At the Beacon School in Manhattan, the teachers and administrators thought they had resolved, at least to their satisfaction, the long national debate over how best to assess students’ work. From the school’s outset in 1993, Beacon’s educators decided to treat their diverse student body, 26 percent of which comes from low-income families, like graduate students. Instead of taking the usual multiple-choice tests and receiving letter grades, the high schoolers would complete long-term projects and defend their work before faculty panels.

Beacon, a public alternative school, soon became a national model for advocates of what modern educators call “portfolio assessment.” Portfolios, a term derived from the carrying case of paintings or drawings that artists present as proof of their talents, are collections of student work. As graduation time neared each year at Beacon, seniors had to present portfolios of their essays, lab reports, problem solutions, and research projects from the past three years–three projects in science, three in history, four in English, and three in foreign languages.

But when New York State began requiring students to pass the standardized Regents tests in order to graduate from high school, Beacon was forced to reduce the number of projects and cut the time for assessing them. For instance, principal Stephen Stoll says the biology course that had 70 labs a year ago now has only 30, because students need more time to learn the terms and concepts that will be on the Regents test.

With the nationwide efforts to raise graduation standards and the increasing use of standardized testing, the idea of basing promotion and graduation decisions on portfolios of students’ work has fallen out of fashion as swiftly as slide rules gave way to calculators. Some schools have tried to keep portfolios as a tool for classroom teachers, but even the most ardent advocates have acknowledged that samples of student work cannot compete with the ability of standardized testing to quickly and cheaply determine the overall performance of a school or a school district.

“If the goal is simply to sort, stratify, and rank, portfolios add little if you already have test data,” says Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest, a Massachusetts-based organization that opposes standardized testing. “If the goal is rich feedback at individual or school level, portfolios of some sort are indispensable while tests are of minimal use as they provide far too little information.”

Waning Interest

The idea of authentic assessment–evaluating children based on an in-depth examination of their work rather than their scores on standardized tests–goes back a century, to the beginnings of the progressive education movement. Even then portfolios were considered time consuming, but the approach fit well with the progressives’ emphasis on cultivating research skills and creative thinking rather than building a broad base of knowledge in the subject. Moreover, many teachers and students liked portfolios, and they became a key part of the alternative public schools that sprang up during the 1960s and 1970s.

At places like the famed Central Park East Secondary School in Manhattan, Deborah Meier and other progressive educators began to experiment with judging low-income inner-city students on the basis of collections of their best work and oral examinations. They found that if students did well on these alternative assessments, they gained admission to college and tended to do well there.

The National Writing Project, begun in 1974 at the University of California at Berkeley, stemmed from a similar notion: that regular reviews of the process of writing, with repeated drafts and frequent editing, were a better way to assess how the student was doing than the old way of grading grammar and spelling tests and the final version of any written assignment. Those series of drafts would be all an assessor needed to judge the student.

The portfolio idea gained strength in the 1980s. Drew Gitomer, vice president for research at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), worked on the Arts Propel project with Howard Gardner and Dennie Palmer Wolf of Harvard’s Project Zero. “We explored the idea of portfolios in writing, music, and art–the latter for all students, not just the serious musicians/artists,” Gitomer said. “These efforts, as well as many others, were focused on teachers and classrooms, rather than measures of accountability.”

Even as several southern governors, including Richard Riley of South Carolina, James Hunt of North Carolina, and Bill Clinton of Arkansas, were working to spread the standards movement, which would become the most significant threat to portfolio assessment, some states experimented with portfolios on a large scale. Vermont and Kentucky investigated the possibility of using portfolio assessments instead of standardized tests to judge the progress of schools, districts, and the state. Some schools in both states piloted programs in which student work instead of multiple-choice tests was used to evaluate their academic progress.

But in 1994, RAND Corporation researcher Daniel Koretz, now at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, released a report on portfolio assessment in Vermont that many experts say dampened enthusiasm for this method of grading. Koretz found that portfolio assessment was not all that useful in evaluating schools or students because one school might require one kind of project, another school quite a different one. It was difficult to compare their work and determine whether the standards were high enough. Teachers, Koretz found, also complained that portfolios were cutting into valuable teaching time. Math teachers, he wrote, “frequently noted that portfolio activities take time away from basic skills and computation, which still need attention.”

Koretz’s careful methodology and national reputation had an impact, but there were signs that portfolios were already losing ground. Around the same time as the report’s release, British prime minister John Major discarded the portfolio system that had been used for 20 years as the nation’s graduation exam in English. Dylan Wiliam, a British assessment expert who now works for ETS, said Major felt “that timed written examinations were the fairest way to assess achievement at the end of compulsory schooling.” Nevertheless, about 40 percent of the English exam grade and 20 percent of the math grade is still based on portfolio-like elements.

Middle Ground

The decline of portfolios as a large-scale accountability measure is not necessarily a bad thing, Gitomer said. “The power of portfolios resides in its coming out of the student’s own classroom practice. The value resides in the wealth of information available and the various conversations that one can have about the work and the portfolio creator. If all you’re going to do is give a single score, there are far more efficient ways of getting at a student’s achievement level.”

Ronald Wolk, founder of the newspaper Education Week, said he appreciates the need for large-scale assessments, but thinks the standardized tests that are replacing portfolios are no easier to judge than actual student work. “Officials object to using portfolios for assessment because they are too subjective,” said Wolk, who admires the Beacon School’s grading system. “But that is exactly how the writing on Regents exams is scored. Teachers read and grade the exams according to their best judgment. At Beacon, at least, the teachers use rubrics that they have crafted and honed over the years.”

Most critics of portfolio assessment say they like the emphasis on demonstrated writing and oral skill, but have seen too many instances in which a refusal to give traditional tests of factual recall leads to charmingly written essays with little concrete information to support their arguments.

Advocates of portfolios respond that such lapses can be blamed on bad teaching, but not on the use of portfolios, since if portfolios are used properly they can also lead students to master a broad range of material. Neill said the idea is to collect key pieces that provide evidence of learning in key areas. Even with a standard high-school grading system, he said, “unless all children take precisely the same curriculum, and master it to a similar degree, and then recall it all, they will come into any college course with different aspects of knowledge and different gaps in that knowledge.”

