The year was 1968. Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and American cities were erupting in flames because of King’s violent death and the decades-long smoldering resentments from racism. In a small city far away from the churning ghettos of Detroit and D.C., a small public school was about to enter the racial hubbub and become part of education history.

That fall, McCarver Elementary in Tacoma, Washington, hung out its shingle inviting students from anywhere in the city to enroll, breaking the link between school assignments and residential location and becoming the nation’s first “magnet” school. Thus began a nationwide experiment to integrate public schools using market-like incentives instead of court orders. (See sidebar, “In the Beginning.”)

The following year, 1969, the country’s second magnet school opened–this one, more appropriately, in Boston, soon to be an epicenter of the race-based school wars. But, like its West Coast counterpart, the William Monroe Trotter School, in Beantown’s poor Roxbury section, was built as “a showcase for new methods of teaching”–enough of a showcase, it was hoped, to attract white children to a black neighborhood for their schooling. It was an odd idea, but one whose time seemed to have come. Within a decade there would be hundreds of such magnet schools all over the country.

The idea was simple enough: draw white students to predominantly black schools by offering a special education with a focus on a particular aspect of the curriculum, such as performing arts, or Montessori, or advanced math, science, and technology. Federal and state agencies, anxious to avoid the growing messiness of coercive integration measures like forced busing, directed new resources toward these magnets, encouraging their pioneering academic programs and giving grants for new facilities. Glossy brochures were mailed to parents and press releases to local media. The hope was that these well-funded, themed schools would ignite a passion for learning as well as spark a movement to voluntarily integrate schools.

The names alone give a sense of the new schools’ range and optimism–the Thomas Pullham Creative and Performing Arts magnet (in Prince George’s County, Maryland), the Copley Square International High magnet (in Boston), the School 59 Science magnet (also called the “Zoo School,” in Buffalo), the Greenfield Montessori magnet school (in Milwaukee), the Central High School Classical Greek/Computers Unlimited magnet high school (in Kansas City). Even older and well-established “examination schools,” such as Boston Latin and City Honors (in Buffalo), would soon claim magnet status to avail themselves of new students and additional funds.

An Early Experiment in “Choice”

The first magnets appeared as the school desegregation battles were heating up. In 1969, the year William Monroe Trotter opened in Boston, a federal court ordered the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina to use busing to desegregate its schools. The use of crosstown busing to accomplish desegregation was unprecedented–and the case went right to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the highly controversial forced integration program in 1971. A federal district court in Boston, paying insufficient attention to the ideals of the Trotter school, introduced a forced busing program in 1974 that set off demonstrations and riots. The court order also prompted the city’s educators to include magnets in their formal, citywide forced busing plan the following year. Thus was born the first “forced busing plan with magnet options.”

Coming as they did, in the midst of several different national desegregation crises, early magnet schools offered a relatively uncontroversial–and peaceful–means of integrating schools. And the magnet movement got an early boost from two federal district court decisions in 1976, in the aftermath of the discord in Charlotte and Boston. In approving magnet-driven, voluntary desegregation programs in Buffalo and Milwaukee, the courts seemed more than willing to accept reasonable alternatives to the forced dissolution of geography-based school assignments.

Though it was another decade before the first southern school district (in Savannah) was allowed to desegregate its school system with a voluntary magnet-school plan, the new schools were soon opening almost everywhere–or, at least, everywhere that public school systems needed to stem the white-flight resegregation that was overtaking many urban school districts, mostly in the North. By 1981, there were some 1,000 such magnet schools in the United States; by 1991, there were over 2,400. (See Figure 1.)

 

These new schools proved to be a remarkably robust and popular trend in school choice. In a study I undertook in 1989, I found that 12 percent of the elementary and middle school magnet programs in my sample specialized in basic skills and/or individualized teaching; 11 percent offered foreign language immersion; 11 percent were science-, math-, or computer-oriented; 10 percent catered to the gifted and talented and 10 percent to the creative and performing arts; 8 percent were traditional, back-to-basics programs (demanding, for instance, dress codes and contracts with parents for supervision of homework); 7 percent were college preparatory; 7 percent were early childhood and Montessori. (The remaining preferences, each under 7 percent, included multicultural/international, life skills/ careers, and ecology/environment.) At the high school level, the programs tended to be either career-oriented (medical careers, law and criminal justice, communications and mass media, hotel and restaurant) or schools with some sort of entrance criteria. The Magnet Schools Association of America, based in Washington, D.C., reports a similar distribution of program themes in today’s magnet schools.

My analyses of the success of these magnets in actually attracting whites indicate that school structure and racial composition was important. Predictably, the most popular magnet school structure was a dedicated magnet, where everyone in the school had chosen it and all were in the magnet program. These “perfect” magnets, however, were the least common, because creating them requires that an entire school be emptied out and children assigned elsewhere or a new school be built. The next most popular magnet structure, and the most common today, is a program-within-a-school. Only students who chose the magnet program are in it, but there is also a neighborhood population assigned to the school that is not in the magnet program. The racial composition of the magnet program is different from the school that houses it and is usually around 50 percent white. The least-popular magnet structure in black neighborhoods is a “whole-school-attendance-zone” magnet: everyone in the school is in the program, but the school has a neighborhood population assigned to it. That these schools and their magnet programs tend to have a racial composition closer to that of the neighborhood–majority minority–only reduces their attractiveness to whites. However, according to most surveys, although whites prefer majority white schools, a sizable, albeit smaller, number will choose schools where whites make up somewhat less than half of the student body.

Staying Power and an Evolving Mission

Even as courts across the country began releasing school districts such as Kansas City, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Savannah, Buffalo, and Boston from long-running desegregation orders during the 1990s, magnet schools continued to thrive. My 1991 randomized national sample of 600 school districts indicated that the 2,400 magnet schools in the United States were operating in 229 different school districts.

And it would appear that their ranks continue to swell despite the declining number of districts operating under court-ordered desegregation plans. The directory published by the Magnet Schools Association of America lists more than 3,000 magnet or theme-based schools as members.

With desegregation waning as a public goal, however, magnet schools have maintained support by attaching themselves to the school-choice movement. For instance, the Magnet Schools of America web site now makes a classic choice-based argument on behalf of magnet schools–that being allowed to choose a school will result in improved satisfaction that translates into better achievement. Thus, although proponents of magnet schools have not disavowed the desegregation goal that is the program’s roots, they currently place almost equal emphasis on magnets as instruments of school choice.

One of the reasons for the sustained growth of magnet schools is the federal government’s steady financial support for the idea. Magnet schools were originally funded as tools of desegregation under the Emergency School Assistance Act from 1972 to 1981. In 1981 they were folded into the Chapter 2 block-grant program, but explicit federal support for magnet schools as desegregation tools resumed in 1985 with the authorization of the Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP), included in the Education for Economic Security Act. Under the new program, however, magnet schools not only had to aid desegregation, but also had to focus on improving the quality of education in order to qualify for funds. The Magnet Schools Assistance Program still exists, now run by the Office of Innovation and Improvement in the Department of Education, and with the same twin goals of fostering integration and choice.

Funding for magnet schools is also part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, housed in the portion of the law bannered “Promoting Informed Parental Choice and Innovative Programs.” Funding has not kept pace with either inflation or the growth in magnet schools, but neither has it withered away. (See Figure 2.) The MSAP appropriation was $75 million in 1984, rose to $108 million in 1994, and remained at $108 million in 2004. Though the program falls under the law’s choice provisions, the federal government still considers magnets an important aspect of desegregation policy, defining a magnet school as one that “offers a special curriculum capable of attracting substantial numbers of students of different racial backgrounds.”

The Money Bite

Perhaps the greatest challenge to magnet schools now comes from fiscal constraints at the state level. Where desegregation has become a secondary goal, resource-rich magnet schools are often a target for cuts when money is tight. States such as Missouri, Ohio, and Michigan have challenged court-ordered desegregation plans in order to reduce their financial and legal liability. But even states such as Massachusetts, Maryland, and California that were never parties to a desegregation lawsuit have been cutting funds for magnet schools. The Prince George’s County, Maryland, school district, for example, eliminated magnet programs at 33 schools in the fall of 2004 because of state funding cutbacks. The only theme programs that will be kept are the Montessori, French immersion, and creative and performing arts, and they will no longer be called magnets.

Indeed, there is probably no school district with an extensive system of magnet programs that has not closed at least one or two magnets because of a budget crunch. In fact, many magnets are the victims of their own success: by the 1990s most neighborhood schools had the science labs and computer technology that had once made magnets unique. Even McCarver in Tacoma removed “magnet” from its name in 1998 and, as a result of No Child Left Behind, became a School in Need of Improvement.

Connecticut is an important exception to this trend, but that is because since 1996, the entire state has been under a state supreme court order to desegregate. Using a complicated formula approved by the court, the state funds magnet schools that accept students from several different districts (at a minimum there must be two) at a per-pupil rate that increases as the number of districts sending students increases–an attempt to bring central-city minority students and white suburban students together in the same school. Thus the scheme eschews outright racial quotas, but achieves some of the diversity that quotas would create.

Challenges for the Future

Though finances will always be a magnet school’s primary concern, the greatest threat to the magnet system going forward is the same as that which gave magnets their early jump-start: the courts. Even the No Child Left Behind Act’s requirement that school districts adopt a voluntary desegregation plan, for instance, may conflict with legal precedents set in most federal appeals courts. In 2001 only the federal appeals court covering the states of Connecticut, New York, and Vermont had upheld the use of race in student assignment or magnet school admissions in school districts not already under court order; it did so on the grounds that the state had a compelling interest in racial diversity. But even in that circuit, several school districts and one state (Connecticut) have continued to avoid the use of racial quotas in magnet admissions because they believe using them invites a legal challenge.

The 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing the use of racial quotas at the University of Michigan–but approving the use of race as one of many factors in admissions decisions–has had little impact on magnet schools, mainly because most had already abandoned the use of quotas. And most school districts now recognize that using explicit racial quotas in magnet admissions when desegregation orders have been lifted is risky. When the court-ordered desegregation plan in Prince George’s County was ended in 2002, the superintendent formed a panel of experts on magnet schools that was thought to be politically and ideologically diverse. Our task was to figure out what to do about magnet school admissions criteria.

All of us were in agreement that race could no longer be used in magnet admissions. We devised a plan in which the district was divided into three subdistricts of roughly similar racial and socioeconomic balance. Students, regardless of their race, could choose any magnet school in their subdistrict. We hoped that racially diverse student bodies would result from the individual choices of students, but there was no way to guarantee it. Since then, as noted above, state funding cuts have prompted the district’s administration to dramatically reduce the number of magnet schools, keeping only the most popular. Similar choices are being made in other districts, where some magnets survive while others are being closed.

Districts throughout the country are responding in one of two ways: either adopting a race-blind system of admissions, thus converting the magnet to a themed school of choice; or constructing a system whereby race is only one of several factors considered in admission. The former is more likely to happen in school districts that have very few whites left and in districts that have had strong appeals court opinions rejecting the use of race altogether. The latter is more likely to occur in school districts such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, that have enough whites left to actually integrate a number of magnet schools and where there has been no strong circuit court decision rejecting the use of race.

It is remarkable, perhaps, that despite the reduction in state funding and the elimination of explicit racial quotas, the total number of magnet schools has not declined. I would suggest three reasons for their resilience. First, the great triumph of the civil-rights movement was its success in getting whites to support the principle of racial diversity in the schools. In districts that still have enough whites to make integration feasible, magnet schools are viewed as an effective way to achieve that diversity, even in districts where court orders have been lifted or never existed. Second, magnet schools have been incorporated into the school choice movement as a means of improving achievement and into No Child Left Behind as a way of increasing the opportunities available to children in low-performing schools. Third, parents like school choice. Although undoubtedly there are some who enroll their children in a theme-based school in order to enable them to pursue a passion, most parents are probably interested in theme-based education as a means of igniting a passion. Magnets have thus developed strong constituencies locally and nationally and, for the foreseeable future, remain an important, if less often noticed, feature of the American education landscape.

Christine Rossell is a professor of political science at Boston University.

In the Beginning How a Small City in the Pacific Northwest Invented Magnet Schools by Alex Sergienko Every once in a while things work out. That’s what it seems like today, as I look back to 1968, when my Tacoma, Washington, school district opened a magnet school. Though Tacoma had only about 7,000 blacks–out of a total population of about 160,000–our minority housing, like that in many cities, was concentrated in one area and served by schools then in violation of our state’s de facto segregation rule. The worst “offender” was McCarver Elementary, which was 91 percent African-American. In fact, we had begun work on segregation issues several years earlier. People were coming to school board meetings complaining about it, and one prominent board member was adamant about integration. We also had a citizens committee, with two African-American members, actively seeking solutions. And, like other cities, we had some racial disturbances in Tacoma after Martin Luther King’s assassination. We knew we had to do something, but we also wanted alternatives to the coercive methods of integration, such as forced busing, that we saw being talked about elsewhere. That’s when we stumbled on an article about someone in Pittsburgh advocating the establishment of a school that would do something so well that students would want to enroll. They called it a “magnet school.” I’d never heard the term, but suddenly we envisioned McCarver as a school of excellence–good enough to pull in white students from the more affluent neighborhoods. We wrote a proposal, called the “Exemplary Magnet Program,” and in the summer of 1968 we received a $200,000 Title III grant to make it happen. We then mounted a huge recruitment effort, enlisting counselors from our summer program to make home visits (to talk to parents) and had administrators make calls to the district’s best teachers. We said again and again that we would use exemplary practices, such as team teaching and “continuous progress”–and it worked. Some very good teachers signed up. And we brought in the most popular principal, then at the best elementary school in town, to run things. With luck, a lot of work, and some key support from members of the upscale North End community, we were able to draw kids from all over, even from suburban schools on the other side of Puget Sound. And we opened that September with a minority enrollment of 64 percent, a 27-point turnaround in just four months. Instead of 50 white kids, we had almost 200. By 1970, African-American enrollment at McCarver was less than 50 percent, and we had a waiting list for parents seeking to enroll their children. After 36 years, I’m still struck by what we were able to get done. It is wonderful to think that good things can be accomplished in this world. Alex Sergienko was an assistant superintendent of schools in Tacoma when McCarver started its magnet program. His grandson Max is a 7th grader at a magnet school, in Portland, Oregon, with “a Japanese emphasis.”

I am not a mathematics teacher, but I have a degree in mathematics and an intense interest in how the subject is taught. When I retire, I would like to teach math, which is why I started tutoring high school students in my spare time three years ago. My first student was a 9th grader having difficulty with geometry. He stated his problem succinctly: “I don’t know how to do proofs.” Confronted with what I thought could be a common problem, I was still unaware that what I was really seeing was a national crisis in mathematics education.

Here’s some of what I would soon learn:

–Only 55 percent of 8th graders taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam in math correctly answered the question, “How many pieces of string will you have if you divide 3/4 yard of string into pieces each 1/8 yard long?”

–In an international math test taken by students worldwide in 1995 (the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS), U.S. student math proficiency for 8th graders fell below the international average (28th out of 41 countries). For 12th grade, U.S. math performance was among the lowest (18th of the 21 countries participating).

–In 1989 the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) published its Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics–an extensive set of mathematics standards for grades K-12 which de-emphasized memorization of number facts, the learning of proofs, and algebraic skills, but encouraged the use of calculators and “discovery learning.”

–The National Science Foundation (NSF) promoted the NCTM standards beginning in 1991 and awarded millions of dollars in grant money for the writing of math texts that embraced them and to state boards of education whose math standards aligned with them (see Figure 1).

Not knowing about these significant events (all of them before last December’s release of the Program for International Student Assessment report ranking American 15-year-olds 24th out of 29 in math among industrial countries (see Figure 2), I had no idea that our children were being deprived of a math education, thanks in no small part to a dubious education theory, watered-down standards, and a well-meaning but intellectually bankrupt federally subsidized program of math illiteracy.

What I did know was that my 9th grader didn’t know how to do proofs.
I looked through his textbook, one of whose authors was a recent president of NCTM, and I was surprised to find very few proofs of anything. More troubling, most theorems in the book were stated as postulates–that is, propositions stated without proof–and students were told to memorize them. The problems at the end of the chapter required students to do only a few simple proofs.

Proofs in geometry class have been a mainstay of mathematics. In fact, proofs were always considered an essential part of high school geometry, not only because of their importance in higher math, but because learning the rules of logical argument and reasoning has applications in science, law, political science, and writing. To see proofs being shortchanged in a geometry textbook was shocking.

Algebra texts were in no better condition, in terms of presentation and content–or, rather, their lack of content. Even if you accept the argument that geometry in general, and proofs in particular, are unnecessary for students to learn, at least algebra should be taught properly, since algebra is the common language of, and gateway to, all of higher math. The absence of clear explanation and logical development left students I later tutored in algebra as lost as my geometry student. Their textbooks (and, probably, their teachers too) encouraged them to use a graphing calculator. Operations with algebraic fractions, like a/b + c/d, were given little attention, to say nothing of quadratic equations, once the pinnacle of any first-year algebra course. Instead, the quadratic formula is presented for the students to memorize and apply–if it is even mentioned at all.

