demand and control the provision of services. For one thing, privacy rules give districts exclusive control over communications with students and families. Although districts, by federal rule, must send a letter explaining the afterschool option to all eligible families, that letter, often sent late in the school year, is typically laden with the usual bureaucratic jargon. According to the Center on Education Policy study, “Parents thought the letters informing them about services were too long and complicated and buried key information.” As Michael Petrilli, a former federal education official has pointed out, “It takes very aggressive marketing to make low-income families aware of their options, and districts are not doing more than is required under the letter of the law.”

To be fair, not every district is proving obstreperous. On the contrary, a number of the largest, New York City included, are doing their best to inform parents of the options available to them. Even where cooperation is less clear-cut, it can in many instances be attributed to significant start-up problems. Schools are not identified as failing until the summer or well into the new school year in which afterschool services are to be made available. Districts must then organize their own afterschool programs or sign contracts with providers, then inform parents of services being offered.

But with a modicum of adjustments, those practical problems can be addressed, if districts are inclined to do so. Unfortunately, financial incentives and ingrained opposition to choice and competition push in the opposite direction. When asked for ways of improving NCLB, one administrator said, “Eliminate the Supplemental Services provision; it is very expensive and is of minimal value.” Union leaders are no less antagonistic. In New York, for example, the spokesman for the New York State United Teachers, the state’s largest teachers union, commented, “Our concern is that it is going to be difficult if not impossible to track whether or not this money is being spent effectively.” Although the point is well taken, teacher unions seldom show a similar kind of skepticism for most other kinds of school expenditure.

The animosity to the afterschool programs and other supplemental services was amply revealed in the Center on Education Policy survey of school administrators, who, when given anonymity, frankly stated their deep-seated suspicion of the profit motive:

“Supplemental Service funds should go to districts that would provide services without the profit motive.”

“I would not use federal funds to support a program being operated by individuals not held to the same standards that public school employees are held to.”

“Supplemental Services for any qualified provider will cause a cottage industry to develop that will be driven by profit and not academics.”

Suspicious of the private providers, mindful of the cost to their own coffers, and in control of the access channel, districts thus have both incentives and opportunities to check program growth. In Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, the school district, which offers its own afterschool programming, actively discourages other entities from offering their wares. Says one for-profit provider, “The school district is the owner of the relationship between provider and the parent. And I can’t get in.” In such cases, says Harvard professor William Howell, “It’s like asking a BMW dealer to extol the benefits of buying a Volvo.”

Such resistance to outside vendors is not limited to the districts in Senator Ted Kennedy’s home state. In testimony before a congressional subcommittee last May, Jeffrey Cohen, president of Catapult Learning, reported the numerous obstacles providers are facing nationally:

“We have seen parent notification letters that are impossible to decipher. We have seen multipart registration processes that seem to delay registration, rather than encouraging it. And, we have been prohibited from talking to school principals and parents.”

Districts are asked to hold “fairs” where competing providers can tell parents about their offerings, said Cohen, but, according to a high official at one of the major providers, “Districts do nothing beyond the bare minimum to promote the fairs to parents.”

When districts have financial incentives to limit participation, such obstacles make bureaucratic sense, however much they limit opportunities for families. Admittedly, private providers need to be monitored, so as to avoid “suede-shoe operators” from peddling their wares to unwary parents, a concern of Demo­cratic representative George Miller, who serves as the ranking minority member of the House Education Committee. Some have been found to be paying parents to attend, and others have used a web site managed from overseas to work with students. As the program ramps up, all private providers need to demonstrate that their services are beneficial. But to turn the job of managing providers over to school districts that have an incentive to limit the competition defies all regulatory logic.

Of course, it cannot be left to the industry to monitor itself. But as long as districts have the monitoring authority, they can be expected to look for legal constraints that will keep the programs in-house. “There are some districts that are clearly not playing fair and have been a thorn in the side of the providers,” says Petrilli.

Despite tighter federal guidelines issued in June 2005, local districts still have a great deal of latitude when negotiating contracts with providers. As Michael Casserly, head of the Council of the Great City Schools, reports, “School districts and potential providers have found themselves tussling over the length of the contracts, per pupil fees, billing and payment procedures, staff qualifications, union rules, and the like.”

In short, the possibilities for burdensome regulations can be endless whenever the financial incentives to create obstacles are ingrained. As an administrator in Worcester explained, “We’re not required to provide transportation. And, to be honest, to send money out of the district, I’m not sure that we would even offer to do that.”

But Will Children Benefit?

How this power struggle will evolve, and whether students will benefit, remains the big unknown. Unfortunately, the accountability provisions of NCLB do not contain any mechanism for ensuring that students profit from afterschool programs, mainly because states are focusing more on overall school performance than on the performance of individual students.