At Beacon, Stoll said the faculty is trying to maintain the portfolio system in a limited form, “but it is hard. You have the teacher telling the student to get his portfolio done and he says that he is studying for the Regents test. It is like mixing two different currencies, and the bad currency drives out the good currency in a certain sense.” Beacon’s request to be exempt from the Regents tests was turned down by Richard P. Mills, New York’s commissioner of education, who had tried portfolio assessments when he was the state school superintendent in Vermont.

The argument between advocates of standardized tests and advocates of portfolios usually ends with each side saying it cannot trust the results produced by the other. Authentic assessment “is costly indeed, and slow and cumbersome,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a supporter of standardized testing, “but I think its biggest flaw as an external assessment is its subjectivity and unreliability.”

Robert Holland, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think tank, raised the issue of cheating. “Scorers may have no way to tell if the work samples came from a student or a smart uncle or from an Internet download,” he said. Portfolio supporters note that regular tests have also produced cheating incidents.

Lisa Graham Keegan, chief executive officer of the Washington-based Education Leaders Council, said she thinks portfolios can help teachers assess their students’ progress, but are not a good tool for determining how a school or a district is doing. She remembers a visit to a northern Arizona school where “the writing teacher was showing me a portfolio of a student’s work in which the student was writing about kamikaze pilots during World War II.” Keegan was state school superintendent for Arizona at the time and saw that “the essay was horribly written, with glaring spelling and grammatical errors, and yet had received a score of 23 out of 25 points.

“The teacher was just glowing with what a mature and moving topic the student had chosen without any direction from her. I was less impressed and said so–something along the lines of how I could appreciate that the student had something interesting to say, but my first impression was that he didn’t know how to say it–and wasn’t that the first order task for the teacher?”

Having students display their personal strengths is fine, Keegan said, as long as they still learn to read, write, and do math capably before they graduate. “A collection of student work can be incredibly valuable,” she said, “but it cannot replace an objective and systematic diagnostic program. Hopefully, we will come to a place where we incorporate both.”

Jay Mathews is a reporter and columnist at the Washington Post and the author, most recently, of Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That Is Best for You (2003).

On the first Monday of the 2003-04 school year, Pablo Sierra was not where he hoped to be. Instead of greeting students as the new principal of a Chicago public school, Sierra was driving downtown for another round of meetings with district officials, trying to keep his spirits up and hoping that a position would open soon.

As a newly minted graduate of the widely heralded New Leaders for New Schools training program for aspiring principals, Sierra (and the developers of New Leaders) had understandably expected to find a slew of opportunities awaiting him. He thought that his prestigious MBA, private-sector experience, and nine years as a classroom teacher would distinguish him from more traditional applicants for the principalship. The intense yearlong “residency” program developed by New Leaders would make up for his lack of traditional administrative experience.

As of September, however, Sierra had all but given up on his first choice: being tapped to run a neighborhood school. He had started looking for a start-up or charter school opportunity and was hoping to avoid taking a job as an assistant principal. The silver lining is that Sierra was eventually able to secure a job as the assistant principal of a charter school and is now set to head a new charter school opening next year.

Sierra’s situation was not unique among his New Leaders peers. Of his graduating class at the program’s Chicago location, less than half had found jobs by late June. Those without preexisting connections to the community or to the school bureaucracy were struggling even to get interviews. Surprisingly, Sierra’s private-sector training and experience were “not being perceived as positive,” he said. “All the positions are going to experienced [assistant principals].”

Since its founding four years ago, New Leaders has shown that there is no shortage of accomplished individuals like Sierra who want to be principals. The program continues to expand each year and has become a national voice for the reform of principal training. The remaining questions are whether school districts will let New Leaders run their own neighborhood schools–and are the New Leaders fellows really ready for the job?

New Blood

New Leaders for New Schools is the brainchild of a group of graduates from Harvard’s business and education schools including CEO Jonathan Schnur, a former Clinton administration official. The New Leaders idea is to recruit accomplished individuals from both the private and public sectors, including public education, and provide them with the leadership training necessary to take on significant school management roles. “We’re looking for the best people, wherever we can find them,” says Schnur.

The motivation behind New Leaders was to supply new blood to cities that were reportedly facing shortages of qualified principals ready to turn around dysfunctional schools. New Leaders fellows would also receive the kind of leadership and management training that principals hired through traditional routes seldom enjoy. Each cohort of “new leaders” is chosen through a highly competitive application process. Those selected take courses during the summer, then spend a year in full-time “residency” at a school under the guidance of a mentor principal.

While securing principalships for the program’s trainees has been challenging, finding accomplished aspirants has not. In 2003 the program received more than 1,000 completed applications for just 55 spots. Overall, roughly half the applications–and half of those accepted into the program–have come from nontraditional candidates, meaning that they were coming to the program from outside education or from another part of the country. Even those with traditional education backgrounds have flocked to New Leaders, seeking a program that is more hands-on and collegial than many of the principal-training programs based at schools of education.

As a result, the pool of New Leaders includes a concentration of individuals with backgrounds not often found among public school principals. For instance, Danny Kramer was a VISTA coordinator, a member of an Internet start-up, and a website designer for Oprah Winfrey. Drema Brown graduated from Yale Law School and ran a children’s program in New Haven, Connecticut. And Cindy Moeller, a member of the current cohort of fellows, entered the program after earning her MBA at Northwestern and serving as a vice president for human resources at Baldwin Pianos. New Leaders usually requires its applicants to have two years of classroom experience in order to meet guidelines for certification as a public schools administrator. The program also works in partnership with local universities to secure formal certification for its graduates.

The current fellows range in age from their late 20s to their mid-50s. Two-thirds are African-American, Hispanic, or Asian-American, and two-thirds are women. Most important, they are among the most confident, determined, and accomplished school leadership candidates you can imagine.

What Shortages?

Despite their accomplishments and passion, New Leaders fellows have had a hard time breaking into traditional public schools, especially those fellows who lack contacts or extensive experience in education. It’s not that New Leaders can’t get work; nearly all of the New Leaders have secured education-related jobs. But just 5 of the first 15 graduates and just over half of the 32 graduates in 2003 found positions running schools of any type.

