Bilingual education’s 26-year reign in California was supposed to end with the voters’ passage of Proposition 227 in June 1998. The proposition declared:

All children in California public schools shall be taught English by being taught in English. In particular, this shall require that all children be placed in English-language classrooms. Children who are English learners shall be educated through sheltered English immersion during a temporary transition period not normally intended to exceed one year.

Of course, there is often a disconnect between a law and its implementation, especially with an issue as controversial as bilingual education. State officials can subvert the law through interpretations that don’t conform to its intent; school districts can change their policies without making genuine changes in curriculum; or teachers can ignore the mandates, closing their classroom doors and doing as they please.

What happened in the wake of Prop 227? The answer should be of interest in Massachusetts, which is currently implementing a similar proposition, and in other states contemplating ending bilingual education or otherwise considering how best to educate students whose native tongue is not English. My research reveals that resistance to the new law was, in many schools and districts, quite intense, indicating the depth of support for bilingual education among teachers and principals. Of course, such opposition was to be expected after state officials and interest groups spent the past few decades aggressively promoting bilingual education. Yet gradually the intent of the legislation has prevailed in most places, apparently to the benefit of English Learners, at least judging by test scores. To explain these findings, however, I need to begin with some fundamentals about a much misunderstood topic.

Bilingual Education Before Proposition 227

During the past 25 years, essentially three different kinds of instructional programs have existed for students with limited English proficiency, also called English Learners. The first is English as a Second Language (ESL) tutoring mixed with regular classroom instruction, wherein both English Learners and English-speaking students are taught in English in the same classroom for most of the day. English Learners receive their supplementary ESL tutoring in a pullout setting for anywhere from an hour a week to several hours a day. The second program is sheltered English immersion, which involves teaching in English to a classroom filled only with English Learners. If all the children speak one language, the teacher may also speak in that language occasionally to clarify or explain a concept, but the children learn to read and write in English and they receive math, science, social studies, and other subjects in English. Teachers of children who function poorly in English will initially spend most of the day teaching them to read and write in English. Gradually, however, other subjects are introduced. For children in 1st grade or higher, it is usually just a matter of months before much of the day is devoted to these other subjects.

In the third instructional program, the only one that meets the definition of bilingual education in the theoretical literature, students are taught initial literacy and subjects like math and science in their native tongue as they progress toward fluency in English. English is taught as a separate subject for about an hour a day initially, although there may be almost no English at all in kindergarten. The amount of English is typically increased over time, but students are not taught entirely in English until they are literate in their native tongue.

The facilitation theory underlying bilingual education as just defined has two parts. The “threshold” hypothesis states that there is a threshold level of linguistic competence in the native language that all children must attain in order to avoid cognitive disadvantages, while the “developmental interdependence” hypothesis holds that the development of skills in a second language is facilitated by skills already developed in learning the first language. The implication is that children must first learn to read and write in their native tongue and should begin training in English literacy only after they have mastered their first language. Programs that deviate from this sequence violate the fundamental theory of bilingual education.

Yet observations I have conducted in more than 300 classrooms in California, Minnesota, New York City, and Massachusetts over the past 15 years indicate that local school systems have commonly used bilingual education as a generic term referring to all three types of language-instruction programs. Recall that sheltered English immersion consists of English instruction in a self-contained classroom of English Learners. However, school systems often call such programs bilingual education as long as the teacher is bilingual, the students are ethnically or linguistically similar, and the classes are formed with the stated intent of providing native-tongue instruction. For example, the program titles and descriptions for the Vietnamese, Russian, Khmer, and Chinese bilingual education programs in Minnesota, New York, California, and Massachusetts (before these programs were eliminated in the latter two states) often state that the children will be receiving native-tongue instruction. This is either completely false or a huge exaggeration. Children in these programs are always taught to read and write in English and receive subject-matter instruction in English.

In some Chinese bilingual-education classrooms, there may be some teaching in a non-English language, but it is neither a means of receiving subject-matter instruction nor of acquiring literacy. In some Chinese “bilingual” education programs, for example, the English Learners, all of whom are of Chinese origin, receive some instruction in Mandarin as a foreign language. (In fact, Mandarin could only be taught as a foreign language since it is only one of the many dialects spoken in China and is rarely the native tongue of Chinese immigrants to the U.S.) But these programs do not fit the theoretical model of bilingual education since the children learn to read and write first in English and the Mandarin is only a small part of their instruction.

Occasionally, even ESL pullout programs, where students spend most of the day learning in English in a mainstream classroom, are mistakenly characterized as bilingual education when the children in the ESL pullout class are of the same ethnicity. The fact that these classes are actually taught in English is ignored by administrators, policymakers, parents, and advocates of bilingual education. Indeed, the latter usually deny it, perhaps seeing a political advantage in categorizing many different types of programs as bilingual education.

In short, official statistics on bilingual-education enrollment consistently overestimate the number receiving native-tongue instruction. Nevertheless, California government figures indicate that in 1997-98, the year before Proposition 227 was implemented, only 410,000 students were enrolled in bilingual education statewide, while 1.14 million Hispanic English Learners were enrolled in California public schools. Even if the only children enrolled in programs labeled bilingual education were Spanish speakers, at most only 36 percent of Hispanic English Learners could have been enrolled in such programs. Thus critics of bilingual education most likely have exaggerated its aggregate harm and supporters most likely have exaggerated its aggregate benefits, since only a minority of English Learners were enrolled in programs that were even nominally bilingual. Moreover, the impact of bilingual education was concentrated almost exclusively on Hispanics.

Spanish speakers were virtually the only English Learners receiving authentic bilingual education because they were typically the only ones who fulfilled all the conditions for providing it efficiently. In order to provide authentic bilingual education, schools must have teachers who are fluent in the language and enough English Learners from the same language group to fill a classroom without combining students from more than two grade levels in one classroom. In addition, the students must all speak the same dialect (Spanish has no important dialects), and the native tongue must be a phonetic language with a Roman alphabet (otherwise few of the skills learned in the native tongue can be transferred to English). Finally, there must be published textbook materials in the native tongue that conform to the U.S. curriculum.

Predictably, then, I have not found any bilingual-education programs that actually teach initial literacy in native languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, that use ideographic characters. I also have not found any non-Roman alphabet bilingual-education programs that teach initial literacy in the native language, even if the alphabet is phonetic (as in the case of Hebrew, Arabic, the Indian dialects, Russian, Armenian, and Khmer). Teachers have told me that it is too difficult or confusing to teach initial literacy, particularly to young children, in a language with an alphabet different from English. These classes are therefore typically taught completely in English either as a pullout supplement to the mainstream classroom, in which case the emphasis is on teaching the English language itself, or as a substitute for the mainstream classroom, in which case all subjects, including math, social studies, and science, will be taught in English at a pace the children can understand. This does not prevent these programs from receiving official approval as “bilingual” education programs and whatever funding is associated with that label.

Interpretations

Though most English Learners, in California and elsewhere, did not receive bilingual education, Prop 227 passed in June 1998 largely on the strength of the allegation that the low achievement and high dropout rates of immigrant children were caused by “costly experimental language programs.” As a remedy, Prop 227 required all English Learners to be educated in sheltered English-immersion classrooms during a temporary transition period not to exceed one year. Once English Learners acquired a good working knowledge of English, they were to be transferred to English-language mainstream classrooms. Parents could request a waiver from these requirements, but only after their child had spent 30 days in a sheltered English-immersion classroom and only if the parent personally visited the school.

However, in practice Prop 227 has been dramatically changed by school districts, as evidenced by guidelines for school principals issued by Los Angeles Unified, San Diego Unified, and San Francisco Unified, apparently without protest from the state board of education. For one thing, the school districts have redefined a sheltered English classroom to include not only self-contained classrooms of English Learners taught in English, but also mainstream classrooms with ESL pullout instruction and self-contained classrooms of English Learners receiving up to 30 percent of their instruction in Spanish. Teachers have been permitted to recruit children for bilingual classrooms, even though the initiative says parents must initiate this process. Parents have been allowed to mail in their requests for waivers, when Prop 227 requires a personal visit. The school districts have also failed to require detailed documentation of the need for a bilingual education classroom, as the initiative requires, and they have changed the requirement of a year in a sheltered English-immersion classroom from a maximum to a minimum. In addition, children are being required to spend 30 days in an English-language classroom only when they first enroll in school–something the initiative says must happen each year.

San Diego’s interpretation and practice come close to subverting the intent of the law. Spanish-speaking English Learners in many sheltered immersion programs in San Diego schools are being taught to read and write in Spanish. My visits to two San Diego schools in September 2001 revealed that kindergarteners who knew no English were being assigned to classrooms called “waivered bilingual” during the first 30 days of the school year and were being instructed almost entirely in Spanish.

Nevertheless, although implementation has been uneven, enrollment in bilingual education has dropped dramatically across the state (see Figure 1). The total share of English Learners in California enrolled in bilingual education plummeted from 29 percent in 1997-98 to 12 percent in 1998-99, with the implementation of Prop 227. By 2001-02, it had declined a bit further, to just under 10 percent. Among elementary schools, where bilingual education was most common, the decline was more dramatic, but again bilingual education was not eliminated entirely. The share of English Learners enrolled in bilingual education in elementary school dropped from 39 percent in 1997-98 to 13 percent in 2001-02. Among secondary students, 10 percent of English Learners were enrolled in bilingual education before Prop 227, and about 3 percent in 2001-02. In the post-Prop 227 world, bilingual education is essentially an elementary-school program.

 

 

In the Classroom

To further investigate the implementation of Prop 227, I observed 170 classrooms and interviewed teachers and administrators in 29 elementary and junior high schools in eight California school districts during the spring of 1999 and the fall of 2001. The districts included Oceanside, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, two small San Francisco Bay-area school districts, and two small school districts near Los Angeles. The schools in Oceanside, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco were selected randomly from among those with large numbers of Hispanic (in San Francisco, large numbers of Chinese and Hispanic) English Learners. Thus my observations are representative of the school districts where bilingual education once flourished and also of the few schools with nominally bilingual programs for Chinese English Learners. (As explained above, the latter are actually sheltered English-immersion programs for students of Chinese origin.)

Visiting the school to sign a waiver authorizing bilingual education is not an idea that typically originates with the parent. My interviews suggest that bilingual education is in this sense like medical care. Teachers, like doctors, create supply by the criteria they use to define a child as needing treatment and they create demand by telling the patient what treatment he or she needs. In every school that I visited in the spring of 1999, teachers explained that they had “worked very hard” to get parents to sign waivers. They held meetings during the first 30 days of school and called parents to persuade them that their child would be better off in the bilingual-education program.

Just as Hispanic students were the only ones receiving authentic bilingual education before Proposition 227, they are the only ones being waivered after 227. The number of waivered classrooms is not caused simply by the number of students whose parents initially seek waivers. It also depends on the total number of Hispanic English Learners in a school, the school’s definition of eligibility for bilingual education, and the school’s strategies for filling a bilingual-education classroom. The most important step a principal can take is to control classroom assignments so that students who had been recommended for bilingual education before Prop 227 are in the same classroom, making it easier to convert the entire classroom to bilingual education on the 31st day of school.

Then parents must be contacted to obtain approval for the waiver of their child. When a simple majority of waivered students is obtained for a given teacher and classroom, the other parents can be told by phone that their child would need to change teachers if they do not sign a waiver. Alternatively, telephone calls might not be made until a decisive majority of waivered students had been obtained. In either case, telephone calls are very effective in converting additional students; most parents simply do not want their child’s education to be disrupted by changing classrooms, and many of them care more about that than they do about the language of instruction.

Thus the number of bilingual waivered students and bilingual waivered classes is not necessarily indicative of parental support for bilingual education. Rather, it seems to reflect staff support for bilingual education and, to some extent, parental deference to staff. Parents in schools with small numbers of Spanish-speaking English Learners, or in schools where a district-wide decision had been made to adopt sheltered English immersion, may not even have been aware of their right to apply for a waiver. In these districts, there was little or no likelihood of having enough students to maintain a bilingual-education program and thus no motive for the school to recruit parents. When pressure from above is absent, parental demand for bilingual education is low.

Interestingly, I also discovered that even the teachers of students still receiving Spanish bilingual education are using more English than in the past. The teachers of these classes offered two reasons. First, Prop 227 expressed the preferences of the electorate for a greater emphasis on English. Many teachers stated they were being responsive to their clients by increasing the English in bilingual education. Second, because there is no guarantee that a waivered class can be assembled for the next grade in the following year, teachers in bilingual-education classes told me they were preparing their students for the possibility that they would have to go into an English-language classroom because there were no bilingual-education classrooms available.

