The charter school movement turns 14 this year, and its behavior, some might say, is “developmentally appropriate.” Unruly and temperamental, impassioned and energetic, growing in fits and starts and fiercely independent, even friends and supporters aren’t quite sure what to do with it. And now comes the apex of adolescence: the identity crisis.

Like most Americans who have ancestors from multiple countries or even continents, charters were born of disparate theories, education initiatives, and social philosophies. That diversity has been one of the greatest strengths of the big family that is the charter movement. But now public policies–certainly No Child Left Behind (NCLB), but also the state standards movement that preceded it–are forcing conversations long delayed. The most fundamental question is, What’s the point of charter schools anyway?

In the early 1990s, at the inception of charters, the bargain was set. These schools would be given greater autonomy and flexibility than traditional public schools, and in return they would be held accountable for getting better results in student learning. And, just as critically, they would be schools of choice for everyone involved–students, parents, and teachers. Two sides of the charter triangle–autonomy and choice–have remained quite clear and without controversy, at least within the charter movement itself. Parents should have plenty of choices; and the more autonomy and flexibility, the better. And it is clear that the charter model has succeeded in attracting applicants (see Figure 1).

But regarding the third side–accountability for results–the conversation was purposefully ambiguous. What results? Measured how? Compared with what? Rather than forcing a standard answer to these questions, policymakers and charter sponsors allowed schools to develop contracts that were customized to their specific contours.

Schools had the freedom to make the case to their state or local overseers for their contracts and accountability plans to reflect their unique pedagogical approaches. If the school was of the progressive stripe, for example, attracting parents and teachers who abhorred standardized testing, then portfolios of student work might serve as the indicator of success. If the school served an at-risk population, such as high-school dropouts, expectations might be adjusted accordingly. In effect, it was accountability sans standards.

As the 1990s progressed, however, and the state standards movement gained strength, the ambiguity around accountability–for charters but also for other public schools–started to recede. Elected representatives decided that it was appropriate to expect all public school students to know and be able to do certain things. Furthermore, they determined that statewide assessments were reasonable tools to measure whether this learning had in fact happened. And, by the end of the decade, some states were ready to hold schools to account for education success or failure.

Finally, by 2002, through the No Child Left Behind act, the public’s elected representatives took decisive action to close the achievement gaps plaguing our nation–and to hold all public schools, including charter schools, accountable for making progress toward that end. Some simple but powerful principles were codified in the law: every child can learn–and to expect anything less is a form of bigotry, which should stop.

Autonomy versus Accountability

So here we are, 14 years after the birth of charters, looking into the mirror at an identity crisis. Some in the charter school movement, viewing autonomy as its most important animating principle, responsible for so much of the innovation and energy in the 3,300 charter schools across the country, argue that the testing regimen at the heart of the standards movement and NCLB will leave charters hidebound, soulless, bureaucratized.

Is that a reasonable concern? Let’s return to the fundamental question: What’s the point of charter schools anyway?

If the only point is for schools to be innovative, experimental, and risk-taking, like the alternative schools of the 1960s, then exemption from statewide testing and accountability systems, and adoption of unique goals and objectives for each school, might make sense. But what if the point of charter schools is to dramatically raise student achievement and close the achievement gaps so that all young people have a chance to participate in our democracy and economy? What if the point is to innovate, experiment, take risks, and bring in new energy and ideas in order to perform at levels higher than otherwise possible?

In practice, this debate over the point of charter schools has itself reached a critical juncture. NCLB, supported by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress, makes it clear that all public schools–including charter schools–must be held accountable for raising student achievement and closing achievement gaps. In particular, schools are expected to make their state-set achievement goals (“Adequate Yearly Progress” under the law) to ensure that all children learn to read and do math.

At What Cost Proficiency?

How much of a threat to charter autonomy are this law and the related state accountability systems? Is proficiency in math and reading too heavy a burden to carry? I would argue that excellent charter schools, no matter how traditional or progressive, can handily meet the achievement expectations of state accountability systems while maintaining their distinct character. The requirements of NCLB are merely a starting point. Schools can build on statewide testing with their own “authentic” assessments of student learning, such as portfolios or demonstrations. And while ensuring that their students are literate and numerate, they can go on to provide a full, well-rounded education, defined as they see fit.

Schools of all kinds of educational persuasions can meet and are meeting the standards demanded by states and NCLB. The Office of Innovation and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education went looking for examples of some of the best charter schools in the nation, as measured by state assessments, and found a wide variety of institutions getting the job done. The resulting booklet, Innovations in Education: Successful Charter Schools, highlights some by-the-book miracle workers like KIPP Houston and Boston’s Roxbury Prep. But it also includes entries like the School of Arts and Sciences in Tallahassee, Florida, which features interdisciplinary learning, portfolios, and multi-age classrooms, and does without grades, report cards, or kids sitting in rows. What the schools all have in common is that they made adequate yearly progress under NCLB and otherwise demonstrated impressive student-achievement gains.

Granted, the achievement-level design of the NCLB accountability system creates some challenges for new schools like charters. Many charter schools purposefully recruit students who historically have been left behind by the traditional public schools; many of them are at-risk students. Especially for charter high schools, with students entering three, four, or five years behind, this presents a unique challenge. Some in the charter movement might prefer a value-added approach to accountability, one that looks at the gains made in student learning each year. In fact, there is a version of this system built into NCLB’s so-called safe harbor provision, which finds a school’s progress adequate if it increases by at least 10 percent, the number of students who are proficient, even if the school does not meet its achievement target. Whatever the system, though, it is important that we expect all students to achieve proficiency. Can educators–in charters and in other types of schools–say that their students are well prepared for life and further learning if they can’t read or do math at grade level?

While the accountability demands of NCLB could lead some charters–those exploring the furthest frontiers of education practice–to modify their programs, a much greater impact will be felt by charters that are low performing by any measure. And this may be the law’s greatest gift to the charter movement. It is already clear that many charter schools will be labeled “in need of improvement” under state accountability systems and NCLB. (According to the Government Accountability Office, as early as 2002-03, 25 charters in California, 28 in Michigan, and 38 in Pennsylvania needed improvement because they did not have enough students in certain subgroups reaching proficiency in reading or math.) While some of these schools are likely making great progress with students who started out far behind, others are unquestionably underperforming. As they face the steadily increasing improvement measures triggered by NCLB, many charters will surely be closed by their authorizers. And that will be a victory for the charter movement in the long run.

Why a victory? Because without the pressure of state accountability and NCLB, precious few authorizers have been willing to pull the trigger on underperforming charters. In a culture that can’t get enough of Donald Trump and his “Apprentice,” we have been terribly gun-shy about telling charters those two important words: “You’re fired!”

This lack of political courage has consequences–not only for the kids in the failing schools, but also for the charter movement itself. The year 2004 was difficult for charters, with the well-placed, well-spun American Federation of Teachers “study” taking center stage in a bruising battle between charter critics and supporters. The report–and the New York Times, which “broke” the story on its front page last August–was roundly criticized by researchers for its inadequate methods. (See “Gray Lady Wheezing,” Education Next, Winter 2005.) While the official release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data demonstrated that the sky had not fallen–after controlling for race, as many had pointed out, any differences between charters and traditional public schools washed out–the news was no reason to celebrate either. Again, if the point of charter schools is to raise achievement and close achievement gaps, there’s plenty of evidence that some charters are not pulling their weight. These are the schools most likely to face the ultimate consequence of closure under NCLB. That will make the whole charter movement stronger.