Of course a 50 percent placement rate for aspiring principals is no small accomplishment, and there has been undeniable progress in getting fellows hired at neighborhood schools. Patrick Baccellieri, a graduate of the program’s first year in Chicago who had previously run a nonprofit, was hired to run a traditional school, as was second-year graduate Jarvis Sanford, a former diversity consultant for the Anti-Defamation League who holds an MBA and a Ph.D. Drema Brown is currently running a traditional public school in the Bronx, New York. Carleton Gordon, a longtime financial services executive, was named the principal at a tough school in Brooklyn in the fall of 2003. And after just a short time, some New Leaders have moved from assistant principal to the leadership spot in their schools.

However, these are the exceptions. Only 7 (out of 47) New Leaders have been hired to run traditional neighborhood schools. One problem is that, as it turns out, there isn’t really that much of a numerical shortage of principals in the four cities–Chicago, New York, Washington, and the Bay Area–where New Leaders currently operates training programs. Principalships don’t open up all that often. And when they do, these school districts receive tons of applications from insiders with more experience in education.

For instance, New York City may need to fill 150 open slots each year in a system with more than 1,200 schools. Program founder Schnur estimates that there are well over a thousand qualified candidates. Schnur says that there were only 60 to 70 genuine openings in Chicago this year, with about 65 applications for each position.

It is not just a numbers game though. The fact is that school district administrators and teachers have not wholly embraced the New Leaders concept. They tend to believe that the principal is also the instructional leader and should therefore have significant classroom experience. “Certainly, experience in other professions brings a perspective that could be a plus,” says Deborah Lynch, president of the Chicago teacher union. “But so little teaching experience really makes me wonder if that’s enough for a person to really get to know instructional improvement and school leadership.”

Even the New Leaders candidates agree that this is somewhat of a disadvantage. “I might have wanted a few more years in the classroom from the curriculum side,” says Kelly Wilson, a New Leaders graduate who holds an MBA and has a background in TV production. “We’re being developed as curriculum leaders, but I probably needed more exposure to that.”

The New Leaders training, while intense, will not make them curriculum experts. They get enough training and experience to talk the talk and are expected to learn along the way. And so, despite the widely acknowledged need for better-trained principals, reports of shortages, and waves of retirees, New Leaders candidates can end up seeming green. “Everybody just wants experience,” says one Chicago school administrator who has observed several of the principal searches where New Leaders fellows were interviewed. “The bottom line is that schools want someone to run the school, not just theories.”

There are also cultural and stylistic conflicts that can complicate the relationship between nontraditional principals and career educators. Winning trust at a new school–what New Leaders tend to call “gaining entry”–is a key challenge, especially for those who have spent most of their careers outside of schools.

Danny Kramer, for example, had a few run-ins with other teachers during his residency year that a more experienced administrator might have avoided. “Danny started with us before the school year started and stayed with us the whole year,” says Armstrong Elementary principal Arline Hersh. “He put his foot into it occasionally and learned that way,” she says. “But that’s part of the process, learning how to extricate yourself gracefully.”

There are also those who, threatened and offended by the notion of programs like New Leaders, question the fundamental legitimacy of bringing in outsiders. “Why should we think someone would be an effective principal just because they were once a student?” asked Jill Levy, president of the 5,500-member Council of School Supervisors and Administrators in New York, last year. Her organization has vociferously opposed Chancellor Joel Klein’s efforts to revamp principal training in New York City.

Conservative Hiring

New York is actually a bright spot in the New Leaders portfolio. Three quarters of the 2003 graduates of the New York program were selected to lead schools–a big increase from the previous year, when just two of eight became principals. Chicago has been more difficult to break into. In the program’s first year, just one New Leaders graduate was tapped to run a school; two more have moved up to the top job since then. The share remains below 50 percent for the 2003 crop of New Leaders.

The disparity at least partly reflects the sheer size of the New York school district and thus the greater number of openings it has to fill. But the actual mechanisms for hiring principals in each city may provide a more likely explanation.

In New York it is largely up to district administrators to hire and assign principals. By contrast, in Chicago each individual local school council makes its own hiring decision. These councils, made up of parents, teachers, and community members, can be advised by the district. But the decision is, in the main, the council’s to make.

Making the situation more difficult, roughly three out of four New Leaders in Chicago come from outside education–reflecting a priority expressed by the Chicago board of education, says Schnur.

The effects on the hiring process in Chicago are many. Local councils may not be familiar with the still-new New Leaders program, creating an enormous marketing challenge. With their strong ties to the community, local councils may also be more inclined to hire an inside person–an assistant principal, interim principal, or someone else from the community. And the principal contracts, set at terms of four years, make it very hard to remove someone if a decision goes awry.

“It is hard to get these people hired,” says John Ayers, executive director of Leadership for Quality Education, a Chicago education reform group that has worked with New Leaders and supports its efforts. “Local school councils tend to be surprisingly conservative.”

Bernard Lacour, a longtime school reformer who works with local school councils and consults with New Leaders on placement issues, believes that the obstacles thrown up by council dynamics and the predisposition for experience may be exacerbated by system politics, the advantages of incumbency, and fear among local councils that their candidates will be challenged by the board of education and their authority taken away from them.

Lacour notes that candidates who have not been administrators or who come from outside education frequently make it to the interview stage but rarely get hired or placed in the Chicago system. Only in rare cases is someone’s newness and lack of strong affiliation with the school system a real advantage. Sometimes council members don’t even know who has applied for the job, he says. “What we need is a process that is less daunting and procedural.”

Heading Charters

Not surprisingly, one result is that a substantial number of New Leaders end up running charter schools, small schools, start-ups, or education organizations rather than traditional schools, especially in Chicago.

Take Kelly Wilson. She was the second New Leader to do her residency at a small but well-known school, Ariel Community Academy, located on the south side of Chicago. Her predecessor had been hired as an assistant principal at Ariel, but before the year was even over, Wilson became executive director of a school-based teacher-training program in Chicago. She was the second New Leader to hold this position.

Opinions vary about whether this is a good outcome for graduates of New Leaders. Wilson and others say that having effective leadership in urban school systems is important, regardless of where that leadership is located. But sending too many New Leaders into alternative schools could easily create the impression that the program is not well suited for mainstream schools or that the school system is not ready and willing to hire even the most capable candidates if they enter through alternative routes. After all, imagine what would have happened if Teach for America, the storied program that places talented college graduates into low-income schools, had sent many of its members into charter schools.