In the fall of 2001, I asked several former bilingual-education teachers who were now teaching in sheltered English-immersion classrooms whether they would ever go back to bilingual education. Not a single teacher said yes. All preferred sheltered English immersion, even though they thought it was harder work for them as teachers. A recurring theme was that “bilingual education was a good theory, but in practice it just didn’t work very well.” One practical problem facing bilingual education was the fact that many students change their residence from year to year, and even within a year. Thus they could find themselves in bilingual education in one school, all-English instruction in the next, and back to bilingual education in a third school. Another problem was the discontinuity between the bilingual-education curriculum and the curriculum in mainstream classrooms.

In general, my interviews indicate that, despite some uneasiness about the future and an unwillingness to renounce the theory of bilingual education, former bilingual-education teachers teaching in sheltered English-immersion programs now strongly support sheltered English immersion. They perceive themselves as giving their students the nurturing environment that they previously believed only a bilingual-education program could provide, while at the same time providing the exposure to English that they worried was lacking in the bilingual-education programs they used to teach in. As we will see below, early evidence of Prop 227’s effect on the achievement of English learners seems to support this view.

Prop 227 and Achievement

One of the biases that evaluations of programs for English Learners must overcome is that a much smaller percentage of students are actually tested in bilingual education than in English-immersion programs. One reason given by advocates and administrators is that it is unreasonable to administer English-language tests to students who are learning literacy in their native tongue. This may be true, but it gives the bilingual-education programs an unfair advantage because schools and teachers tend to exclude the lowest-scoring students from testing.

This problem exists in California with English Learners as a group and with bilingual education in particular. According to state regulations, all English Learners must be tested on the statewide Stanford 9 tests first administered in 1997-98, the year before Prop 227. However, only 68 percent of English Learners were tested in 1997-98 in reading; the share increased to only 84 percent in 2000-01. Although math is less language-based than reading, the testing rates for English Learners in math are only a few points higher: 72 percent of English Learners were tested in math in 1997-98; 86 percent in 2000-01.

The cause of this in California is threefold. First, a loophole in the state law gives parents the right to remove their child from testing. Second, since special-education students may be excused from testing, an English Learner can be classified as special education and excused on that basis. Third, English Learners tend to have lower socio-economic status, making them more likely to be absent from school on the day tests are administered. These factors bring about considerable variation in testing rates among schools and school districts.

Valentina Bali of Michigan State University found that in 1997-98 the Pasadena school district in southern California tested only 50 percent of its bilingual-education students, versus 89 percent of those who were in ESL programs. A 1998 Los Angeles school district report showed that bilingual-education students scored higher than students in English-immersion programs after five years. But only 61 percent of the bilingual-education students were tested, versus 97 percent of the students in the all-English program. Under these circumstances, the kind of casual comparisons made by the media of achievement before and after Proposition 227 and across school districts are risky. Moreover, any trends in aggregate achievement can be obscured by increases in the testing rates of the target population, as has happened in the wake of Prop 227 for English Learners. Evaluating the effect of Prop 227 on achievement is also complicated by the lack of data on student achievement broken down by which program they participated in.

It is possible, however, to analyze the effect of Prop 227 indirectly by examining the relationship between the percentage of students enrolled in bilingual education and the achievement of English Learners across the more than 9,000 schools in California. A simple comparison, examining only those elementary schools with significant bilingual- education programs (more than 120 students enrolled before Prop 227), reveals that the schools that eliminated their bilingual education programs had a 10-point gain in reading and a 13-point gain in math, but those that maintained some form of bilingual-education program had only a 6-point gain in reading and a 14-point gain in math.

This comparison may underestimate the impact of eliminating bilingual education, since even the schools that kept more than 120 students in bilingual education still had a large reduction in bilingual-education enrollment. Moreover, even if a school maintained a scaled-down bilingual-education program, my interviews suggest that in many schools it is no longer the same program–more English is being used and students are being transitioned faster since there are fewer bilingual-education programs in the upper grades. Trying to isolate the true effect of a program that is no longer the same is difficult even at the individual level; it is even more difficult at the school level. Differences in testing rates by program introduce further bias. The percentage of English Learners tested in reading was four points lower in the schools that eliminated bilingual education, while the percentage of English Learners tested in math was three points lower. All else being equal, these lower testing rates should inflate the test scores of the schools that retained bilingual education.

Examining the relationship between the percentage of English Learners enrolled in bilingual education in a school and test scores for English Learners, taking into account differences in schools’ pre-Prop 227 test scores and the percentage of schools’ students eligible for free lunch, reveals another indicator of Prop 227’s effect on achievement. This approach shows that the percentage of an elementary school’s students enrolled in bilingual education is significantly and negatively related to a school’s average test score for English Learners in both reading and math, even after accounting for the characteristics of its students. The results suggest that elementary schools with no bilingual-education enrollment score six points higher in reading and three points higher in math than schools with all their English Learners enrolled in bilingual education. The magnitude of the effect in reading is greater than one-half of a standard deviation–a large effect by the standards of education policy research. The effect on math is .21 of a standard deviation (see Figure 2). Moreover, as with the comparisons discussed above, these estimates may underestimate the true impact of English-language instruction, since Prop 227 has also changed bilingual education.

Data for individual students still suffer from the testing-rate bias favoring bilingual education, but where it is available one can at least determine which program the student is enrolled in. Valentina Bali also analyzed the achievement of individual English Learners in the Pasadena school district. In 1998, 53 percent of Pasadena’s English Learners were enrolled in bilingual education, compared with less than 2 percent after Prop 227. Adjusting statistically for the lower testing rate among students in bilingual education, Bali found that the effect of being in bilingual education in 1997-98 was negative and statistically significant, but the magnitude was only 2.4 points in reading and 0.5 in math.Using the same technique to examine the gains made by the two groups following the implementation of Prop 227, Bali found that putting these same students in a structured immersion classroom the next year eliminated the small gap between English Learners who had been in bilingual education and those not in bilingual education. The English Learners who transferred from bilingual education to structured English immersion made gains of four points in reading compared with gains of only two points for the students who had been taught in English previously. (There was no difference in the gains the two groups made in math.) In short, Bali’s analyses suggest that putting English Learners who had been in bilingual education into structured immersion increased their reading scores by about two points (.18 of a standard deviation) and their math scores by about a half point or less (.03 of a standard deviation). These effects are somewhat weaker than those produced by my school-level analysis, but still indicative of substantial benefits.Prop 227 appears to have had a positive effect on the achievement of English Learners, but it is not going to turn them into high-scoring students. Although bilingual education may be a relatively ineffective way of teaching English Learners, it was not the primary cause of their low achievement. The root problem is the way children are designated limited English proficient. An English Learner is not just a child from a non-English-speaking family. He or she is a child from a non-English-speaking family who scores low in English. Children from non-English-speaking families who score above a state-designated standard in English when they are initially tested are not designated limited English proficient. Therefore, English Learners must, by definition, be low scoring in English regardless of which program they are enrolled in.Practically speaking, the movement away from bilingual education will not dramatically improve the performance of students of non-English-speaking background, in part because bilingual education, in the pure form theorists advocated, was not as widely practiced as generally believed and in part because no program can dramatically improve the achievement of a group that is defined by its low achievement. There is a ceiling effect, not on individual children, but on the group as a whole because children who improve ultimately disappear from the category. Prop 227’s effects on student achievement have also been moderated by the fact that some schools and school districts are subverting the law’s intent and assigning Spanish-speaking English Learners to classrooms taught largely or almost entirely in Spanish in the first 30 days of school.Nevertheless, the law has had beneficial consequences. Test scores of English Learners appear to have risen considerably, if less dramatically than some of Prop 227’s proponents had hoped. Even more impressive is the fact that Prop 227 changed the direction of California policy, reversing 26 years of aggressive support for bilingual education by advocates within the state department of education. It seems that when voters speak clearly, policy does change, if somewhat more unevenly than the stark phrasing of the law would require.Christine H. Rossell is a professor of political science at Boston University. This research project was funded by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The scene in January 2002 was a civics text come to life. Flanked by jubilant members of Congress and standing in front of a cheering crowd, President George W. Bush declared the start of a “new era” in American public education with the signing of the No Child Left Behind Act. The new law represented a sweeping reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was originally enacted in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty–and has since been reauthorized every four to six years, usually under a catchy new banner. Its signature program, Title I, funnels nearly $12 billion annually to schools to support the education of disadvantaged children. “As of this hour,” said the president, “America’s schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results.” Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., shared the president’s enthusiasm. “This is a defining issue about the future of our nation and about the future of democracy, the future of liberty, and the future of the United States in leading the free world,” the legislative icon had proclaimed on the Senate floor. “No piece of legislation will have a greater impact or influence on that.”

While No Child Left Behind does mark an unprecedented extension of federal authority over states and local schools, the law’s accountability measures were not, for the most part, newly developed in 2001. No Child Left Behind was the cumulative result of a standards-and-testing movement that began with the release of the report A Nation at Risk by the Reagan administration in 1983. The movement gained momentum with the 1989 education summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which President George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors set broad performance goals for American schools. By 1991, President Bush’s “America 2000” proposal included voluntary national testing tied to “world class” standards, a provision that led to the bill’s death by Republican filibuster. In 1994 President Clinton signed into law “Goals 2000,” which provided grants to help states develop academic standards.

The sea change came with the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which signaled a nationwide commitment to standards-based reform. The reauthorization required states to develop content and performance standards for K-12 schools. Congress also adopted the notion of “adequate yearly progress” that later became the linchpin of accountability in No Child Left Behind. States were required to make “continuous and substantial” progress toward the goal of academic proficiency for all students. However, there was no deadline for doing so; indeed, consequences were largely absent from the law. State standards were supposed to be in place by 1997-98, assessments and final definitions of adequate yearly progress by 2000-01. But the administration never withheld funds from states that failed to meet these timelines. The Clinton administration, concerned that cracking down would rile the Republican Congress, focused on providing states with assistance in the development process. As of the original 1997 deadline, the American Federation of Teachers found that just 17 states had “clear and specific standards” in English, math, social studies, and science. Nevertheless, the 1994 reauthorization jumpstarted the process of developing standards and tests in most states.

By the mid-1990s, then, the themes of No Child Left Behind were already on the table. In many ways the final ingredient was President George W. Bush, who persuaded some Republicans to accept proposals that they had rejected just one session of Congress earlier and tacked with Democrats toward common ground. In so doing, however, agreements in principle sometimes papered over real disagreements regarding policy particulars. This meant that many key issues in No Child Left Behind were postponed until implementation. As a result, the Education Department’s rule-making process and its enforcement practices will be vital in determining how seriously states and schools will take the new requirements.

 

The Late Clinton Years

The lesson that many policymakers and analysts took from the 1994 reauthorization was that federal dollars needed to be tied more explicitly to measurable gains in student performance. In April 1999, Andrew Rotherham of the Democratic Leadership Council’s Progressive Policy Institute summed up the key elements of this view in an influential white paper. In it he wrote that Congress, to rectify the Title I program’s status as “an undertaking without consequences” for everyone except students, should set performance benchmarks and terminate aid to districts that failed to meet them. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s 50-plus separate, categorical grants would be reduced to five broad “performance-based grants” funding the Title I compensatory-education program, teacher quality, English proficiency, public school choice, and innovation.

As the next reauthorization cycle rolled around, conservatives were supportive of the idea of state flexibility combined with performance goals, but they favored an even broader block grant approach that would give states enormous discretion over how they spent federal education funding. This would prove to be a major sticking point, as Democrats tended to oppose broad block grants that threatened programs with specific purposes. The proposal that reached the Senate floor included a pilot block-grant program giving spending discretion to 15 states. It also held kernels of the language that would find its way into No Child Left Behind two years later. It still allowed states to define what adequate yearly progress meant, but the state plans had to ensure that each racial, ethnic, and economic subgroup of students would be proficient within ten years. Any school identified as “needing improvement” was required to offer students the chance to transfer to another public school and to pay the transportation costs. This was to happen after two years of failing to make adequate progress.

The bill wound up satisfying no one. Liberal Democrats sought a substitute amendment protecting existing programs from block grants and pushing President Clinton’s triumvirate of class-size reduction, school construction, and teacher training. New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg and other conservative Republicans demanded a far larger block grant and a voucher program that would be further-reaching than the public-school transfer provisions in the bill. New Democrats, led by Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman, pushed a modified block-grant proposal. Like Rotherham’s Progressive Policy Institute agenda, it created five major grants, raised overall funding by $35 billion over five years (targeted to poor school districts), kept the class-size reduction program, and added $100 million for public school choice. In the end, the New Democratic proposal got just 13 votes. As a long list of riders on unrelated issues like gun control bogged down floor debate, both sides decided to take their chances on the imminent presidential election.