So in which direction is our 14-year-old heading? Which identity will it assume? It can throw tantrums, declare its disgust with the “system” that is NCLB-style accountability, and become a teen rebel. Or it can work through its growing pains, coming to grips with the responsibilities of a mature education movement while also maintaining and celebrating its uniqueness and independence. I am hopeful that the charter movement will find its way, never giving up the innovation and energy that make it special, but also shouldering the load of helping to close the nation’s achievement gaps. And when it does so, it will be declared not only a success in its own right, but a role model for the entire public education system.

Michael J. Petrilli is associate assistant deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, which houses the federal charter-school grant programs.

As almost everyone knows by now, the central aim of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law is to make every public-school student proficient in reading and math by the year 2014. It is a laudable goal, as the overwhelmingly bipartisan congressional support for the legislation in 2001 proved. The law’s drafters even had the foresight to know that fixing the deficits in student proficiency would be accomplished within the allotted time only if “each State” established “a timeline for adequate yearly progress,” or AYP, that would steadily close the gap between current levels of performance and the ideal proficiency level each state established. Accordingly, adequate yearly progress toward proficiency on the part of every student became the heart and soul of NCLB.

Unfortunately, however, four years into the life of the law–and fewer than ten years from 2014–there are signs of an irregular heartbeat. Though NCLB is absolutely correct in insisting that schools make measurable improvements on the way to the 2014 goal–and is right also to demand that they do so with subgroups of students who have lagged behind others in the past–those responsible for implementing the legislation have yet to find the best way of giving concrete meaning to each of the key words: proficiency, adequate, progress, every, yearly.

The spirit of NCLB–and even the language included in the actual provisions of the legislation–is right. The implementing regulations, however, too often thwart the estimable intent of the law. When measuring progress, the legislation repeatedly states that AYP assessment should be based on statistics that are scientifically valid, but the regulations that help states abide by NCLB sometimes guide them toward statistically invalid calculations. Thus a school may be identified as failing when in fact it is not. Such mistakes undermine the legitimacy of the law, not just among parents and teachers, but even among administrators and legislators who are proponents of accountability.

Because so many of the key issues are administrative, a legislative fix is not necessary to address the basic problems. In this essay, I want to suggest five relatively easy fixes–improved ways of giving operational meaning to “proficiency,” “adequate,” “yearly,” “progress,” and “every”–that are designed to fill the worst potholes on the current road. The fixes are relatively easy because they can be implemented without new legislation, are respectful of the autonomy of the states, and are fairly easy for schools to understand. Just as important, they will neither penalize schools unfairly nor dilute NCLB goals and objectives.

The Spirit of AYP

Before turning to these fixes, though, I wish to take a few moments to emphasize some of the basic principles of NCLB. A core principle of NCLB is that every student must reach the desired level of performance: no group of students–minority, disabled, poor, limited English proficient, mobile–should be left behind.

Another core principle of NCLB is that every child is capable of attaining proficiency, defined in an appropriate way. Thus, while progress is important, NCLB deliberately emphasizes reaching proficiency, not making gains each year, regardless of past performance. NCLB provides no special recognition to students or schools that exceed the minimum. This is not a good thing or a bad thing, but it clearly demonstrates that the focus of NCLB is on bringing low-achieving students to a sound level of academic achievement.

A third principle of NCLB is that it works through the states, long the workhorses of the country’s education system. States and localities provide more than 90 percent of funding for schools, so it makes sense for them to exercise control. Furthermore, with fewer schools to watch, states are in a much better position than the federal government to monitor multiple targets. Thus, even though NCLB monitors only proficiency, it encourages states, in their own accountability systems, to reward schools that make gains along the entire spectrum of achievement.

These three principles–attention to every child, a focus on reaching proficiency, and respect for state autonomy–lie at the core of NCLB. The five relatively easy fixes that I propose–benchmarking state definitions of proficiency, measuring progress scientifically, reporting clearly whether the school is making adequate progress, encouraging participation by every student in test taking, and taking seriously the requirement that schools track yearly progress–can be implemented immediately.

1. DEFINING PROFICIENCY:
Use a National Benchmark to Clarify State Standards

NCLB allows each state to determine the level of proficiency that a student needs to achieve in reading and math. While this provision of the law respects state autonomy, it has given rise to a wide variation in state definitions of this key concept. Ironically, the states that took accountability the most seriously before NCLB set high standards for their students and are thus most likely to be penalized by NCLB, which requires every student to meet these standards. Meanwhile, states that set lower proficiency requirements–seemingly on the basis of what schools can readily achieve rather than what students ought to know–find NCLB regulations considerably less onerous.

Given that NCLB allowed all states to set their own proficiency levels and that part of the implementation period has already elapsed, the federal government must keep faith with the states and allow them to stick to their approved plans. There is no reason, however, why citizens should not be told whether their state’s definition of proficiency is tough or lenient. Such transparency might encourage states with a lenient definition to raise their requirements.

What can the federal government do to keep faith with states that set unusually high proficiency standards for themselves? I propose that any state with a proficiency standard higher than the median state’s standard have its proficiency deadline extended in proportion to the amount by which its proficiency level exceeds the typical level.

To create transparency among states and to provide a basis for the extension of the proficiency deadline in states with tough proficiency standards, one needs to find a common benchmark that allows for objective comparisons among the states. Fortunately, a quite good benchmark, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is readily available. It is administered in every state to a representative sample of children in grades 4 and 8. Although it is not a perfect bridge between states’ tests–it is not, for instance, administered to students in all the grades that are required to be tested under NCLB–it is by far the best available. (How each state currently performs on this benchmark is shown here.)

Were the federal government to give its official imprimatur to an interstate benchmark, it would greatly enhance the transparency of state proficiency standards. It would also encourage states with low standards to raise them and discourage others from reducing them as a strategy for helping local schools achieve compliance with AYP provisions.

Benchmarking will also give the U.S. Department of Education a scientific basis for deciding whether some states deserve extensions of the time to reach proficiency because they have set their proficiency standards significantly higher than those of the typical or average state. In sum, it will encourage states with ambitious proficiency standards to keep them, expose proficiency standards that are too modest, and inform political debates within the states themselves.

2. MEASURING PROGRESS:
A Statistically Valid Approach

The purpose of NCLB is to make sure that every child reaches proficiency, and measuring AYP is meant to help schools figure out whether they are on track to do so. Unfortunately, current methods of measuring AYP sometimes incorrectly evaluate the progress of schools. This is troubling because misclassifying a school undermines the credibility of AYP itself.

Measuring AYP is in fact a fairly straightforward statistical activity. To use a school’s existing record of performance to forecast whether 100 percent of its students will attain proficiency by 2014, I propose that regulators use conventional statistical tests. Using regression, a statistician can construct what is called a linear forecast. (See Figure 1.) Each student’s information enters the regression as an observation, with the student’s scale score being the outcome. Once the regression has been computed, the statistician can forecast what each school’s distribution of scores will be in 2014. These forecasts are not perfect, of course, but the statistician can compare the forecast scores with the proficiency level set by the state and estimate confidently how many students will be below proficiency in 2014. Conventional statistics give us a confidence level for each forecast.

The technique is not unlike the method used to forecast whether a business will meet its earnings target. It is also similar to the method used to project the arrival time of airplanes, the trajectory of a hurricane, and so on. Conventional statistics give us the most likely forecast and also give us high-end and low-end forecasts. The same principles can be applied to forecasting progress toward proficiency under NCLB.