At the time I started tutoring, my daughter was in 2nd grade. I was concerned that she was not learning her addition and subtraction facts. Other parents we knew were saying the same thing. Teachers told them not to worry because kids eventually “get it.”

One teacher told me her understanding of the new method. “It used to be that if you missed a concept or method in math, then you were lost for the rest of the year. But the way we do it now, kids have a lot of ways to do things, like adding and subtracting, so that math topics from day to day aren’t dependent on kids’ mastering a previous lesson.”

In a world where it doesn’t matter when you learn something, because you’ll get it eventually, there seem to be few if any critical junctures, no mastery of procedure, no building on what you’ve learned–no learning.

The Hell-Hath-No-Fury Postulate

Coincidentally, I had the opportunity to find out how my experiences related to the politics of math education. I work for the federal government, which has a program that gives employees a chance to work on Capitol Hill to gain experience and knowledge of legislative and congressional procedures, which is valuable information when working in government. I applied for and received a six-month detail to work in a Democratic senator’s office. Senator X (so called, in keeping with mathematical convention to describe a class of variables, because, as I was also to learn, both the good intentions and the shortcomings of Congress are institutional) was interested in establishing a science project to nurture a “homegrown” breed of scientists and engineers who would then support that state’s burgeoning technology industry. Since I thought a likely place to start would be math education, the staffers working the education issue asked me to see what I could come up with.

I compiled a list of questions that I sent by e-mail to various mathematicians involved with the math education issue. The questions focused on the quality of textbooks and teaching, with emphasis on algebra and geometry. I also wanted to know whether K-6 texts taught arithmetic well enough to prepare students to learn algebra.

The nice thing about working on the Hill is that you almost always get responses to e-mails and phone calls. Fifteen minutes after I sent an e-mail to Harvard mathematics professor Wilfried Schmid, he called. I found out that his initiation into the world of K-12 math education was similar to mine–through his daughter. He explained how she was not being taught her multiplication tables. He was shocked at the math instruction she was receiving in the 3rd grade. Its substance was shallow, memorization was discouraged, students were kept dependent on mental crutches (her teacher made her work with blocks or count on her fingers), and the intellectual level was well below the capability of most of the kids in his daughter’s class.

Schmid’s reaction to the problems of math texts and teaching was similar to that of other mathematicians I talked to in the course of my Capitol Hill assignment, particularly those with children. Those dialogues led me to develop an ad hoc theory that I will postulate (this means I don’t have to prove it): Hell hath no fury like a mathematician whose child has been scorned by an education system that refuses to know better. In Schmid’s case, he talked to parents, school boards, and ultimately with the Massachusetts commissioner of education. Along with others, he succeeded in revamping Massachusetts’s math standards, much to the dislike of the education establishment and textbook publishers.

Framing the Debate

The controversy over K-12 math education has come to be known as the “math wars.” Like Schmid, mathematicians have been active in this debate, as has the “mathematics community” at large, including not only mathematicians at the university level, but teachers and others involved in the education establishment. They believe that students must master basic skills (the number facts, standard algorithms for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing) in tandem with larger concepts about mathematics.

On the other side of the debate are the followers of an education theory that promotes discovery learning, minimization of both teacher instruction and repetitive drills, and a disdain for standard procedures (algorithms). The math being protested–by the mathematics community–is called a variety of things: “reform math,” “standards-based math,” “new new math,” and, most commonly, “fuzzy math.”

Although the education theories on which much of fuzzy math is based are promoted in many education schools in the United States, it is not accurate to say that everyone in the education arena buys into these ideas. Therefore, for purposes of clarity, and to be consistent with a vocabulary used by others describing the math wars, I will use the term “educationist” to refer to those who promote the contested theory of math education known generally as discovery learning.

Early Skirmishes

The math wars revolve around a four-part problem: A disputed theory of education that informs NCTM’s standards; state boards of education that base their standards of learning for mathematics on the NCTM standards; textbooks written to incorporate these standards; and teachers and others in the education establishment who are indoctrinated in the disputed education theory and who may not possess enough knowledge of mathematics to overcome the first three factors.

The education theory at the heart of the dispute can be traced to John Dewey, an early proponent of learning through discovery. But for all practical purposes, the story begins on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. This event signaled the American malaise in science and mathematics education and the need to overcome it if we weren’t to fall further behind the Soviet Union and lose the cold war. Thus the U.S. Congress was motivated to pass appropriations that triggered the development of the “new math,” a national effort, spurred by the National Science Foundation, that eventually found its way into most of our schools.

The curriculum, designed primarily by mathematicians, had problems, but it introduced to algebra, geometry, and trigonometry a long-missing formalism, logic, and consistency, and it resulted in calculus being taught in high school. The problem, however, was that a similar formalism was introduced into K-6 texts and curricula, with the result that students (and elementary school teachers, who were caught totally off guard) were exposed to number bases, set theory, and axioms long before they were ready for them. And soon enough the new math was being blamed for not teaching basic arithmetic: it was often said that new-math students could tell you that 5 + 3 = 3 + 5, but didn’t know that it was equal to 8.

Mathematicians have agreed for years that emphasizing sets and number bases in math programs designed for the lower grades was a horrendous mistake. Notwithstanding these errors, however, the difference between the current slew of textbooks and those from the new-math days of the 1960s is definitely worth noting: Accomplished mathematicians wrote many of the texts used in that earlier era , and the math–though misguided and inappropriate for the lower grades and too formal for the high school grades–was at least mathematically correct. Some of the high school texts were absolutely first-rate, and new-math-era textbooks like Mary Dolciani’s “Structure and Method” series for algebra and geometry continue to be used by math teachers who understand mathematics and how it is to be taught. (They usually use them on the sly, since most teachers are required to use the books that the schools have adopted.)

During the new-math era, which spanned the period between Sputnik to the early 1970s, mathematicians dominated the design of math texts and curricula for the first, and almost last, time. Up to that point mathematicians had been kept out of the math education picture, and K-12 mathematics tended not to include any examination of the logical structure of mathematics itself, with the single exception of Euclidean geometry. Students in the first half of the 20th century had instruction in practical matters: consumer buying, insurance, taxation–everything but algebra, geometry, or trigonometry, which, when they were taught, were frequently lacking in depth.

Significantly, the new-math era was one of the only times that mathematicians were given an opportunity to make proper math education available to the masses. (Not until the past few years, working with several state education departments, would they be allowed back into math education decisions.) And some believe that had certain prominent mathematicians who had started working with the development of the new-math programs managed to maintain their influence on those programs, the math education that would have emerged from new math–both lower grades and high school–would have been on par with the best of the math programs overseas.

Eventually, however, the problems with K-6 formalism and the logic and formalism of the program in general doomed new math. The general public, the education community, and even mathematicians themselves judged the new-math programs a failure. Mathematicians were assigned the blame, and the education establishment took back the reins. That establishment received an inadvertent boost in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk, the shockingly pessimistic assessment of the nation’s schools by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The report sounded another alarm about student math performance, and the NCTM, increasingly dominated by educationists, took advantage of this new education crisis to write revised math standards. The Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics, published in 1989, purported to put the country back on the math track. But because it was, in part, a reaction to the new math and those believed responsible for it, NCTM did not, as mathematicians point out, promote a lively public debate, as had the creators of the new math, but suppressed it.

Some Secrets about Discovery Learning

The NCTM standards were a brew of progressivism–a nod to the 1920s when math was supposed to be practical–and constructivism, which was progressivism that adapted research from cognitive psychology to the task of teaching and called it discovery learning. The standards were based on theories of learning that assumed that children had an innate ability to understand math. The group’s math curricula were thus structured to allow children to discover math concepts rather than to be given them, through direct instruction. The standards also expanded their reach to include, in addition to basic arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.

The NCTM’s view was that traditional teaching techniques, known as “drill and kill,” numbed student minds, turned them off math, and taught them nothing. And so the new standards recommended that students learn “strategies” for learning number facts rather than memorize those facts. It emphasized the use of calculators in all grades. Most important, however, the standards recommended certain areas that should receive “decreased attention” in grades K-4, including “complex paper-and-pencil computations,” “long division,” “paper-and-pencil fraction computation,” “use of rounding to estimate,” “rote practice,” “rote memorization of rules,” and “teaching by telling.” This last item, teaching by telling, is a reference to direct instruction (telling students what they need to know), which NCTM believed should be replaced by “discovery.”

Discovery learning has always been a powerful teaching tool. But constructivists take it a step beyond mere tool, believing that only knowledge that one discovers for oneself is truly learned. There is little argument that learning is ultimately a discovery. Traditionalists also believe that information transfer via direct instruction is necessary, so constructivism taken to extremes can result in students’ not knowing what they have discovered, not knowing how to apply it, or, in the worst case, discovering–and taking ownership of–the wrong answer. Additionally, by working in groups and talking with other students (which is promoted by the educationists), one student may indeed discover something, while the others come along for the ride.

Texts that are based on NCTM’s standards focus on concepts and problem solving, but provide a minimum of exercises to build the skills necessary to understand concepts or solve the problems. Thus students are presented with real-life problems in the belief that they will learn what is needed to solve them. While adherents believe that such an approach teaches “mathematical thinking” rather than dull routine skills, some mathematicians have likened it to teaching someone to play water polo without first teaching him to swim.

The Standards were revised in 2000, due in large part to the complaints and criticisms expressed about them. Mathematicians felt that the revised standards, called The Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (PSSM 2000), were an improvement over the 1989 version, but they had reservations. The revised standards still emphasize learning strategies over mathematical facts, for example, and discovery over drill and kill.

Concept still trumps memorization. Textbooks often make sure students understand what multiplication means rather than offering exercises for learning multiplication facts. Some texts ask students to write down the addition that a problem like 4 x 3 represents. Most students do not have a difficult time understanding what multiplication means. But the necessity of memorizing the facts is still there. Rather than drill the facts, the texts have the students drill the concepts, and the student misses out on the basics of what she must ultimately know in order to do the problems. I’ve seen 4th and 5th graders, when stumped by a multiplication fact such as 8 x 7, actually sum up 8, 7 times. Constructivists would likely point to a student’s going back to first principles as an indication that the student truly understood the concept. Mathematicians tend to see that as a waste of time.

Another case in point was illustrated in an article that appeared last fall in the New York Times. It described a 4th-grade class in Ossining, New York, that used a constructivist approach to teaching math and spent one entire class period circling the even numbers on a sheet containing the numbers 1 to 100. When a boy who had transferred from a Catholic school told the teacher that he knew his multiplication tables, she quizzed him by asking him what 23 x 16 equaled. Using the old-fashioned method–one that is held in disdain because it uses rote memorization and is not discovered by the student–the boy delivered the correct answer. He knew how to multiply while the rest of the class was still discovering what multiples of 2 were.

Enter Stage Left: The National Science Foundation

The NCTM standards received a boost of credibility in 1991 when the Education and Human Resources Division of the National Science Foundation funded two grant programs related to math education. The first was for state education departments that aligned their math standards with NCTM’s and school districts that adopted constructivist math programs aligned with NCTM’s standards; the second, for the development of commercial mathematics texts that also followed the NCTM party line, a spending program that now took NSF into the textbook business.

Eventually, NSF supplemented grants to school districts by funding “distribution centers” that promoted the very programs NSF had helped to create. This “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” technique has worked well in enhancing the NCTM constructivist ethic and the texts that NSF helped develop. Meanwhile, NSF continues to fund revisions to some of those texts.

The imprimatur of the National Science Foundation on both NCTM’s standards and the various textbooks they funded and NSF’s grant program caused states to revise their standards of learning for mathematics. Case in point: In 1992, the California State Board of Education adopted the California Mathematics Framework–a set of standards based prominently on NCTM’s standards of 1989.

And Stage Right: the Right

By this time, people were beginning to notice. NSF’s embrace of NCTM’s philosophy of education, among other problems with the teaching of mathematics, became grist for Lynne Cheney, then an active senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. With well-articulated essays in leading media, Cheney took out after the educationists and won the respect of mathematicians and scientists as she helped raise awareness among a wider audience across the United States. Isolated math revolts began to occur. One of the first was in Silicon Valley, where parents are engineers, scientists, programmers, and mathematicians–and they didn’t like the way their children were being taught mathematics. Two local mathematicians, Jim Milgram of Stanford and Hung-Hsi Wu of Berkeley, became key players in the rewriting of California’s math standards and the elimination of NSF-funded books from the state’s curriculum. Several years later, as I mentioned earlier, Wilfried Schmid from Harvard became active and helped rewrite Massachusetts’s standards. Two other states, Minnesota and Michigan (Milgram and Wu went to the Wolverine State as well), also just recently revised their math standards. Minnesota’s standards were changed due in large part to the efforts of Dr. Larry Gray, chair of the mathematics department at the University of Minnesota, and of concerned and outraged parents.

But the education bureaucracy did not roll over, and in the fall of 1999 the U.S. Department of Education released a list of ten recommended math programs, designated as “exemplary” or “promising,” all of them aligned with the NCTM standards and based on texts funded by NSF.

The reaction was swift. More than two hundred university professors–including Milgram and Wu, Schmid, and several winners of the Fields Medal, the highest international award in mathematics–wrote an open letter to Secretary of Education Richard Riley, calling on the Department of Education to withdraw the recommendations. The open letter was also published as a full-page ad in the Washington Post, paid for by the Packard Humanities Institute, long a critic of constructivist education. The Department of Education did not withdraw the recommendations, but instead added two more NCTM-aligned books to the list.
The Education Department’s 1999 list, as it represented a more visible–and seemingly overtly political–assertion of political will, was a critical point in the new-math wars. And when Lynne Cheney slammed the Clinton administration as she criticized math textbooks and the NSF in her editorials, she helped ensure that the math wars would become (as they remain) partisan. Republicans tended to be sympathetic to the issues, and some hearings were held. But nothing came of them, and no investigations into NSF and its funding practices were launched. No questions were asked about why the Department of Education didn’t rely on mathematicians in the review of proposals for these programs, nor was anyone in the department ever questioned about the NCTM’s education philosophy and the millions of tax dollars spent on texts that were the subject of fierce objections from 200 prominent mathematicians and scholars.

An Evidentiary Interlude

In the various arguments about how best to teach math, educationists make the point that research shows that their approaches work best. I tend to be suspicious of that research, and apparently others are as well. Ironically, a recent study by the National Academy of Science’s Mathematical Sciences Education Board, sponsored by the NSF itself, was also skeptical. “Evaluations of mathematics curricula provide important information for educators, parents, students and curriculum developers,” concluded the NAS about 19 specific mathematics curricula, including all 13 NSF-sponsored curricula, that it analyzed. They all “fall short of the scientific standards necessary to gauge overall effectiveness.”

While the proponents of these NSF-sponsored math programs may be able to claim that the research shows no evidence that the programs are “ineffective,” the mathematics community, and parents who are protesting to the various school boards across the United States, can now claim that the research cannot be used to support claims of superior effectiveness–or any effectiveness at all.

Is there a common ground in this war? It seems that for now both sides agree that subject matter should be as important as pedagogy and that improving the math education of teachers is probably the most important weapon in the battle. What constitutes a proper math education for prospective teachers, however, is subject to debate. A mathematician I know who teaches at a small college told me that a graduate of his education school caused much embarrassment when, during the interview for a job in an elementary school, the job seeker was unable to add two fractions when asked to do so. The college’s education department subsequently decided to put its math content courses under control of the math department.

Meanwhile, Back on the Hill

Though academic debate about mathematics curricula will no doubt continue, the field of argument is increasingly muddied by politics. It was in this context that I began my investigation into math education in 2002. I recall meeting with Senator X’s deputy chief of staff and two other staffers not long after completing my research on math curricula and the battles that had shaped–often, misshaped–them. “So what are your ideas on how math and science education can be enhanced?” they asked. My answer was something like, “You can enhance a car by painting it, but if the car has no engine, it’s not going to do much good.” This was not what they were expecting to hear. Nor were they expecting to hear that Lynne Cheney had also taken up the cause of anti-fuzzy math. At that point, the discussion took a decidedly troubling turn. These staffers–Democrats–now worried that they could not support policies that were also advocated by the wife of a powerful Republican.

I told them about the open letter from the two hundred mathematicians and urged them not to confuse the message with the messenger. “This is a real issue,” I said. “Kids aren’t learning the math they need to learn.”

I had discussions and sent e-mails in the hopes that I would at least get a chance to brief Senator X on the issue and, perhaps, persuade him to ask some tough questions of NSF when it came time to fund their programs. But I felt that at any moment everything was going to be whisked away.