Thus, for the first time in its history, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was not reauthorized on time. Instead, the old law was simply rolled over for an additional year. Rotherham complained, “At the national level, the debate about how to address education has broken down along predictable and partisan lines” and urged that the New Democratic proposal be the basis for the new administration’s first move on education reform. Surprisingly, in a way it was.

Add One “Compassionate Conservative”

In 1999 Texas governor George W. Bush was on the presidential campaign trail, pitching himself as a “compassionate conser-vative.” The compassion was for students trapped by what Bush frequently called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The conservatism lay in maximizing parental choice and local spending flexibility. However, Bush also envisioned a strong national role in education policy. This put him at odds with Republicans who cared mainly about keeping the national government out of local schools. In fact, Bush had to lobby to eliminate language calling for the abolition of the Department of Education from the 2000 Republican platform.

For Bush, focusing on education had potential risks, given its association with voters as a “Democratic” issue. In July 1999, for example, a Pew Research Center poll found that by a margin of 52 to 29 percent, voters trusted Democrats to do a better job on education. The very title of the Bush campaign position paper on the topic, “No Child Left Behind,” was cribbed from the liberal Children’s Defense Fund, whose (now trademarked) mission is “to leave no child behind.”

However, education reform was a major issue in Texas, and Bush realized its potential for a Republican presidential hopeful. As governor, he had promoted the state’s program of annually testing all students in grades 3-8 and rating schools based on their performance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) exams. On the campaign trail he touted steadily improving TAAS scores, especially among black and Latino students.

Developing these themes for the campaign was a small policy staff that included Alexander “Sandy” Kress. Kress was a Dallas attorney, a school board member who had worked with Bush on Texas’s accountability statutes–and, as Bush liked to point out, a Democrat and Democratic Leadership Council member. As such, Kress was familiar with Rotherham’s paper and the various 1999 bills and borrowed widely from them.

Soon after Bush’s victory was sealed by the Supreme Court, the president-elect invited about 20 members of Congress to Austin to discuss education policy. Along with Republican leaders–Boehner, Gregg, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont–New Democrats such as Sen. Evan Bayh, Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana, and Georgia senator Zell Miller were prominently featured. So was Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., a major education player in the House whom the president was soon calling “Big George.” Ted Kennedy was conspicuously absent, illuminating the president’s intention to seek a coalition of Republicans and New Democrats. Warned that pushing hard on private school vouchers would end that prospect, Bush gave his reassurances: vouchers were not a make-or-break issue.

As Congress opened its doors in January 2001, “No Child Left Behind” emerged, not as a piece of draft legislation but as a 30-page legislative blueprint. The proposal, released just three days after the inauguration, closely tracked Bush’s campaign agenda. It included a broad block-grant program providing new spending flexibility to “charter states,” and it consolidated categorical grants into five areas of focus, modified slightly from the New Democrats’ proposal. It called for the annual testing of students in grades 3-8 and the release of state and school report cards showing the performance of students disaggregated by ethnic and economic subgroups. States would be required to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) each year as a double check on the results from state assessments, and schools receiving Title I compensatory-education funds would be required to show that disadvantaged students were making adequate yearly progress. The proposal did not spell out the requirements for “corrective action” when a school or district continued to fail, but public school choice and, later, “exit vouchers” toward private school tuition or for supplemental services were to be included. Schools and states that succeeded “in closing the achievement gap” would receive funding bonuses from the federal government; those that did not would lose funding for administrative operations.

The blueprint, in short, borrowed liberally from several competing proposals made in the waning years of the Clinton administration. Bush “essentially plagiarized our plan,” one Lieberman aide told the Washington Post, but others in Congress could have made the same claim. What is called plagiarism in academia wins political points in Congress; the Bush proposals were well received on Capitol Hill.

Horse Trading

In Texas, Governor Bush had found success in producing broad statements of principle instead of legislative drafts. Perhaps remembering the 1993 health-care debate–when majority Democrats insisted that the Clintons produce a complete bill, then sniped at its fine print until it sank–Republicans did not demand more from Bush. The administration had thus set itself up to claim credit at the end of the process while Congress squabbled over the specifics. As one Democratic staffer put it, “This was great political strategy. When you put out legislation, then you’re fighting for colons and sentences and subheadings. The White House had orders: don’t get bogged down in details.”

Lawmakers, of course, thrive on detail, notwithstanding the devil’s reputed place of residence. But as the stalemate in the previous Congress made clear, reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would require building bipartisan coalitions; after all, the present Congress was even more closely divided. Here the Bush administration’s shrewd brand of alliance politics enabled it to avoid a partisan showdown in the Senate’s education committee. Kress, the president’s point man on No Child Left Behind, was dealing mainly with Gregg, who clearly called the Republican shots. Meanwhile, he also cultivated the New Democrats, using those discussions to lure Kennedy to the table. While Kennedy had been left out of the Austin summit in December, the senior senator was a consummate dealmaker, expert in the issues and perturbed by the prospect of a major bill in his bailiwick moving forward without him. Bush and Kress began to woo him; Kennedy, for his part, “bought himself into the game” by agreeing that some form of program consolidation and block-grant flexibility, along with supplemental services portability, could be part of the Senate bill.

The result was a three-way coalition among conservative Republicans, New Democrats, and the Democratic regulars. Jeffords’s momentous decision in late May to quit the Republican caucus, throwing the Senate to the Democrats, had little impact on the education bill. Kennedy’s decision to deal with the White House had made him a major player already.

The coalition was almost derailed in late April over the definition of adequate yearly progress, prompting what one Senate staffer colorfully called “hell week.” Governors had been pressuring the White House to weaken the bill’s requirement that states make adequate yearly progress. As it stood, the Senate language required annual progress by each individual subgroup of students in such a way that all would become proficient within ten years. But states were worried that too many schools would be identified as failing–an expensive, and embarrassing, label. Jeffords’s staff fueled this with analyses claiming that a majority of schools, even wealthy ones in states that invest heavily in education, would “fail” under the bill’s formula.

Not everyone agreed that these charges were accurate. Whatever their validity, though, they had clear political utility. The governors (and some committee members) leaped at the chance to gut the disaggregation and testing requirements of the bill. And Bush’s negotiators seemed surprisingly sympathetic. After cutting out Jeffords for months, “suddenly Kress was backing up Jeffords’s staff.” The new language required at least a 1 percent improvement in test scores each year per group. However, progress would be judged over a three-year period and the scores of the lowest achieving students would be weighted more heavily, giving schools credit for closing the achievement gap.

The new formula was attacked as unworkable by states and unfair by civil rights groups. Kress didn’t try very hard to defend the compromise, calling it “Rube Goldbergesque”–but settling the adequate yearly progress debate for the present kept the bill moving forward.

In the meantime, the challenge was to hold on to the majority Democrats who hoped to boost funding. By wide margins senators agreed to $181 billion in special-education funding over ten years; they also agreed to boost authorized spending on compensatory education by $132 billion over the same period. Ultimately, 89 programs were included in the Senate version of the bill (up from 55 in existing law and 47 in the House bill), with a price tag of $33 billion (compared with $19 billion in the president’s plan and $23 billion in the House’s). “A function of being on the floor too long,” moaned a GOP aide, as debate reached seven weeks and 150 amendments.

The members of the bill’s formulation group, however, had pledged to suppress amendments that cut at the core of the basic deal. For example, the late Paul Wellstone, a Democrat from Minnesota, failed in his attempt to defer the new annual testing requirements unless funding for compensatory education was tripled; Kennedy, Lieberman, and Bayh all voted against it. A small voucher pilot program was also defeated, 41-58, with 11 Republicans in the negative. Finally, on June 14, the bill was resoundingly approved, 91-8.

Like Gregg, John Boehner, the new chairman of the House Education and the Workforce committee, was an unlikely convert to an increased federal role in education, having previously urged elimination of the Department of Education. But Boehner was dedicated to cementing Bush’s disputed electoral victory with an undisputed legislative success, and he knew how to count. That is, he knew there were 30 to 40 House Republicans who would never support the sort of testing regime Bush had promised, especially without vouchers. Given the slim Republican majority in the House, the need for Democratic votes was simple fact. And for Democrats to support annual testing, the Republicans would need to give ground on vouchers and block grants.

An emblematic compromise in the House created “transferability,” which shifted spending discretion across the many different programs not just to states but to school districts as well. No one (outside the New Democrats, who proposed it) truly liked this; but Boehner was worried that planned efforts to add even the Senate’s pilot version of a block-grant program would scare off Democrats and scuttle the bill. The first committee roll call stripped vouchers from the draft; markup then had to be suspended so that Boehner, with Kress, could hold a closed-door meeting to mollify committee conservatives, promising a floor vote.

Boehner had achieved bipartisanship, as promised–the final committee vote was 41-7–but with a rather Democratic flavor. In general the president had no desire, as Undersecretary of Education Eugene Hickok later put it, “to sacrifice accountability on the altar of school choice.” This naturally upset those who felt that accountability required choice. GOP dissenters complained that “the bill . . . contains very few provisions of the president’s original proposals.”

The floor debate put those dueling definitions on display. Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., urging members to vote against a voucher amendment, argued, “This amendment has no accountability in it. We take the money with the voucher from the public school to a private school, and then there is no accountability there. No test, no trail, no nothing.” Majority leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, retorted, “We do not ask the Catholic schools to be accountable to the government, we ask them to be accountable to the parents.”

In the end, the committee bill passed the House largely intact. The attempts to add vouchers were defeated; so too, after intensive White House lobbying, was a coalition of the far Left and far Right (led by Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich.) seeking to eliminate annual testing. The ultimate vote was lopsided 384-45, with Republicans making up three-quarters of the “no” votes. Still, holding a skittish membership together had been no easy task. And given the differences between the House and Senate, the task was far from over.

Conference Calls

During the summer of 2001, No Child Left Behind came under fire from all sides: from local officials who didn’t want national norms; from teacher unions that didn’t want mandatory testing; and from conservatives who thought that with vouchers dead the rest of the bill might as well be. The National Conference of State Legislatures called the bill’s testing provisions “seriously and perhaps irreparably flawed.” And new reports argued that both the House and Senate provisions for adequate yearly progress would result in a large number of schools’ being identified as failing. On Capitol Hill, House Republicans had calculated that with a Republican Senate they could gain back their concessions in conference, but now that chance was gone. Democrats began to wonder too: after all, didn’t the president need this bill more than they did?

The conference committee, then, had to repair the bill’s bipartisan armor–and bridge some 2,750 divergences between the House and Senate versions. It would not merely revise but rewrite many provisions that had been pushed through with the promise of a later “fix,” maximizing the remarkable degree of discretion delegated to congressional conferees.

During the summer recess, staff members representing all 39 members of the conference–the Senate, to represent its coalition’s various blocs, had named an astounding 25 conferees–met daily to hammer out more than 2,000 agreements. Even September 11 and the anthrax scare did not push No Child Left Behind off the agenda.

With periodic presidential exhortation, accountability provisions slowly took shape under the watchful eyes of the “Big Four”: Boehner, Miller, Kennedy, and Gregg. Language providing additional targeting of compensatory education funds to poor districts was approved. A pilot block-grant program was grafted to “transferability.” Final supplemental services language was developed. Extra money for charter schools was found (though money for special education was not; indeed, most of the Senate’s funding levels were slashed). Announced last, or nearly so, were the adequate yearly progress requirements. While the conference’s basic stance on this was in place by late September, it was kept quiet to allow additional tinkering and to avoid interest group pressure.

The final language required all students, in all groups, to reach proficiency within 12 years. However, it allowed districts to average results across three years. No punishment would be imposed on states for low test scores. And though Bush endorsed “an objective check on state accountability systems” (specifically naming NAEP), this issue was settled by requiring states to participate biennially in the 4th- and 8th-grade NAEP exams, but prohibiting penalties based on the states’ NAEP performance. These changes, though hardly satisfying all critics, made the final version more workable than either the House or Senate versions.

At once numbingly detailed and comfortably vague, the conference report was adopted by the House and Senate in December, with opposition again limited to an odd amalgam of the discontented far Left and far Right. The process, said Roemer, had “brought the middle together, and held it.” An impressive legislative victory was in place.