A major benefit of using conventional forecasting methods is that they automatically determine, with a specific level of confidence, whether ethnic, low-income, or other subgroups are making adequate yearly progress. Currently, the crude manner in which the progress of these subgroups is measured has stirred controversy, because the number of such students varies from one school to the next–and is often too small to permit a confident forecast. The statistical technique I have described will standardize and clarify the degree of accuracy that can be achieved.

My proposed forecasting method is quite different from the technique now used, which includes or excludes subgroups based on the number of students falling into a subgroup. A subgroup may be shown as failing even though it is actually making AYP according to conventional statistics. Moreover, the current technique treats schools differently if they fall slightly above or below the subgroup threshold, often without good statistical reason for doing so. Such anomalies matter because a whole school will fail to make AYP if a single subgroup fails. Thus, if a statistically invalid test is applied to a particular subgroup, AYP for the whole school can end up being wrong. When there is an error in measuring AYP, it undermines the credibility of NCLB itself. A standard forecasting technique that can be applied consistently to every school is more consistent with NCLB principles and will enhance the legitimacy of the legislation among administrators, teachers, and parents.

A second major benefit of the method described above is that it automatically takes account of progress that students make toward proficiency, even if they do not cross the proficiency threshold. There is no need for the current unsatisfactory, difficult-to-explain “safe harbor” provision, which is the partial substitute for what I am proposing. Even those students now performing far below proficiency will help a school make AYP if those students are improving quickly enough.

3. ADEQUACY:
Conveying Its Meaning Readily

The adequacy of a school’s progress ought not to be mysterious. It ought to convey what it means to make adequate yearly progress–in other words, what it means for a school to be on track or off track toward the goal of universal proficiency. Thus an AYP report should contain figures (with graphics) showing where the school is currently and where the school needs to be in the year 2014. The figures should show the best forecast of where a school will be in each year between the current year and 2014. They should indicate low-end and high-end forecasts so that readers understand whether the forecast is precise or noisy. A figure ought to be created both for the school overall and for subgroups. Such figures can automatically be generated using the forecasts described above (see Figure 1).

4. EVERY CHILD:
Participation in Proficiency Testing

Under current legislation, a school fails to make AYP if less than 95 percent of its students participate in state assessments of achievement or if less than 95 percent of the students in any of its subgroups participate in assessment. (If a subgroup is too small for the AYP calculation, it is currently exempt from the participation requirement.) The goal of the participation provision is excellent. Nevertheless, the rule can be improved by placing it on a sound statistical basis.

Instead of requiring 95 percent participation, regulations should simply assign the minimum score to any student who does not participate. Since all students will score at or above the minimum score, every school has a strong incentive to ensure that every child take the test during the weeks set aside for this purpose. And a school will be penalized only to the extent that the minimum scores recorded for nonparticipants drag down the overall score for the school or the relevant subgroup.

The calculation I propose is statistically valid, amply rewards schools that maximize participation, and penalizes schools that fail to get full participation. In contrast, a 95 percent participation cutoff is an arbitrary way to determine whether a school is failing to make AYP.

5. YEARLY PROGRESS:
Keep It Simple

Finally, inadequate yearly progress should be taken seriously: a student’s achievement should not be fully factored into a school’s AYP unless the student has been enrolled for at least 90 percent of the year since the last test was administered. If students switch schools within a local education agency, their achievement should be factored into AYP with a weight equal to the share of the year that they spent in each school.

Back to Basics

AYP is the heart of NCLB. Many consequences of NCLB depend on it. Moreover, if the goal of NCLB–making every child proficient–is a correct one, then it is crucial to track whether we are on the path to achieving that goal.

Fortunately, reasonable administrative action can correct deficiencies in the way in which AYP is measured and reported today. AYP can be refined simply by paying closer attention to the operational definitions of key words in the law. We need to benchmark state definitions of proficiency, measure progress by forecasting how well each school is moving toward the 2014 goal, publicize adequacy by means of simple figures that show where each school stands, encourage schools to test every child by assigning minimum scores to those who are not tested, and hold schools accountable for only that portion of the year the child spent in the school.

Caroline M. Hoxby is professor of economics at Harvard University, the director of the Economics of Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Of the many arguments for charter schools, one is crucial: that charters should be deliberately, thoughtfully, boldly different from existing mainline public middle and high schools.

The evidence of the ineffectiveness of the traditional design of K-12 education, especially that of middle and high schools, serving both rich and poor, is overwhelming. The trail goes back for decades, from John Goodlad’s massive inquiry, summarized in A Place Called School (1984), and Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen’s The Shopping Mall High School (1985), to a string of studies starting in the late 1950s by James S. Coleman and scores of others. Journalists’ accounts ring similar bells: Frederick Wiseman’s searing 1960s documentary film “High School,” Charles Silberman’s 1970 Crisis in the Classroom, Samuel Freedman’s 1990 Small Victories, Mark Edmundson’s 2002 Teacher, to name just a few. They all tell a remarkably common story. I know of no research that argues that the secondary-school design with which we are all so familiar is effective, by any measure.

Age-graded institutions where “delivery” is the dominating education metaphor are the norm. So are schools where teachers have 120 or more students to get to know (with this 120 shuffled at the end of each semester); where serious learning is broken up into snippets of 50-minute “subject matter periods” arranged in no intellectually coherent order; where assessment keeps knowledge tightly packaged in separate intellectual domains; where short-term memory work is rated as deserving the highest value at the expense of original, long-term analytic work; and where the intellectual engine of the curriculum comes at most students and teachers as a list of subjects and skills, usually far too long for the careful savoring and devoted practice that leads to deep understanding and worthy habits. As the research shows, these so very familiar conditions poorly serve children, their teachers, and, ultimately, the culture.

The waste is prodigious, and the frequently observed (and unsurprising) cynicism of all too many adolescents about serious intellectual work is deeply disheartening. The title of Denise Pope’s painstakingly documented recent book is as blunt as it is illuminating: “Doing School”: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. That title is less hyperbolic than many of us wish to believe.

A Vive la Difference Standard

If one takes this tidal wave of research and reportage seriously, one cannot responsibly push aside fresh school designs that challenge the premises apparent in the schools that we have inherited. Indeed, we must encourage new designs, risky as that may appear. Accordingly, any policy that drives charters into old molds-making them, in effect, “look and act familiar” as worthy expressions of the existing “system,” producing students who do well primarily on tests organized in ways that reflect this system-undermines the sound intent of the charter idea. (See Figure 1.) Mindlessly administered, NCLB could have the effect of driving charter schools into discredited routines, in effect, killing them.

Charters (and cousins such as district-sponsored pilot schools) should be different, should march to promisingly better tunes. Policymakers should insist on that. If these schools are different, however, how to evaluate them? As one of the founders, with my wife, Nancy Faust Sizer, of the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, and as its acting co-principal, again with Nancy, during the school’s fourth year, I have personal experience with the admirable Massachusetts system of performance review. The heart of it is rigorous in-school inspection of student work; of faithfulness of the school to the terms of its charter; of the mood, morale, and intensity of the school, its faculty, students, and families. Test scores are part of it, but hardly its center. Inspectors randomly examine student portfolios of work, “shadow” students and teachers, witness classes, talk confidentially with staff, students, and parents and guardians. They get a fair sense of the place as a whole. Full-scale inspections come every five years, supplemented with annual focused visits. On the basis also of rigorous inspection, the school is a member of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the regional independent accrediting organization. Parker’s students take the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), as well as the Stanford 9 (now 10), and SATs. There are data arising from such indexes; but these are not the only or the most compelling data. There is far more to it. As there should be.