And one day it was. The staffers in my office talked with other Democratic staffers on the Hill, who told them that it would be wise to stay away from the “fuzzy math/Lynne Cheney/Bush agenda” issue. Ultimately the staffers I was working with told me they couldn’t take a chance on having Senator X “come off like Lynne Cheney.”

This development was not surprising to any of the mathematicians with whom I had been working–most of them Democrats, like me. The senator was never briefed, and no investigation into NSF was launched. I was thanked for my hard work. I went back to my regular job and started tutoring middle school students in math at a school in D.C. while continuing to work with high school students in my neighborhood. That year a 9th-grade girl was having problems in geometry and came to me for help. “What seems to be the problem?” I asked. “I don’t know how to do proofs,” she said.

“I know,” I replied. “Don’t worry. It isn’t you.”

All politics is local, I decided.

Barry Garelick is an analyst with a federal government agency in Washington, D.C. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.

Checked:
The Myth of Laziness
(Simon & Schuster, 2003)
A Mind at a Time
(Simon & Schuster, 2002)
By Mel Levine

Checked by Daniel T. Willingham

Mel Levine writes about learning disabilities in a way that sometimes invites satire. The premise of his 2003 book, The Myth of Laziness, for example, is that a child who appears lazy probably doesn’t lack motivation, but rather suffers from “output failure.” It is tempting to have a good laugh and say, “Where were you when I was in school, Doc?”

But writing Levine off as a gooey, feel-good lightweight will not do. Indeed, Levine, a professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School and director of UNC’s Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning, is that rare author whose work affects not only millions of parents, but hundreds of school systems as well. While The Myth of Laziness had some success, his 2002 book, A Mind at a Time, reached #1 on the New York Times best-seller list and brought coverage by the national media, including (every publisher’s happiest hope) an appearance on Oprah. And in 2005, Levine added a third work, Ready or Not, Here Life Comes, which tackles the transition from adolescence to adulthood. By this time, his second book’s success had already given a significant boost to All Kinds of Minds, a nonprofit organization Levine cofounded in 1995 to promote his theories. A subsidiary program, Schools Attuned, trains teachers to recognize and address learning problems in children. So far eight training centers have been set up in North America.

Levine’s project got a push when state legislatures in North Carolina and Oklahoma allocated funds allowing any public school K-12 teacher to attend the course with substantial or complete remission of the $1,500 tuition. Then in May 2004, the New York City Department of Education signed a five-year contract with All Kinds of Minds worth about $12.5 million to train 20,000 city teachers. By the time 60 Minutes aired a story on the children of baby boomers last fall, Levine was called “one of the foremost authorities in the country on how children learn.”

There are two questions that parents and educators should ask about Levine’s program. First, Is his theory of how the mind works correct? Theories of learning disabilities (including Levine’s) are theories of what happens when learning abilities have gone wrong. If you mischaracterize the abilities, your description of potential problems is inaccurate. As I’ll describe, Levine’s broad-strokes account of the mind agrees with that of most researchers (and for that matter, with the observant layman): there is a memory system, an attention system, and so on. But it’s the detailed structure Levine claims to see within each of those systems that really drives his proposed treatments for disabled children, and on those details Levine is often wrong. The second question one should ask is, Does the evidence indicate that his proposed treatments help? The answer is that there is no evidence, positive or negative, as to whether or not the program helps kids. Given the inaccurate description of the mind on which it is based, however, it seems unlikely that it will prove particularly effective.

Old Ideas in a New Package

Levine proposes that the human mind has eight major cognitive systems-and many more subsystems (see Figure 1). Much of A Mind at a Time describes, through case studies, what happens when one or more of these systems or subsystems fails. For example, he tells the story of Vance, who dropped out of the 9th grade. According to Levine, Vance was strong in reading and math, but he could not remember facts. Levine diagnosed Vance’s problem as a deficit in long-term memory, one of the subsystems of memory. Despite a mind that worked well in most respects, this one glitch left Vance an academic failure, frustrated and shamed. The case typifies those described in the book: an able mind is foiled by a single weak link, and the child is failed by the school system’s inability to identify and address the problem.

Levine suggests a number of measures to help kids like Vance, some of which are standard practice in the field-for example, accommodations or workarounds in the classroom. The child with a long-term memory problem might be permitted to use notes during a test; the idea is that with this long-term memory support, Vance will be able to show his cognitive strengths such as analytic skills or effective writing. Levine also suggests that teachers take care not to accidentally embarrass children with learning disabilities. For example, Vance’s teacher should ensure that other children don’t know that he has any accommodation.

In fact, the same common treatment practices that Levine suggests are rooted in assumptions about the nature of learning disabilities. For example, the strategy of allowing accommodations is based on the widely accepted belief among educational and cognitive psychologists that learning disabilities may strike a specific cognitive process, like memory, but leave others, like attention, intact. As to the emphasis on the students’ dignity, that too is based on the consensus view that learning disabilities are inborn and specific. The disabled child is not stupid or lazy and should not be blamed for his or her problem.

Levine argues forcefully that learning disabilities are inborn and specific. Both propositions, however, are already well known to those in the field. In 2002, the same year that Levine published A Mind at a Time, ten different national organizations, including the Department of Education and the Learning Disabilities Association of America, released a report describing points of consensus about learning disabilities. These two points-and others that Levine proposes-were among them. One could argue, on Levine’s behalf, that some parents and teachers do not share these beliefs and that A Mind at a Time is meant to bring important research conclusions to a broader public. The problem, however, is that Levine departs from these consensus conclusions to make a host of claims about learning disabilities that are not supported by solid research.

Levine’s Theory

Let’s examine the architecture of the mind that Levine proposes, which serves as the theoretical backdrop for his analysis of learning disabilities. Most researchers in cognitive science (and of learning disabilities) would agree with the top level of the hierarchy in Figure 1: attention, memory, and motor control are separate, though interactive, systems. The separability is important because it implies that if a system is faulty, the other systems might still operate well. But these systems do interact; it’s obvious that if you don’t pay attention in class (due to a faulty attention system), you don’t learn, even if your memory system works well. (I will return to the question of interactions below.)

Although the top level of the hierarchy is standard stuff, the second and third levels of the hierarchy he proposes are anything but. And that’s the part of the theory that Levine puts to work. Children are diagnosed and treated using concepts at the second and third level of the hierarchy. In some cases, the specific subsystems Levine identifies arguably exist-there are probably different levels of language processing much like those mentioned by Levine-but there is no research, for example, to support the existence of his 5 subprocesses of “higher order thinking” nor his 14 subprocesses of attention.

Levine’s view of sequential ordering is also inconsistent with the evidence. He appears to assign any function involving time to this process, from dribbling a basketball to punctuality. In fact, although dribbling a basketball entails timing, it is an unusual case of sequencing because the movement is largely repetitive. And there is no reason to think that keeping appointments calls on sequencing-it calls on a type of memory scientists call prospective memory. In another odd distinction, Levine argues that “automatic” language (informal speech used with peers) differs fundamentally from “literate” language (formal speech used in the classroom). These types of speech do not differ in kind, as Levine claims, but differ because the latter is more demanding than the former-formal speech is more explicit and uses a wider vocabulary. That’s why, as Levine notes, some kids can speak fluently to their friends, but are inarticulate in class. If the subsystems were separate, as he claims, one should also see the opposite pattern: kids who speak articulately in the classroom, but cannot speak informally to their parents and peers.

Seeing Is Believing

How did Levine come to his particular theory of the mind?

Since A Mind at a Time contains few references to the scientific literature, I telephoned All Kinds of Minds and asked the associate director of research if there was a more research-oriented publication that I might read. She directed me to the web site of Schools Attuned, the teacher training program Levine established to promote his prescriptions for handling learning-disabled students, which lists the “research base” for the program. This research base consists of eight works, all by Levine and coauthors, none of which appeared in a peer-reviewed journal.

A review of these works reveals that they do not marshal research evidence to support their conclusions. Instead, they present the same ideas contained in A Mind at a Time, citing a few references that support well-accepted ideas-or example, that attention capacity is limited-but none to shore up Levine’s particular views. Sometimes the citation makes no sense whatever, as when Levine and coauthor Martha Reed cite a 1993 paper by Richard McKee and Larry Squire for the idea that declarative knowledge is consolidated in categories, enabling growth in knowledge as the child gets older. In fact, the McKee and Squire study had nothing to do with the categorization of declarative knowledge-it was an investigation of the neural basis of a memory paradigm often used in infants.

Since Levine makes little use of existing research on the mind’s function, it would appear that he leans heavily on his interpretations of clinical cases that he sees in his practice. Clinical case studies are always dangerous sources of evidence because there is a tendency to “see” in these cases what one’s theory leads one to expect. Even setting that problem aside, Levine makes some mistakes in interpreting his clinical observations.

One problem lies in Levine’s moving from children’s symptoms to the hypothetical disabled cognitive systems underlying them. A classic mistake in neuropsychology is assuming that the intact mind is a mirror reflection of the impaired mind. To use a well-known analogy, if you damage a transistor in a radio and the sound becomes fuzzy, it would be a mistake to assume that a normally functioning transistor is a fuzz suppressor. In the same way, it is a mistake to assume that a cognitive subsystem must lie behind every observed clinical symptom. Levine relies on such logic, however, to validate the subsystems in his theory. According to Levine, a faulty “previewing control” subsystem makes a child impulsive. A faulty “quality control” subsystem makes a child careless in monitoring how well a task is going. These behaviors are not proof of different cognitive subsystems; they are symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Levine disagrees, and he points to the fact that different children show different symptoms. If the same cognitive subsystem were impaired, he reasons, one would observe the same symptoms, but since kids have different symptoms, different cognitive subsystems must be impaired. But variability in symptoms need not indicate different disorders. For example, patients with clinical depression may show many or few of these symptoms: change in appetite, change in sleep pattern, restlessness, difficulty concentrating, and fatigue. We do not differentiate a different type of depression for each pattern of symptoms because the underlying causes of depression are the same. Similarly, there is no clear evidence for Levine’s distinctions among different types of attention disorders, which he bases on different symptom patterns.

Levine also makes an error in logic when he considers motivation. He believes that all children want to succeed (which is easy to believe), but he takes that to mean that there is no variation in motivation (which is not easy to believe). In The Myth of Laziness, where he argues that people who appear lazy actually have “output failure,” Levine says that the subsystems supporting overt behavior are faulty. Levine describes a student who had a memory problem that led to poor spelling and writing (among other problems), which in turn made his work look careless. Levine’s sensitivity is to be applauded-no doubt some students who appear lazy have a learning disability. But it is just as certain that children vary in their motivation to succeed, due to a myriad of factors, including their home environment. It is a logical error to assert that because some children’s apparent laziness is due to a learning disability, all children who appear to lack motivation must have a learning disability.

Another mistake of interpretation that Levine makes is diminishing the importance of the interaction of cognitive systems. Most of the systems and subsystems Levine identifies depend on attention: it is necessary for the successful deployment of memory, problem solving, reasoning, language, and so on. Similarly, a limited working memory capacity-the “workbench of the mind,” where complex thought occurs-reduces one’s reasoning ability, while problem solving is profoundly influenced by long-term memory, and so on. Levine acknowledges such interactions here and there, but he never comes close to giving these effects their due in specifying the implications for diagnosis and intervention.

Doubts about Diagnosis and Treatment

Learning disabilities are far from completely understood, but some facts are relatively clear. Levine’s approach leads him to take a contrarian view of two of them: diagnostic categories and the effectiveness of medications for ADHD.

Levine goes into some detail on the pitfalls that diagnoses (he calls them “labels”) may elicit-for example, they may be used as an excuse to prescribe medication. He argues that kids should not be “labeled,” but overlooks the fact that categories are useful (or not) to the extent that they mean something. A good category allows us to make inferences about nonobvious properties: for example, categorizing an object as a dog (based on observable features such as the shape of the head, the tail) allows the inference of nonobservable features (for instance, it has lungs, it may bite). In the same way, diagnostic categories are based on observable features of the child (that is, symptoms) and tell us something about nonobservable features (such as the neural basis or associated risk factors). Refusing to use diagnostic categories is refusing to benefit from experience to infer nonobservable features. In fact, we can surmise that Levine must use diagnostic categories to some extent.

If a clinician did not generalize from past cases to current patients, he or she would have to approach each case as totally novel and as though experience had no bearing on the treatment of the case. Thus what does it mean not to use “labels”? Levine does not simply mean that one should not tell the child, “You have disorder X.” His comment in A Mind at a Time, “I have seen no convincing scientific evidence that [Asperger’s syndrome] exists as a discrete disorder of some kind like a strep throat” indicates a belief that a diagnostic category must have a clear boundary of symptoms and that the relationship between the cognitive, neural, behavioral, and genetic factors must be understood before the category is useful. Psychiatry and neurology make use of diagnostic categories that initially did not meet these criteria or still do not (for example, schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer’s disease), but nevertheless prove useful. By demanding that diagnostic categories either be simple and clear or go unused, Levine throws the diagnostic baby out with the bathwater.

Levine also takes an odd position on the use of stimulant medications for kids with ADHD. Their use has been intensively studied, and the best research shows that they are more effective than behavioral therapies and that adding behavioral therapy to medication does not seem to work better than medication alone. It is also important to remember that untreated ADHD is associated with increased risks of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, school dropout, and other behavioral problems. These risk factors are significantly reduced by medication. You would not be aware of these facts if you read A Mind at a Time. Levine allows that “some children” “may benefit” from medications, and, elsewhere, that they “can have a dramatic positive impact on many.” But he adds a list of eight caveats to the use of medication, ending with this one: “After a thorough evaluation, it is often possible to avoid or at least delay the use of medication, as other therapeutic possibilities present themselves.” Trying behavioral therapy first is sensible, and it is of course appropriate to be cautious in prescribing any medication, but given existing data (and the medical community’s consensus), Levine is simply too sunny in his predictions.

Do Levine’s Interventions Work?

How effective is Schools Attuned, Levine’s teacher training program? As of this writing, the evaluation effort is in its infancy. Several research reports exist, but none is peer reviewed, and most offer qualitative, not quantitative, data with small sample sizes. All Kinds of Minds has provided grant money to independent researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of Schools Attuned, and that research is ongoing. It is worth pausing to dwell on this fact: there are virtually no data with which to evaluate the efficacy of this program, yet the program has been embraced by two states and by the largest city in the United States. Instead of reviewing studies that evaluate the program, we are left to guess at its likely effect on children.

As noted, Levine suggests that teachers make accommodations for students-for example, that the student who is slow in recalling facts be given extra time on an exam. Levine adds another prescription that is not commonplace; he suggests practice on the cognitive subsystem that is impaired. That is, some practice is directed at the faulty subsystem itself in an effort to improve its workings, practice that need not be centered on schoolwork. The child who cannot express himself well verbally, for example, is to tell stories at every opportunity and to play word games such as Scrabble. This strategy gives rise to two concerns.

First, such intervention depends on an accurate diagnosis. If Levine’s theory of the mind and how it fails is incorrect, some percentage of children will be diagnosed incorrectly and the remediation misdirected.

Second, Levine assumes that cognitive processes are open to direct change through practice. Some of Levine’s subsystems likely don’t exist, but those that do are known to be more or less open to practice effects. For example, long-term memory cannot be changed, but students can learn tricks and strategies (such as using visual images) that will maximize the efficiency of even a poor memory system. Such strategy instruction is a typical intervention for learning-disabled children; properly applied, it can be effective. Levine offers some good suggestions in this vein, but he also makes suggestions that are known to be wrong. For example, he argues that memory would be improved if school classes were longer, when in fact study that is distributed in time is known to be superior.

But other cognitive processes are very likely resistant to remediation. Working memory can improve with practice, but the improvement is quite specific to the practiced task and does not generalize. Levine’s suggestion to exercise it with increasingly long arithmetic problems will yield little benefit. Also, problem solving or other higher-level thinking skills are very difficult to practice in any direct sense, in part because they are so closely tied to background knowledge. There are no general-purpose tricks to be learned that can improve them as there are with long-term memory.

Some of Levine’s interventions are designed to help the child’s emotional life, and those are both simple to implement and likely to be effective. As noted, Levine suggests that teachers avoid revealing to the student’s peers that the child has a deficit. Levine also emphasizes explaining to the child why she is having trouble in school and emphasizing that the problem is self-contained; the child should not think of herself as stupid. I suspect that many sensitive teachers are already following these guidelines. Still, Levine does well to assume that they are not and to emphasize their importance.

Other Levine ideas are more novel but still deserve consideration. Students should not take the identification of a learning disability as an excuse for poor performance, Levine argues, but rather as a reason to work all the harder. Further, Levine suggests that teachers should request “payback” from the student for the accommodation. Payback could bring several benefits: it not only represents fairness to the rest of the class, but also communicates to the student that she is as responsible as anyone else in the class to work hard and that she has talents to draw on. These prescriptions strike me as insightful, powerful, and uncommon. Levine is at his best when he considers the emotional life of learning-disabled children.