The Implementation Challenge

Many factors contributed to No Child Left Behind’s passage: the tentative alliance between moderate New Democrats and much of the Republican caucus; the need for the newly elected president to succeed on a campaign priority; Bush’s willingness to embrace Democratic positions and leaders; and the media attention that resulted from the debate’s “man bites dog” quality-a Republican president pushing a supposedly Democratic issue.

Cooperation among legislators was made possible by the willingness to move past divisive issues–itself possible because the conversation was newly framed by a common vocabulary centered on “accountability.” Accountability was hard to be against, but elastic. It served as a way for Democrats to talk about reform without simply talking about increased spending; it was also a selling point for additional resources, since ordinarily skeptical Republicans could console themselves that the new funds went to a system newly worthy of investment. While accountability was unproved as a reform tool, there was also no conclusive evidence that it did not work. In the absence of empiricism, aphorism took hold, as with Secretary of Education Rod Paige’s athletic metaphor: “If you want to win the football game, you have to first keep score.” How one defines accountability matters greatly in practice, but it proved to matter far less in politics-in other words, to the term’s usefulness in providing a unifying theme for the No Child Left Behind debate that could garner broad agreement in principle even when policy specifics proved elusive. The latter could be compromised or, as often happened, deferred from campaign to committee to floor to conference to implementation. But when the bill became law in 2002, it could be deferred no longer.

The compromises of No Child Left Behind avoided both extremes of the policy spectrum. Democrats, for example, resisted granting wide discretion to local districts on the one hand and to parents on the other. The number of categorical programs did not diminish significantly. In principle, public school choice has been greatly expanded, but it is not clear how well this will serve students in far-flung rural districts or in urban systems where most or all of the public schools are identified as needing improvement. And experimentation with voucher programs will have to await the baby steps of the supplemental services program and continued local efforts, albeit encouraged by the Supreme Court’s June 2002 Zelman decision.

Meanwhile, Republicans resisted efforts to require strong state accountability to the federal government. The first bullet point in the House fact sheet on the conference report trumpeted, “No National Tests.” There are no consequences linked to NAEP participation or for states that fail to attain adequate yearly progress. The text of the law left the states to set their definition of proficiency and to use their own assessments to measure it, leaving open the possibility that states will lower their expectations.

Both sides ducked the fact that the federal government is just a “7 percent investor” in a huge company owned by someone else, as Kress put it, referring to the fact that states and localities fund 93 percent of K-12 public education. This limits the degree of change the federal government can leverage. Even if it were willing to use its sticks, the Department of Education has small sticks to brandish. The law’s titular commitment to the success of every child made it hard to compromise on the adequate yearly progress requirements, but this does not make it feasible policy. During the next reauthorization, scheduled for 2007, a lower figure (90 percent?) may be substituted at the halfway point of the 12-year countdown to prevent states from lowering proficiency standards.

Of course, the passage of legislation does not end the story. The political compromises written into No Child Left Behind make the regulatory process crucial, even determinative, and here the secretary and the department are key actors. In a series of congressional hearings in 2002, the department touted its progress and promised to hold firm on enforcement in the face of skeptical Democratic questioning.

State flexibility has been granted in some areas. Draft rules on testing released in March 2002 indicated that states would be allowed to use different tests in different areas, potentially undercutting their comparability. The department also signaled a hands-off stance on judging the quality of state standards and assessments. The rules released in July 2002 allowed states to use either criterion-referenced tests linked to state standards or norm-referenced tests that measure how students perform compared with their peers, modified somewhat to reflect state standards. It remains unclear whether states will be forced to develop standards-driven tests or whether “augmented” commercial exams will be ultimately acceptable.

This flexibility suited the Bush administration’s interpretation of the law’s intent; in other areas, that interpretation was more stringent. In July 2002, for example, the department listed some 8,600 schools that had failed to meet state standards for two consecutive years. Under No Child Left Behind, students in those schools were to be offered the chance to attend a better-performing school in the district starting in September. In an October letter to state school chiefs, Paige warned that state plans to “ratchet down their standards in order to remove schools from their lists of low performers” were “nothing less than shameful.”

The final regulations were not released until late November 2002 in advance of a January 31, 2003, deadline for the submission of preliminary state plans to achieve adequate yearly progress toward full proficiency. While states remained worried that too many schools would be identified as failing and asked for additional leeway, the department continued to take a tough line. The first round of state plans (produced on time, though some were incomplete) varied wildly. Their specifics depended in large part on how stringently states defined proficiency and how closely the new law tracked existing requirements. Some states proposed complicated statistical techniques for gauging school progress; others backloaded their predicted progress, with far greater gains toward the end of the 12-year timeline. Most states, noted a January report by the Education Commission of the States, had a long way to go. And by spring, despite Paige’s warning, many states were trying to rework their standards to downgrade the definition of proficiency.

The early outcomes of the rulemaking process seemed to indicate the Bush administration was holding the line on its substantive priorities such as choice and assessments, giving the president a clearer legislative victory than it initially appeared. On the law’s first anniversary, Bush declared, “We can say that the work of reform is well begun.” George Miller, however, accused the administration of implementing regulations in a manner “inconsistent with the way the law was approved by Congress” and called Bush a “truant from sound education policy.”

This opening chasm means many questions remain as the story continues. How will the secretary balance state experimentation and national rigor? Budget issues are a prominent part of the equation: while Democrats were satisfied with the funding levels provided in fiscal year 2002, this was not true for fiscal 2003 or 2004. Complicated by revenue shortfalls and budget cutbacks in many states, the funding/mandate balance promises to be an ongoing source of friction. Furthermore, as the scene shifts to the states and the bureaucracies, interest groups–surprisingly dormant in the narrative above–may reassert themselves. One target may be the testing regime itself, if states (and key suburban voters) continue to gripe.

John Adams once observed that “the laws are a dead letter until an administration begins to carry them into execution.” More than two centuries later, that is how government still works, even in the textbooks. For the students in America’s public schools, the ways in which No Child Left Behind is implemented will determine how government works in real life.

Andrew Rudalevige is assistant professor of political science at Dickinson College. This essay is adapted from Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West, eds., No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practice of Accountability, forthcoming from the Brookings Institution Press.

A fierce debate over civic education in America’s public schools has erupted in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Broadly speaking, liberal approaches to civic education have emphasized the need to resist jingoism and to explore why America induces such hatred in certain parts of the world. By contrast, conservative responses to 9/11 have emphasized our national virtues and the need to defend them in times of danger. Conservatives tend to caricature liberal civics lessons as the toleration of the intolerable, while liberals often criticize conservative civics lessons as a knee-jerk brand of patriotism. Yet despite this stark contrast in content, both liberal and conservative advocates continue to insist that civic education in our schools not only impart civic knowledge and civic skills but also shape our deepest values, attitudes, and motivations. My view, briefly stated, is that the attempt to inculcate civic values in our schools is at best ineffective and often undermines the intrinsic moral purpose of schooling.

What is civic virtue, and how does it relate to civic knowledge and civic skills? I define civic knowledge as an understanding of true facts and concepts about public affairs, such as the history, structure, and functions of government, the nature of democratic politics, and the ideals of citizenship. Civic skill is the ability to deploy knowledge in the pursuit of political goals-actions such as voting, protesting, petitioning, and debating. Civic virtues integrate such knowledge and skill with proper civic motivations or attitudes, such as respect for the democratic process, love for the nation, and concern for the common good.

Ideally, it would seem that civic education ought to promote appropriate virtues, not merely knowledge and skills, because without a virtuous motivation, knowledge and skills lack moral worth. After all, civic knowledge and skills routinely support all manner of immoral political conduct-including the use of deception, manipulation, and coercion-all the way to a traitorous betrayal of the nation to its enemies. Yet if civic schooling attempts to inculcate civic virtue, it can lead to the subordination of knowledge to civic uplift. So it is best for public schools to focus on what they do best: the inculcation of knowledge and skills.

Schools might well encourage participation in community and life. But educators are not content with these modest contributions to the practice of citizenship.

Civic Education or Civic Schooling?

For the past half-century, political scientists have been seeking to answer some basic questions about the nature of civic education. For instance, where do citizens acquire their knowledge, skills, and virtues? What role do schools-in particular, high-school civics courses-play in that acquisition? Studies focusing on the learning of civic competence or skills find, not surprisingly, that these skills are mainly acquired not by children in schools, but by adults in churches, labor unions, civic organizations, and workplaces. According to these researchers, schools foster skills not by directly teaching civics, but by encouraging students to volunteer in extracurricular organizations and to participate in student government.

Even if civic skills are not acquired in schools, surely civic knowledge and civic attitudes might be. After all, there is a longstanding consensus among researchers that an individual’s knowledge and attitudes are best predicted by his or her years of schooling. After surveying a huge body of literature about the role of education in political socialization, political scientists M. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi reported a broad consensus that interest in politics, the possession of political skills, political participation, and support for the liberal democratic creed all increase with years of schooling.

However, there is no agreement on how to explain the simple correlation between civic virtue and educational attainment. It certainly does not appear that more education by itself automatically produces more political activity. Americans receive more schooling today than they did 50 years ago, but they are also less likely to vote or otherwise participate in politics or civic life.

Many studies find that schooling, by fostering greater verbal and cognitive sophistication, indirectly fosters greater civic knowledge and political tolerance. But what of more direct efforts at civic education, such as the civics courses that most states require public schools to teach? Do such courses, which advocates of civic education strongly support, foster desirable knowledge, attitudes, and conduct? The answer appears to be no: among other studies, influential research by Jennings and Kenneth Langton found that the high-school civics curriculum had little effect on any aspect of civic values. “Our findings,” they wrote, “certainly do not support the thinking of those who look to the civics curriculum in American high schools as even a minor source of political socialization.”

These and other studies have created a lasting professional consensus that, in general, the scholastic curriculum has some effects on the civic knowledge of students, but little or no effect on their civic values. Civics courses in particular appear to have little effect on civic knowledge and even less on civic values. Admittedly, Niemi and Jane Junn modify this consensus in their major new study, Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn. They researched the effects of different kinds of civics courses on students’ civic knowledge and attitudes, hypothesizing that certain kinds of teaching methods might significantly add or subtract from learning about politics. They found that, although the civics curriculum had much less effect on civic knowledge and values than did the home environment, civics courses did make some difference. Those that did the best job of enhancing civic knowledge were those that covered a wide variety of topics and discussed current events. However, as with earlier studies, Niemi and Junn found that civics courses had virtually no effect on attitudes. Indeed, while the earlier Langton and Jennings study focused on civic attitudes and the more recent Niemi and Junn study focused on civic knowledge, both studies converge on the qualified conclusion that civics courses have some small effect on students’ knowledge but virtually none on attitudes.

Civic Virtue or Intellectual Virtue?

Curiously, leading contemporary advocates of civic education in schools, such as the philosophers Amy Gutmann and Stephen Macedo, admit that it is ineffective. Their support for civic education lies with the conviction that schooling would lack any compelling moral purpose without it. It is no accident, then, that advocates share a fundamental assumption: that purely academic education lacks an inherent moral dimension, since it is concerned only with the acquisition of skills and information. If this is true-if academic education is merely about the three R’s-then we might well ask: Why should any society make a fundamental and expensive public commitment to common schools?

If academic education intrinsically lacked a compelling moral purpose, I would agree that our students need a compensatory moral education-and an education in civic virtues might well be the most feasible in a pluralistic democracy. But, as every good teacher knows, learning mere information and skills cannot be the aim of academic education. Divorced from a virtuous orientation toward truth, information and skills are simply resources and tools that can be put into the service of sophistry, manipulation, and domination. Only when the acquisition of information and skills is combined with a proper desire for true knowledge do we begin to acquire intellectual virtue, which may be defined as the conscientious pursuit of truth.

My developmental hierarchy of the intellectual virtues begins with the virtues of intellectual carefulness, such as single-mindedness, thoroughness, accuracy, and perseverance. Having acquired these virtues in elementary school, students must then learn how to resist the temptations to false beliefs by acquiring the virtues of intellectual humility, intellectual courage, and intellectual impartiality. Finally, adults ought to strive for coherence in what they know and for coherence between their knowledge and their other pursuits by acquiring the virtues of intellectual integrity and, ultimately, wisdom. The philosopher John Dewey thought that the aim of academic pedagogy was the inculcation of certain traits in students, among them open-mindedness, single-mindedness, sincerity, breadth of outlook, thoroughness, and responsibility. Dewey insisted that these academic or intellectual virtues “are moral traits.” In other words, academic education is itself a kind of moral education.