In fact, many New Leaders would rather work in a traditional environment. “I’d love to work in a traditional school,” says Kramer, who is now serving as an assistant principal at Clinton Elementary School. “But that’s a hard nut to crack, to get the [school councils] to interview you.”

Despite these difficulties, New Leaders already seems to be making an impact, both directly and indirectly. Evidence from the 2002-03 school year, while minimal, suggests that schools with New Leaders fellows at the helm outperformed other schools with first-year principals in reading and math improvements and in reduced percentages of failing students.

At the same time, there has been an enormous increase in attention toward new ways of recruiting, training, and placing principals, at least some of which can fairly be attributed indirectly to New Leaders. New Leaders has 55 residents in training this year, has expanded to Washington, D.C., and will be expanding to Memphis, Tennessee, this summer. Moreover, the organization was recently named one of the top 20 organizations that are changing the world by Fast Company magazine. In the meantime, other efforts to set up fast-track principal training programs dot the nation, and in-depth residency components are increasingly common. The New York, Chicago, and Boston school systems have all initiated or adapted school leadership programs that have key elements in common with New Leaders.

Befriending the System

Nevertheless, New Leaders will need to find more success in placing its graduates if it is to remain a viable model for improving the management of regular public schools. This presents no small challenge. In the end, hiring a nontraditional principal may be considered more of a risk than hiring teachers or superintendents with nontraditional backgrounds–two related trends that have swept the nation over the past decade.

For starters, compared with the principal, a teacher has an important but relatively small role in the overall well-being of a school. Principals and administrators may be more willing to “take a chance” with a single 4th-grade class than risk the health of an entire school on a candidate with little experience in education. Furthermore, with the proliferation of alternative certification and programs like Teach for America, the practice of hiring teachers without formal degrees in education or classroom experience is fairly well established. Teaching, unlike the principalship, is also often an entry-level job that requires little previous experience aside from student teaching. The only real difference between a Teach for America teacher and a regular teacher is the nature of their training.

Similarly, the trend toward bringing in outsiders to run school districts is now at least a decade old. Superintendents with backgrounds in business, the military, or government are hired more for their forceful personalities and management skills than for their knowledge of instruction. They can arguably rely on the veteran educators within their systems to provide instructional leadership, while school principals need to be involved more directly in the process of upgrading the curriculum and monitoring the performance of teachers. By contrast, entering a role that involves directly managing professionals, like teachers, is tough to nearly impossible in any field where a candidate does not have significant experience. After all, how many newspaper editors did not do significant time in the reporting trenches? How many law firms’ managing partners were not once first-year associates?

The lessons from the Chicago experience are clear and are already being implemented, according to Schnur. “We need to become more aggressive earlier in the year about helping nontraditional candidates access networks that can help them and in helping them understand the climate of the school system,” he says. Last year, “We didn’t invest enough time and energy into this part of the process early enough.” This year the program has started networking earlier in the process and beefed up efforts to make sure that, when the time comes, New Leaders fellows are not just ready to take leadership positions, but are also welcomed by the school system.

-Alexander Russo is a freelance education writer. He is the editor of School Reform in Chicago: Lessons in Policy and Practice (Harvard Education Press, 2004).

Across the nation, urban officials are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the performance of elected school boards. The examples of mayors Richard Daley in Chicago and Michael Bloomberg in New York City” both of whom sought and won direct control over their city’s school systems–have inspired other mayors, such as Anthony Williams in Washington, D.C., to press for the power to appoint the school board’s members or dissolve the board altogether.

The typical complaints lodged against elected school boards are that no one person is in charge of the schools and that board members are often concerned more with advancing their own political careers than tending to the students’ educational needs. The resulting turf battles and grandstanding can create chaos instead of focused leadership.

School boards in some cities, notably in San Diego and Houston, have coalesced around a vision for reform and put that vision into action. Can they become the norm rather than the exception? And if not, are there alternatives that can keep the public involved in school governance while still encouraging high performance?

• Sarah Glover on the necessity of school boards

• Chester E. Finn Jr. and Lisa Graham Keegan on the end of school boards

The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved

By Todd Oppenheimer
Random House, 2003, $26.95; 512 pgs.

Reviewed by Brian Nelson

In 1997 Todd Oppenheimer published a widely read Atlantic Monthly article, “The Computer Delusion,” that painted a provocative portrait of technology’s failure to improve education thus far. The article outlined a long history of high expectations and underwhelming results and made Oppenheimer a well known if controversial figure in the field of education.

In The Flickering Mind, Oppenheimer amplifies his earlier theme by visiting schools around the country to get a firsthand glimpse of how technology is or is not working in schools. In general, Oppenheimer does not like what he sees. The Flickering Mind offers a grim image not only of educational technology but also of modern schooling altogether. Oppenheimer denounces a cast of anti-heroes who he claims, through duplicity or stupidity, are destroying education.

The lead villains in The Flickering Mind are the hardware and software companies that hawk their products to schools. Corporations such as Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are portrayed as “self-interested manipulators” out to swindle “naïve” administrators and “gullible” teachers by foisting worthless technology on them.

To Oppenheimer, the central crime perpetrated by these businesses seems to be the very fact that they are businesses; they charge something for their products. Oppenheimer frequently juxtaposes the marketing slogans-improved learning! students who love school!-against the costs of implementing and maintaining classroom technology. The implication is that because businesses have a financial interest in selling technology, their claims regarding the educational value of their products cannot be trusted. No doubt technology firms, primarily interested in earning a buck, can sometimes make overblown claims. Most, however, probably believe in their products and hope to make a positive difference.

Nevertheless, Oppenheimer does an excellent job of highlighting the futility of simply throwing money at a problem. In case after case, he finds that schools have spent huge sums on technology at the expense of more pressing needs. He ruefully recounts tales of gleaming computer labs in crumbling buildings, purchased with funds that could have gone to art, music, shop, and teachers’ salaries.

Oppenheimer derides schools that blow the budget on late-model computers and software with no thought to maintaining them or training teachers in how to use them. Maintenance of the machines often falls on a few harried technology workers who scramble from school to school or even a single enthusiastic teacher who operates as the default school network administrator, software buyer, and curriculum designer. New computer labs sit idle because overworked teachers have neither the time nor the training needed to make use of them.