A Final Analysis

I began by asking whether Levine’s theory is accurate and whether there is evidence that his program will help children. The answer to the first question should be clear; in scientific terms, A Mind at a Time and The Myth of Laziness are riddled with error. Even worse, there is currently no evidence regarding the effectiveness of the Schools Attuned program, and the inaccuracy of the theory makes it inevitable that some kids are going to be misdiagnosed and some interventions are going to be misapplied or faulty. Further, Levine does not acknowledge that a sizable fraction of the kids in special-education classes identified as learning disabled don’t have a cognitive problem; they have an emotional disturbance or a chaotic home life.

These problems don’t mean that Schools Attuned will be a disaster. The program calls for teachers to provide more individual attention, for parents to change the student’s home environment, or for other professionals to be brought in to work with the child. Such emotional support and care may well have beneficial effects on the child’s attitude toward school and subsequent effort. But I suspect that another program able to recruit the same resources from parents, teachers, and other professionals but based on solid research evidence would prove more effective.

The obstacles to recruiting these resources are not trivial. Levine is a clinician, meaning he deals with parents who care enough to bring their child in to be evaluated and therefore are probably invested enough to take on the extra work with their children that Levine prescribes. Special-education teachers in schools more often deal with parents who are not so invested. Still, motivating others may be Levine’s greatest strength; he writes positively and passionately about the potential in every child.

Perhaps the greatest testimony to Levine’s passion and power of persuasion is that decisionmakers in North Carolina, Oklahoma, and New York City have invested good money and staked the learning of vulnerable children on Schools Attuned, not with solid evidence of efficacy, but because it sounded good to them-they didn’t have anything else to go on.

Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Willingham thanks Rick Brigham for help in the preparation of this article.

The unabridged version of this article may be found at www.educationnext.org.

Tough Love at the Hyde Schools

Shortly after his initial visit, I asked James Traub whether he planned to evaluate Hyde according to how effectively we honor our mission or on the basis of how closely we embody his perception of the good school. Reflecting the latter, Traub’s “The Moral Imperative” (Features, Winter 2005) is a thoughtful piece on a complex subject. I write to fill in a few gaps.

His education worldview focused tightly through the window of the classroom, Traub naturally begins with a classroom drama. Although his depiction of the scene might be familiar to Hyde students and faculty, the accompanying illustration is so incongruous to their experience that they have uniformly wondered if the drawing was intended to apply to another article in the magazine. (For one thing, any Hyde student would tell the kid in the front, “No hats in the building!”)

In examining the Hyde “ship,” Traub’s bias (that is, school = classroom) prevented him from setting foot into its powerful engine room: the Hyde Family Education Program. Hyde’s 40-year trial-and-error quest to discover the best way to develop character has led us to our most significant discovery: good teaching will invariably lose out to poor parenting. The dynamics within our families can either catapult us to personal greatness or chain us to desperate dysfunction. Traub’s decision to disregard Hyde’s family education program prevented him from seeing what makes the place tick.

While Hyde’s holistic balance of academics, character, and family is undoubtedly at odds with Mr. Traub’s preferences, Traub misleads the reader when he suggests that Hyde has abandoned academic requirements for graduation. Our enterprising culture did indeed lead us to a brief flirtation with this notion in our earliest days. However, stringent traditional requirements have been in place for more than 30 years.

I must strenuously object to at least two examples of the writer’s tendency toward broad-brush characterizations. His depiction of the members of the Hyde community as “wounded souls” is both inaccurate and unfair. Character development is good for both wounded souls and confident ones. Both can be found at Hyde. He also goes way over the line in claiming that the “Hyde content” has been drained out of Hyde-New Haven. Suffice it to say that Mr. Traub neither visited the school nor spoke with anyone who works there.

The mathematician would categorize as “necessary but not sufficient” his reference to Hyde as a family “caste.” To be sure, the Gauld family has long had a heavy hand in the leadership of Hyde. However, Mr. Traub fails to mention that three of Hyde’s four schools are led by individuals with no familial ties to the Gaulds. There are no family members on Hyde’s board of governors, the authority to which all four of those teams report.

Pointing to our 100 percent college acceptance rate at Hyde-DC (all four schools combined annually attain 98 percent), Traub seems begrudging when he offers that we “must be doing something right.” We offer him a standing invitation to take a hard look at our “engine room” should he want to discover the nature of that something.

Malcolm Gauld
President, Hyde Schools

Chicago’s Proven Results

Regarding your two stories about Chicago’s ending of social promotion (“Retaining Retention” and “Teachers and Students Speak,” Features, Winter 2005), it should be noted that one of the most important policy decisions that Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley made when he took control of the public schools in 1995 was to end social promotions.

Before then, the high school dropout rate was almost 16 percent; the percentage of our elementary students meeting national norms on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in reading was less than 37; the percentage of our students testing in the bottom quarter was about 32. But things have changed. By 2003 the dropout rate had fallen to 13 percent, the percentage of students meeting national norms was up to 41, and the percentage of students testing in the bottom quartile was down to about 24-better than the nation as a whole. This is all to say that we see retention as a tool to help students get the help they need. And it works.

Your articles note many of these facts, but it must be pointed out that the key to making retention effective is to recognize it as a warning sign and fix the problem. This year, we have refined our policy to require that a personalized learning plan be designed for each student retained, so that the principal, teacher, and parents can all monitor the child’s progress.

These students also work with specially trained teachers. And previously retained 4th and 7th graders now have access to extra learning opportunities after school and during the summer to make sure they stay on track.

We also are working to prevent retentions before they even occur, by targeting high-retention schools and implementing an intensive literacy program in the early grades. We already have more than 30,000 preschool slots systemwide and have expanded this program into full-day kindergarten in targeted schools.

We look forward to a day when no children are retained, not because they are simply passed along without scrutiny, but because they have mastered the skills and concepts needed for their grade level. On that day, we will know that we truly have served every child in every school.

Arne Duncan
Chief Executive Officer
Chicago Public Schools

Teaching Teachers

However flawed David Steiner’s study of the syllabi and texts used in three clusters of teacher education courses (foundational studies, reading, and methods of teaching), we agree with his basic argument that future teachers need more exposure to the three millennia of writings about schooling and education (“Skewed Perspective: What We Know about Teacher Preparation at Elite Education Schools,” Features, Winter 2005).

Unfortunately, given the current realities of mandated courses and prescribed curricula, this is impossible to achieve. For more than 30 years the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) has pleaded for more “life space” for teacher education in the college curriculum, including five-year and fifth-year teacher education programs. Confined to the undergraduate curriculum, teacher education has surrendered space-once occupied by foundational studies-to courses in the technical aspects of teaching and learning and to more clinical practice.

Steiner faults courses in teacher education for what he perceives as ideological bias-specifically, for their contemporary and Western orientation. Given the minimalist curriculum assigned by the state, however, the wonder is that the syllabi have as much as they do. Faculty members do have choices to make, but the conversations at the AACTE are about “dispositional knowledge” and how to engage prospective teachers in the debates about liberalism and education.

Steiner insists that he wants teachers who are liberally educated, but his rush to judgment may produce the opposite effect: the state’s imposing an even more prescribed curriculum. Steiner is playing to the “new right monopoly” in education and setting the conditions that could lead to mandates for a sterile, neutral, and value-free preparation of teachers. Nothing could be more damaging to the (classical) liberalism that Steiner and AACTE are seeking.

David Imig
President and CEO
AACTE

In “Skewed Perspective,” David Steiner makes a valid claim about the ideology of American education schools, but he misreads its significance.

As the syllabi for teacher education courses suggest, there is indeed an ideological consensus around pedagogical progressivism in education schools, but it has had little serious impact on teaching and learning in American schools. It was that other branch of education progressivism, the administrative progressives, who shaped the form and function of American schools in the 20th century. Following the credo of social efficiency rather than inquiry learning, they created the modern education bureaucracy and a radically differentiated curriculum, complete with vocational rationale, dumbed-down courses, and a focus on life adjustment more than academic learning.

Research from inside and outside the ed school consistently shows that teacher education is an extraordinarily weak intervention in the process of socializing teachers, whose main influences are a long apprenticeship of observation as K-12 students before entering teacher education and the powerful culture of the school in which they begin to teach.

As for education professors, our primary accomplishment as acolytes of pedagogical progressivism has been to change the rhetoric of educators, who have all come to talk like constructivists. But beyond this talk-and a few formalistic changes, like placing desks in clusters instead of rows-there is little sign that the traditional teacher-centered mode of instruction has changed significantly in the past one hundred years.

Yes, education schools are ideologically convergent in ways that are intellectually unhealthy. But instead of beating the dead horse of education school ideology, researchers might better spend their time trying to figure out which forms of teacher preparation best enhance student learning.

David F. Labaree
Professor, School of Education
Stanford University

David Steiner replies:
Regarding David Imig: The point of my research was not that foundations courses are missing, but that their content is generally shallow and ideologically slanted. Teacher preparation programs unquestionably face time pressure, but Imig makes the unwarranted inference that more course work would produce better-balanced reading lists. This contradicts common sense: surely, to do more of what is being done poorly is not a winning proposition. The case for devoting more time to teacher preparation can only be made if we are ready to correct the deficiencies in teacher preparation that my study reveals. As for Imig’s opening rhetorical gesture, my research analyzes 165 syllabi-45 in foundations-from a representative sample of elite schools. Imig does not claim, or even suggest, that a larger sample would bring different results. Rather, in his eagerness to belittle my findings, he shows a defensiveness that raises concerns about the capacity of teacher education to reform itself.

Professor Labaree doesn’t dispute my methodology or my findings, but questions their significance on the grounds that teacher preparation is inconsequential. This would seem to argue for abandoning teacher preparation; yet Labaree calls for further research, implying that if we knew how to prepare teachers, then teacher preparation would have an impact. However, in claiming that meaningful preparation is yet to be found, he not only sidesteps my argument that teachers should be taught to think through intellectual and moral issues related to pedagogy, but also a long history of reflection on the aims, methods, and content of education. Moreover, if teacher preparation is to remain in business in the hope that it becomes consequential, then it surely matters that this preparation ceases to be ideologically biased.

Reading, Writing, and Willpower

I liked Diane Ravitch’s review of Paul Zoch’s Doomed to Fail (Winter 2005), which I also read with great interest. The myopia that overlooks student effort is, in my view, the biggest flaw in our current approach to education reform. Teachers, and teachers of teachers, tend to focus on what teachers do, not on what students do.

This reminds me of a story I heard Al Shanker [longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers] tell a couple of times:
Apparently, when Jaime Escalante moved to Sacramento, the local media were anxious to find out how good this famous teacher was. They found a 9th-grade student who said he was a lousy teacher.
Fascinated, they asked her why. She said she had had a problem with her algebra and went to Mr. Escalante for help. He kept her after school for several days and also on Saturday.

The media asked her what happened.

“Well,” she said, “I finally got it, but he didn’t teach me anything. All he did was make me work!”

Will Fitzhugh
Founder, The Concord Review

What’s a Teacher Worth?

In “The Uniform Salary Schedule” (Forum, Winter 2005), Brad Jupp cites Public Agenda research and identifies us as a “pro-teacher group.” While I believe most of us at Public Agenda admire teachers, Public Agenda is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy research organization, and we don’t endorse a particular strategy for any group.

Mr. Jupp cites Public Agenda’s report on American public school teachers, our 2004 study “Stand by Me: What Teachers Really Think about Unions, Merit Pay, and Other Professional Matters.” In this study we found fairly broad support among teachers for some forms of differential pay-just not the form that ties pay directly to student test scores. But the research also suggests, at least among teachers nationally, that differential pay is just not an especially strong motivator or a top priority for most teachers. Beyond that, our surveys of superintendents and principals have shown strong support for reform of both salary and tenure.

Ruth A. Wooden
President
Public Agenda

Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?
By James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger
Edited and with an introduction by Benjamin M. Friedman
MIT Press, 2003, $40.00; 370 pages.

As reviewed by Martin R. West

In the first half of the 20th century, a rapidly industrializing American economy intensified the need for a more highly skilled workforce. White-collar workers were in demand, and blue-collar laborers were being asked to follow written instructions, decipher blueprints, and perform basic calculations.

As wages for workers who could perform these tasks grew, so did Americans’ appetite for schooling. School districts across the country built a vast number of new high schools and adapted their curricula to employers’ needs. By the time the United States entered the Second World War, roughly 50 percent of American teenagers were completing high school, up from less than 20 percent just two decades earlier. This heavy investment in education gave the nation a huge edge over other countries in the amount of “human capital” in its workforce-an edge that helped drive the American economy in the decades that followed.

The time Americans spent in school continued to grow after the war, due in part to policies like the GI Bill that encouraged students to attend college. Indeed, for a time it appeared that Americans might actually be receiving too much education. When the first of the baby boomers entered the job market in the 1970s, many of them holding freshly minted college diplomas, the economic value of a bachelor’s degree plummeted, leading Harvard labor economist Richard Freeman to fret over the plight of the “overeducated American.”

But concern about too much education has long since dissipated. The students who came of age in the 1970s set a benchmark for attainment of education that subsequent generations have surpassed only recently, and then barely. College participation rates leveled off sharply for individuals born after mid-century, native- and foreign-born alike. While 62 percent of those born in America in 1950 attended at least one year of college, the comparable figure for those born in 1975 (and who came of age in 1995) was just 59 percent (see Figure 1).

Meanwhile, technological advances-in particular the spread of computers-accelerated the economy’s need for skills, once again boosting the wage premium received by more-educated workers (see Figure 2). Yet unlike the early decades of the century, when higher wages quickly spurred greater enrollment, the educational response in the late 20th century was slow and uneven. Although the share of the labor force enrolling in college increased modestly in the 1990s, college graduation rates remained essentially flat.

In contrast, education levels elsewhere in the developed world continue to rise, with college graduation rates increasing roughly 5 percentage points among the other countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) over the past 20 years alone. As a result, America’s longstanding international advantage in the share of its adult population with college degrees, while still sizable, shows signs of eroding (see Figure 3).

Recent high school graduation statistics are even more alarming. The percentage of American students completing high school has actually fallen since 1970-a trend masked in official statistics by the growing number of students receiving alternative credentials like the General Educational Development, or GED, certificate. This decline, along with the arrival of a sizable immigrant population that has relatively little education, has bequeathed the United States a pool of low-skilled adults exceptional in the developed world.

In short, America’s supply of educated workers is simply not keeping up with demand.

A Hard Row to Read

Why not? And what, if anything, should the government do about it? These were the questions put to Alan Krueger and James Heckman at a 2002 symposium at Harvard University. Heckman, the recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Economics, and Krueger, formerly the chief economist at the Department of Labor and now a professor of economics at Princeton University, have long been among the most prominent observers of the policies that affect the skills of the American workforce. Their answers, along with the discussion they provoked among such authorities as Harvard president Lawrence Summers and Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, have now been compiled in this important volume from MIT Press.

Before running out to purchase a copy of Inequality in America, however, readers are warned that the authors have made disappointingly little effort to present their ideas and evidence in a way that is intelligible to noneconomists. Moreover, the book’s format-lengthy essays by Krueger and Heckman (who teamed up with fellow economist Pedro Carneiro, now of University College London, for his contribution), followed by commentaries from five scholars, each with a favorite bone (or nit) to pick, then by extended responses and final rejoinders from the lead authors-makes it hard to find the forest for the trees.

That said, readers willing to invest the effort to make sense of it on their own can expect a healthy return. Krueger offers an energetic, if ultimately unconvincing, call to expand existing education and training programs for people of all ages, focusing especially on the most disadvantaged. In contrast, Heckman and Carneiro advocate reallocating resources toward the youngest students (especially preschoolers), expanding mentoring programs for disadvantaged adolescents, and raising the quality of the nation’s public schools, not by augmenting their resources, but by enhancing parental choice. Together these prescriptions for enhancing America’s stock of human capital clarify the range of policy options.

 

More of the Same: Money

For Krueger, the flaws in America’s human capital policies stem less from the design of existing programs than from the level of resources devoted to them. Krueger would increase spending first and foremost on compensatory programs for the disadvantaged. These investments will be especially effective, he contends, because low-income groups often lack either the resources or the desire to invest adequately in their own education. By the same token, Krueger rejects the notion that policymakers should focus new investments in education on a particular age group, such as the very young: “Old dogs can learn new tricks,” he says, and the benefits of programs for teenagers and adults are apparent more quickly than those for young children. He would therefore expand education and training programs for people of all ages, from preschool to underemployed adults.

For school-age children, Krueger would begin by reducing class size and increasing teachers’ salaries, especially in schools serving low-income communities. He would also increase the quantity of schooling by lengthening the school year (or offering disadvantaged students vouchers for summer school) and extending the age for compulsory schooling to 18. Finally, for those not yet or no longer in the public school system, Krueger would increase funding for programs sponsored by Head Start (programs for disadvantaged preschoolers) and the Job Corps (programs for high school dropouts) until all those eligible can participate-and expand adult training under the Workforce Investment Act.