Parker’s design is not traditional. Students enter at “seventh grade,” but move upward over three “divisions” on the basis not of their age but of their publicly exhibited performance. There is one focused course of study (history, language-English and Spanish-and the arts; mathematics, science, and technology; and health); everyone is enrolled in it; an appropriate path for each student is developed (every child has a “personal learning plan”); most teachers have responsibility for no more than 50 students (this on a per-pupil budget that is the same or less than in nearby public secondary schools). The basic pedagogy is provocation, question asking, “do it over and over until you get it right,” “apply what you think you know in this new, even unexpected situation.” In these and other ways Parker is deliberately different (and, incidentally, closer to the way the world beyond school actually works), and we are blessed to be in a state that honors, values, and, in its practice, protects that difference. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is “results oriented,” but it demonstrates that there are many fashions of “results,” many ways of achieving them, and several ways of measuring them.

The reality is that there is no such thing as an admirable manner of “doing school”: our children and our communities are too richly varied for that. Policy that stiffens the grip of any one narrowly defined “system” is sure to result in seriously mixed results. There are many good roads to a fine education, and varied travelers along those roads.

NCLB Is Bad-but Good!

I have twice been the principal of a charter school: during 1997-98 at Parker and 1972-81 at Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts; the latter, arguably, the earliest such school in America still in operation. Its charter (allowing it to own property-farms-from which revenue could be raised to pay the costs of the school) was granted by the Massachusetts Revolutionary Legislature in 1778 and signed by its chairman, John Hancock. That document (modified by modern realities) remains in force to this day. In the cases of both Phillips and Parker, separated by more than two hundred years, each school received broad but specified authority from the state, with diplomas granted on the basis of public “exhibitions” and with the expectation-the trust-that the details of the program and its assessment would be creatures of the schools’ immediate community, subject, as deemed necessary, to the inspection by the state or, in the case of Phillips, the local superintendent of (public) schools.

Neither the Andover of the 1970s nor the Parker of the 1990s was perfect, but I make no apology for either. Both pursue high standards, expressed in a rich variety of ways. Both have attracted and hold strong faculty, largely because the teachers know that they have both the exhilaration of shaping their place for learning and an obligation to meet external standards, including the satisfaction of their students’ parents. Both attract substantial numbers of families seeking admission for their children, and by careful selection-at Andover originally done by the master and now by faculty committees and at Parker by state-controlled (blind) lottery-both are able to admit only a small percentage of those applicants.

So why are NCLB and its “external standards” so troubling to educators like me who work today in and for public schools like Parker?

Because, especially at the secondary school level, the academic patterns to be “tested” may excessively reflect the centralized political, and thus pedagogical, wisdom of their times, with which citizens and teachers in a healthy democracy may very often and very reasonably disagree.

Because-and especially in their assessments-they tend to reflect familiar categories: The sharp and often distorting distinctions among and between “subjects”; age grading; the value placed on quick recall; the dumbing down of the quality and grace of expository prose to make it fit into some sort of rating scheme; the overload of material to be covered, usually the inevitable result of intracommittee ideological logrolling, which leads to a bit of this and a dollop of that; the almost absolute denial of a value placed on individual ingenuity, craggy but provocative thinking, sustained work, and desirable variety; the lack of interest, signaled by the assessment apparatus, of the virtues of fairness, good character, and imagination.

Because they represent-or could soon represent-something never before seen in American education: a centrally directed, narrow categorization of just what a child should know and be able to do and an excessively consistent way of assessing all that. This process, perhaps necessarily wrapped in psychometric mumbo-jumbo far beyond the reach of the common, smart citizen, is, at its egregious worst, Orwellian.

All that said, NCLB is in fact also an inspired and necessary corrective to the sloppy, often thoughtless reality of existing American education. NCLB and the state initiatives that preceded it have served the purpose of putting in front of all citizens the stunning weaknesses of our schooling system, especially as it serves-or fails to serve-its most vulnerable young citizens. The test results, even with their technical flaws, have exposed the appalling neglect that we as a people have long recognized but have never fundamentally addressed. Americans started down this worthy road of exposure during the 1960s, with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, of which NCLB is technically the reauthorization. But we dodged the deep implications of this exposure thereafter, preferring stirring statements to sophisticated reform and necessary finance.

Ends and Means

The end of No Child Left Behind is worthy, profoundly reflecting a democracy’s need for an educated citizenry. It is long overdue, but its current means may end up, save at the embarrassing margins, hurting the schools more than helping them, turning them into test-prep places and driving away the imaginative teachers that each of us as a parent wants in contact with our children. Test prep is a parody of serious education. While the scores from good standardized tests tell us something about a student, they hardly tell us everything about that student, much less that student’s school. Policy that blithely ignores these realities is destructive policy.

Which brings me back to charter schools and their relatives in mainstream school systems that are, by bearing witness, pushing their colleagues in better directions. These enterprises deserve vigorous encouragement and support for their quality, variety, and imagination. For their own as well as for the public’s benefit, they need a program of serious, sustained, independent assessment, based on the exhibited quality of an agreed-upon scope of work. This evaluation can be achieved with a mixture of inspection and varied forms of standardized testing. It can also be helped by policies that extend parental choice among schools, allowing a market to play a proper part in the process: Family interest represents an important kind of assessment.

Some of us in the charter world (and beyond) already see the merits of these interconnected approaches. May our tribe increase.

Theodore R. Sizer is author of The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education (Yale University Press, 2004), and coauthor, with Deborah Meier and Nancy Faust Sizer, of Keeping School: Letters to Families from Principals of Two Small Schools (Beacon Press, 2004).

It has been an almost uncontested proposition since the founding of the republic that America’s schools have a duty to prepare young people for active citizenship. As Thomas Jefferson put it, in arguing for a national system of schools, the idea was to have a common curriculum where “a foundation [would be] laid for a government truly republican.”

Today 40 state constitutions explicitly refer to the need for an informed electorate; 13 of them, according to a 2003 Carnegie Corporation report, “state that the central purpose of their educational system is to promote good citizenship, democracy, and free government.”

The problem is, despite Jefferson and the good intentions of state constitutions, we still don’t know exactly how schools are supposed to nurture this enlightened civic engagement. Most young people simply don’t vote, violating the first commandment of civic duty.

In the 1972 presidential election, when the ink was barely dry on the Twenty-Sixth Amendment (lowering the voting age to 18), only 52 percent of those aged 18-24 showed up at the polls (see Figure 1). Twenty-eight years later, in the closest presidential race in modern history, youth turnout, having fallen steadily over the years, reached a new low of 36 percent. Despite unprecedented efforts to mobilize younger voters for the 2004 presidential election, the turnout rate in the 18-24 age range was still only 45 percent-higher than in 2000, but nonetheless just at the average through the 1970s and 1980s. In future years, it is likely that voter turnout overall will continue to decline given the current trajectory of civic engagement among the youngest members of the electorate.

If America’s schools have a mandate to prepare young people for a lifetime of active citizenship, the evidence seems to suggest that schools are failing. But why? What can be done?

Click for enlargement.

What Brings People to the Polling Booth

To understand why some people vote while others do not, one must concede the obvious fact that the outcome of an election seldom turns on the vote of any one person. Influencing the outcome of an election is thus not by itself a good reason to take the time to vote. Though many nonvoters say they do not go to the polls because their vote does not count, research shows that this is an excuse, not a characteristic that distinguishes them from voters.