These implementation problems are secondary, however, to Oppenheimer’s belief that technology actually has little role to play in schools. He argues that there are fundamental weaknesses in the curricula delivered through technology. At various points in the book, he dismisses technology-supported, project-based learning; collaborative group work; computer-based simulations; and Internet-based research. In the face of teachers’ happy claims, he sees only noisy “chaos.”

Oppenheimer’s opinions may reveal more about his personal outlook on modern education than about the value of technology in schools. Though he objects to this characterization, he clearly yearns to return to the education system of an idealized yesteryear. In one technology-heavy school, the only class Oppenheimer enjoys has a teacher lecturing to orderly rows of silent students, heads bent down and taking notes. He lauds aspects of project-based learning, but maligns it when it involves the use of technology.

For example, Oppenheimer admires traditional textbook-based research projects and “leafing methodically through a solid book,” but dismisses Internet-based research projects as lacking intellectual content. Material on the worldwide web, he claims, is often difficult to find, low in quality, and not easily understood by students. Furthermore, Oppenheimer complains that few of the PowerPoint presentations students design in lieu of more traditional paper-based reports show any depth or creativity. Where computers have failed, Oppenheimer hopes homespun projects featuring (among other things) knitting, pinecones, and homemade crayons will save the day.

Oppenheimer’s antipathy toward modern pedagogy is further reflected in the few uses of technology he finds effective. His vision for “how learning can be saved” boils down to using computers as supplemental tools in support of traditional, teacher-led classroom activities.

For example, he advocates a “one computer per classroom” approach, in which teachers carefully guide groups of students through software programs. While this approach has some benefits in keeping kids on task, Oppenheimer seems to support it primarily because it moves the teacher back to center stage and eliminates the inherent messiness of allowing students some measure of control over their own learning. Because he rejects the notion of a student-centered, collaborative pedagogy, Oppenheimer necessarily also rejects the use of technology to support such learning.

While Oppenheimer’s complaints about the poor quality of most software and computer-supported curricula are on target, it is difficult to place the blame on technology. When describing computer-based projects that are inventive and motivating, Oppenheimer is quick to point out that similar projects could be done without computers. But when discussing poor curriculum, he links low quality directly to technology. He can’t have it both ways. If good curriculum is good, with or without technology, the same must be true of bad curriculum.

Most day-to-day activities in regular classrooms are no more or less inspired than their technology-supported counterparts. The reality of public schooling in the United States is that it has always had to aim at the middle. In trying to help most students learn pretty well most of the time, outstanding curriculum is going to be the exception rather than the rule. The promise of educational technology, as yet unfilled, is that such exceptions can become the norm.

-Brian Nelson is a doctoral student and instructor in the Technology in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Common Sense School Reform
by Frederick M. Hess (Palgrave Macmillan).

Common sense suggests that educators, like everyone else, are more effective when given the flexibility to innovate and held accountable for their performance. Unfortunately, as our own executive editor Frederick Hess demonstrates, common sense is a tool rarely used in school reform. Much of what passes for “reform” protects a status quo in which success is seldom rewarded and failures go unpunished.

Hess uses examples from within education and beyond to suggest new approaches to issues as diverse as school choice, teacher compensation, and the use of technology. His recommendations represent a comprehensive reform agenda that policymakers would be ill-advised to ignore.

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The War Against Excellence: The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America’s Middle Schools
by Cheri Pierson Yecke (Praeger).

Yecke, Minnesota’s embattled education commissioner, targets two trends: the “middle-school movement” and public education’s growing hostility toward the needs of gifted youngsters.

Both trends began as well-meaning impulses. The middle-school movement sought to place adolescents in environments that would be sensitive to their developmental needs and, in contrast to traditional junior high schools, would focus on “teaching the child, not the subject.” The neglect of giftedness arose from the belief that any extra resources should be devoted to kids who are falling behind in school.

As with so many good intentions, however, these went badly awry. They turned into a profound anti-intellectualism that surely underlies both the decline in student achievement after 4th grade and our spotty record in nurturing tomorrow’s leaders.

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Mayors in the Middle: Politics, Race, and Mayoral Control of Urban Schools
edited by Jeffrey Henig and Wilbur Rich (Princeton).

A provocative collection of case studies on the consequences of increased mayoral control over the schools, featuring studies of Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The cases are somewhat uneven. Some, like the studies of D.C. and Boston, illuminate the politics and practice of mayoral control, but the volume as a whole doesn’t set out to make the case for or against mayoral control. On balance the book is a useful and measured contribution to a complicated question.

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The New Accountability: High Schools and High-Stakes Testing
edited by Martin Carnoy, Richard Elmore, and Leslie Santee Siskin (RoutledgeFalmer).

States are increasingly requiring students to pass an exam in order to graduate from high school. This volume includes a series of thoughtful chapters on the practice of this “new accountability.” The central argument is that “accountability systems work-when they work-by calling forth energy, motivation, commitment, knowledge, and skill” from educators. Accountability cannot compel schools to improve, the editors argue, but it can complement more traditional reforms. They call for greater attention to capacity-building, professional development, and curriculum. Sensible warnings, but delivered with the depressing and potentially misguided subtext that policy can do no more than provide tools in the hope that educators will utilize them.

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Political Education: National Policy Comes of Age
by Christopher T. Cross (Teachers College).

Veteran Washington education operative Christopher Cross chronicles the making of federal education policy from the Truman administration to the present. Cross adeptly covers the creation of the federal Department of Education and provides perceptive and fair mini-portraits of the tenures of several secretaries of education. The book’s shortcomings are its que sera, sera view of the current state of federal education policy and its unimaginative musings on the future. But readers will come away with enhanced understanding of what got us where we are today.

It’s been said, more than once, that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a mandate that the federal government has failed to fund. Not true, in either respect. The law is neither unfunded nor, with one exception, much of a mandate.

The funding question was put to rest by James Peyser and Robert Costrell in the Spring 2004 issue (“Exploring the Costs of Accountability,” Feature). They showed that it costs but $20 to test a student, the only new activity NCLB requires all schools to do. Meanwhile, federal dollars have risen steadily since the law’s passage; the average district now receives $300 more per pupil from Washington than it did in 2000.