If the NCLB accountability system can be gradually shifted to a student focus, then the impact of afterschool programs, along with much else, can become part of the planning for the future. Until then, one can expect private providers to claim great success without much convincing evidence. And school districts will complain about problems, corruption, and profit making with no more than an anecdote here and there to justify their self-serving complaints. But for those who think that choice and competition are the key to school reform, the afterschool intervention is the most promising vehicle currently available.

Paul E. Peterson is professor of government, Harvard University, and the editor-in-chief of Education Next.

With charter schools now serving approximately one million students nationwide, policymakers have been awaiting rigorous evaluations of their effects on student learning. The following articles help fill the gap.Caroline Hoxby and Jonah Rockoff present evidence from the first randomized evaluation of charter schools, focusing on three charter schools in Chicago. Robert Bifulco and Helen Laddexamine charter schools in the Tar Heel state, concentrating on those students whose progress can be compared in both charter and traditional public schools.

The picture that emerges is, to say the least, complex. But we learn some significant things: Charter schools appear to do better with young students who matriculate directly into these schools than with students who enter during the middle-school years. Students who remain in charter schools do better than those who migrate back and forth between sectors.

• Findings from the City of Big Shoulders by Hoxby & Rockoff, page 52

• Results from the Tar Heel State by Bifulco & Ladd, page 60

Last April, in a move that generated many headlines but surprised almost no one, the National Education Association (NEA) and nine school districts filed a lawsuit against Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, claiming that federal funding to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was inadequate. Although the claim of “unfunded mandate” has been asserted almost since the day NCLB was signed into law, School District of the City of Pontiac et al. v. Spellings constitutes the first major legal challenge to the historic education law to be filed in federal court. If the suit succeeds, the Department of Education (DOE) will be asked to stop enforcing NCLB regulations until sufficient federal funds are provided.

The federal law does have language stating, “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to … mandate a state or any subdivision thereof to … incur any costs not paid for under this Act.” While that seems clear enough, isn’t the mandate to teach all children what schools are supposed to do anyway? Or could Pontiac v. Spellings be the ultimate adequacy case, resulting in court-ordered multibillions of dollars? Although many school districts and union leaders would like to think so, a closer look suggests otherwise.

For one thing, the plaintiffs ignore the fact that any state can escape all regulation simply by refusing the money. If NCLB-induced costs actually surpassed the federal revenue flow, then states could simply refuse the money. Though Utah has made noises about such a move, significantly, no state has yet done so.

Further, the plaintiffs in this lawsuit would have to show a real dispute between the school district and the DOE. To prevent federal courts from premature intervention, plaintiffs are normally required to show that all administrative remedies have been pursued before a lawsuit was filed. In this case, there is no allegation that the DOE has refused a district request for a waiver of NCLB requirements. Without such a showing, the court may well refuse even to consider the case.

The NEA’s legal standing is even weaker. Only parties genuinely injured by government action are allowed to bring suit. Since the NEA does not assert that the DOE has acted in a manner that specifically injures the organization, it is hard to see what standing it has in court. While it claims that teachers are being stigmatized, it would be a real stretch to argue that any stigmatization that teachers suffered because their students were not learning constituted an injury that required a legal remedy.

What about the claim that NCLB causes school districts to spend money not provided by the act? The plaintiffs rely on a handful of studies claiming to prove the high cost of accountability, but presumably those studies could be refuted by other studies that would be at least equally convincing. Even if accountability does have some fiscal cost, it will be hard to show that the cost can be uniquely attributed to NCLB. By the time NCLB was signed, the trend toward emphasizing student assessment and accountability had already spread nationwide. Nor are the courts likely to overrule allocations made by the DOE under NCLB rules. Federal courts are generally loath to substitute their judgment for that of the agency entrusted by Congress with the task of administering a statutory program.

In the end, the NEA and the nine school districts that have taken this legal plunge face a difficult task to show that they are the right plaintiffs to bring this suit, at this time, against this agency. Even if they get past the procedural hurdles, substantial factual issues concerning accountability costs will impede their journey. Even if they overcome all these barriers, the plaintiffs must persuade a federal court to enjoin the DOE’s administration of NCLB simply because school districts say they need more money. That refrain, more money, is one that has been heard countless times before, by legislators, policymakers, and the courts. Without the proper legal basis, this particular version of the song is not likely to resonate.

John R. Munich and Rocco E. Testani are partners in the Education, Government and Civil Rights Litigation Practice Group of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, LLP.

Getting the Right Principals

I just finished reading “The Accidental Principal” by Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly (Features, Summer 2005), with great interest and agreement. I have been in public education for 33 years, 4 of them as an adjunct professor in education administration. When I’d had all I could take of exactly what Hess and Kelly described in their article, I quit. I felt there were better ways to affect the system.