Those who vote, in fact, do so because of a sense of civic responsibility, not because they believe their votes will change an outcome. In their 1995 study of civic involvement, political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady asked politically active Americans why they engage in an array of civic and political activities. An overwhelming majority reported doing so because they feel it is their duty. This is only the most recent and comprehensive of studies that, since the 1950s, have found a clear connection between a sense of civic obligation and political participation.

This means that voting has roots in communal life. It is an individual action taken for reasons that go beyond the immediate interests of the individual voter. Communally, voting is an indicator of a government’s legitimacy. What, after all, distinguishes a democracy from all other forms of governance if not the vote? As voter turnout climbs, the legitimacy of the republican enterprise is enhanced. Indeed, many commentators interpreted the higher-than-expected turnout for the January 2005 Iraqi vote as an indication of the new government’s legitimacy.

Apparently, then, those who vote have an intuitive sense of the legitimizing power of the vote. Do they learn it at home? In their community? Or perhaps in school? The fact is, until now, it wasn’t clear-not even for Americans.

Schools and Civic Obligation

Researchers looking for links between school and voting habits in the United States have typically focused on the impact of the school’s civics curriculum. Despite assiduous efforts, however, they have usually found no discernible relationship. In 1998, Richard Niemi and Jane Junn, in summarizing the research, concluded that the conventional wisdom among political scientists is that civics classes have no effect on young people’s political engagement. Some scholars, a group that includes Niemi and Junn, have tried to challenge that conclusion, but they can do no better than show that children who take civic classes do marginally better on civics tests while they are actually enrolled in civics classes than students who are not enrolled in the same classes. Not a particularly remarkable finding, and not one that sheds much light on the influence of schools on civic engagement.

A much more promising line of inquiry is to ask how experience in a school community inculcates an appreciation for the value of civic engagement. And that branch of inquiry has borne some fruit.

If people are voting because of a sense of duty, then it is reasonable to wonder where these civic norms come from and how they are communicated to individuals. It makes sense to inquire about the strength of norms within the community and the effect of those collective norms on an individual. As Stephen Knack, now a senior economist at the World Bank, explained in a 1992 essay, “Civic Norms, Social Sanctions, and Voter Turnout,” even people with a weak personal sense of obligation have a greater likelihood of voting in a place that is populated with duty-bound compatriots. They do this, as Knack points out, because “someone with a low sense of civic obligation may nonetheless vote to avoid displeasing a friend or relative with a stronger sense of duty.” What matters, then, is not just whether a given individual has a strong sense of duty, but also whether that individual is surrounded by others with that commitment.

Knack’s analysis owes much to the work of the celebrated sociologist James Coleman, who was among the first to use the concept of social capital in a systematic way. The norms within a community that facilitate cooperation, Coleman showed, pay dividends for the community as a whole. In a 1987 essay, “Norms as Social Capital,” Coleman noted that people act in accordance with norms to avoid social sanctions-a disapproving look, a raised eyebrow, the whispered label of “shirker”-as well as to earn approval. Such social rewards and punishments, he suggests, are internalized by the individual and become part of that person’s own ethic, which then redounds to the benefit of others.

Since adolescence is a particularly important period of life for the adoption of norms, schools can be expected to be an especially important incubator of norms of civic participation. This is why Coleman centered his work on social capital in schools. And if he is correct, we should find a link between strong civic norms at school and engagement in the political process, in both the present and the future. In short, the civic norms at your high school should affect whether you vote.

Data

Although well-known for many years, these ideas have not been put to a careful empirical test, in part because few surveys of students contain detailed contextual information about their school community and track the students into adulthood. Fortunately, the University of Michigan’s pioneering Youth Studies Series (YSS) does both. The YSS began in 1965, when a representative sample of the nation’s high-school seniors and their parents were interviewed. These students were part of a panel, which means that they were surveyed again in later years-1973 and 1982. (Because the first wave of data was collected in 1965, just as the Voting Rights Act was beginning to be implemented and while many African-Americans were still deprived of the vote, I limit my analysis to whites only.)

Information was also gathered in 1965 from roughly 125 students from each sample member’s high-school class. These students answered a similar, but shorter, version of the questionnaire given to students who were in the panel. For every question asked of these additional students, average measures for their high schools can be calculated independent of the panel member’s own qualities. For example, the answers will show whether an individual student intends to attend college, and the aggregation of the entire school sample can give an estimate of the percentage of students within that school who plan on going to college.

My analysis of these data proceeds in three stages. First, I examine whether the civic norms in a high school in 1965 affected whether adolescents anticipated being politically engaged as adults. Second, I test whether the civic norms in the schools individuals attended in 1965 affected their likelihood of voting in the 1980 presidential election. In both cases, my central hypothesis is that the stronger the school’s civic climate, as measured by the strength of a school’s communal belief in voting, the greater the degree of electoral engagement for any of the school’s individual students, regardless of their own personal sense of civic duty. Having confirmed the independent influence of civic norms within a school, I turn finally to exploring conditions that facilitate their development.

Each stage of the analysis hinges on the availability of a reliable indicator of civic norms. The YSS makes it possible to gauge the civic norms within a high school with a question that asked students, “What three things about a person are most important in showing that he is a good citizen?” Students were asked to choose from a list of six options that included religious involvement, adherence to the law, a sense of privatism (or minding one’s own business), not considering oneself better than others, being proud of one’s country, and, most important for this study, voting in elections. The beauty of this measure is that it relies on the students’ initiative to identify voting as a component of good citizenship and avoids the problem of having everyone reflexively endorse voting as a normative expectation. As a result, the percentage of students in each high school who endorse voting as a component of good citizenship varies widely, ranging from 46 to 85 percent (with an average of 70 percent) across the 77 schools in the sample. I will refer to the percentage of students in each school who link voting with good citizenship as the school’s civic climate.

Anticipating Engagement

I begin by testing whether the strength of a school’s civic climate affected its students’ anticipation of being engaged in politics later in life. Specifically, students in the sample were asked, “Looking ahead to the time when you are on your own, what about actual participation in public affairs and politics? How active do you think you will be in these matters?” In response, they had three choices: not very active, somewhat active, very active. It is likely that, to an adolescent, this question is really asking, “Do you think people should be engaged?” Or, perhaps more accurately, “Do you think people like you should be engaged?”

In testing whether adolescents attending schools with a strong civic climate were more likely to envision themselves as active citizens, I control for differences in a wide variety of individual and contextual factors that could also affect anticipated engagement. These factors include, for the individual, the level of education the student planned to attain, the level of education the student’s parents attained, the length of time the student had lived in the community, and gender. I also control for differences in the average level of education attained by the parents of other students in the school, the average length of time that its students have lived in their community, and the political diversity within the school population (as measured by differences in self-reported major-party affiliation).

Perhaps most critically, I also take into account whether each individual endorsed voting as a sign of good citizenship. In other words, my analysis isolates the effect of being surrounded by others who see voting as a component of good citizenship regardless of the individual’s own expressed sense of civic duty. As expected, adolescents who reported that good citizens exercise their right to vote also reported that they anticipate being publicly engaged on reaching adulthood. All else being equal, endorsing voting as a mark of good citizenship boosted anticipated engagement by about one-eighth of a standard deviation-a slightly larger impact than resulted from an increase in parents’ education of one standard deviation.