Nor is NCLB, apart from its testing requirement, much of a mandate. To be sure, schools are expected to show adequate yearly progress toward state-determined goals, as measured by state-developed tests. If progress is not made, the school is said to be failing or, in the polite language of the federal Department of Education, “in need of improvement.”

But what are the consequences of failing? Not much. If a school fails for two years running, the only requirement is to let its students transfer to one of the district’s nonfailing schools.

Students are not given the option of transferring to a private school or to a charter school outside the district’s boundaries. Inner-city children are not given the choice of attending a suburban school. Students cannot move to a better school if it too is “in need of improvement.” If every school in a district is failing, or if the district has only one school, children have no choices whatsoever.

According to the Council of Great City Schools, roughly 20 percent of big-city schools have been deemed “failing” (see the article by Michael Casserly on p. 32). This percentage is almost certain to increase, because the “adequate yearly progress” rule becomes more demanding each year. Unless schools improve-or states ease their academic standards-most big-city schools will soon be defined as failing. If every school is so designated, the choice mandate vanishes.

William Howell reports that over a fifth of the parents in failing schools would like to consider an alternative (see the article on p. 26). Since his data are from Massachusetts, a relatively high-scoring state, the parental demand could well be greater elsewhere.

Yet less than 1 percent of all students in failing schools have sought a transfer. Some hurdles (transportation costs, timing, and so forth) are practical. But many school districts appear to be obstructing the process by restricting the number of available choices and discouraging parents when they apply. As one Worcester, Massachusetts, official put it, “The feds told us we had to offer a choice, not the parents’ choice, but a choice.”

After three years of making inadequate progress, schools face another so-called mandate: Students must then be given the option of receiving free tutoring or other supplemental educational services. For this, the federal government is providing more than enough funds to pay current costs-and still more money is on its way.

Local districts can contract with outside vendors or provide these tutoring services themselves. At present the system is designed so that districts can keep the motivated students with supportive families who initially apply for services, leaving the less motivated students to be served by outside providers.

Where, in all of this, is there a tough mandate? Admittedly, schools are to be “reconstituted” by their districts if they fail five years in a row. Will this mandate have a bite? Though it’s too soon to tell, the reconstitution concept remains ill defined, leaving plenty of wiggle room for local school officials-the very same people who let these schools “fail” in the first place.

So is NCLB too weak to succeed? Not as long as test results continue to be reported to the public. Because of NCLB, parents and taxpayers are being told, more clearly than ever, how much students are learning at school.
This, it seems, is the excruciating mandate that many school officials and union leaders detest most. The feds are making them squirm under a bright light of public information about the schools’ performance. What’s so bad about that?

-Paul E. Peterson

Final Test: The Battle for Adequacy in America’s Schools

By Peter Schrag
New Press, 2003, $25.95; 288 pgs.

Reviewed by William A. Fischel

Peter Schrag’s Final Test describes how judicial rulings in state courts are transforming the way American public schools are financed. The pioneer in the brave new world of school finance was the California Supreme Court, which in the 1971 Serrano decision found that local property taxation was an inequitable means of funding public schools. The court ordered the state to simultaneously equalize tax bases and spending per pupil. Implementation of this idea was furthered in 1978 by Proposition 13, which, by capping property-tax rates and assessments, forced California to use statewide taxes to finance local schools.

California thus produced an “equitable” system at a comparatively low level of spending. As a consequence, Schrag argues, California’s achievement levels are now similar to Mississippi’s. To avoid this outcome, a new wave of school-finance litigation has instead endorsed an “adequacy” claim based on state constitutional clauses that exhort the legislature to provide for a “thorough and efficient” (or similar language) system of education. The current method of financing public education, plaintiffs argue, has left poor and minority students with inadequate schools. The goal is to “level up” the poorer schools by focusing on standards as well as the fairness of local taxation.

Final Test takes readers on a tour of states in which the adequacy approach has had some success. Schrag, formerly the editor of the Sacramento Bee‘s opinion page, puts his journalistic talent to good use. Readers learn about not only the courtroom action but also the events leading up to the cases and what happened afterward. Schrag is to be commended for his willingness to describe how the sausage meat of school-finance litigation is manufactured.

The problem for some readers will be Schrag’s open enthusiasm for this movement. He goes admirably beyond trial transcripts and news stories by interviewing participants in the litigation and its implementation. His sources, however, are heavily weighted toward the plaintiff side, and his most caustic comments are reserved for governors who hire lawyers who actually want to defend their school systems.

Schrag offers extensive coverage of cases in California, Kentucky, New Jersey, Ohio, Alabama, North Carolina, Maryland, and New York. California’s latest litigation, Williams v. California, is still under way, and Schrag devotes his opening chapter to its proceedings. The strategy of the plaintiff’s lawyers in this and other cases might be abbreviated “TTT,” for “Trailing the Terminex Truck.” The lawyers actively look for school conditions like toilets that do not work and vermin in the basement that will “shock the conscience” of the judge trying the case.

To his credit, Schrag raises the validity of the TTT strategy with lawyers for the California plaintiffs. The lawyers admit that the conditions are not really the central issue, but they use them nonetheless because they believe that (in a quote attributed to “someone”) “dumbing things down for judges” is necessary to get their attention.

This puts into sharp relief the issue of why school reform has been channeled through the courts. State supreme court judges are hardly philosopher kings. They usually know considerably less about public schools than state legislators, who are at least in touch with their local constituents and who sometimes start their political careers on a local school board.

A more profound problem with using the judiciary as a vehicle for school-finance reform is the inherently undemocratic nature of the courts. Schrag has little patience, though, with judicial deference. His ideal process is what lawyers call a “friendly suit,” in which both sides actually want the same outcome. He most admires Kentucky, where establishment politicians organized the litigation, the state deliberately put up a weak defense in which the governor actually switched to the plaintiff’s side, and the legislature responded to the court’s sweeping demand to restructure the entire system with a 20 percent increase in the sales tax rate.

There’s one party absent from this happy picture of democracy’s institutions’ joining hands to fix things: the voters. Now this may be no loss for Schrag, who is skeptical of their capacities, but it does make one wonder who is being served by all this. If the voters really wanted sweeping school reform, their duly elected representatives could have given it to them without the court having ordered it. Voters’ approval, of course, is not the same as the “right thing to do,” but if government is spending the voters’ money, it seems reasonable to ask their permission. Feeding the poor may be the right thing to do, but its rectitude is compromised if one takes food from the farmers without asking their permission.