But what happens when schools commit themselves to civic education as well? One finds the answer in both the history and the ideas of civic education: the academic pursuit of knowledge will be corrupted if truth-seeking is subordinated to some civic agenda. The history of civic education in the United States is a cautionary tale indeed. Many advocates of civic education invoke the prestige of Thomas Jefferson, who was a pioneer in using common schools for republican civic education. What these advocates fail to notice, however, is how Jefferson’s commitment to civic education corrupted his intellectual integrity.

Jefferson’s initial vision of his proposed University of Virginia reflected his lifelong commitment to intellectual freedom. “This institution,” he wrote, “will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” But Jefferson could not bear the thought of students at his university being exposed to and corrupted by politically incorrect ideas. Thus, in order to protect them from the seductive Toryism of David Hume, Jefferson spent two decades promoting the publication of a censored, plagiarized, and falsified but politically correct edition of Hume’s History of England. When he could find no partners in this intellectual crime, he enlisted James Madison’s support as a fellow member of the university’s board of overseers in drafting regulations aimed at suppressing political heresy.

Jefferson and Madison succeeded in passing a resolution to “provide that none [of the principles of government] shall be inculcated which are incompatible with those on which the Constitutions of this state, and of the U.S. were genuinely based, in the common opinion.” Moreover, Jefferson came to agree with Madison’s argument that “the most effectual safeguard against heretical intrusions into the School of politics, will be an able & orthodox Professor.” To this end, Jefferson and later Madison worked to ensure that only those professors who espoused a strict construction of the U.S. Constitution and the doctrine of states’ rights would be appointed to the school of politics. Jefferson’s passion for civic education in republican virtue led him to abandon his commitment to intellectual freedom at his beloved university. That such a champion of intellectual freedom should attempt to whitewash, censor, and suppress what he called “heresy” powerfully illustrates the poisonous consequences of using schools as instruments of civic education.

Textbook Cases

It should come as no surprise that in order to teach civic values, American textbook writers have systematically sanitized, distorted, and falsified history, literature, and social studies in order to inculcate racism, nationalism, Social Darwinism, anti-intellectualism, and every manner of religious, cultural, and class-based bigotry. An early text from 1796 warned of the danger posed by the importation of French ideas and persons: “Let America beware of infidelity, which is the most dangerous enemy that she has to contend with at present.” The author went on to teach that Native Americans lack all science, culture, and religion, that “the beavers exceed the Indians, ten-fold, in the construction of their homes and public works.” Later, in the wake of large-scale Irish immigration, school texts began slandering Roman Catholicism, describing it as an anti-Christian form of paganism and idolatry. One spelling text asked: “Is papacy at variance with paganism?” After 1870, religious bigotry gave way to racial bigotry; all non-Anglo Saxon peoples were described as permanently inferior due to their intellectual, moral, and physical degeneracy. Beginning in 1917, many states forbade any public school lessons that might be disloyal to the United States, including the teaching of the German language.

Today, in many states, creationism is taught in place of biology and geology because of the perceived moral dangers of Darwinism. Many states also sanitize American history in order to foster fealty to the American way: the Texas Education Code provides that “textbooks should promote democracy, patriotism, and the free enterprise system.” The New York Board of Regents was found to have falsified, on moral grounds, most of the literary texts used in its exams; here classic literature was bowdlerized in the interests of political correctness. Systematic studies of current social studies and history textbooks find extensive evidence of American history’s being distorted in order to highlight previously neglected contributions as well as the victimization of women and minorities. In response to the traditionally rosy and uplifting versions of American greatness designed to instill patriotism, we now find dark and brutal narratives of American imperialism and racism designed to covertly instill multicultural tolerance.

What again and again proves fatal to the pursuit of knowledge is the conviction that civic virtue is more important than truth. Indeed, some leading contemporary advocates of civic education frankly admit the need to sanitize and falsify history. For instance, University of Maryland scholar William Galston, a policy advisor in the Clinton administration, writes, “Rigorous historical research will almost certainly vindicate complex-revisionist’ accounts of key figures in American history. Civic education, however, requires a more noble, moralizing history: a pantheon of heroes, who confer legitimacy on central institutions and constitute worthy objects of emulation.”

Both conservative and progressive civic educators routinely subordinate the quest for truth to a preferred agenda for civic uplift. In English courses, literature is selected not on the grounds of its beauty, renown, or usefulness for teaching prose style, but because it presents desirable moral lessons, such as how boys love to cook. Soviet education deployed the same techniques: “Before the Revolution, Russia had 1,000 tractors; now, thanks to Comrade Stalin, we have 250,000 tractors. How many more tractors do we have under developed socialism?”

Civic education poses a profound threat not only to the integrity of the curriculum but also to the integrity of pedagogical techniques. Much of what is known as “progressive” educational pedagogy-teaching that attempts to respond to the spontaneous curiosity of the student-has long been advocated on moral and civic grounds as much as on academic grounds. Progressive techniques, these educators argue, are egalitarian, democratic, tolerant, and caring, and they foster autonomy. John Dewey, in particular, championed many progressive pedagogical innovations because he thought they turned classrooms into laboratories of democracy. Critics of progressivism have wondered why these methods are widely adopted without much empirical evidence of their effectiveness. But the passion for progressivism, like the passion for civic education more broadly, does not rest on the conviction that it is effective but on the conviction that it is morally desirable. Civic educators are often quite frank about the need to subordinate not only truth but also academic achievement to the imperatives of civic virtue.

The Moral Purpose of Schooling

The obvious objection to my claim that academic education is itself a kind of moral education is to point out that the information and skills acquired in school are just as easily put in the service of sophistry as in the service of truth-seeking. But this view of academic education misrepresents the actual point of scholastic education, which is to acquire information and skills in the context of a love for genuine knowledge. In other words, good math, history, science, and English teachers do not attempt to arm students with morally neutral resources and weapons and then hope for the best. Good teachers fuse the acquisition of information and skill to a growing desire for genuine knowledge. In other words, proper academic education does not seek merely to provide the means for whatever ends might be chosen by the student; proper academic education encompasses both the means and the end. John Dewey saw this clearly: “The knowledge of dynamite of a safecracker may be identical in verbal form with that of a chemist; in fact, it is different, for it is knit into connection with different aims and habits, and thus has a different import.”

The aim of academic education is the acquisition of those traits of character, such as thoroughness, accuracy, perseverance, intellectual humility, and intellectual courage, that make us conscientious in the pursuit of true knowledge. Our relationship with these academic virtues is fundamentally different from our relationship with our capacities and skills. We can use or misuse them, like any resource or tool; we recognize a kind of “distance” between ourselves and our skills. Virtues, however, are not capacities but qualities or aspects of persons: virtues cannot be misused because they cannot be used at all. Virtues define who we are; they are not things to be used. Academic education aims not only to equip us with new resources and skills, but also to transform us: from people who have a curiosity for knowledge, but who are credulous and prone to false beliefs, into persons who love and can reliably acquire genuine knowledge. Academic education is as deep, transformative, and virtuous as any other kind of moral education.

Once we see that the conscientious pursuit of knowledge is the inherent moral purpose of schooling, we will not be surprised by the absence of any agreement about which civic virtues ought to be taught in schools. I strongly value a commitment to human rights, the rule of law, public service, and a love of country, but I don’t see what these noble virtues have to do with pursuing knowledge of physics, French, English, chemistry, history, and math. No catalog of civic virtues can be shown to be a prerequisite of academic excellence, a part of such excellence, or its product. The simple truth is that one can be a paragon of academic virtue and a lousy citizen. Many great scholars, scientists, and educators have notoriously lacked the civic virtues by being resident aliens, cosmopolitans, or epicureans. Trying to decide which civic virtues to teach in schools is like trying to decide which sports or which crafts to teach: since none of these is intrinsically related to academic education, there are no academic grounds for deciding these matters.

Because civic education, like driver or consumer education, lacks an intrinsic relation to the academic curriculum, it quickly comes to be regarded by teachers and students as ancillary and irrelevant. The ancillary nature of civics courses may help to explain why such courses are so ineffective. To overcome their irrelevance, many advocates insist that civic education be incorporated into the core academic curriculum, so that English, history, and social studies courses impart lessons in civic virtue. But here we become impaled on the fundamental dilemma of civic education: if we teach civic virtue in a way that respects the integrity of the academic curriculum, civics becomes ancillary and irrelevant; but if we attempt to incorporate civic education into the academic subjects, we inevitably subvert the inherent moral aim of those subjects by subordinating the pursuit of truth to civic uplift.

Indeed, there may be something paradoxical and self-defeating about the whole project of teaching civic virtue in schools. Political scientists Niemi and Junn speculate that civic education might be ineffective largely because it is so whitewashed. In the attempt to promote patriotism, our civics courses, they observe, present a “Pollyannaish view of politics that is fostered by the avoidance of reference to partisan politics and other differences of opinion.” So instead of a nasty contest between interest groups, we get “how a bill becomes law”-a presentation of civics cleansed of all politics as well as of all possible interest. They also decry the Whiggish distortions of American history, in which the “problems” of the past (such as racism and oppression) are invariably “solved” in the present. Niemi and Junn worry that these attempts to inculcate civic trust may actually backfire by creating greater political cynicism. Political theorist Christopher Eisgruber similarly observes of the attempt to inculcate values through an academic course: “How would students react to such a course? My suspicion is that any student old enough to understand such a course would also be old enough to recognize it as propaganda-and to resent it for that reason.”

The Barbarism of Civic Virtue

Schools, especially public schools, have an indispensable role in civic education. Public schools must impart accurate information about the history, structure, functions, and ideals of our democratic institutions. Given how little Americans know about their government and politics, even civic education that is focused merely on civic knowledge faces formidable challenges. In addition, schools might well encourage participation in student government and in community and civic life. But our civic educators are not content with these modest contributions to the practice of American citizenship; they insist that public schools must attempt to teach the proper moral attitudes required for civic virtue. Nevertheless, it is precisely the attempt to teach full civic virtue that has consistently proved to be both ineffective and subversive of genuine academic schooling.
Since public schools are regulated and funded through democratic politics, they seem to be the ideal locale for education aimed at democratic citizenship. At the same time, however, public schools depend on a widespread civic trust: families send their children to common schools with the expectation that no one gets to impose his or her own sectarian religious or moral values at school. However, liberal and conservative civic educators cannot agree on proper civic virtues, turning our public schools into just another front in the culture wars. Thus, inherently partisan civic education undermines the trust necessary for vibrant common schools. Moreover, even if we could all agree about the proper civic virtues, the very attempt to inculcate them undermines the integrity of the academic curriculum. The quest for truth is quickly subordinated to civic uplift when teachers see their role as fostering certain civic dispositions in their students.

I believe there is much wider agreement concerning the intellectual virtues than there is regarding the civic and other moral virtues. However, one might well ask: What about the heated disagreements over how to teach reading and math, American history, science (evolution or creationism?), and health and sexuality? Aren’t the intellectual parts of the curriculum just as contentious as civics courses? That there are bitter disputes over how and what to teach in the academic curriculum is undeniable. But these arguments are fundamentally moral, not academic, in character.

Let’s consider them in turn. Progressive educators reject the practice of drilling phonics and multiplication tables on moral and civic grounds; they argue that these methods are undemocratic. These debates are driven by contrasting moral visions of the proper authority of teachers and the proper docility of students. Traditionalists accuse progressivists of fomenting anarchy, while progressivists accuse traditionalists of fomenting authoritarianism. These debates are very rarely academic debates concerning the efficacy of whole-language or phonics instruction as revealed in experimental studies. Debates over whether public schools should teach creationism or Darwinian evolution are also fundamentally moral. Many advocates of creationism argue that teaching Darwinian evolution undermines Christian faith and morals. Darwinians argue that creationism is not about science at all, but a religious and moral doctrine masquerading as science. The controversies over sex education are also transparently moral in nature: no one is arguing over the scientific facts about reproductive biology; they are arguing about competing moral visions of proper sexual conduct. These debates, far from suggesting that the intellectual curriculum is just as controversial as the moral, merely illustrate the poisonous effects of subordinating knowledge to moral uplift. In the context of our highly moralistic culture, every debate about knowledge is twisted into a debate about morality, just as every debate about art is twisted into a debate about the moral message of the artist.

The essential aim of schooling is not the mastery of a historically specific body of knowledge, but the acquisition of the dispositions that make us conscientious in the pursuit of knowledge. Perseverance, thoroughness, accuracy, intellectual honesty, intellectual courage, and intellectual impartiality are the preconditions for all conscientious pursuit of knowledge. The content of schooling will always evolve, but the essential aim of schooling remains constant. To say that these intellectual virtues are the essential aim of schooling does not imply that they are the only proper aim of schooling. Some moral virtues in students, such as temperance, courage, honesty, fairness, and friendship, might well be prerequisites for their acquisition of intellectual virtues. And some moral vices in teachers, such as bigotry, sexism, favoritism, or cruelty, might undermine the acquisition of the intellectual virtues by students. Some kinds of moral education are prerequisites for intellectual virtue, some are its parts, and some are its product. An education in the intellectual virtues is not a substitute for a moral education; it is an academically principled way to focus moral education in schools. Schools properly aim at making us good students, not good citizens or good persons.