Implementing even a fraction of these recommendations would require massive new resources. Unfortunately for policymakers with fixed budgets, Krueger makes no effort to prioritize among them. He settles instead on a “policy of giving ample resources to local governments in low-income areas to invest in the initiatives they think best meet their needs-and holding the local governments accountable for the results.”

Krueger says nothing about how such accountability might work. And why would he? If existing programs are doing the best they can with what they have, surely they can safely be trusted to put new resources to good use.

Elusive Evidence

But does Krueger demonstrate that current investments in education and training on this scale could be worthwhile? He contends that the return on investments in education in low-income individuals compares favorably with the return on investments in the stock market. On its face, this fact would seem to justify increased spending on a wide range of costly interventions.

Elsewhere in the book, however, former treasury secretary Summers reminds readers that any returns of the Krueger program would need to be balanced against the cost of forgoing other policies, within education and beyond, and against the drag on the economy due to increased taxation. Krueger, even though allowed to respond to Summers’s critique, makes no effort to account for these costs.
And a close look at the evidence Krueger uses to calculate the expected return on investments in education reveals that it is, at best, highly selective. Krueger mounts his case like a seasoned lawyer, presenting the evidence most likely to sway the audience to his position, all the while downplaying doubts as to its validity and ignoring evidence to the contrary.

To justify his call for class-size reductions, for example, Krueger relies heavily on evidence from Tennessee’s Project STAR, a large-scale class-size experiment conducted in the 1980s. But it remains unclear whether improvements of the kind identified in Project STAR would justify the costs of reducing class sizes-particularly if it were attempted on a large scale. Although Krueger’s own cost-benefit analysis paints a modestly optimistic picture, it ignores the fundamental tradeoff between quality and quantity that school districts face when hiring teachers. Likewise, Krueger’s interpretation of the much larger body of nonexperimental evidence on class-size reduction (he considers these studies supportive of class-size reduction) is at best open to debate.

The empirical support for Krueger’s other proposals is equally tenuous. While teachers’ salaries have declined relative to other occupations requiring a college degree since midcentury, there is no evidence to suggest that across-the-board raises would improve student outcomes enough to justify the expense, particularly if they were not accompanied by changes that would link teachers’ pay to their performance in the classroom. Moreover, the apparent success of the famous Perry Preschool Program and several other intensive early-childhood interventions is insufficient to justify an expansion of the less-intensive federal Head Start program.

While the evidence Krueger reviews does not prove his program will be effective, neither does it prove the opposite. This is hardly surprising. As Heckman and Carneiro argue elsewhere in the book, “A purely empirical approach to assessing policy proposals is never effective, because the data almost never dovetail with the proposed policies.” They go on to point out, however, that it is essential that analysts draw on “all available data and theory.”

Fortunately, elsewhere in the volume, Eric Hanushek provides key evidence that Krueger ignores: the United States has been reducing class size and otherwise increasing the resources invested in the public school system for more than four decades. The results of this large-scale “experiment” are far from ambiguous: while school resources, adjusted for inflation, have more than tripled since 1960, student achievement has hardly budged. Meanwhile, as noted above, high-school dropout rates have increased, and college graduation rates have been essentially flat.

This dismal record indicates the need to reassess the nation’s basic approach to improving education. Krueger’s failure even to acknowledge the need for such a reassessment, much less contribute to it, is disappointing.

A Fresh Approach

It is encouraging to find that Heckman and Carneiro begin their analysis with a discussion of the process by which individuals acquire skills. Their point of departure is the observation that skills acquired by a given time affect not only performance levels at that moment, but also the learning tools available going forward. For example, 1st graders who learned to read while in kindergarten not only excel on reading tests, but also are able to use books to learn new material more quickly. Likewise, students with a demanding 3rd-grade teacher may learn more as 4th graders because of work habits and study skills developed during the previous year.

The notion that human capital accumulation is a dynamic process has one crucial implication: delay is costly. All else being equal, education interventions for young students should be more cost-effective than interventions later on. It is no surprise, then, that most public job-training efforts have had disappointing results. As Heckman and Carneiro put it, such programs must “work with what families and schools supply and cannot remedy twenty years of neglect.” They would have the government exit the field of job training almost completely and rely on employers to make whatever investments in adult workers will be profitable.

In contrast, programs for very young students should be especially cost-effective. Here Heckman and Carneiro call attention to the evidence demonstrating that intensive intervention programs for disadvantaged preschoolers can be quite successful. They are quick to acknowledge the limitations of this research, in particular, the small number of programs that have been rigorously evaluated. Nonetheless, they are prepared to recommend that aggressive (and expensive) preschool interventions be central to any effort to enhance the skills of the American workforce.
Heckman and Carneiro also advocate the expansion of mentoring programs for disadvantaged teenagers, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters. But they maintain that these interventions should focus on noncognitive outcomes, such as social skills, work habits, and motivation, which are more malleable at that age than cognitive skills. In fact, they argue that the cognitive abilities of eight-year-olds are basically fixed, in the sense that their IQs correlate very closely with their IQs later in life. This is not to say that older students cannot improve their academic achievement, or that such improvements will not reflect the acquisition of valuable skills. Indeed, the long-term importance of skills that do not necessarily show up on standardized tests is an important secondary theme of Heckman and Carneiro’s essay.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence on this point comes from Heckman’s own research on the GED program (first published in the American Economic Review in 2001). It is well established that GED recipients do better in the job market than high school dropouts without a GED-a fact that has led some to conclude that the program is a success. But as Heckman has shown, GED recipients also tend to have stronger cognitive abilities than other dropouts; after all, they passed a test to earn their credential. Controlling for this difference, GED recipients earn considerably less than other dropouts. The same characteristics that lead students with considerable academic potential to leave high school before graduation apparently make them less-productive workers later in life.

The apparent implication is that the GED has become a mixed signal for employers: it identifies the smart but undisciplined individuals within the larger pool of dropouts. The relatively low wages GED recipients receive, controlling for their cognitive ability, show that discipline matters.

 

The Need for More Competition

Although Heckman and Carneiro devote markedly less space to the public school system than to the failure of job training programs, the potential effectiveness of early-childhood education, and the importance of noncognitive skills, they do document a “growing consensus” that schools’ material resources are only weakly related to their students’ earnings later in life. Simply increasing those resources is therefore unlikely to stimulate more disadvantaged students to attend college. In fact, they note, this pattern implies that the United States could be spending too much on students-at least given the incentives schools currently face.

Heckman and Carneiro would aim to change those incentives. Specifically, they call for families to be given more choice over the schools their children attend. The resulting competition among schools to attract students should force schools to reduce costs and increase quality. As Heckman and Carneiro point out, the evidence on the benefits of competition within education is limited-a necessary consequence of the lack of serious experimentation with meaningful choice-based reforms. Nonetheless, they make a persuasive case that “policies that promote such competition are much more likely to raise schooling performance than policies that increase schooling quality and do not change the organization of schools.” (Though this is an example of the sometimes wooden prose that can make this book a workout, what they mean is that it’s better to give schools more competition than more money.)

More puzzling is Heckman and Carneiro’s failure to discuss the most prominent current strategy for encouraging schools to put their resources to good use: test-based accountability. By the early 1990s, several states were experimenting with policies that reward or sanction schools based on their students’ performance on tests that are aligned with statewide standards. In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act mandated that all states adopt such policies as a condition for receiving federal aid. With each student in grades 3 through 8 now being tested annually in at least two subjects, and schools’ progress assessed largely on the basis of the results, there is no corner of the American public school system left untouched.

Heckman and Carneiro’s inattention to the accountability movement is consistent with the low regard in which they hold evidence from standardized tests and with their emphasis on the importance of noncognitive skills. Throughout the volume, they are critical of analysts who evaluate education interventions solely on the basis of “arbitrarily scaled test scores” and of “proposed systems for evaluating school performance” (read: No Child Left Behind) that take this same approach. Their enthusiasm for school choice suggests that they are more confident of parents’ ability to sense whether a school or teacher is effective and to act on that knowledge.

In my view, however, they are too quick in their otherwise thorough survey to dismiss the accountability movement’s potential to improve the productivity of America’s schools-even with respect to the outcomes they consider most important. While standardized tests are necessarily limited in scope, well-designed assessments can and do measure skills that are essential components of what we expect schools to impart. Moreover, the very process of preparing to take them can be expected to cultivate in students many of the same noncognitive skills Heckman has shown to be so important later in life, all the more if states go beyond the requirements of No Child Left Behind and create incentives for individual students to do well. Given that we do not yet know how to measure students’ discipline, motivation, and social skills directly, setting high expectations for skills we are able to measure and holding students accountable for meeting them may well be the best ways to improve all of the above.

Martin R. West is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and the research editor of Education Next.

The unabridged version of this article may be found at www.educationnext.org.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
By Lynne Truss
Gotham Books, 2004, $17.50; 240 pages.

The War Against Grammar
By David Mulroy
CrossCurrents, 2003, $20.00; 144 pages.

As reviewed by Diane Ravitch

When I was a high school student in Texas in the mid-1950s, the study of the English language was an important part of every school day. Every student took four years of English, and half of each year was devoted to the study of grammar, syntax, spelling, punctuation, and speech. The other half was reserved for the study of literature. In every subject, not just English, teachers corrected our work if we made mistakes in spelling or grammar.

Thirty years after my graduation, I returned to an event in Houston and met one of my favorite English teachers, who had recently retired as director of English education for the city schools. When I told her how much I, as a writer, appreciated our careful study of English all those years earlier, she was appalled. “Well,” said Mrs. Ruth Reeves, “it was just terrible imposing all those useless and mechanical exercises on you poor children.” I was as disappointed at her reaction as she was at mine.

Over the past 40 or so years, it has often seemed that the study of proper English had died a sad and unlamented death. During the 1960s, standard English came under attack, not only from academics who considered it “oppressive,” but also as a result of the celebrated rise of the youth culture, which cared not a fig for the King’s English or any other conventions. By the early 1970s, organizations representing English teachers and English professors were insisting that students had the “right to their own language” and that dialects deserved equal status with standard English. In one policy statement, a higher education committee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) insisted that a student’s reference to “them flowers” was just as acceptable as “those flowers.” Of course, the policy statements and proclamations by the professors and teachers were written in flawless English, but they nonetheless declared their independence from teaching it to their students (or “them students”). When the NCTE and the International Reading Association produced “national standards” in 1994, they neglected to include the study of correct English usage as part of their subject.

The consequences of this era of linguistic libertarianism (or Know-Nothingism) could be readily detected in the collapse of SAT verbal scores in the 1970s, the persistence of these low scores even as SAT math scores rebounded in the 1980s and 1990s, and the rise of remedial programs in reading and writing in universities, where professors became accustomed to receiving error-ridden papers from their poorly educated students. Eventually, it was no longer remarkable to see egregious errors in newspapers, books, and other printed material. To some extent, these errors were mitigated by the introduction of spell-check and even grammar checks in software programs. Even so, large numbers of students, probably a majority, have had no acquaintance with the study of their own language.

And now, much to the surprise of everyone, a book about punctuation topped the best-seller lists for many weeks in 2004. Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves was first a best-seller in England, where the author lives, and then in the United States. She describes herself as a stickler for correct punctuation, who flies into a rage when she sees anything in print, whether an advertisement or a street sign or an e-mail, in which apostrophes are forgotten or misplaced. Her rage is unbounded when she sees someone confuse “its” and “it’s.” Much of the book consists of examples of the ways in which punctuation can change the meaning of sentences or paragraphs, as in these two sentences:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.

British schools, like ours, went through a long sojourn into grammatical illiteracy. Until 1960, Truss writes, every British school routinely taught punctuation. Then, for more than a quarter of a century, during the “dark-side-of-the-moon years in British education-teachers upheld the view that grammar and spelling got in the way of self-expression.” Not until the adoption of the National Curriculum in Margaret Thatcher’s time were students expected to study their own language.

Why focus so relentlessly on punctuation? Truss says that without punctuation, “there is no reliable way of communicating meaning. Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart. Punctuation directs you how to read, in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play.”

Why did this book become a huge best-seller? It’s a mystery to me. Perhaps it is the book’s flippant, chatty tone. One hopes it is because the public is fed up with the academic profession’s indifference to correct English.

It must be said, as well, that Truss’s book contains errors of punctuation and grammar. Her use of commas and semi-colons is maddeningly inconsistent. She writes of a “greengrocers’ punctuation,” when she is referring to a single greengrocer. She is “a-buzz with ideas,” even though the word “abuzz” has no hyphen. Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, said, “Either Truss needed a copy-editor or her copy-editor needed a copy-editor.”

David Mulroy’s book did not reach the best-seller list. In fact, when I checked Amazon.com, the book was ranked 471,437. Yet The War Against Grammar is a far more consequential and far more interesting book than Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The latter has verve and sass, but Mulroy’s book has important things to say to American teachers and parents. In 1996, Mulroy, a classics scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, attended a public hearing about the state’s academic standards and innocently suggested that all high school seniors should be required to identify the eight parts of speech in a selection of normal prose. He thought it a “modest and reasonable suggestion.” To his surprise, he was plunged into controversy, supported by parents, but strongly opposed by pedagogical experts, who informed him that the NCTE disparaged the value of any grammar instruction.

After this disturbing discovery, Mulroy began to research the reasons why English teachers have become opponents of grammar, a proposition that he would previously have thought to be an oxymoron. He repeatedly encountered the view in NCTE publications that “decades of research” or “many studies” have shown that formal grammar is not only useless but also harmful to students’ self-esteem and even their mental health! Those who were hostile to grammar instruction cast themselves as progressives and saw proponents of instruction in grammar as rigid traditionalists. These negative views toward grammar, Mulroy writes, became dogma in the nation’s schools of education.

Mulroy’s goal in dissecting “the war against grammar” is to encourage the teaching of grammar in grades four through six. He believes that this will set a strong foundation for all future studies of language, for understanding great literature, and for developing the capacity for eloquent self-expression. He can’t make his case empirically, but his case is powerful on its face. As he says, “Questioning the value of basic grammar is like asking whether farmers should know the names of their crops and animals.”

Mulroy’s brief for grammar instruction is powerful and important. If I had the power, I would place it on the required reading list of every future teacher.

Mulroy’s book also contains numerous lapses, mainly missing words, as in “The body of the report has been long forgotten, but its summary judgment on the value of instruction grammar [sic] has been frequently quoted in NCTE publications.” Or, “No matter how well attuned you may [sic] to the secret harmonies of nature.” Or, referring to a book written half a century ago, “It was a valuable contributions [sic] to the development of modern linguistics.”

Anyone who reads books, magazines, and newspapers with any degree of attention to correct use of language is aware of the pervasiveness of poor copyediting. It is in such places that we can see clearly the corrosive results of the accumulated influence of the “war against grammar.”

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

Leave No Child Behind: Preparing Today’s Youth for Tomorrow’s World
By James P. Comer, M.D.
Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Yale University Press, 2004, $28.00; 327 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Leave No Child Behind is the most recent and perhaps the fullest account of Professor James Comer’s approach to the improvement of schools and education. All of the competing models for school improvement that have been developed and in various degrees implemented in the past few decades have distinctive features, but the School Development Program (SDP), or the Comer process, as it is also called, is unique: it is apparently indifferent to specifics of curriculum.

But is it after all not a distinctive approach to curriculum-traditional or progressive, intensive or relaxed, free or prescribed, pluralistic or monistic-that characterizes the various competitive models for enhancing school achievement?

So how do we define or characterize the Comer process? Some years ago, a proposed model for school achievement labeled Atlas, which brought together the approaches of Theodore Sizer, Howard Gardner, the Educational Development Corporation, and Comer’s SDP, received funding in a competitive process to develop the model and implement it in various schools. It was easy enough, from their works and products, to describe what the first three approaches were, and curriculum loomed large in all of them. But I became perplexed when I tried to understand the content of the Comer approach.

To enhance learning, Comer does not recommend any particular content as much as “relationships, relationships, relationships.” “Good relationships among and between the people that influence the quality of child life, largely home and school, make good child and adolescent rearing and development possible. Good relationships make student, adult, and organizational development possible, which in turn makes a strong academic focus possible.” But note how far down the line the “academic focus” comes in this characterization of his approach. Indeed, as Dr. Comer takes us through his interesting and varied experiences in trying to improve schooling and education for children who are generally at the bottom in school achievement, we discover that, in contrast to some other models, his does not aim at or expect any rapid improvement in achievement. I should emphasize at the beginning that Comer is not indifferent to achievement; it is a key objective of his emphasis on relationships and psychological development. He knows achievement is essential to functioning in today’s society, and the book has an extensive chapter on the ramifications of failure in school achievement for life, health, and income. But he knows it will take a while to see any improvement in achievement as he builds his foundation of relationships.