Yet even when taking into account the individual’s own sense of responsibility, the school’s civic climate had its own impact on how students plan to live their political lives. Impressively, attending the school with the strongest civic climate (where 85 percent of students listed voting as a component of good citizenship) rather than the school with the weakest civic climate (where 46 percent chose voting) increased anticipated participation by a quarter of a standard deviation, or by about twice the effect of the individual student’s having listed voting as a component of good citizenship.

Meeting Expectations?

That more students in a school with a strong civic climate anticipate being engaged in politics is surely a good thing, but, of course, teenagers do not always live up to even their own expectations. Does the civic climate of one’s high school also affect the likelihood of turning out to vote in the years following high school?

To address this question, I use data from the second round of YSS follow-up interviews, conducted in 1982, which asked the study’s participants to report on whether they voted in the 1980 presidential election. This election occurred roughly 15 years following the panel members’ graduation from high school, when most were in their early 30s. The overall voter turnout that year, roughly 55 percent, was fairly typical for elections after 1968.

In examining the impact of the school’s civic climate, it is again important to take into account other factors, focusing this time on those most likely to influence the respondent’s decision to vote. At the individual level, this includes education, marital status, gender, and length of residence in the community-all factors, past research has shown, that have a bearing on turnout. And since the home is also a critical factor in a person’s civic development, I control for three measures of the engagement level of the student’s parents as of 1965, including whether the parents voted in the 1964 presidential election. Finally, I again take into account whether the individual respondent endorsed voting as an essential component of good citizenship in answering the question used to gauge the school’s civic climate in 1965.

I also control for several characteristics of the respondent’s high school, including the average level of education attained by the parents of other students in the school, average residential stability, average level of anticipated participation, and partisan diversity within the school environment. Of course, for the purpose of testing the impact of civic norms, the most significant school-level variable is its civic climate: the percentage of students who viewed voting as an obligation of citizenship.

As in the case of students’ anticipated participation, the civic climate of the school has a clear impact. People who in 1965 attended a school where students saw voting as a civic duty were far more likely to vote 15 years later. All else being equal, a typical individual who attended the school with the largest percentage of students identifying voting as a component of good citizenship was 14 percentage points more likely to vote than the person who attended schools with the lowest percentage of students identifying voting as a civic duty. By way of comparison, having a college degree increased the likelihood of voting by 18 percentage points. An individual who attended a school with a civic climate one standard deviation above the mean school in the sample was about 7 percentage points more likely to vote than a similar individual attending a school with a civic climate one standard deviation below the mean (see Figure 2). Meanwhile, the partisan diversity of an individual’s school had no impact whatsoever on later turnout-a finding that is important to keep in mind when interpreting the results presented later in the story.

After accounting for the school’s civic climate, the fact that an individual student identified voting as a civic duty in high school also has no effect on voting later in life. However, had I not measured the effect of the school’s civic climate, I likely would have concluded that an individual’s attitudes toward voting as an adolescent were quite important. In doing so, I would have attributed to the individual what was in fact a consequence of the environment in which he or she was educated.

Click for enlargement.

A Civic Norms Nursery

Finding that communal civic norms in high school lead to voter turnout years later leads naturally to the question of what conditions facilitate the incubation and nurturing of those collective norms within a school. Myriad possibilities present themselves, most of which are beyond the scope of these data to test. The findings of scholars who study social capital, however, suggest one possibility that can be tested: homogeneity-whether racial, religious, or economic-seems to foster social capital. Or, to put it more provocatively, diversity may diminish the social cohesiveness necessary to sustain strong civic norms.

With this in mind, I examine how diversity influences the civic climate of a high school, focusing on three distinct dimensions of that diversity: racial, religious, and partisan. Although most research to date on the effects of diversity has focused on demographic characteristics like race and religion, there is good reason to think that political diversity may be even more important-especially with regard to norms about voting. Recall that the theoretical link between cohesiveness and social capital is that of widely shared values. Those shared values constitute a cultural outlook that research shows is often expressed through political party affiliation. Partisanship, then, provides a particularly good proxy for shared values, even though high-school students are unlikely to identify each other by partisan labels.

As hypothesized, I find that the more politically homogeneous the high school, the stronger the norm linking voting with good citizenship (see Figure 3). This is true even after taking into account two other factors that might be expected to affect a school’s civic climate; namely, the mean level of education attained by students’ parents and the average length of time that students have lived in their community. The impact of political homogeneity on civic climate is about the same as that of the average parents’ education, which is noteworthy given that education and the status it confers has long been recognized as a major facilitator of social norms generally and of civic engagement specifically. Only political diversity adversely affects schools’ civic climate; neither religious nor racial diversity has effect.

Conclusion

The bottom line of this analysis is that the civic climate in high school has a great impact on voter turnout at least 15 years following graduation. What matters is that an adolescent’s community, defined in this case as the high school, is populated with a high percentage of peers who express their belief that voting is an indicator of good citizenship. In fact, after accounting for the civic climate of an individual’s high school, an individual’s own belief that voting is a civic duty does not have an impact on voting as an adult. Individuals do not act, nor are they acted on, in isolation. Rather, norms are inculcated within communities, such as the family, the neighborhood, and the school. And those norms reach into the future.

I also found that cohesive schools, including those with a homogeneous political composition, foster civic norms. This is clearly an explosive finding: diversity, at least along a political dimension, dampens civic norms. A naive reading of this result might suggest that the cure for America’s civic ills lies in crafting clusters of political homogeneity, with conservatives shunted off to their schools and liberals to theirs. Such an inference would be dead wrong. Recall that political cohesiveness had no discernible effect on adolescents’ later voting patterns after the civic climate within the school was taken into account. And surely there are many factors apart from political diversity that can influence civic norms.

A more sensible conclusion to draw is that any school-based reform aiming to enhance voter turnout among the rising generation should focus on ways to foster a strong civic climate. The importance of political cohesiveness provides a clue to how to do this. Political cohesiveness is merely an indicator of values held in common within a community. A promising course of action to strengthen a school’s civic climate, therefore, is to identify ways to foster a sense of commonality among a school’s students.

For this to happen, legislators, educators, parents, and the public must recognize that the civic dimension of our education system deserves more than lip service, but should be subject to the same scrutiny as other education outcomes. Schools will take civic education seriously only when policymakers and parents begin to scrutinize the civic experiences provided by their schools as closely as they currently monitor academic standards. I echo political theorist Stephen Macedo’s lament: “Given the centrality of civic purposes to public schools it is ironic that studies of -effective schools’ pay so little attention to civic ends.” We need to learn what works and then make it possible for our schools to do it.

But is it realistic to expect today’s schools, beleaguered as many of them are, to add the promotion of civic duty to their long list of responsibilities? I believe that it is, and that an unlikely model can be found in the way American schools have in recent decades come to embrace tolerance for diversity as a preeminent value. This respect for differences has not come about through a particular class that students take, nor is it restricted to a select few who participate in a specific program. It has become part of the modern public school’s culture, quietly and consistently reinforced by teachers and administrators. It has, in other words, become a norm.

Tolerance for diversity is a noble objective, and America’s educators should be applauded for having successfully integrated it into the education of today’s students. However, while tolerance is necessary for a vibrant democratic culture, it is not sufficient. Turnout among the youngest voters has declined, even as they have grown more tolerant; plainly, a sense of civic duty is also needed. So let’s consider the way tolerance has become a norm as a template for a renewed focus on encouraging a sense of civic duty among today’s adolescents. Our schools need to reemphasize America’s shared civic culture, not to replace but to complement encouraging tolerance. Let educators do for unum what they have done for pluribus.