James B. Murphy is a professor of government at Dartmouth College. This essay is adapted from a forthcoming article in the journal Social Philosophy and Policy.

To the egoistic and asocial being that has just been born, [society] must, as rapidly as possible, add another, capable of leading a moral and social life. Such is the work of education.

Emile Durkheim, 1911

“Critical pedagogy,” a body of education theory represented by the writings of Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Michael Apple, and other leftist-leaning thinkers, takes its cue from the Durkheim quotation above, but it carries the notion of schools as agents of moral instruction and socialization far beyond what Durkheim envisioned and what the public expects. Critical pedagogy extends critical theory-the neo-Marxist examination of the relationship between power and culture, aimed at addressing issues of class, race, gender, and social justice through the remaking of societal institutions-to the realm of schools. The core concern of critical pedagogy is to illuminate the role of schools in perpetuating the established order and to convert them, instead, into instruments for social reform.

Despite its radical bent-bordering on the kind of liberation theology associated with Latin American revolutionary clergy-the critical pedagogy school has managed to carve out a respectable niche in America’s schools of education, enough to get its views aired in journals such as the Harvard Educational Review (see Giroux’s essay in the Winter 2002 issue) and to have its patron saint, Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist, recognized by the New York Times as one of 13 “provocative leaders” in education “on whose shoulders the future is being built.” Marilyn Cochran-Smith, the newly elected president of the influential American Educational Research Association (AERA), is at least sympathetic to the critical pedagogy movement and is the director of a curriculum and instruction doctoral program at Boston College that lists critical pedagogy as one of only four areas of specialization. At its 2002 annual meeting, the AERA program featured more than 40 panels on critical theory and pedagogy.

Admittedly, the critical pedagogues have squarely confronted two of the most enduring issues surrounding the work of education: 1) To what extent should the mission of public schools be focused on character development, societal reform, and other such affective goals, as opposed to cognitive development and academic preparation? 2) To the extent that values should be taught in school, whose values should take precedence? A related issue, first raised by Durkheim and now at the center of critical pedagogy, is: How much emphasis should schools place on promoting individual achievement vis-à-vis collective well-being? Proponents of critical pedagogy view “egoism” as incompatible with societal progress and complain that schools have become too wedded to Social Darwinist competition. By contrast, traditionalists worry that schools have taken the “it takes a village” slogan to such lengths that they risk producing an increasing number of village idiots.

Historical Context

There has always been the temptation to use schools for proselytizing or other ends normally associated with religious and other institutions. Both conservative and progressive forces at various moments in American history have been behind the move to turn schools into sites not only for informing minds but also for transforming lives. In Who Controls Our Schools? Michael Kirst notes that the widely read McGuffey readers, first published in 1836, openly preached the Protestant ethic, while Catharine Beecher “urged that the school teach the importance of fresh air, loose clothing, simple diet, and exercise.” By the early 20th century, schools were increasingly relied on to assimilate newly arrived immigrant children into the American mainstream and to instill a sense of patriotism.

From John Dewey’s democratic schooling crusade and George Counts’s anti-capitalism pedagogy at Columbia’s Teachers College in the 1930s, and the life adjustment movement of the 1940s and 1950s, to the character education movement of the 1980s and 1990s, the academic mission of schools has continued to compete for attention with other mandates. The character education movement itself was a conservative reaction to what some viewed as an excessive liberal fixation on the psychosocial needs of schoolchildren and the relaxation of standards of conduct in the name of diversity, inclusion, and other politically correct shibboleths.

The building of “self-esteem” and “community” has been part of the same progressive project, coalescing in today’s dominant K-12 paradigm-constructivism-which combines the child-centered, nonjudgmental, nonhierarchical, teacher-as-facilitator classroom (rooted in the romantic tradition of Rousseau) with a cooperative learning regimen (rooted in Counts’s vision of a New Social Man). The conjoining of seemingly paradoxical elements of independent and collaborative learning reflects the odd juxtaposition of radical libertarianism and radical egalitarianism that defined the Woodstock generation now running America’s schools.

Some attention to “moral” education in schooling is almost inevitable (in other words, it is nearly impossible to completely separate normative values from empirical analysis) and desirable (surely we do not want schools to be wholly amoral). The same goes for “political” education, if by that we mean citizenship education. But the question remains, What exactly should be the extent and nature of such training-how much time should be spent shaping the heart and soul relative to the mind? Critical pedagogy answers this question in a highly provocative manner that leaves it open to much criticism. Moreover, nowhere do the inherent tensions of progressivism, between the twin impulses of self-expression and self-abnegation, surface more clearly than in the case of critical pedagogy, which can be viewed as an offshoot of constructivism, which in turn is an offshoot of postmodernism. To see this, we need only examine the words of the critical pedagogues themselves, deconstructing their own texts.

What Is Critical Pedagogy?

If, as D. C. Phillips has put it, constructivism is not so much a scientific theory as a “secular religion,” then critical pedagogy is an especially militant sect. Indeed, the apostles of critical pedagogy have fallen out with their progressive brethren because of the progressives’ pretensions toward science and, hence, failure to adopt a more evangelical posture toward schooling. Critical pedagogy shares with constructivism the following: 1) Critical pedagogy is very PC in that it pays homage to multiculturalism and situational learning (tied to the student’s group identity and personal experiences) as antidotes to what is portrayed as the traditional, Eurocentric education system; 2) critical pedagogy is wrapped in the rhetoric of “emancipation” and “collaboration,” promoting creativity as long as that does not create advantages for some students over others; 3) critical pedagogy stresses “higher order thinking” while disparaging the teaching of basic skills (rules of grammar, punctuation, computation) and basic information (factual knowledge) as producing mere “rote memorization”; and 4) critical pedagogy opposes what it calls the “corporatization” of education, represented by the testing and standards movement.
Critical pedagogy departs somewhat from constructivism, first in its emphasis on the affective-normative domain at the expense of the cognitive-empirical domain-it is more interested in engaging students in understanding the world as it ought to be than in how it is-and, second, in its acceptance of the hierarchical, judgmental classroom, where the teacher’s role is not to facilitate value-free inquiry but instead to use the bully pulpit to preach doctrinaire gospel, with schools performing the function not of political socialization but of counter-socialization. The school is to be, if not a ministry, at least a political party.

The high priest (or, as McLaren puts it, “inaugural protagonist”) of critical pedagogy is the late Paulo Freire, whose view of conventional schooling (a teacher instructing students in the canon of established academic curricula) was captured in the title of his seminal 1970 book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In his tribute to Freire following the latter’s death in 1997, McLaren stated that Freire supported “a radical politics of historical struggle” and “acquired a mythic stature among progressive educators, social workers, and theologians” for “fomenting dedication to the ways that education can serve as a vehicle for . . . -a politics of liberation.’ ”

Although Freire boasts numerous disciples (Michael Apple, Stanley Aronowitz, and Donald Macedo, among others), McLaren and Giroux are arguably the leading exemplars of critical pedagogy today. In the 1980s both, ironically, were housed in McGuffey Hall (named after the inaugural protagonist of character education) at Miami University of Ohio, where Giroux was director and McLaren associate director of the Center for Education and Culture Studies. Their paths continued to cross, even after the former migrated to Penn State and the latter to UCLA. In fact, their writings have crossed so much-the authors often mirroring one another, even at times sharing the same volume as coauthors and coeditors-that it is hard to distinguish between the two. Reviewing a few selected, representative pieces, I will trace the evolution of their thinking since the 1980s, although there is relatively little observable change, given not only the constant polemical tone that has remained at the core of their work but also the similar language that appears throughout the corpus of that work; they unabashedly acknowledge their frequent borrowing, almost verbatim, from previously published essays. If one wished to be unkind, one might say that the “three R’s” in their case stand for redundant, recycled rants-well-rehearsed arguments exhibiting a recitative, drill-like quality of the very sort that critical pedagogy abhors. Nevertheless, if nothing else, these authors do challenge us to reexamine our basic assumptions about the American school.

In Their Own Words

In Teachers as Intellectuals (1988), a collection of his early articles, Giroux criticizes the “hidden curriculum,” the excessively “technocratic” character of literacy training, and insufficiently “radicalized” teacher education programs, among other targets. He opens with the observation:

In the worldview of traditionalists, schools are merely instructional sites. That schools are also cultural and political sites is ignored. . . . Rather than viewing school knowledge as objective, as something to be merely transmitted to students, radical [critical pedagogy] theorists argue that school knowledge . . . [represents the] dominant culture . . . [with its] privileged language forms, modes of reasoning, social relations, and lived experiences.

We begin to see here the connection between critical pedagogy, postmodernism, and the legitimation of Ebonics (in Oakland and elsewhere), inventive spelling (in the national standards published by the National Council of Teachers of English in 1996, which devalued standard English conventions), fuzzy math (in the national standards published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in 1989, which devalued right and wrong answers), and a relativist, multicultural social studies (in the 1994 national history standards project, whose director, Gary Nash of UCLA, said, “We want to liberate students from the prison of facts”).

While questioning the very existence of any objective, core knowledge and competencies to teach students, Giroux at the same time says, “Schools are public places where students learn the knowledge and skills” that constitute an educated person. He resolves the apparent contradiction by explaining what “knowledge and skills” he has in mind. Teachers and administrators, Giroux argues, should play the role of “transformative intellectuals who develop counterhegemonic pedagogies” and educate students “for transformative action.” One of the problems with critical pedagogy is that authors express ideas in such airy, abstract terms that it is hard to get a handle on exactly what practical classroom applications might follow. It is clear, however, that instruction in the core subjects of math, science, English, and history is secondary to other goals.

We should not be “organizing schools around the goals of raising reading and math scores,” writes Giroux, “but our primary concern is to [get students] to learn how to affirm their own experiences, and to understand the need to struggle individually and collectively for a more just society.” Discovery learning and individual empowerment go only so far. Giroux rejects absolutism when it comes to empirical knowledge, but he is more dogmatic with regard to the values teachers as transformative intellectuals are supposed to cultivate. While historical facts, multiplication tables, and proper grammar may be in the eyes of the beholder, what constitutes a “just society” is an objective exercise, to be defined by Giroux and his associates, not by parents, taxpayers, school boards, or other stakeholders.

He is critical of “how schools socialize students to accept unquestionably [sic] a set of beliefs” and how “all social interaction between teachers and students [is] mediated by hierarchically organized structures,” yet he praises Freire for “fashioning a theory of education that takes seriously the relationship between radical critical theory and the imperatives of radical commitment and struggle” [emphasis added]. Given his revolutionary zeal-he does not disguise his fondness for the “important focus” and “value” of “the neo-Marxist position”-one has to wonder whether, in Giroux’s classroom, students are exposed to a full range of ideas and opinions, lively debate, and the best scholarship based on evidence and argument, or whether only “counterhegemonic” thoughts are permitted. Giroux believes that “central to a realizable critical pedagogy is the need to view schools as democratic public spheres,” but his vision invites the charges of elitism that have always dogged proletarian vanguards.

Giroux caricatures the traditional classroom as one where “students sit in rows staring at the back of each others’ heads and at the teacher who faces them in symbolic, authoritarian fashion”; “events are governed by a rigid time schedule imposed by a system of bells and reinforced by cues from teachers”; we “glorify the teacher as the expert [and] dispenser of knowledge”; “social relationships . . . are based upon power relations inextricably linked to the teacher’s allotment of grades”; and tracking “alienates students from schooling.” Thanks to Giroux and others, the contemporary classroom-even if it falls short of the critical pedagogues’ ideal-increasingly is a block-scheduled site presided over by a teacher who, at least concerning academics, is the guide on the side, eschews grades in favor of portfolios, minimizes ability-grouping, and, rather than being a content provider, is a manager of peer editing, team building, and other processes. (Curiously, the standards movement has been gaining momentum despite, or perhaps because of, these trends.) If the logic of the hegemonic classroom, according to Giroux, was “more ideological than rational,” at least as much could be said for the counterhegemonic classroom. While Giroux is critical of neoconservative “moral regulation” represented by the recent character education movement, he has few misgivings about his own neoradical version of character ed.