From Indiana to the Ivy League

Dr. Comer began working with two New Haven schools in 1968. He came from a working-class black family in East Chicago, Indiana, earned medical and public health degrees, worked in various settings as a child psychiatrist, and had pondered problems of dysfunctional child development. He leapt at the opportunity offered by Yale’s Child Study Center to go into two elementary schools in New Haven on a Ford Foundation program. “The schools were thirty-second and thirty-third out of thirty-three in the city on standardized achievement tests. They had the worst attendance. The student behavior problems were overwhelming. The almost completely new staff brought in for the project was in disarray from the first day; almost all were gone by the end of the year. My first reaction was that we had to change the environment; children could not learn and develop in that chaotic situation.” After five years, one of the schools was dropped and replaced by another. “Eventually the two schools in our project achieved the third and fourth highest-level mathematics and language arts test scores and the best attendance in the city.” But it took seven years.

Building on the foundation of all he and his associates have learned over the years-they have since worked in almost a thousand schools-Dr. Comer writes that when they begin with a dysfunctional school they might expect improvement in five years. It is a rare administrator or public that is that relaxed in its expectations.

But just what do they do during those years of building relationships? One would like to know more than one learns from this book, but that would undoubtedly take detailed logs of daily actions and problems. The Comer process begins with a committee-teachers, administrators, parents, social agency workers, and, at the high-school level (which Dr. Comer does not discuss in this book), students. The committee considers ways of improving the school, and these could be very varied indeed. But the key, as Dr. Comer presents it, is that the members of the committee must not find fault with any of the participants (though there would seem to be much to find fault with), and they must operate by consensus. One has the impression that if this condition is not possible, the Comer group will simply withdraw. The process does not and cannot operate with conflict. It is very far from the Alinsky method or some other social change processes that look for and find a mobilizing grievance against authority. One hears little in this book about school bureaucracies and the difficulties they create for education reformers.

Dr. Comer does not think much of some of the approaches that are popular with many of the readers of this journal. He does not think school choice will do much, as many believe, for poor minority children. He does not think much of “merit-pay and high-stakes accountability, or -reward and punishment,’ to solve education problems.” One could enter into an argument with him on the basis of various studies, but Dr. Comer would not be easily moved. His approach is clinical, and one suspects he would be more convinced by what he sees in a school than by a proper scientific study comparing it with others. But in the end, as I have noted, yes, he would be in full agreement that there must be a payoff in academic achievement, and that achievement tests show whether there is such a payoff.

But what do they actually do in Comer process schools, aside from providing “vital environments and good experiences”? The first reference in this book to anything one might call a curriculum comes on page 150, where we learn of the development of a “Social Skills Curriculum for Inner-City Children” in 1977. “The goal was to better prepare students to be successful in school by introducing them to activity areas where they could learn and develop the skills needed to be successful in life.” Dr. Comer thinks highly of this curriculum, but there are no further details. The first reference to anything that one could call an academic curriculum comes on page 196, where Comer describes an “Essentials of Literacy” program. The six essential elements are “phonics, story sense, listening, guided reading, vocabulary, and writing.” The program “provides students with a safe, nurturing, highly stimulating, and rewarding environment in which to develop their literacy skills.” It seems to stand aside from the regular school curriculum.

The SDP has many success stories to tell, as well as cases where it had to withdraw from the school or where administrators and principals changed or abandoned support. The story is not very different from other school-reform models. Its successes are based on committed and energetic individuals and the inspiring role of Dr. Comer himself. Some claim to be proof against individual variation and effectiveness, but that would be far from Dr. Comer’s approach. Clearly this is an interesting man, with a program that has been attractive to many schools. One would still like to know just what they do, and after this book this reader, at least, is still somewhat at sea.

-Nathan Glazer is a professor emeritus of education at Harvard University and the author of, among other books, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Harvard University Press, 1998).

With the re-election of George W. Bush and the appointment of Margaret Spellings as his new secretary of education, many are wondering whether now is the time to revisit No Child Left Behind. The historic law, passed by Congress with broad, bipartisan support and signed by the President in January of 2002, introduced significant new systems of accountability into American education. While the law continues to have broad backing, school boards, administrators, and analysts from across the political spectrum have raised questions about many of its provisions.

“We’ve made great progress in our schools,” said President Bush, as he nominated Spellings last November 17. But even the president, the law’s strongest supporter, said at the time, “There is more work to do.”

Education Next invited four leading analysts to share their opinions about what has been learned in the three years since NCLB was enacted. John Chubb, a member of the Koret Task Force and our editorial board, calls for changes in the definitions of Adequate Yearly Progress. Robert Linn, a professor of education and former editor of the Journal of Educational Measurement, believes that the law sets “unrealistically high” standards. And Kati Haycock and Ross Wiener of the Education Trust caution against too much legislative tinkering, preferring administrative action instead. “Right now,” they argue, “energy should be focused on making NCLB work better.”

We began by asking them to state, in general,

Q: Is this law fundamentally good for America?

John Chubb (JC): Yes. With the enactment of NCLB, the United States may have taken a historic stride toward improving American education. NCLB is not like any federal education law before it. It sets ambitious goals for what all students in America will learn and authorizes radical measures to achieve them.

Robert Linn (RL): The law has much that is worthy of praise, particularly its emphasis on all children and the special attention it gives to improving learning for children who have been too often ignored or left behind in the past. The emphasis on closing the achievement gap is certainly praiseworthy. Other positives include the encouragement given to states to adopt ambitious subject-matter standards and to enhance teacher quality.

Kati Haycock and Ross Wiener (H/W): The bipartisan coalition that passed NCLB demanded that states pick up the pace of reform-that they take their own standards more seriously, provide more honest information to the public on progress, and tackle the deeply inequitable provision of education within their borders. These demands were absolutely necessary and long overdue, and they should be allowed a fair chance to work before being significantly modified.

Q: How does NCLB differ from its predecessors?

JC: NCLB is based on principles that are fundamentally different from those that have historically driven public education. First, there’s accountability. Schools are required to ensure that all of their students achieve proficiency in reading and math according to a set schedule. If they don’t, they face sanctions. The important difference is that schools are accountable not for delivering education to students, the historical norm, but for actually educating them-and to high academic standards.

Second, transparency. NCLB requires states to make public the scores of every public school on annual assessments for all students and for major economic, racial, ethnic, language, and special education subgroups. The law provides a window into school performance that parents, citizens, policy-makers, and the media have never had.

And third, choice. Students whose schools need improvement under NCLB are given the opportunity to transfer to better public schools and to receive tutoring from outside the school system. Disadvantaged students are given a power that middle- and upper-income students have always had: to choose a better school in a different neighborhood (by moving) or to hire a private tutor. NCLB thereby injects an element of the free market into an education system that has been organized strictly on the basis of direct government provision.

H/W: You have to consider how much had changed between passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 and Congress’s consideration of NCLB in 2000. On the one hand, education had become vastly more important to our economic prosperity and good citizenship; on the other hand, academically, the United States had fallen behind many of our international competitors.

Additionally, you have to remember that Congress had already asked the states to step up the pace on these issues. The 1994 reauthorization of ESEA represented a paradigm shift: No longer would the government ask states and districts to account specifically for how each federal dollar was spent; instead, it would ask for demonstrable results for students of color and students living in poverty.

Far too often, though, states fell significantly short in developing the necessary assessment, accountability, and public reporting systems. Most school systems continued to perform at a level that was “good enough” on overall averages, allowing schools to hide the underperformance of some groups beneath school averages. Indeed, by the time Congress readied itself to reauthorize the law in 2000, the average reading and math skills of the nation’s African-American and Latino high school seniors were identical to those of white 8th graders. So Congress acted on this information and demanded that states and school districts assert ownership over their low-performing schools and take responsibility for helping them to improve.

RL: I agree. The biggest difference between NCLB and earlier versions of the law is the specificity and stringency of the accountability system that states are required to put in place. All students in grades 3 through 8, and in high school, must be tested each year in reading and mathematics; intermediate achievement goals must be established. The student body as a whole, and each of several subgroups, must meet the annual achievement targets. Failure to do so invokes sanctions that become increasingly severe with continued failure to meet the targets.

 

 

Q: Is it working?

JC: The evidence that accountability works is already strong. As can be seen in Figure 1, states that adopted accountability systems during the 1990s made significantly greater gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) than states that did not adopt such systems.

During the first full year of NCLB’s implementation, 2002-03, the largest school systems in the United States-and prime targets for NCLB-nearly doubled their average rate of improvement in reading and math combined. The Council of Great City Schools, which represents large urban school systems, reports major test-score improvements and attributes them to NCLB.

H/W: This country needed to ratchet up the focus on inequality in public education, and in that important respect the law is already working: NCLB has brought increased attention to achievement gaps and has ushered in accountability systems that make closing these gaps a top priority.

Accountability systems, of course, don’t teach students-educators do. But results from state assessment systems in the first two years of implementation provide heartening evidence that more and more schools are stepping up to the challenges created by this new form of accountability. Our recent analysis of elementary achievement data from every state with comparable publicly reported data for the past three years documents that almost every state is getting more students up to and above the state’s standards and that a sizable majority are narrowing gaps between groups.

RL: The NCLB focus on students with low achievement seems to have had some short-term positive effects. The percentage of schools meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) targets increased in 2003-04 from the year before in most states where the results have been reported (as of early September 2004).

In many instances, however, the gains in the number of schools making the AYP is attributable to changes that some states were allowed to make in reporting criteria, such as increasing the minimum number of students in a subgroup for separate reporting or using statistical techniques that give the school the benefit of the doubt when student performance is close to the annual achievement target.

H/W: Nevertheless, it is particularly encouraging that some of the most impressive gap closing is occurring in states-like Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Florida-that already had established standards-based accountability systems. These results suggest that NCLB’s focus on historically underserved groups is paying dividends. To be sure, it is far too early to reach definitive conclusions about NCLB: at least several more years of state data, together with 2005 NAEP results, will be necessary. And clearly the pace of change in most states is not yet sufficient. But surely these results are too promising to abandon this approach now.

Q: Is NCLB too rigid? Does it subvert state accountability systems?

RL: Several problems need to be addressed. The most serious is that the expectations for student achievement have been set unrealistically high, and as a consequence, almost all schools will fall short of the AYP targets within the next few years unless major changes are made in the definition of AYP. Performance goals mandated by the accountability system should be ambitious, but they also should be realistically obtainable with sufficient effort.

H/W: NCLB improves upon most state accountability plans, which relied on growth targets that set lower goals for lower-performing schools. This practice institutionalized achievement gaps. If we learned anything during the 1990s, it was that public education will not take responsibility for educating all students to state standards until schools operate under an accountability system that expects this outcome.

RL: At the very least, there needs to be existence of proof. That is, there should be evidence that the goal does not exceed what has previously been achieved by the students in the highest-performing schools. For example, if the best-performing 10 percent of schools had rates of improvement averaging 3 percent a year for the previous five years for students at proficient or above, then AYP for that state’s schools might be defined as a 3 percent increase in students who are proficient or above each year. That would be a great challenge to the vast majority of schools, but might be a target that is within reach with sufficient effort.

JC: It is important to keep in mind that NCLB, contrary to popular argument, has provided a very fair and flexible definition of what constitutes 100 percent proficiency. The law provides ample allowance for students in exceptional circumstances-for example, students with serious special education needs or non-English-speaking students newly arrived in the country-to satisfy alternative standards or to proceed at a slower pace and not be part of the calculation of full proficiency.

The key impediment to achieving the bold objectives of NCLB is the law’s reluctance to interfere with traditional state and local powers and prerogatives. The balance between state and nation needs to be altered, but every level of government retains a crucial responsibility in achieving universal proficiency for every young American.

H/W: A focus on incremental growth had labeled schools as successful even when very few students could read or do math on grade level. States said everything was fine, while underserved students were missing out on a quality education. So finally, Congress demanded accountability systems that level with the public. To be a good school now, under NCLB, a school has to be good for all groups of students it serves. That’s a positive development.

Q: Is it or isn’t it an unfunded mandate?

JC: Not at all. Since 2001 federal support for elementary and secondary education has increased nearly two-thirds, the largest increase in history. With NCLB, the federal government has dramatically increased its financial support for public schools while asking those schools to be accountable for what they have always said is their mission-to ensure every child a decent education.
Although it is often asserted that NCLB is underfunded, that’s a red herring. The direct costs of implementing NCLB’s requirements are more than covered by the substantial funding increases that followed its enactment. This plain fact was well documented by a Government Accounting Office study in May 2004. The indirect costs of NCLB are highly debatable, for they are nothing more or less than the costs of public education that states and districts are otherwise expected to provide.

H/W: Both politically and substantively, we would be better off if the federal government increased NCLB funding (especially if bigger investments were targeted to improving assessments). But this doesn’t make NCLB an unfunded mandate. NCLB requires states to set goals, measure progress, publicly report the results, and develop plans for improvement. Whether or not states make any progress meeting the goals, they will continue to receive their federal funding.

Most of the costs that are ascribed to NCLB, such as attracting and retaining more qualified teachers and improving low-performing schools, aren’t costs of complying with the law. It’s useful to reverse the analysis and ask whether, in the absence of NCLB, states would have less responsibility to educate all students up to state standards. Some will argue that states would have fewer tests or less public reporting, or they would offer less school choice or fewer supplemental services. Yet these are the costs most directly borne by NCLB.

 

 

Q: Is the AYP provision too onerous?

JC: Only two years into the law’s implementation, it is clear that NCLB is breaking education china-if not a new education path. More than one in every ten public schools is facing sanctions for failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for at least two years’ running. Nearly a third are at risk of sanctions, having failed to make AYP once.

Certainly, the major goal of NCLB is audacious: to have all public school students proficient in reading and math by 2014. But that goal is morally right and-again, contrary to popular argument-attainable. The median state has set proficiency standards about midway between the NAEP’s basic and proficient levels, a standard that half of all U.S. students already meet. It is not unreasonable to ask America’s schools to help the other half of today’s youth to meet these expectations within a decade.

H/W: The animating principle behind NCLB’s accountability system is that public education can teach, and has a responsibility to teach, almost every student how to read and do math up to a respectable level defined by the state. There is abundant evidence from schools all over the country that this is possible. The AYP system has been tweaked to be more sensitive to some of the challenges facing public schools, for instance, in the way students with disabilities and English-language learners are accounted for and in the method for calculating participation rates.

RL: Although the use of state-level NAEP results is not specified in the law, it is reasonable to think of those results as providing some kind of benchmark for state assessments. In 2003 no state or large district had anything close to 100 percent of its students performing at the basic level, much less the proficient level at either grade 4 or grade 8 in either reading or mathematics. (See Figure 2.)

Furthermore, the law requires an unrealistically rapid rate of improvement. This becomes apparent when the required changes are compared with a variety of different types of evidence, including historical data on change in student performance on state testing programs or on the NAEP. In mathematics, for example, the percentage of students at the proficient level or above on the NAEP would have to have an annual rate of improvement between 2003 and 2014 that is almost four times as fast at grade 4 and over seven times as fast at grade 8 as the rate actually realized between 1996 and 2003. Such rapid acceleration of achievement trends is unrealistic.

In reading, the rate of increase in the percentage of students who are proficient or above is an even more unrealistic jump. At grade 4, 31 percent of the students scored at the proficient level or above on the 2003 reading assessment compared with 29 percent in 1998. At grade 8, the percentage proficient or above on the reading assessments was 32 in both 1998 and 2003. These essentially flat trend lines in the percentage of students who are proficient or above in reading at both grades 4 and 8 would have to suddenly accelerate and maintain that previously unseen rate of improvement for the next decade.

H/W: Predictions that many or most schools will fail to meet their AYP goals in the coming years are flawed because they are projections based on past practice, which NCLB emphatically is intended to change. Unfortunately, we have never provided the conditions that would allow us to answer conclusively whether all students can be taught to high standards.

This much we know from current conditions: we cannot educate all students up to high standards by giving the least resources to the most vulnerable students.

RL: In 2003, 21.3 percent of Missouri’s grade 8 students scored at the proficient level or above on the Missouri mathematics assessment. The corresponding figure on the grade 8 NAEP mathematics assessment was 28 percent. The Missouri three-year trend of percentage proficient or above on its own grade 8 mathematics assessment is relatively flat (21.1 percent in 2002, 21.3 percent in 2003, and 22.9 percent in 2004), yet somehow that percentage is supposed to reach 100 by 2014.

California provides an example of a state where the proficiency standards are somewhat more lenient than the NAEP standards. Thirty-one percent of California’s grade 8 students scored at the proficient level or above on the California English-Language Arts Standards Test in 2003, whereas only 22 percent of California’s grade 8 students were at the proficient level or above on the 2003 NAEP reading assessment. The percentages of grade 8 students scoring at or above proficient on the California English-language arts test in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 were 32, 32, 31, and 33, respectively. That trend does not augur well for reaching 100 percent by 2014.