Written in Stone

The practical problem with using the courts to bypass the voters is that judges have to ground their rulings in state constitutions, whose hortatory education clauses are the basis for their intervention. The decisions thus chart a particular approach to education that cannot be changed without constitutional amendment or reversal by a later court. Had these reforms emerged from purely legislative initiatives, they could be reversed easily if it became evident that they were not working as planned or if a better approach had been discovered in later years.

A sad example is California’s Serrano decision. It enshrined as constitutional doctrine the idea that local property-tax bases were to be the common property of the state, not the locality, for funding education. Implementation of tax-base sharing was soon shown to penalize a majority of the state’s poor and African-American students, who are concentrated in large urban districts where the property wealth is higher than the state average. Had this huge error been grounded solely in legislation, it could have been easily remedied. However, having enshrined tax-base equalization as constitutional principle, California and numerous other states that have invoked it will be stuck with it for a long time.

Schrag’s keenest insight is that any individual court decision is merely a way station on a cycle of litigation, legislation, and litigation yet again. For instance, New York’s highest court threw out an equity suit in 1982, but the plaintiffs later regrouped around the adequacy principle. They prevailed at the trial level but were reversed on intermediate appeal. After Final Test was published, the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) ruled for the plaintiffs.

Rest assured that the last decision has not been made in New York. And Schrag finds little to lament in this. What others call judicial tyranny he calls dialogue, and he is not entirely wrong about that. It is an odd way, though, for an allegedly self-governing people to manage their schools.

Schrag’s weakest point is his grasp of social-science methodology. He does cite the leading economist in this area, Eric Hanushek, at considerable length. The gravamen of Hanushek’s 30 years of research is that public schools are notoriously inefficient at converting additional dollars into improved student learning. Nonetheless, Schrag concludes from far less reliable sources that the additional money that adequacy litigation brings will help public education.

Competition Needed

Schrag’s dismissal of Hanushek’s findings is not entirely gratuitous. Hanushek has not attempted to explain why additional funds have so little effect on student outcomes. But Harvard’s Caroline Hoxby (who is not cited in this book) has a decade’s worth of research that provides an answer. Hoxby finds that education is not much different from other industries. If there is competition among many public school districts and private schools in a given geographic area, the schools will offer better services at a lower cost. Even students in the poorest districts appear to do better in a competitive system, as exists in the Boston area, than they do in areas in which one or two districts dominate a metropolitan area, like Miami.

Hoxby’s attention to market structure may offer an explanation for the apparent ineffectiveness of increased spending on education. Since the early 1970s, much additional funding for education has come from state rather than local sources. Increases in state funds usually come with strings that hamper the ability of an individual district to hire better teachers, adopt new technology, and respond to parental demands. Thus even in situations where the number of competing districts is great, the districts’ ability to behave like suppliers in a competitive market is hobbled by the additional regulations that inevitably arrive with the new subsidies.

A related problem is that school-finance cases often require the state to send more money to schools that already hold a monopolistic position. The most troubled schools, as Schrag demonstrates, are those in the largest districts. They are essentially governed by entrenched bureaucracies and teacher unions. The quality of the schools suffers as a result. By steering funds to the least effective districts, school-finance litigation may have added to Hanushek’s evidence that additional money is ineffective in improving education.

What is effective then? Competition, whether it comes from vouchers, independent private schools, public charter schools, or the breaking up of oversize districts, is the tonic to which Hoxby’s work most clearly points. In smaller school districts and in private schools, parents have more say about curriculum and the evaluation of teachers. Administrators will listen to them in competitive situations because if they don’t, the parents can move their child to another school or another district. Hoxby’s evidence indicates that competition would meet the demands of state constitutions for a “thorough and efficient” education system better than the lawyer-engineered, centralized outcomes that are so eagerly sought by the advocates of adequacy.

-William A. Fischel is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College.

Have school boards outlived their usefulness? Are they an anachronism? To answer these questions, we must consider why most school districts consistently perform at mediocre levels–and why some districts fail children in vast numbers. The National Assessment of Educational Progress data for African-American students in urban districts is truly alarming. One looks at the numbers and wonders why people even show up in the buildings called “schools” if so little learning is taking place.

Are school boards to blame for this state of affairs? No. But can school boards help to change this state of affairs? Absolutely.

Of course it would be foolish not to acknowledge the missteps many school boards have taken. There are school boards (and union organizers, superintendents, and district officials) that have created terrible, costly problems by serving the needs of adults rather than kids.

For instance, until 2001, the school board in Duval County, Florida, contracted with more than one hundred private bus companies to provide students with transportation–about $36 million worth of services–without soliciting competing bids. Today the school district has four competitively bid contracts, a consolidation that has resulted in substantial direct and indirect cost savings.

But if school boards have outlived their usefulness as evidenced by district performance, wouldn’t we also have to say that superintendents, the district model, and teacher and administrator preparation programs have all outlived their usefulness as well? Well, they might have. Which means there needs to be a dramatic redesign of schools and school systems to achieve different results. But that leads us right back to school boards–or some other form of local governance.

Some argue that school districts are the chief hindrance to such a “dramatic redesign.” They may be. But waving a wand to make districts and school boards disappear will not solve this problem. More than ten years of experience with charter schools has demonstrated that, in the absence of a traditional school district, it is still necessary to have some form of local oversight. There are poor performers and unscrupulous players to monitor. This cannot happen from the state level; states don’t have the capacity or the reach. Some form of local governance must exist–not only because of the sheer number of schools, but because the quality of decisionmaking tends to disintegrate as it moves farther from the target. Moreover, some core group in the community has to have a fire in its belly for better results. It has to be the school board.

Leadership for Reform

Poll after poll finds people dissatisfied with public education as a whole, but they consistently give their local schools high marks. This should tell us that parents are not going to push for wholesale improvement. They don’t appear to see a need for it.

Perhaps the superintendent and district staff could lead the charge? Don’t hold your breath. It is unrealistic to expect people within the system to generate a commitment to significant change and follow through when the upheaval affects employees’ job security, pay, and recognition. Expecting significant change to develop from within a bureaucracy is like expecting marshmallow fluff to take on the properties of titanium. Besides, superintendents are mobile professionals–they move from city to city and are rarely committed to a long-term vision for a community.