-David E. Campbell is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Article funded by a grant from the John M. Templeton Foundation.

Checked: “Quality Counts,” Education Week, January 6, 2005

“The Funding Gap,” Education Trust, Fall 2004.

Checked by Robert M. Costrell

This is a tale of two rankings. They represent the best of states-and the worst of states. A little wisdom and considerable foolishness. Some light, some darkness. Most of all, they purport to be about the same thing, but are strikingly at odds with each other. And that can be confusing.

Each January since 1997, Education Week, the K-12 industry’s newspaper of record, has issued its “Quality Counts” report, ranking states by, among other things, the “equity” of their school finances. And every fall since 2001, the Education Trust, a national organization devoted to closing the achievement gap in our public schools, has issued “The Funding Gap” report, also ranking states by the equity of their K-12 finance systems. Both lists receive a great deal of attention, as winning states issue press releases claiming credit for high marks, and education interest groups point fingers at those at the bottom. Litigants on both sides of school finance cases submit their preferred rankings as evidence, and judges sometimes cite them in their decisions. In a widely followed New Jersey case, Abbott v. Burke, a 1998 court order (one of a long series of education directives in that case) concluded with numerous citations of Education Week‘s material, including New Jersey’s Report Card, showing the state’s grade of D+ in equity, ranking 47th in the nation.

The rankings by Education Week and Education Trust, however, produce some wildly contradictory results. For instance, despite large court-ordered funding hikes to poor urban districts, the districts that were the focus of Abbott, New Jersey still received a grade of only C in equity (a ranking of 33rd in the nation) from Education Week. By contrast, Education Trust’s report, reflecting the effect of Abbott, ranked the Garden State as the second most equitable school finance system in the country. Other discrepancies are even worse. Education Trust ranks Massachusetts at the very top and New York at the very bottom of its list, while Education Week flips these rankings virtually upside down. How can two well-respected groups reach such different conclusions about the same thing?

Measuring the Funding Gap

Education Week‘s equity rankings depend on measures of the spread between higher- and lower-spending districts. This assumes that the high-spending districts are the rich ones, but that is no longer true in many states.

Specifically, Education Week ranks states on a composite equity index that has three components, the most important of which is the McLoone Index (named after Eugene McLoone, now a retired professor of education finance at the University of Maryland). This index calculates how close low-spending districts are to the state median, by comparing total spending in districts at or below the median with the amount that would be required were they to spend at the median. The ideal ratio, by this measure, is 100 percent, where no district spends below the median. An index of 95 percent means the additional funds required to bring all districts up to the median would be 5 percent of the required total. Another component of Education Week‘s composite index also measures the dispersion of spending among districts; the third component measures the association between a district’s education revenues and its property wealth. These two measures can affect the overall Education Week rankings in specific cases, but they are distinctly less correlated with the composite than is the McLoone.

To focus more directly on the gap between rich and poor, the Education Trust began issuing its own equity rankings several years ago, with “The Funding Gap.” Using census data to sort districts within each state by the federal poverty rate among school-age children, the group identified the poorest and richest districts-those with the highest and lowest poverty rates, respectively, whose enrollments compose 25 percent of the state’s total enrollment-and matched that information with education revenues from state and local (but not federal) sources. Adjustments are made for regional cost differences and special-education students (who, it is assumed cost 1.9 times as much to educate as regular students)-the same as in Education Week. The resulting “funding gap” is the difference between per-pupil revenues in poor and rich districts. That gap is positive in states where funding of poor districts exceeds that of rich ones, and it is negative where the reverse is true (see Figure 1). A positive gap is considered equitable and a negative gap is not. Education Trust has a second, closely related measure, which assigns low-income students a weight of 1.4 in the per-pupil calculation, on the assumption that it costs 40 percent more to educate low-income children. This shifts the gap down somewhat, but the rankings themselves are very similar, with a correlation of 0.98. Education Trust also presents rankings on the funding gap between minority and nonminority districts.

Conflicting Rankings

The conflicts between Education Trust and Education Week measurements are most apparent at the extremes (top or bottom), exactly the parts of the lists that gain most public attention. Of the ten states rated tops in equity by Education Trust, five are ranked in the bottom third by Education Week‘s composite index (Massachusetts, New Jersey, Georgia, North Dakota, and Tennessee); among Education Week‘s top ten are four states (Iowa, West Virginia, Louisiana, and New York) that are in Education Trust’s bottom third. The overall relationship between the two measures is very low; it is essentially nil between Education Trust and Education Week‘s McLoone Index (see Figure 2). Can they both be measuring equity?

Given the importance of the equity issue to the education policy debate, this is a question worth exploring. How is it that states ranked at one extreme on the funding gap between poor and rich districts (Education Trust) can be ranked at the opposite extreme on how much it costs to raise all districts to the median (Education Week‘s McLoone Index)?

Part of the answer is in the question: states that spend considerably more on poor districts than rich ones can be ranked very low by Education Week because the McLoone Index is measuring the cost of increasing the spending on rich districts toward that on poor ones.

Consider the two states at the top of Education Trust’s rankings, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Massachusetts’s progressive school-finance system, the product of reforms made in 1993, begins by establishing a minimum per-pupil spending figure-the foundation budget-that accords low-income children a premium of about 42 percent over that allotted other children. (According to “Quality Counts 2005,” 23 state formulas have an adjustment for low income, but most provide no more than a 25 percent premium.) State aid in Massachusetts is targeted at districts that cannot meet the foundation budget out of local funds, so the state’s education dollar is concentrated on poor districts. Rich districts may choose to spend more than their foundation budget out of locally generated funds, but on average they still spend less than poor districts do.

As we saw earlier, the story is similar in New Jersey. The Abbott litigation forced the state to devote large sums of money to spending in poor urban districts, resulting in its high ranking by Education Trust. Even Education Week‘s raw dataset shows that the poorest districts (those with the most students living in poverty) spend, on average, 122 percent of the state’s median. In fact, Education Week highlights the New Jersey case, showing that the Abbott districts have reversed the 1996 gap and now exceed in spending by 13 percent the 30 K-12 districts that were previously the state’s highest spenders.

While this would appear to suggest finance equity, Education Week still ranks New Jersey near the bottom (42nd) on the McLoone Index and Massachusetts even further down (45th). In both New Jersey and Massachusetts, the districts spending below median have less than half the poverty of the rest of the state. Almost none of New Jersey’s and Massachusetts’s poorest districts enter into the McLoone calculation because they spend above the median. Even so, Education Week obliviously opines, “New Jersey has room to improve when it comes to the equitable distribution of education dollars.” Education Week seems to have missed an opportunity to reflect on the measures that form the basis of its report card, since the only way New Jersey and Massachusetts could “improve” equity in Education Week‘s ranking would be to increase funding for relatively affluent districts.

It has long been known that the measures Education Week uses do not distinguish between progressive and regressive disparities in spending. Perhaps in an earlier era, when spending gaps were more consistently regressive, the problem was not overwhelming. Today, however, funding gaps are progressive in as many states as they are regressive. Indeed, in Education Week‘s own dataset, 40 states spend more in the poorest quartile of districts than in the richest. (This is more states than indicated in Figure 1 because these data include federal funds, targeted at poor districts.) Also, in 40 states, the average poverty rate is higher in districts that spend above the median than below it. Thus in today’s environment, for the vast majority of states, Education Week‘s McLoone Index measures equity by the cost of increasing spending in relatively well-off districts. This seems to be exactly the reverse of what most users of Education Week‘s rankings would assume.