Q: Is it a good idea to let states set their own standards? Won’t these decline as states strive to ease their failure rates?

RL: NCLB requires states to set “challenging student academic achievement standards.” The problem is that states set the standards, and they have done so in ways that vary greatly in stringency. Some states have set lenient standards, so that 80 percent or more of their students perform at the proficient level or above, while other states have set such stringent standards that less than a quarter of their students perform at that level.

JC: States have used the discretion provided them by NCLB to set achievement proficiency standards that vary widely in difficulty (and worthiness), that in some cases have begun to decline, and, yes, that are likely to foster a “race to the bottom,” driving academic standards further downward as 2014 approaches rather than establishing and sustaining the high standards intended by the law.
More disturbing, some states have lowered their definitions of proficiency in response to NCLB. It is very likely, without changes in NCLB, that more states will weaken their standards to meet rising performance expectations.

H/W: States that have lowered their standards in response to NCLB constitute a small minority. Most states recognize that if they lower their standards, then they lower their expectations of how much students will learn.

The ramifications of continuing to undereducate our citizenry provide pressure to maintain and even raise our standards. Still, there is a danger that states will lower standards rather than step up to their responsibilities to help more schools and students to meet them. Mandatory participation in NAEP helps some by providing an external benchmark (albeit an imperfect one) for comparing the rigor of state standards. But policymakers at all levels should explore additional ways to ensure that standards for student learning are adequate to meet the needs of society.

JC: Some states have used the discretion provided by NCLB to set intermediate proficiency targets (what the law calls Annual Measurable Objectives, or AMOs) that spare most schools from any improvement efforts for several years. This practice only delays the need for major achievement gains by all schools. If this prospective train wreck is allowed to happen, the nation will have little alternative but to ignore NCLB or indefinitely delay its implementation.

RL: The differences in stringency have essentially no relationship to differences in the performance of students in the various states on NAEP. (See Figure 2.)

Consider, for example, the grade 8 mathematics results for Colorado and Missouri. NAEP scores show that Colorado students performed slightly better than those in Missouri in 2003 (66 percent below proficiency for Colorado compared with 72 percent for Missouri). On their own assessments, however, the percentage below proficiency in 2003 was 33 percent in Colorado compared with 86 percent in Missouri. The difference between the states’ scores clearly has more to do with the higher NCLB standards in Missouri than with a real difference in students’ achievement in the two states.

A consequence of this huge variability in stringency of state standards is that, in the context of NCLB, the word proficient has become meaningless.

JC: To encourage states to set their academic standards high and avoid a race to the bottom, all state proficiency standards should be calibrated using NAEP as a common yardstick. Specifically, NAEP should be used to rank all state proficiency standards against NAEP’s rigorous proficiency standard, and these rankings should be made public.

In addition, states that have set their standards above the median of all states should be given extra time (proportional to the amount by which their standards exceed the median) beyond 2014 to meet those standards for 100 percent of their students. Following this recommendation, states below the median would be encouraged to lift their standards by the public exposure of their low standards and states above the median would be encouraged, by extra time, to keep their standards high.

Q: Were NCLB’s architects right to focus on “levels” of achievement rather than on student gains?

H/W: If students are far behind grade level, they need an accountability system that asks adults to accelerate those students’ learning. Those students need to catch up, not just move a little from where they were before. Replacing AYP with an accountability system based exclusively on growth means that some schools won’t ever be expected to teach all of their students the fundamental skills of reading and math.

Moreover, NCLB does credit schools for making real progress. The law’s “safe harbor” provision allows schools to make AYP even if they have not met the statewide goals for that year, as long as the school reduces the percent not proficient by 10 percent from the previous year. For example, a school makes AYP if it goes from 60 percent below the proficiency standard to just 54 percent below the standard, a mere 6 percent. Since 6 percent divided by 60 percent is 10 percent, it meets the “safe harbor” requirement, a level of progress that is significant and attainable without being too ambitious. It is also important to recognize that some states, including Massachusetts and New York, use an index system for calculating AYP determinations. In addition to focusing on students at or above proficiency, these index systems give schools credit for bringing students up from below basic to the basic level of achievement.

RL: If the percentage of students who are above a “cut score” on a state assessment is to be used, the cut score should be more meaningful than the state-established proficient levels, which lack any semblance of a common meaning across states.

There are several approaches that would be preferable to reporting results in terms of percent proficient or above. One simple approach would be to define the standard, or cut score, on a state assessment as equal to the median score in a base year, presumably 2002. The percentage of students scoring above that constant cut score would then be used to monitor improvement in achievement, with target increases set at reasonable levels, for example, 3 percent a year. With a target increase of 3 percent a year, the proportion of students scoring above the 2002 median would need to increase from 50 percent in 2002 to 86 percent in 2014. That would represent a gigantic improvement in the achievement of the nation’s students, but might not be totally unrealistic. And it surely is not as poorly defined as 100 percent proficient or above, given the huge state-to-state variability in the meaning of proficient.

JC: A modest policy adjustment that takes advantage of statistical forecasting techniques could alleviate current concerns. To make statistical forecasts of how schools and their subgroups are progressing, achievement would be projected using each school’s current and recent data, estimating the trajectory of progress that schools and subgroups would follow if established trends continue. Schools that fall significantly below the trajectory needed to reach 100 percent by 2014 would not make AYP and would thus become subject to NCLB’s accountability provisions. This procedure would remedy the arbitrariness of state AMOs and subgroup sizes, replacing them with consistent measures. It would also give all schools an incentive to help all students achieve immediately-and avoid the train wreck of mass failure now down the tracks.

Q: Is it fair to penalize an entire school when a single group of students underperforms?

H/W: Contrary to conventional wisdom and the phrasing of this question, the school improvement process is not designed to penalize schools. Indeed, there is a set-aside of federal funds to which underperforming schools are entitled and an expectation that states and districts will augment these funds with additional resources and technical assistance to help schools improve.

RL: A positive feature of NCLB is its emphasis on groups of low-achieving students who have too often been ignored in the past. Disaggregated reporting of results provides a mechanism for monitoring the degree to which improving the achievement of these underserved groups of students is being achieved.

The problem, however, is that while schools can fail to meet AYP in many different ways, they can meet it in only one way. Schools with a sufficient number of students in each of several targeted groups are less likely to meet AYP targets than schools of the same size and similar performance but with a homogeneous student body (such as students who belong to one racial or ethnic group). For example, 3 out of 4 of the 937 California schools reporting results for two subgroups made their AYP target in 2003, compared with only 39 percent of the 291 schools reporting results for six subgroups.

A straightforward fix of the overidentification of schools not meeting AYP would be to change the safe harbor provision. If a subgroup of students in a school falls short of the AYP target, the school can still meet AYP if 1) the percentage of students who score below the proficient level is decreased by 10 percent from the year before, and 2) there is improvement for that subgroup on other indicators.

Changing the safe harbor provision from a 10 percent reduction in below proficient to a 3 percent reduction would go a long way toward solving the problems caused by the multiple hurdles created by subgroup reporting, while ensuring improvement in performance of all subgroups.

H/W: If a school has not met its goals with just one group of students, improvement plans can be focused on serving that group in the future. Local educators can distinguish between schools that missed their goals by a little versus schools that are far behind in student achievement.

The real anxiety over these provisions is that they will label good schools as bad. We need an accountability system that identifies every way in which our schools need to improve, but we also need a better way of communicating about it. The American public is capable of handling the truth. We need education leaders who can explain the precise problems facing their schools and how they will fix them.

Q: Will the “highly qualified teacher” provision do more good or harm?

JC: Schools are accountable for ensuring that every student is taught by a teacher who is highly qualified to teach his or her subject area. As basic a requirement as this might seem to be, it has never been demanded in America’s schools.

H/W: For decades, we have accepted high levels of out-of-field teaching as inevitable and have failed to change policies that systematically assign our weakest teachers to our weakest students. Congress exhibited great leadership by calling on states to improve teacher quality and to address the inequitable distribution of teacher talent. However, states retain tremendous discretion in how they determine who is qualified to teach, and many states have papered over their problems rather than acknowledge and confront them.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Education has not focused adequate attention on making sure these provisions were implemented as Congress intended. For example, the Department of Education has never reviewed the plans meant to “ensure that poor and minority children are not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, unqualified, or out of field teachers.” And there is little evidence that states are complying with the obligation to address these issues.

JC: NCLB’s mandate that (by 2005-06) all public school students must be taught by “highly qualified teachers” who are proficient in their subject areas is being satisfied in disingenuous ways that do not in fact ensure that teachers know their content areas. Some states have used their discretion under NCLB to adopt tests for new teachers and alternative requirements for veterans that are far too easy. Unless this portion of NCLB is modified, the law will not significantly improve the quality of teachers.

H/W: The irony is that the teacher quality provisions represent the support side of the law. There are no sanctions other than public reporting for failure to meet the goals. Research is clear that raising teacher quality is imperative for raising student achievement, especially in high-poverty and high-minority schools. If the teacher quality provisions can be said to have caused any harm, it is that states have abused their discretion to define away problems rather than addressing them.

JC: The definition of highly qualified teacher should be revised to include any teacher who possesses a bachelor’s degree and one of these three additional attributes: 1) a college major in the subject being taught; 2) passage of a subject competency test provided or approved by an independent national agency on teacher certification; or 3) demonstration through a statistically sound value-added methodology that one’s teaching has significantly raised pupil scores on state proficiency tests.

There is a dual purpose here: first, to attract more promising candidates to teaching by concentrating on skills directly related to student performance and providing alternatives to time-consuming and often ineffective traditional certification; and, second, to retain effective veteran teachers by focusing directly on their knowledge of subject matter and their teaching effectiveness and to weed out ineffective ones who are holding down positions better given to new, highly qualified teachers.

 

 

Q: What’s the role of choice in NCLB?

JC: The major new engine in NCLB for raising student achievement is choice: the right of students in faltering schools to choose a new school or private tutoring. These promising strategies for getting students better education are being resisted by the school districts responsible for implementing them. Unless this situation changes, these powerful forces for improvement, equality, and opportunity will fall well short of their potential, leaving NCLB with far fewer chances of succeeding. (See Figure 3.)

RL: In many instances choice is not an option for students attending schools in need of improvement because there are no schools eligible to receive students within the district. While NCLB encourages districts to accept transfer students from other districts, it does not require them to do so. Moreover, even when the option is available, it is seldom used. According to a report of the Harvard Civil Rights project, requests for transfers were made by only 1.9 percent of the 127,451 eligible students in Chicago in 2002-03. The corresponding figure in New York City was 2.3 percent. Just under half of the requests were granted in Chicago, while in New York City slightly fewer than a quarter of the requests were granted.

H/W: Choosing a higher-performing school is likely to benefit some students. For example, a Chicago Sun Times analysis documented that students who transferred in Chicago accelerated their learning in their new schools, and research from the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights suggests that the choice provisions are giving students of color opportunities to attend less racially isolated schools.
That said, most families don’t want to change schools; they want their neighborhood schools to change. The overwhelming majority of America’s young people will continue to be educated-or not-in their local public schools. The school improvement process, which requires a written plan in which the state and school district commit to providing additional support and assistance, has the potential to drive much more significant reform than the choice provisions.

Q: Do we keep NCLB, change it, or scrap it?

RL: NCLB has the potential to make substantial contributions to the achievement of students who have lagged behind and too often been ignored in the past.
Some features of the accountability system, however, need to be modified. The most important modification is to set reasonable performance targets for judging Adequate Yearly Progress. The need for more realistic goals applies to both the safe harbor provision of the law and the annual performance targets.

The current definitions of proficient achievement established by states lack any semblance of a common meaning. Alternatives to defining proficiency should be considered that would provide more meaningful and comparable achievement targets.

JC: Modifications are indeed warranted, and I have already mentioned several needed changes, such as making proficiency standards consistent, using NAEP as a guide, replacing AMOs, and revising the definition of a highly qualified teacher.

But these changes are not the ones most often bandied about in policy circles or recommended by interest groups on Capitol Hill. We hear talk about relaxing AYP standards or spending more money. Such recommendations undermine the law’s basic purpose. They will not save NCLB; they will gut it. This is unfortunate because NCLB deserves saving. The law has the potential to improve public education more than any federal education initiative since Brown vs. Board of Education more than 50 years ago. While Brown set the historic precedent for equality in education, NCLB could set the precedent for quality.

H/W: Commentators from across the spectrum have remarked on Americans’ propensity for championing and then dismissing education reform strategies in very short order. We are in danger of repeating this unfortunate pattern with NCLB. Instead of stretching ourselves to meet the new challenge and carefully reexamining our practices-everything from resource allocation to the preparation and support of classroom teachers-far too many education and policy leaders are deriding the demands of the law as unattainable and calling for immediate relief.

Since NCLB was enacted, we have done more to acknowledge public education’s problems than we have done to solve them. Right now, energy should be focused on making NCLB work better. That’s the only way we’ll know what genuinely merits modification when the law is up for reauthorization in 2006-07.

John Chubb is chief education officer at Edison Schools, a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, and co-author of Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.

Robert Linn is professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder and codirector of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing.

Kati Haycock is director of the Education Trust and former executive vice president of the Children’s Defense Fund.

Ross Wiener is policy director of the Education Trust.

 

With Chisel or Jackhammer? A Public School Pragmatist Takes on Education When President George Bush nominated Margaret Spellings as his second-term secretary of education last November, he said, “I have relied on her intellect and judgment throughout my career in public service.  She has my complete trust.” The question on most people’s minds then became, Margaret Who? The 47-year-old mother of two (stepmother of two more) had directed the White House Domestic Policy Council for the previous four years. Nonetheless, she was so far below the Beltway radar that Karl Rove, who has a reputation for controlling that radar (and a great deal more) as the president’s chief political strategist, described Spellings as “the most influential woman in Washington that you’ve never heard of.” (Rove also volunteered that, in the 1980s, he had once asked Spellings out on a date-and she had said no.) It came as another surprise, though, even to some education watchers, that the unheralded Michigan native (she moved with her family to Houston when she was in the 3rd grade) played a principal role in the creation of the historic No Child Left Behind law. In fact, Spellings, a 1979 political science and journalism graduate of the University of Houston, has been an education advisor to Bush since 1994, when he first ran for governor of Texas. She was a lobbyist for the Texas Association of School Boards when Rove brought her onto the gubernatorial campaign. During Bush’s six years as Texas’s chief executive, Spellings was a senior advisor in charge of education policy and oversaw the state’s assessment and accountability system reform. She used the Texas program as a model in drafting No Child Left Behind. “The old way was to mask the problems of underachievement and move kids through the system,” Spellings has said. “NCLB moves us from denial into confronting reality.” Rolling up her sleeves to join Bush’s cabinet, Spellings confronts her own tough reality, that of leading the nation’s education reform movement as it struggles to become the new education establishment. “She is very bright, articulate, does her homework, and does not like to waste time,” says one education observer who has known Spellings since her Texas School Boards days. “The key thing to remember is that she was a statehouse lobbyist on education and a pragmatist, not a manager, education bureaucrat, or academic policy type. And she does value public education.” Some school choice advocates worry that Spellings does not share their agenda. But for NCLB proponents and critics alike, it seems especially fitting that the woman who helped make education history should assume the crucial role in determining whether that law will produce a lasting education monument. Undaunted, Spellings says, “I am a product of our public schools. I believe in America’s schools, what they mean to each child, to each future president or future domestic policy advisor, and to the strength of our great country.” -Morgan R. Goatley

It is an odd mark of our time that the first question people ask about character education is whether public schools should be doing it at all. The question is odd because it invites us to imagine that schooling, which occupies about a third of a child’s waking time, somehow could be arranged to play no role in the formation of a child’s character.

Try to imagine a school that did manage to stay out of the character education business, refraining from promoting virtues such as honesty and respectfulness. Even if the school survived the chaos that would ensue, could we expect that the character of its students wouldn’t be affected (adversely, in this case) by the message that such an abdication of responsibility would impart? For better or worse, every school envelops its students in a moral climate. The choices that the school makes–or fails to make–about what sort of moral climate to create inevitably leave lasting marks on the students who live and learn there. Moral education, in the title phrase of one early book on the matter, “comes with the territory.”

Still, questions of whether–not how–today’s public schools should attempt to educate for character keep popping up. And in their variety, they tell us something about the roundabout journey

of public schooling in the United States. For the sake of this narrative, we will consider whether that journey helps to accomplish one of schooling’s few totally uncontested aims: teaching kids how to read.

A Perennial Best-Seller

From 1836 to 1922, McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers were by far the number-one school reading text in most parts of the United States. In their many editions, the readers sold more than 120 million copies. They presented, without hesitation or qualification, the moral and ethical code that their original author, the Reverend William Holmes McGuffey (a Presbyterian minister), believed essential for all children to learn. As exemplified through the dramatic story-problems of these slim volumes, the McGuffey code may be simply stated: A child should be respectful, honest, diligent, kind, fair-minded, temperate in food and drink, and clean.