How about city government? Some mayors have inserted themselves in this role and been effective. But mayors have plenty to do without making sure the school district is on track. What happens when the mayor’s attention is absorbed by a natural disaster? City budget deficit? Reelection campaign? Of course, members of elected school boards have their own reelection campaigns to worry about–but this is in no way comparable to a mayor’s campaign. School board elections are focused on . . . schools. They are also dramatically different in scale. The sitting mayor in Houston spent over $8 million on his campaign; candidates for the Houston school board spend about $50,000. And in a large district just outside of Houston, winning school board candidates often spend less than $1,000.

What if the next mayor does not maintain the focus on education? School districts are much larger (in employees, budgets, facilities) than traditional city agencies like fire, police, and sanitation. School districts are also just plain harder to manage because they are so intensely human. The resources are teachers, the raw materials are children, and the product is learning. This is a world different from getting sewage clean. Mayoral control of school districts is not likely to be stable or focused over time.

How about the business community? In 15 case studies of cities across the nation, the Center for Reform of School Systems has found that business involvement is uneven and crisis-driven. Perhaps more troubling, as businesses consolidate and there are fewer corporate headquarters, there are fewer business leaders who train their focus on a specific city. An education leader in Charlotte, North Carolina, said: “The bank CEOs used to be like our benevolent dictators–and they deeply cared about what happened in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. But now, the world is their playground. They are as worried about Tokyo as they are about Charlotte.”

Religious leaders? They are obviously important contributors, but not organized or funded for systematic oversight of schools and school systems.

That leaves school boards, groups of citizens who are specifically concerned with driving school reform. It’s a fair question to ask whether local school boards have the will or the capacity to take on the responsibility of leading change. Some argue that school boards are the vanguard of the status quo, investing their time defending the “one best system” that perennially delivers dismal results.

But that is by no means universal. In Houston, Seattle, Sacramento, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, and Dayton, school boards have been the primary actors in reform. Likewise, the school boards in Aldine, Texas, and Long Beach, California, have been strong partners in maintaining a commitment to delivering better results. The Philadelphia School Reform Commission (the new name for the city’s school board) saved a sinking ship. In St. Louis, the school board took on great personal and political risk to hire a private management firm skilled in the art of the turnaround.

In these cities, the school boards hired superintendents with the clear intention of promoting systemic change in the district. Some of these boards ensure that the superintendent’s contract is tied to performance targets, providing salary bonuses for specific increases in student achievement over time.

The reforms in Philadelphia and St. Louis are too recent to assess, but all the other districts have logged student achievement gains, some of them substantial. The Washington, D.C.-based Education Trust recently recognized both Houston and Aldine with its prestigious “Dispelling the Myth” award for narrowing gaps in student achievement.

This need for outside pressure may be an argument for appointed boards. But, of the districts listed above, only Philadelphia has an appointed board. If the democratic process is yielding poorly qualified school board members, then we should all pay attention to recruiting and supporting talented people to run for school board. This is a leadership deficit that city governments, business leaders, and the faith community are well poised to address.

Local Accountability

The improvements observed in school districts during the past several years (largely confined to the elementary grades) can be traced to increased accountability and standards developed and imposed by the state. So, for much of the past 20 years, the state has been the outside source of pressure on school districts to improve. But these are “big box” improvements that can go only so far. By definition they cannot address needs that are idiosyncratic to a local geography or local economy.

For instance, some of the school boards named above implemented district accountability systems that are congruent with but go beyond the state accountability systems. How can the state of Texas–which serves four million students–create a standards and accountability system that perfectly meets the needs of students in Houston and far-off Amarillo? It can’t. So in the Houston Independent School District, students take the Stanford achievement test. These scores are then used to rate schools in the district’s accountability system, which was designed to augment the state’s. These testing requirements are established in local board policy, not required by the state. The state can do some of the heavy lifting–and then local leaders need to augment to meet local needs.

Not many school boards are exercising this responsibility. A Center for Reform of School Systems survey found that less than 25 percent of the nation’s 120 largest districts were implementing anything that wasn’t purely reactive. Only 10 percent had actual teeth in their local accountability measures. The fact that school boards are not exercising leadership in this area means they need to get busy–not disappear.

Watching the Coffers

As long as public dollars flow to schools and districts, it is important that the use of those dollars is looked after. There must be oversight. In large states like Texas, California, and Florida, the state’s reach is not long enough or skilled enough to get the job done. There is no way for a state education administrator in Sacramento to be in tune with what is happening in Chula Vista and the umpteen other districts this person would surely follow. The Chula Vista students would just be numbers for the state administrator, easily disappearing in columns of test results.

Some who suggest that school boards should disappear also argue that school districts should vanish. But what do a vast number of individual schools look like without local governance? A recipe for disaster. A high-level Texas Education Agency administrator told me that she spends more time on the handful of charter schools that request assistance from her office than on the more than 1,000 school districts she serves. One can quickly see how the state’s being responsible for local governance is farcical.

Without proper oversight, opportunities for mismanagement and fraud will abound. Many states have horrid stories of unscrupulous charter school operators defrauding the state. We cannot be naïve about sending millions of public dollars into the hands of individual school operators or district managers.

Yes, school boards and school board members have themselves been involved in shady deals. There are too many stories of school board members influencing district contracts in ways that have benefited themselves, their friends, and their families. But how will the wrongs disappear if school boards vanish? They won’t. We will just have a new list of things going wrong.

School boards–or some form of local governance–must exist. They should be held responsible for leading significant reform, holding their schools accountable for high student achievement, and ensuring that tax dollars are deployed efficiently.

For school boards to live up to this list of responsibilities, they must focus clearly on the core mission of the district: high performance of kids–not safe harbors for adults. City leaders must participate actively in recruiting talented and committed people to run for boards or to be appointed to boards. States should ensure that school board elections are held with other elections so that narrow interest groups don’t gain such a toehold.

School boards must take responsibility for improving district performance. Indeed, they are the only group that can.

Sarah C. Glover is the director of programs and operations at the Center for Reform of School Systems, a Houston-based group that promotes reform-minded school board leadership.