It had become painfully clear that teacher colleges were more concerned with covering everything required by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) than with preparing good school administrators. Many times I saw the great frustration of other professors who were interrupting good learning to “cover” NCATE standards.

It’s exactly what I see in all our schools, where administrators are more concerned with jumping through all the hoops than with educating kids. Perhaps it’s time to admit that central planning isn’t working any better in education than it did in the Soviet Union.

Dr. Steve Wyckoff
Educational Services and
Staff Development Association
of Central Kansas
Hutchinson, Kansa

 

Unflagged and Unequal

When the College Board stopped flagging the SAT scores of students who took the tests with accommodations (most commonly, extended time) in 2004, it instituted a tightened eligibility process to offset the new stigma-free advantage.

In his examination of the 2003 and 2004 SAT I results, both flagged and unflagged (“Unflagged SATs,” Features, Summer 2005), Samuel J. Abrams found that the eligibility process became a hidden advantage for students whose parents and schools were more skilled at meeting tightened eligibility requirements—documentation from therapists and psychologists—than families “less savvy and less financially endowed.”

Indeed, the increase in the scores of students with accommodations in the District of Columbia is dramatic, and Abrams attributes the anomaly to the division between extremes of wealth within the District. But he is not quite correct. The extremes are there, but they are within the entire metropolitan area, including the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Many of the students living in these richer areas attend private schools in D.C. and contribute to the high scores in the city.

More significantly, on these schools’ college counseling web pages there are links to the College Board’s “site for students with disabilities” as well as other disability sources. The web site of Georgetown Day School has a four-page Learning Disabilities section that includes a detailed list of the categories of professionals who can diagnose LD and ADHD.

By contrast, many of the public high schools don’t even have web sites.

Unflagging the scores in 2004 tilted the playing field to the advantage of parents most skilled at working the system; the high number of flagged scores in 2003 suggests that the College Board saw stigma where sophisticated parents saw advantage. The stiffened eligibility process increased their advantage at the expense of the less skilled, when it created a de facto double standard.

Erich Martel
Teacher, World History and AP U.S. history
Woodrow Wilson H.S.
Washington, D.C.

 

Mel Levine’s Brain

It is unfortunate that Dr. Daniel Willingham took a rather superficial view of our work in reviewing Dr. Mel Levine’s most recent popular press books for his article “Mind over Matter” (Check the Facts, Spring 2005). Both books, A Mind at a Time and The Myth of Laziness, were intended to describe Dr. Levine’s neurodevelopmental framework for a general audience and provide examples from his clinical cases; they were not intended to describe the research base on which Dr. Levine’s neurodevelopmental framework is founded.

Those who read Dr. Levine’s entire body of work carefully will find that it is rooted in rigorous scientific research as well as sound clinical judgment and experience. Dr. Levine has developed and refined an accurate and usable framework of the mind and its functions. His 1992 book, Developmental Variation and Learning Disorders, was written for a more academic audience and includes citations of the research, theory, and clinical experience on which his framework is based. Dr. Levine’s theoretical framework is based on existing research from across a variety of scientific and academic disciplines as well as the convergence of clinical evidence and experience. Some of Dr. Willingham’s misunderstanding may be the inevitable result of the wide gap that often separates clinical studies and frontline experience from research in a field like cognitive psychology. In addition, different disciplines that study learning vary significantly in their terminology and conceptual models.

At All Kinds of Minds [a research organization established by Dr. Levine] our continual goal is to use our theoretical framework to help those who have an immediate need: the students who struggle to learn and the parents, teachers, and clinicians who strive to help them achieve success in school and in life. Many critical clinical problems have not been rigorously researched. Nevertheless, they need to be addressed vigorously using the best possible judgment by educators and clinicians. To date, the feedback we have received from thousands of teachers and parents is that our programs make a dramatic difference in their lives.

The All Kinds of Minds Institute is committed to rigorous, high-quality research. Over the past three years, All Kinds of Minds has made a multi­million-dollar investment in building our research infrastructure and fielding three national independent research studies. In addition, several small-scale independent studies have already found that the Schools Attuned program has a positive impact on student and teacher outcomes. In the coming years we will continue to solicit input from the scientific, clinical, and education communities to inform the further development of our programs. We invite the academic research community to study our framework and programs thoroughly. We will carefully vet and incorporate all appropriate emerging research into our theoretical framework and programs.

Ann E. Harman
Director of Research
All Kinds of Minds Institute

Daniel Willingham replies: Harman suggests that Levine’s popular press books are reader-friendly versions of a much more substantial scientific theory. That is a misrepresentation; Levine’s “scientific” work is not better supported than his popular books. As I noted in my article, I called the All Kinds of Minds Institute specifically to ask for more research-oriented publications and was directed to (among others) Developmental Variation and Learning Disorders, to which Harman refers (although I read the 1999 second edition, not the first edition she mentions). I pointed out that these works do indeed have more references to the scientific literature, but only for well-accepted ideas (which I did not criticize), and none for the particular views Levine espouses (which I did). The second edition also happens to be the source of Levine’s complete misinterpretation of research by Richard McKee and Larry Squire that I discussed.