More Contradictions

Similar themes are struck by Giroux in Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life (1988). He recommends that teachers “concern themselves with the business of moral and political education” and not “work to become curriculum experts.” While praising John Dewey for making “a valuable pedagogical contribution . . . that linked a theory of ethics to the issue of moral character,” he condemns “various right-wing spokespersons, in and out of the government, [who] have become quite aggressive in pushing a program for schools to teach a particular set of moral values and virtues.” He scoffs at teachers’ being asked “to promote character development in students, to teach them a clear sense of right and wrong, to promote skills of individual achievement.” He accuses not only conservatives but even liberals and postmodernists of “a flight from ethics,” given their “silence regarding forms of race, class, and gender discrimination.”

Giroux struggles with the inconsistency of ridiculing the moral clarity of others while defending his own and of teachers’ mapping what is supposed to be a student’s journey of self-discovery: “The issue here is how can educators make their own political commitments clear while developing forms of pedagogy consistent with the democratic imperative that students learn to make choices . . . and act on their own beliefs.” He applauds the efforts by Counts and others in “usurping pedagogical opportunities in schools . . . in order to transform existing political and economic inequalities.” In social studies, while rightly criticizing the tendency of earlier American citizenship educators to produce America-Firsters by teaching a sanitized, celebratory U.S. history, Giroux overcorrects in promoting a curriculum calculated to produce America-Worsters, focused on the country’s warts, as schools serve as “sites of struggle that address the suffering . . . of the oppressed.” His is not a recipe for a serious, sophisticated, accurate, intersubjective history, but one where “knowledge and power come together” in support of “the good society.”

Literacy is “associated with the transmission and mastery of a unitary Western tradition based on the virtues of hard work, industry, [and] respect for family.” Children in urban schools, we are told, are especially at risk of becoming bored or disruptive if teachers ignore their “voice” and “cultural capital,” which Giroux equates with teachers’ behaving like “white collar” functionaries, dispensing insights from Great Books and tips on diagramming sentence structure. Instead of following in the Marxist tradition of Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the working class needed to master the knowledge and skills of the establishment in order to succeed, Giroux prefers Freire’s “emancipatory literacy,” designed to “throw off the colonial voice” and “the terror and brutality of despotic regimes.” This is more than a call for respecting diversity; it is an attack on the teaching of fundamentals, as Giroux opposes schools of education training teachers in “the implementation of mandated basics,” which he contends only results in masses of students participating in their own oppression.

In Education Still under Siege (with Stanley Aronowitz; 1993), Giroux states that central to “transformative intellectuals is the task of making the pedagogical more political and the political more pedagogical.” Again, “knowledge and power are inextricably linked.” In place of “the authoritarian classroom armed with the three R’s curriculum,” we must draw on “the legacy of a critical Marxism” but “move beyond Marx,” mounting a “challenge to the racist, patriarchal, sexist principles embedded in American society and schooling.” He says all this while berating the conservatives’ “hubris that declares they know what truth and the good life really are” and confessing bewilderment over “the paradox of how groups that so blatantly favor the rich, the upper classes, and the logic of unbridled individualism can so effectively mobilize . . . oppressed groups.”

Here, as in other writings, Giroux laments the “proletarianization of teacher work,” their demotion to “high-level clerks,” and their “deskilling” and “demoralization,” all of which he blames on a conservative-driven “emphasis on accountability schemes, teaching to the tests, and . . . the growing corporatization of the schools.” Might it be, instead, the progressive-driven collapse of classroom discipline, the proliferation of bureaucratic paperwork for special education and the concomitant full inclusion of behavior-disordered and learning-disabled students, the devaluing of subject-matter expertise, the mind-numbing coursework often required for certification and advancement, and the refusal to reward professionals based on their merit?

Fellow Traveler

With Peter McLaren, we get more of the same. Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (2002), the latest edition of his 1989 text, is dedicated to Giroux and Freire and candidly relies heavily on the former’s “ideas” as well as “sections from our co-authored works.” The book is mostly an account of his four years as an elementary teacher in a Toronto inner-city school, first narrated in his 1980 Cries from the Corridor, and it echoes the customary critical pedagogue’s conclusion that the school must be foremost a “social and moral agent.”

He takes on the important task of shedding “a more critical light on the issue of why disadvantaged students generally don’t succeed in school,” but adds little to Giroux’s explanation. Teaching has become “apolitical . . . stripped of its . . . ethical imperative to analyze and remediate existing societal and institutional practices” and of its mission to promote “self-empowerment and social transformation.” There has been a “devaluing and deskilling of teachers,” as they have been “reduced to . . . -clerks of the empire'” by “the present rush toward accountability schemes, corporate management pedagogies, and state-mandated curricula.” Schools “favor the interests of the dominant culture,” as “the dominant curriculum separates knowledge from the issue of power,” and “the hidden curriculum” favors boys over girls and whites over people of color. Here, then, is what purports to be a definitive portrait of public schools, painted in broad strokes (spanning the United States and Canada, urban, suburban, and rural settings), based on anecdotal (action) research, by someone who does not believe in the possibility of objective knowledge-who says “any worthwhile theory of schooling must be partisan”-begging the question: Why should we take his study any more seriously than any other?

In Revolutionary Multiculturalism (1997), McLaren expounds on “a socialist-feminist multiculturalism that challenges . . . historically sedimented processes through which race, class, and gender identities are produced within capitalist society.” His analysis suffers from all the intellectual flabbiness (for example, claiming that “the U.S. is fascist,” or that “the greed and avarice of the U.S. ruling class are seemingly unparalleled in history”) and turgid prose (like his reference to the “Dickensianizing of postmodern megalopolises,” or his final chapter, entitled, “Unthinking Whiteness: Critical Citizenship in Gringolandia”) that are commonly associated with the postmodern genre.

As always, schools, including universities, must serve as “moral agents.” Possible role models include rap and hip-hop artists, whom he characterizes as “organic intellectuals,” suggesting what he means when he says, “What is needed in school settings . . . is radical shifts in what counts as knowledge and what counts as learning.” He devotes an entire, mostly laudatory chapter to “the terrorist pedagogy” advocated by the French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard. Reading McLaren, one searches in vain for any discussion of the normal stuff of schooling, of alphabets or algorithms or lab experiments. School is treated almost like experimental theater, the theater of the absurd. At one point, McLaren refers to ideas buried in the recesses of his mind as “gliding past me like some eerie opium-induced object,” as if getting high on higher-order thinking. If his goal is to shock us out of accepting the conventional education paradigm, he fails badly, since it is simply impossible to translate any of this into best practices that a typical teacher, on the ground, might be able to implement. Critical pedagogy is critical of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but titillation for titillation’s sake seems permissible.

Barbarians in the Temple

Like McLaren, Giroux extends his analysis to the collegiate level. In the aforementioned Winter 2002 Harvard Educational Review article, entitled “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere,” Giroux discusses “the role the university should play as a site of critical thinking [and] democratic leadership” that “confronts the march of corporate power.” He envisions a seamless K-16 system in which affective learning trumps cognitive learning throughout all grades. Meanwhile, equating the teaching of basics with job training of “compliant workers,” he glosses over the fact that “many employers in the business community feel dissatisfied because,” in the words of the Committee for Economic Development’s 1994 report, Putting Learning First, “a large majority of their new hires lack adequate writing and problem-solving skills.” Giroux would prefer that schools produce a cadre of social activists who can take to the streets even if they lack the marketable skills that can put a roof over their family and bread on the table.

The academy is lambasted as a place where, like the larger society, “anyone who does not believe that rapacious capitalism is the only road to freedom and the good life is dismissed as a crank,” and “academic disciplines gain stature almost exclusively through their exchange value on the market.” Never mind that recent surveys of university faculty have shown that an overwhelming percentage are liberal Democrats and that women’s, black, and minority studies programs continue to proliferate on campuses. While Giroux raises legitimate concerns about bottom-line financial pressures’ potentially undermining the university’s intellectual mission, he fails to consider how critical pedagogy, in its emphasis on ideology over inquiry, fosters its own brand of anti-intellectualism.

Perhaps nowhere does one see this more vividly than in Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (2000), McLaren’s paean to two figures with whom he shares “a feeling of kinship.” McLaren explains why “Che and Freire have never been needed more than at this current historical moment,” since their pedagogical ideas can be used “to contest and transform current global relations of exploitation and oppression. . . . [They have taught us that we need] to do battle in the streets, in the boardrooms, in the classrooms.” McLaren says very little about education here, devoting much of the book to biography and to his critique of capitalism. He laments that critical pedagogy “no longer enjoys its [earlier] status as a herald for democracy, as a clarion call for revolutionary praxis. . . . The conceptual net known as critical pedagogy has been cast so wide and at times so cavalierly that it has come to be associated with anything . . . from classroom furniture organized in a -dialogue friendly’ circle to-feel-good’ curricula designed to increase students’ self-image.” He winds up faulting constructivists not for their ideas, with which he is generally sympathetic, but for their lack of radical fervor, as “their work is marked by a flirtation with but never full commitment to” the cause of revolution.

Perhaps it is just as well that critical pedagogy’s clarion call has not been fully heeded. We would do better to reaffirm education as that which promotes, in the words of an 1830 Yale University report, “the discipline and furniture of the mind.” Put more simply, to quote a recent newspaper editorial, we might “let schools be schools,” encouraging a renewed commitment to what is uniquely their mission-fostering a solid foundation of knowledge and understanding, a love of learning, and the tools for pursuing that learning-as the first principle of schooling, not the last. There will always be debates over what truths and values to teach, as there should be, but at least let these be guided by a disposition toward objectivity, the spirit of free inquiry, and academic integrity rather than by chiliastic movements.

J. Martin Rochester is a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the city of Cleveland’s school voucher program constitutional because it took a neutral stance toward religion. Both religious and secular schooling options were available to parents. Now the political and legal struggle shifts to the states, where opponents of vouchers are pinning their hopes on the so-called Blaine amendments enshrined in the constitutions of 39 states. Named for 19th-century anti-Catholic presidential candidate James G. Blaine, these provisions are commonly understood to prohibit the use of public funds at religious schools.

Washington State relied partially on its own Blaine amendment to revoke the publicly funded scholarship of Joshua Davey, a student who had declared a major in theology at Northwest College. In its next term, the Supreme Court will again consider whether it is legitimate for a state to forbid individuals from choosing to use public dollars for religious instruction. The Court’s decision in Davey v. Locke, writes James E. Ryan in this issue’s cover story “The Neutrality Principle,” may neutralize the Blaine amendments altogether, thereby clearing the legal path for school vouchers.

If the principle of neutrality is the key to the voucher question, is it also the best way to think about civic education? James B. Murphy in “Tug of War” believes that efforts to teach civic values in public schools ultimately place students at the nexus of the country’s culture wars. In an essay that is sure to provoke both those who want schools to advance patriotic values and those who preach social change, Murphy argues that public schools should focus on teaching students the knowledge and skills necessary to be intellectually engaged citizens, while remaining neutral on questions of civic values.

The principle of neutrality lies at the core of an equally provocative feature by Miriam Kurtzig Freedman. In “Disabling the SAT,” Freedman examines the College Board’s controversial decision to end the “flagging” of students’ scores when they are granted extended time to take the SAT because of a disability. Beginning in October 2003, some students will take the test in three hours, others in four and a half hours, and college admissions officers will no longer know the difference. Either abolish the time limit for everyone, Freedman argues, or note whose time limits have been lifted.

In this issue’s forums “Lifting the Barrier” and “Out with the Old,” Frederick Hess and Marc Tucker, respectively, suggest that public schools should also remain neutral regarding where potential principals and superintendents gained their management skills and experience. Presently, most public schools are constrained by state rules to choose their leaders from the pool of candidates who have earned degrees in educational administration. Why aren’t graduates of business schools, experienced military officers, or business and nonprofit executives also eligible for a license? Do we need state licensure at all?

After all, many education schools focus less on enhancing student performance than on proposing unproven instructional approaches such as bilingual education and critical pedagogy. Christine H. Rossell in “The Near End of Bilingual Education” follows bilingual education’s gradual demise in California in the wake of Proposition 227-and finds that achievement is climbing slowly upward in schools that adhered to voters’ wishes by abolishing the purest forms of bilingual education. Separately, J. Martin Rochester in “Critical Demagogues” checks “critical pedagogy,” a body of education theory espoused by Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren and Michael Apple.

Elsewhere in this issue, Andrew Rudalevige in “The Politics of No Child Left Behind” explains just why the sweeping reforms of the federal No Child Left Behind Act were written in ways that created a host of implementation challenges. Gary W. Ritter and Christopher J. Lucas in “Puzzled States” tell us how the states are doing at addressing those challenges.