It may surprise some that the readers still sell about a hundred thousand copies a year, mostly for use in home-school or traditional community settings (such as among the Amish). For the most part, however, the morally centered lessons of McGuffey have been replaced by a different sort of reading text. Some of today’s storybooks for students evoke the personal feelings of growing up; some convey the charms of pets; some insightfully delve into problems with friends or family; and some are terrifically funny, with irresistible titles such as How to Eat Fried Worms and Snot Stew. Yet as well-written, brilliantly illustrated, and personally enlightening as these new books may be, they are not stocked with unambiguous and comprehensive ethical guidance.

This historical change in school reading texts has been neither accidental nor isolated. As a general trend during the 20th century, academic expertise came to prevail over character as public schooling’s clear priority. Increasingly, schools became places where children were sent to learn skills first and foremost. The dominant assumption (which had become explicit by the latter part of the 20th century) was that children themselves should figure out–perhaps with some help from family or religious sources, but more likely through their own autonomous rational choices–what to do with the skills they had acquired. Educators wondered–and were pointedly asked–why public schools should presume to muck about with values anyway. And, as public schools increasingly filled with students from diverse backgrounds, determining whose values to teach became more problematic. It all seemed a questionable distraction from the hard and urgent task of skill building.

Words to Live by, for Centuries, across Nations and Religions: This Rule Is Golden Bahá’í­ World Faith And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbour that which thou choosest for thyself. –Epistle to the Son of the Wolf Brahmanism This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you. –Mahabharata 5:1517 Buddhism Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. –Udana-Varga 5:18 Christianity Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. –Matthew 7:12, King James Version And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. –Luke 6:31, King James Version Confucianism Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you –Analects 15:23 Tse-kung asked, “Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life?” Confucius replied, “It is the word ‘shu’–reciprocity. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.” –Doctrine of the Mean 13.3 Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence. –Mencius VII.A.4 Hinduism One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to oneself. –Mahabharata, Anusasana Parva 113.8 This is the sum of the Dharma [duty]: do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you. –Mahabharata 5:1517 Islam None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” –Number 13 of Imam “Al-Nawawi’s Forty Hadiths.” Jainism In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self. –Lord Mahavira, 24th Tirthankara A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated. –Sutrakritanga 1.11.33 Judaism Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. –Leviticus 19:18 What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary. –Talmud, Shabbat 31a Sufism The basis of Sufism is consideration of the hearts and feelings of others. If you haven’t the will to gladden someone’s heart, then at least beware lest you hurt someone’s heart, for on our path, no sin exists but this. –Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order Zoroastrianism That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself. –Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5 Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others. –Shayast-na-Shayast 13:29 –compiled by Mark Linnen

Where We Lost Our Way

In any historical narrative, events always trump opinion. Although a reborn character-education movement had sprouted in the early 1970s, it was seen as a throwback to a bygone era and thereby marginalized (one of its own leaders wistfully referred to it as “the great lost tradition”). But by the end of the century, in the wake of ceaseless alarming reports from the disheveled, dispirited, and sometimes violent front lines of our nation’s schools, the values-free approach to schooling began to seem less progressive, less inevitable, and less wise. Columbine High School was but one data point, albeit an especially vivid one, on the blood-and-graffiti-splattered high school map of the 1990s. When the mayhem invaded tony suburban communities as well as urban centers, mainstream media took notice. A 1993 front-page New York Times story reported: “Gang membership grows in middle-class suburbs,” showing up in everything from larceny and vandalism in schools to “razors, bats, and bottles, and now to guns.” Other forms of scandalous behavior, nonviolent but still terribly disruptive, paralyzed many schools as well. Cheating in particular became epidemic. Among many well-publicized incidents during the early 1990s, students at Taylor Allderdice High School in a prime Pittsburgh suburb collaborated in a systematic cheating ring, buying and selling homework from one another, stealing tests, and smuggling reference books into exams.

The growing perception of violence-racked and cheating-tainted schools in the early 1990s helped spawn a revived and robust character education movement. Organizations and web sites spread the word, and centers–more than 150 by my count–sprang up to produce and distribute curriculum materials for classroom use. The character education movement, given a boost by widespread, continuous reports of youth misbehavior, became an established part of the education landscape in the space of a few years, a surprisingly rapid development in a field that normally adopts changes slowly. It may be that the movement already has had some effect, for as Joel Best pointed out (“Monster Hype,” Education Next, Summer 2002), evidence shows that school violence has begun to decline in recent years.

I witnessed one facet of the resurgence of the character education movement in the federal government’s adoption of it during the Clinton administration. At a 1993 White House conference that I attended, Secretary of Education Richard Riley expressed approval of the movement’s aims, but cautioned that such moral uplift was a matter for family and church, not the federal government. By 1996, however, in his State of the Union address, President Clinton proclaimed, “I challenge all our schools to teach character education.” That year the Department of Education established the “Partnerships in Character Education” program to support the president’s challenge. The Bush administration has continued and expanded the size of the program several fold.

The Inner-Directed Society

Yet the original question–whether, not how, to educate for character–remains essentially unanswered, a condition that creates doubt and debate among educators and the public. Far from worrying about how to preserve children’s autonomy, however, skeptics now complain that character education is not forceful enough in presenting children with the stark and incontestable contrast between right and wrong. In a recent book, with the perhaps understandably overwrought title The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil, James Davison Hunter criticizes character education for its failure to promote morality with sufficient strength and clarity. The problem, according to Hunter, a professor of sociology and religion at the University of Virginia, lies in the psychologically oriented pedagogy that character educators turn to in teaching values to children: “Dominated as it is by perspectives diffused and diluted from professional psychology, this regime is overwhelmingly therapeutic and self-referencing; in character, its defining feature is a moral framework whose center point is the autonomous self.” By focusing on the child’s everyday behavior and feelings, moral values get watered down and lost.

Indeed, a recent research review by Marvin Berkowitz and Melinda Bier of the University of Missouri (at St. Louis) found that the most common topic in today’s character education programs is “social-emotional content”–in particular, what they call “personal improvement/self-management and awareness (self-control, goal setting, relaxation techniques, self-awareness, emotional awareness).” Exactly what part of a child’s moral development might be stimulated by relaxation or emotional awareness training is a mystery that neither science nor philosophy has shed much light on. My guess is that such feeling states have little to do with the acquisition of childhood morality and that, as Hunter complains, a pedagogy built primarily around the self’s sentiments may distract children from the real challenges of forging character.

The Right, the Wrong, and the Strictly Instrumental

The contemporary character-education movement has thus been misled by the trendy notion that children’s positive feelings are the key to all sorts of learning, moral as well as academic. Many educators now engage in silly activities and exercises focused on an obsessive attention to children’s self-esteem, a focus that has foisted warehouses’ worth of nonsense on students. (One assignment given my youngest daughter in her elementary school days was to write, “I’m terrific,” 20 times on a 3×5 card–which she dutifully did, all the while wondering aloud what in fact she was terrific at.) When the drive to boost children’s self-esteem interferes with moral instruction, it goes beyond silly to harmful.

Once when I was a guest on a National Public Radio show, a parent of a 5th-grade student called in to discuss an incident that was highly upsetting to her but all too familiar to me. That week her son had been sent home with a note informing her that he had been caught taking money out of fellow students’ backpacks. The mother quickly got on the phone to the boy’s teacher to tell her she was appalled, that she couldn’t bear the thought of her son stealing from his friends. “What can we do about this?” asked the mother. To her astonishment, the teacher responded by asking her to say and do nothing. “We were obliged to inform you of what happened,” the teacher said, “but now we wish to handle this in our own professional way. And to start with, we are not calling this incident ‘stealing.’ That would just give your child a bad self-image. We’ve decided to call what your son did ‘uncooperative behavior’–and we’ll point out to him in no uncertain terms that he won’t be very popular with his friends if he keeps acting this way!” The parent reported that the boy now ignored her efforts to counsel him about the matter. She worried that he had “blown the whole thing off” without learning anything from it at all.

In its “professional” judgments, the school had translated a wrongful act (stealing) into a strictly instrumental concern (losing popularity). The school did so in order to save the child from feelings (shame, guilt) that it assumed could cause the child discomfort and thereby damage the child’s self-image. The school was right on the first count and mistaken on the second. The child probably would have felt embarrassed if forcefully told that he had committed a moral offense–and such an experience in firsthand shame and guilt is precisely what researchers have found to be a primary means of moral learning. There is no credible scientific evidence that supports the idea that a child’s self-image can be harmed by reprimands for wrongdoing, as long as the feedback pertains to the behavior rather than to the child’s own intrinsic self-worth.

Confusing Ourselves and Our Students

Over the years I have often been asked to help resolve trouble in schools torn apart by cheating scandals. In each case, the resistance of teachers to discussing the moral meaning of the incident with students was palpable. I explain to them that the moral issues are many, but by no means hard to understand. Cheating is wrong for at least four reasons: it gives students who cheat an unfair advantage over those who do not cheat; it is dishonest; it is a violation of trust; and it undermines the academic integrity, the code of conduct, and the social order of the school.

I am still shocked at the number of teachers who say, in front of their students, that it is hard to hold students to a no-cheating standard in a society where people cheat on taxes, on their spouses, and so on. Some teachers sympathize with student cheaters because they think that the tests students take are flawed or unfair. Some pardon students because they believe that sharing schoolwork is motivated by loyalty to friends. In my experience, it can take days of intense discussion, and some arm twisting, to get a school community to develop a no-cheating standard that is solidly supported by expressions of moral concern.

In our time, a hesitancy to use a moral language remains the most stubborn and distracting problem for character education. Teachers worry that words that shame children may wound their self-esteem; that there are no words of moral truth anyway; that it is hypocritical to preach moral codes to the young when so many adults ignore them; or that in a diverse society one person’s moral truth is another’s moral falsehood. Yet adult expressions of clear moral standards are precisely what guide character formation in the young.

The conviction that moral standards are not arbitrary, that they reflect basic human truths and therefore that they must be passed from generation to generation is a necessary prerequisite of all moral education. This was a point that sociologist Emile Durkheim made in his great 1902-03 lectures, “Moral Education,” the foundation for most modern approaches to the subject. Even those who started their moral education work from a different direction, such as Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, came around to this view once they tried their hand at the actual practice of teaching children good values.

Back to the Future

The contours of what we must do are clear: Public schools must accept the mandate of educating for character. Since they shape student character no matter what they do, schools may as well try to do a good job at it. Schools must present students with objective standards expressed in a moral language that sharply distinguishes right from wrong and directs students to behave accordingly. Sentiments such as “feeling better” cannot stand as sufficient reason for moral choice. A school must help students understand that they are expected to be honest, fair, compassionate, and respectful whether it makes them feel good or not. The character mandate that adults must pass on to children transcends time, place, or personal feelings.

The cauldron of day-to-day practice, of course, always contains a steamy mixture of disparate elements. What schools actually do with character education cannot be summed up in one easy generalization. At the classroom level, education is a pragmatic, seat-of-the-pants enterprise in which teachers tend to throw whatever they have at students, and character educators are no exception.

For clues about what we can do, let us return for a moment to the James Hunter critique quoted earlier. The complaint was that character education “in a time without good or evil” provides children with the following moral logic: To the question “Why should one not be bad, say, through stealing or cheating?” follows the reply, “How would it make you feel if someone did that to you?” As I suggested earlier, Hunter is correct that the moral logic here is not sufficient, because stealing or cheating is wrong no matter how anyone feels about it. But Hunter’s complaint is too sweeping and in its overreach misses a valuable opportunity to educate children about the foundations of moral behavior and belief.

At Kipp Academy Charter Schools, maxims pervade everyday classroom life.

The Heavy Metal of Character

Suppose that the teacher took the response, “How would it make you feel if someone did that to you?” an extra step–backward through the ages of moral tradition–linking what Hunter takes to be a mere touchy-feely sentiment to one of the great moral maxims of all time: the Golden Rule. The version most familiar in Western society–“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”–is in fact a general precept shared by most of the world’s religions (See box, p. 23). While asking the child to take the perspective of another who would be hurt by a harmful act, a teacher could draw the student’s attention to the great moral traditions that have proclaimed the importance of doing so, connecting the student’s personal sentiments with the earlier wisdom of civilizations. The teacher could introduce students to the glorious panoply of worldwide philosophical thought that has celebrated this principle. A lively classroom discussion could ensue from exploring why so much profound thinking across so many diverse times and places has focused on this classic maxim.

Pointing out the rich religious and historical traditions behind a maxim underlines its deep importance in human life. It informs students of the universal and timeless truths underlying moral strictures. It does not imply proselytizing for a particular religious doctrine, because the universality of core moral principles can be easily demonstrated. This kind of instruction is needed pedagogically not only because it elicits historical interest, but also because it adds a dimension of moral gravity and objectivity to what otherwise would stand only as a simple statement of a child’s personal feelings.

If a child’s moral education is limited to stimulating self-reflection about his personal feelings, not much has been accomplished. But if the child’s moral education begins with a consideration of moral feelings such as empathy and then links these feelings with the enduring elements of morality, the child’s character growth will be enhanced by transforming the child’s emotions–which do play a key role in behavior–into a lasting set of virtues.

An essential part of moral education is reaffirming the emotional sense of moral regret that young people naturally feel when they harm another person or violate a fundamental societal standard. Every child is born with a capacity to feel empathy for a person who is harmed, with a capacity to feel outrage when a social standard is violated, and with a capacity to feel shame or guilt for doing something wrong. This is a natural, emotional basis for character development, but it quickly atrophies without the right kinds of feedback–in particular, guidance that supports the moral sense and shows how it can be applied to the range of social concerns that one encounters in human affairs. A primary way that schools can provide students with this kind of guidance is to teach them the great traditions that have endowed us with our moral standards.

The Golden Rule is a prototypical moral maxim with both a long historical legacy and widely recognized contemporary usefulness. (It is explicitly taught and practiced in the field of business management, a fact that many high school students would very likely be interested to learn.) There are legions of maxims in the living lore of our common culture, and many, like the Golden Rule, bear a moral message: “Two wrongs don’t make a right” (ancient Scots); “You are only as good as your word” (early American); “Honesty is the best policy” (Cervantes, Ben Franklin); “It’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness” (old Chinese proverb). As education policymaker Arthur Schwartz has written, each of these “wise sayings” encapsulates a store of wisdom that has been handed down to us through countless conversations across the generations.

What these ancient maxims suggest is that societies distant from us in time and place have something important to tell us regarding our efforts to educate young people for character. Among other things, they remind us that neither we nor our children need to invent civilization from scratch. Our journeys in moral learning begin with the aid of our rich cultural traditions and the living wisdom found therein. We are inheritors of a wealth of moral knowledge, a set of universal truths drawn from the forge of human experience over the centuries. In our transient lifestyles and throw-away relationships, in our modernist commitment to the autonomous self, we sometimes forget this. But in our role as guardians of the young, we must share the obligation to pass on to our children that which civilization has given us.

All this, of course, flies in the face of “constructivist” approaches to education favored in recent decades. Supposedly, children learn nothing useful through memorization; and, we have been warned, rote learning leads only to boredom and rejection, going “in one ear and out the other.” But as I have written elsewhere, such fears are simplistic as well as unsupported by evidence. The contrast between the “discovery learning” of constructivism and the practice-and-drill of traditional learning is a false opposition. Children benefit from both, they require both, and the two complement rather than fight each other in the actual dynamics of mastering knowledge. The usefulness of memorized bits of wisdom that are stored away and used at later times, when they are better understood in the light of lived experience, has been fully supported by developmental theories ranging from the social-cultural to the biological.

One of the other principles of psychological development is that children learn best when they confront clear and consistent messages in numerous ways and in multiple contexts. In the character arena, young people need to hear moral messages from all the respected people in their lives if they are to take the messages to heart. A student learns honesty in a deep and lasting way when a teacher explains why cheating undermines the academic mission, when a parent demonstrates the importance of telling the truth for family solidarity, when a sports coach discourages deceit because it defeats the purpose of fair competition, and when a friend shows why lies destroy the trust necessary for a close relationship. The student then acquires a sense of why honesty is important to all the human relationships that the student will participate in, now and in the future.

And the past plays a part in moral learning. We do not invent our ethical codes from scratch, nor should we expect that our children could. Our inherited moral traditions are the essential elements of civilized society. When presented to students through a lively pedagogy of received wisdom, such as may be found in common maxims and precepts, these moral traditions can provide a compelling historical dimension to character education. For too long our public schools have hidden away the historical dimension, keeping the traditional foundations of moral instruction out of sight. It is time to remove this unnecessary handicap and build the moral futures of our children on the best wisdom that the past and present can offer.

William Damon is professor of education, director of the Center on Adolescence at Stanford University, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

This article was funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.