Some Other Problems

What about those states at the bottom of Education Trust’s spectrum, the ones that spend considerably less on poor districts than on rich ones? Here, at least, one might think the McLoone Index would generate a ranking similar to Education Trust’s. Pennsylvania, for example, is 39th on McLoone and 46th on Education Trust. But what explains New York, dead last on Education Trust’s rankings and third on Education Week‘s McLoone Index? The answer: New York City, which has 37 percent of the state’s students. New York City dominates the Education Trust calculation: the funding gap is essentially the difference between New York City’s revenues and the revenues of the state’s richest districts (see Figure 1 and “The Legal Cash Machine,” page 26). This gap is not reflected in Education Week‘s McLoone Index because New York City, although among New York state’s poorest districts, is also the state’s median-spending district-and therefore the benchmark for the McLoone Index’s comparisons. In states where the median district is huge, the proportion of the population below the median can be considerably less than 50 percent; for New York, it’s only 18 percent. (This is also true in Illinois, where Chicago is the median-spending district.) Since it costs nothing to increase New York City’s spending to the state median, this accounts for two-thirds of the state’s high McLoone Index. It also strongly suggests the McLoone Index is meaningless for New York. And yet, based on the McLoone, Education Week‘s report card states, “New York does fairly well in its grade for resource equity.”

Another problem that arises in equity rankings concerns the state (as opposed to local) share of education funding. Education Week‘s equity rankings used to depend heavily on the state share, but the measure was quite rightly dropped this year, since it is not a measure of equity. Education Trust still publishes rankings of the state’s share, as the recommended means to greater equity, albeit not an end itself. But there is no statistical relationship between state share and equity: Education Trust’s top-rated states on equity (Massachusetts and New Jersey) have a low state share of funding, while some states that rely more heavily on state revenues (such as Michigan) rank low on equity.

The inequities in relying solely on local property tax are well known: state revenues are definitely needed to smooth out disparities in local tax capacity. At the same time, the drawbacks of excessive reliance on state revenue are less widely appreciated. With less local finance, local officials lose their stake in the success of education. In addition, the main sources of state revenue, income and sales taxes, are far more volatile than local revenue, so an overreliance on state funding can leave schools more vulnerable during recessions. There is likely a happy medium for state share, and the precise optimum surely varies from state to state. But rankings by state share imply that there is no happy medium: a higher share is always better. This is at least debatable. A little state funding can go a long way if it is concentrated on those districts most in need.

Equity in an Era of Adequacy

Finally, we must ask what relevance measurements of equity have if, as is increasingly asserted, the debate is now about adequacy. Are there constitutional funding obligations to bring student achievement up to specified standards? Even if there is perfect equity, the adequacy argument says, funding may still be lacking.

So far, however, the difficulty in linking resources to outcomes has made the adequacy debate more contentious than enlightening. The methodologies typically used-such as the “professional judgment” model, based on educators’ opinions, rather than on data on actual spending and outcomes-are deeply flawed (see “No Money Left Behind: Exploring the Costs of Accountability,” Education Next, Spring 2004). And although some courts (such as New York) use such methods, the results are so widely at odds with one another that Education Week wisely concluded it had no sound basis on which to rank states by adequacy.

Some judges rely on purported measures of adequacy that are in fact an equity standard in disguise. Other judges turn directly to comparisons of plaintiff districts with rich districts, which is to say equity. Massachusetts’s recently concluded litigation in the Hancock case (see my sidebar, this issue, page 28) is a good example of how equity and adequacy measures can play out in court. After prevailing in court in 1993 on equity grounds, plaintiffs sought further relief in 1999 on adequacy grounds. Equity is irrelevant, the plaintiffs now argued, if funding is inadequate. But their adequacy studies provided no evidence of a causal link between spending and outcomes. The commonwealth’s highest court, citing huge increases in spending since 1993 and sharp improvement on equity measures quite similar to those used by Education Trust, rejected the complaint earlier this year.

In short, the death of equity has been exaggerated. Equity measures will surely continue to play a role in public discourse, as indeed they should for a society that values equal opportunity. The equity-rankings industry should examine its performance and make the changes necessary to provide the public with an accurate barometer. In this tale of two rankings, it may well be a far, far better thing to give certain measures the ax.

Robert Costrell is chief economist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and professor of economics on leave from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

As I write, the National Conference of State Legislatures has just decreed that the federal No Child Left Behind act is an unconstitutional, unworkable, and undesirable federal power grab that should be rolled back-while the National Governors Association has made the contrary suggestion that NCLB’s core principles and mechanisms be extended to cover high schools.

How much government is too much, and what is a workable balance between leaving people and institutions (and states and cities) free to make their own decisions and compelling them to behave in ways that someone else, usually someone higher on the federalism hillside, decides is good for them?

This issue of Education Next vividly illustrates these dilemmas and shows how such hoary questions of political philosophy are now entangled with interests and ingrained practices.

No Child Left Behind arose from the premise that America’s public schools weren’t doing well enough and states ought not to be left to their own devices to improve them. So Uncle Sam created a new web of requirements, incentives, and sanctions aimed at boosting school performance and student achievement.

Some see this as an unwarranted and ultimately futile extension of federal authority into matters properly left to states and communities. Yet NCLB left the biggest decision of all to the states: how high to set their standards of academic achievement and the passing levels on their tests. And now we see, thanks to Paul Peterson, Frederick Hess, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (see page 52), that many states have set their standards shamefully low, which gives the citizens of those states a false sense of comfort-and shields their educators from criticism. These jurisdictions may be complying with the letter of NCLB, but not its spirit. Yet as states pay most of the education bill, why shouldn’t they set their own standards?

“Complying” with a complex federal statute carries other costs, too. In this issue’s Forum (page 55), Theodore Sizer contends that charter schools need the freedom to innovate and distinguish themselves, while Michael Petrilli explains why charter schools, too, should be subject to NCLB’s core accountability requirements.

Academics aren’t all that schools do or that Washington meddles in. Feeding children (via school breakfast, lunch, and commodities programs) is now a $10 billion federal enterprise. It began as a way to feed the hungry, but the biggest issue today is slimming down chubby kids and improving their nutritional habits. That classic “nanny state” impulse collides, however, with ingrained cafeteria practices, powerful agribusiness interests, and, perhaps especially, children’s tastes. What if they prefer to chow down on pizza and fries? Will someone force them to eat broccoli and grapes? By what authority and with what consequences? Yet the debate on the Potomac’s shores, as Ron Haskins expertly elucidates (see page 10), is overshadowed by political and corporate considerations that have little to do with what’s good for kids. Healthful or not, school food is not always good to eat, according to restaurant critic Mark Zanger’s delectable review (see page 18) of six school-cafeteria meals in Massachusetts.

Washington is not the only locus of government complexity. Joe Williams skillfully recounts the ways in which New York City and New York state, pushed by an activist private group called the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, have tied themselves in judicial, legislative, and budgetary knots for 12 years now-and with no end in sight. In the latest turning of this wheel of fortune, a judge has commanded that another $5.6 billion per year be added to the Big Apple’s already massive public school budget-to ensure that young New Yorkers receive an “adequate” education. But he’s left it to the legislature and the governor to figure out how and where to find the money.

The moral: Beware of minefields when you push on government-any government-to mind people’s business and try to alter their behavior.

-CHESTER E. FINN JR.