Harman’s second point is that cognitive psychologists might view the mind differently than clinicians. It is not clear to me how that point absolves clinicians from providing data to support their views, particularly when their views conflict with existing data.

Finally, Harman notes that several small studies have found that the Schools Attuned program “has a positive effect on student and teacher outcomes.” She might have added that these studies have not undergone expert peer review, nor do they compare Schools Attuned with competitor methods. To the extent that they show student effects, they show that Schools Attuned is better than nothing. I applaud the interest All Kinds of Minds has taken in evaluating the program, but I dispute that existing research has shown much of anything, least of all that the program is ready for statewide support.

 

Charter School Melee

Ted Sizer and Michael Petrilli illustrate what makes education policy such an interesting field (“Identity Crisis,” Forum, Summer 2005). The fellow writing for the “right” (Petrilli) argues for state involvement, while the fellow representing the “left” (Sizer) objects to a strong exercise of federal power.

It’s a compelling discussion that avoids two of the more frustrating positions in debates about these issues: testing is all that matters or there are not actually serious problems in American education.

But even this debate seems to obscure the potential for reasonable compromise. Sizer is right about the possible excesses of No Child Left Behind—style accountability, though it’s worth noting that these issues predate the law. However, is Petrilli’s plea for basic literacy and numeracy standards too much to ask? And, even in practice, is it really at odds with the rich notion of education that Sizer has long championed and in fact not something of a predicate for it?

The problem with the direction Sizer wants is that, for a variety of reasons, good intentions and localized accountability have proved an insufficient guarantee of equity for underserved students. In many walks of life, people are held accountable to external standards. Is education really so exceptional among American endeavors that it needs no such outside accountability?

Within both the traditional public and charter sectors there are schools that serve niche populations and do not lend themselves to the mainstream accountability system. However, these schools are a minority. Instead of arguing whether charter schools should be included in No Child Left Behind, a more fruitful question is how to ensure that state accountability schemes allow enough flexibility for boutique programs within the public system while not opening up loopholes that low-quality schools can slip through. That’s a key issue for Congress to consider during the next reauthorization of No Child.

Apart from giving new start-ups an initial period of time to establish themselves, it is appropriate to hold the average charter school, serving similar students, to the same standards as other public schools in that community. If those standards are overly prescriptive or otherwise unreasonable, that’s an issue for all schools, not a reason to carve out exceptions for charters. Rhetorically, charter foes consistently fail to note that charters are public schools; charter proponents should not substantively make the same omission.

Andrew J. Rotherham
Director of Education Policy
and Senior Fellow
Progressive Policy Institut

 

The Inequity of Adequacy

Much appreciated is Joe Williams’s excellent account of the fiscal-equity juggernaut that has rolled through New York State (“The Legal Cash Machine,” Features, Summer 2005). The depressing results that are sure to follow from this ill-advised lawsuit will be equally unwelcome.

The tragedy of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) lawsuit is that it has resulted in mindless simplification of all debate surrounding education. By making more spending the only path to better results, we forgo the more important discussions of how, for instance, better pedagogy might improve outcomes, or how better management can direct more money to classrooms by creating transportation and procurement efficiencies.

The promise of what seems to be unlimited funds on the horizon has also created a “we can have it all” mentality. We can pay teachers more and also have more teachers (even though the number of qualified teachers in the job pool is a very finite commodity). We can build new schoolhouses rather than more efficiently use the ones we already have. We can increase available technology regardless of the capacity of the schools, their staff, and their students to absorb it. The sky is the limit. Don’t worry. The new money will be here soon.

As recounted by Mr. Williams, the lawsuit began during a period when city schools were indeed being shortchanged in the allocation of state funds. But the shortchanging of the city by about $400 per student 15 years ago is ancient history. Both the state’s and the city’s share of education funding in New York City have skyrocketed. Education outcomes are still mixed.

Finally, in New York City, as Williams made clear, the drumbeat continues for the State of New York to assume the full $5.6 billion annual school funding increase. But few in Gotham seem to realize that beyond the sphere of economic influence and affluence of the city is a world of dire economic crisis: boarded-up strip malls lining the upstate highways and byways and devastated cities with crippled economies, unable to support their own schools, much less subsidize ours. At the same time, these are the districts that are already eyeing the CFE lawsuit as a model for their own fiscal ambitions. All will discover that there is no pot of gold buried outside Albany.

Andrew Wolf
Columnist
The New York Sun