An earlier but still deeply influential set of educational theories, popularized by the likes of John Dewey and Herbert Spencer, are the targets of Lynne V. Cheney‘s review of Kieran Egan’s Getting It Wrong from the Beginning in “Progressively Worse.” In his review of Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police “Sensitivity Training,” Nathan Glazer wonders whether the efforts of both the Right and the Left to promote their values through the censoring of schoolbooks are presenting an unrealistic picture of America to students. Perhaps textbook authors and publishers should adhere to the neutrality principle as well.

The Editors

Getting paid

One would think that economist Michael Podgursky (“Fringe Benefits,” Check the Facts, Summer 2003) would analyze teachers’ salaries through the lens of supply and demand. Such an analysis would not examine teachers’ salaries as they are, but would ask what salaries are necessary to attract highly qualified teachers to the field. Instead, Podgursky insists that teaching is a swell job, using data showing that elementary teachers actually earn a few pennies per hour more than mechanical engineers (even though their salaries fall short of salaries in mechanical engineering by $17,000 per year). What a surprise this must be to students aspiring to engineering degrees!

Podgursky cites “straight-time” hourly pay estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which show K-12 teachers having a 38-hour workweek and a 37-week work year (which would end in April). Another BLS survey describes the hours worked by teachers more accurately. The average teacher was under contract to work six and a half hours per day, but teachers actually spent an average of eight and a quarter hours at school each day. The standard time diary methodology suggests that a teacher’s working day is almost ten hours long when work outside school hours is factored in.

It’s true that teachers work about 40 fewer days per year than private-sector employees. But even if teachers were able to fill the gap with additional work at $30 per hour-an unreasonable expectation for teachers seeking part-time employment-their annual earnings would increase by only $9,600. This still leaves teachers $3,000 per year short of accountants, $17,000 short of computer systems analysts, and $25,000 short of engineers. Teachers also earned only 8 percent more than the average worker in 2001 and 4 percent more than other government workers.

The AFT uses data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which contain information on about 30,000 job offers, not 2,600 as Podgursky reported, to update a 30-year time series for the earnings of new college graduates who found full-time jobs in the private sector. We agree with Podgursky that NACE salary data are higher than the average earnings of new college graduates, many of whom work part time, attend graduate school, or are underemployed.

Podgursky assumes that teachers enjoy generous benefits, but according to the BLS, benefit costs for teachers made up 24 percent of the total compensation package in December 2002-the lowest percentage of any broad occupational category. Benefits compose 28 percent of the average civilian worker’s compensation package.

Furthermore, benefit costs for teachers have risen more slowly than the average, not faster, as Podgursky insinuated. Between 1989 and 2001, the benefits portion of the U.S. Department of Labor’s employment cost index increased 48 percent for K-12 education workers, compared with 67 percent for all private-sector white-collar employees.

HOWARD NELSON
American Federation of Teachers
Washington, D.C.

Michael Podgursky’s analysis of teacher compensation makes thoughtful use of the sometimes incomplete and conflicting data that have been available to us. Regarding the issue of the U.S. Department of Education’s reliance on data from the teacher unions on annual teacher salaries, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) plans to add teacher salary data items to its Common Core of Data finance collections. Collection of school year 2003-04 finance data would take place during the spring and summer of 2005, and NCES would publish the data in 2006.

It would also be desirable to have detailed information comparing the total compensation packages of teachers with those of other professions. While NCES currently gathers information on salaries and benefits through the quadrennial Schools and Staffing Survey, this survey does not collect information that would permit comparisons with other professions. There is no logical way to redesign the survey to do this. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a large-scale payroll survey that gathers detailed information by profession, but this survey lacks information on the characteristics of employees, such as years of experience or educational qualifications. This survey also would not lend itself to a major redesign. The monthly Current Population Survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census offers considerable potential for making salary comparisons of various occupations based on age and educational attainment. The sample size is limited for a number of occupations, including teachers, but NCES staff are working on ways to effectively increase the sample through more complex analysis of multiple waves.

VAL PLISKO
Associate Commissioner
National Center for Education Statistics
U.S. Department of Education

Michael Podgursky responds: Collective-bargaining agreements negotiated by the AFT in large urban districts typically include language restricting the contractual teaching workday to little longer than the school day for students. Thus the contractual workday in urban districts such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, or San Diego is roughly 6 hours and 45 minutes. (This includes a duty-free lunch as well as a prep period.) The AFT claims that the average public school teacher actually spends 8 hours and 15 minutes in school daily. There are several possible explanations for this discrepancy. First, the self-reported data from teachers may be inflated. Or the self-reported data are correct and the contractual workday is routinely exceeded by teachers. This raises the question of why the AFT and NEA would insist on bargaining unprofessional language into contracts that most of their members then ignore. Finally, it may be that pay gaps between urban and suburban teachers in part reflect an hours gap, with suburban (and rural) teachers putting in longer workdays than their urban counterparts. These are interesting topics for further research.

In my article I avoided comparing the overall fringe benefit rate of teachers to nonteachers for the reason Howard Nelson notes, and then ignores. The overall fringe benefit rate for private-sector professionals on 12-month contracts includes paid vacations. However, in lieu of paid vacations, teachers on 190-day contracts get their summers off. A correct apples-to-apples comparison would either exclude paid vacations for the former or treat teachers as 12-month employees with 66 days of paid vacation. If we take the latter approach, this adds an additional 26 percent to the fringe benefit rate for teachers, and would thus produce a total fringe benefit rate that is far in excess of the private sector.

Comparing the pay and benefits of teachers and nonteachers is complicated and highlights the need for independent, arms-length assessment and high-quality data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) performs this valuable function in other industries. Unfortunately, in the area of teacher compensation, the national policy debate is largely framed by data and analysis from the teacher unions. The public interest would be better served if the U.S. Department of Education worked with the BLS to produce objective data on this important topic.

Second career

As a former aerospace engineer in my eighth year of a second career as a public high-school physics teacher, I find that Peter Temin and Richard Vedder pretty much get it right in their discussion of teachers’ compensation (“Are Teachers Underpaid?” Forum, Summer 2003). I offer the following comments.

Incompetence is not the major problem. In a labor-intensive business enterprise, one is always trying to improve the average level of staff ability by replacing the merely adequate with the better than adequate. Failure to do so is a double whammy: You don’t get the services of the very able; worse, your competitor does. I find few of my colleagues outright incompetent, but there are more than a few who wouldn’t last ten seconds in a nontenured work environment.

In public schools, managers are never disciplined for the way they treat staff. This is primarily because seniority rules strongly discourage teachers’ changing employers, which means they can’t use the threat of resigning to curtail management abuse. I have seen very able colleagues treated with a degree of disrespect that in industry would have resulted in the keys being thrown on the boss’s desk.

There is no distinction between adequate, good, and outstanding teachers. Having unique professional experience or winning grants for your school counts for nothing in determining pay or layoffs. It’s all strict seniority.

When I left engineering, sick leave was typically five days a year, and new employees got one week’s vacation in the first year. In my school district, everyone starts out with 15 days’ sick leave, 16 days’ paid vacation, and 11 paid holidays during the school year.

Most of my colleagues care deeply about their work and their charges, but whenever the union’s interest in minutes, money, and benefits collides with students’ interests, the students lose. As a union officer once shouted at me in a moment of exasperation, “The kids aren’t in the contract!”

The biggest disincentive to stay in this profession is not lack of money, but the relentless assault on one’s self-esteem by the corrosive stew of union avarice, management fecklessness, and school committee politics. Apart from that, I love it.

CLARK NEILY
Allston, Massachusetts

Does accountability work?

Margaret Raymond and Eric Hanushek harshly criticize (see “High-Stakes Research,” Feature, Summer 2003) our study of high-stakes testing policies. Before reporting the results from our study, the New York Times journalist obtained feedback from our study’s external reviewers as well as from scholars and advocates who support high-stakes testing. Raymond and Hanushek ask the media, “Why not bring in some outside expertise to review such a report before heralding its arrival?” Actually, the media did.

Our study analyzed data across multiple indicators of academic achievement, not simply the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Yet Raymond and Hanushek’s review looked only at the results from our analysis of NAEP, ignoring the effects that high-school graduation exams have had on college-admissions tests like the SAT and on participation and performance in Advanced Placement courses. They also ignored the fact that high-school graduation exams have resulted in increased dropout rates and an increasing use of the General Educational Development, or GED, tests as a substitute for a high-school diploma. Do these consistently negative effects matter when assessing high-stakes testing? We think so.

Raymond and Hanushek discard our findings on the basis that our methods were flawed. All of our findings were derived using one of the strongest designs in empirical research-the archival time-series analysis, a method that some claim is second in quality only to a true controlled experiment. An archival time-series analysis is simple enough that readers do not need a background in statistics to understand the underlying logic. Readers need not get caught up in more-complicated analyses, such as significance testing, effect sizes, and even regression-statistical methods that Raymond and Hanushek criticize us for not using. However, many statistical textbooks recommend against using complicated statistical methods with archival time series analyses.

Raymond and Hanushek throw the bias card into their critique, writing, “When a report is commissioned by an organization like the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, a Midwestern group sponsored by six state affiliates of the National Education Association, it would seem to call for a reasonable dose of skepticism.” Not mentioned by Raymond and Hanushek is the fact that the research was originally funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and was published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal six months before the consortium of teacher unions released this version of the study. The fact that teacher unions backed the study had no impact on its conclusions.

Raymond and Hanushek claim that the “accumulated literature” supports the conclusion that “student performance on the available measures, usually state tests, improves after accountability reforms are introduced.” We believe that is patently false. We conducted a thorough review of the literature on high-stakes testing and found very few articles that would support such a proposition.

AUDREY AMREIN, DAVID BERLINER
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona

Margaret Raymond and Eric Hanushek respond: The assertion that “archival time-series analysis” is second in quality only to a true controlled experiment is ludicrous. Long ago, in their classic discussion of research design, Donald Campbell and Julian Stanley said that the time-series design “rarely has accepted status in the enumerations of available experimental designs in the social sciences.” The obvious inability of simplistic historical approaches to establish “experimental isolation”-to rule out other factors that might have influenced the observed outcomes-opens up results from such analyses to significant interpretative questions.

Another problem with Amrein and Berliner’s study is that they did not define an adequate comparison group. Instead, they compared student-performance trends in (some of) the states that adopted high-stakes testing with the average gain among states participating in NAEP-a trend that partially reflects the gains among high-stakes states, thereby corrupting the analysis. Amazingly, they make no attempt to defend this faulty approach. Instead, they trumpet the fact that they reached similar conclusions when they applied the same troubled analysis to other measures of student performance, such as SAT scores and drop-out rates. When we applied Amrein and Berliner’s own time-series methodology to the data (with an appropriate comparison group of states that have not adopted high-stakes testing), their conclusions were completely reversed. Yet Amrein and Berliner don’t even address this. Their response ignores the egregious errors in implementation that we identified, namely the fact that they threw out a majority of the state observations, miscoded outcome information, and completely confused the sequence of test introduction and achievement measurement in several states.

We know of no legitimate statistical text that argues it is irrelevant to use tests of statistical significance to guard against random fluctuations in the data-in this case, scores on tests of student performance. Each administration of the NAEP involves a different group of students, a different set of test questions, and a different testing environment. Across test administrations, these differences can lead to random changes in scores that bear little relation to actual changes in students’ knowledge and skills. The purpose of tests of statistical significance is to determine whether results reflect genuine changes in performance or simply random fluctuation.

That four of Amrein and Berliner’s colleagues from education schools approved of their report says more about the quality of the standards for research at too many schools of education than about the validity of this particular study. The disregard for standard scientific principles reveals why so little has been learned about effective educational practices.

Too soon to tell

In “Locked Down” (Feature, Summer 2003), Ronald Brownstein questions the efficacy of the No Child Left Behind Act’s school choice provisions. For one thing, it is a little too soon to draw conclusions based on anecdotal data in the first year of implementation. After all, one of the most chronic problems with school reform is the lack of patience with bold, innovative reforms that take at least a few years to bear fruit. Brownstein ignores the good faith effort that officials in cities like New York put forth once it was made clear that they did not convey the availability of options to parents in a timely fashion. In fact, most states and districts have been open to reforming their systems to meet the requirements of the law once they were notified of problems. Brownstein also fails to point out that districts that repeatedly circumvent the letter of the law will eventually come under more rigorous state sanctions and possibly federal sanctions.

NINA SHOKRAII REES
Deputy Under Secretary
Office of Innovation and Improvement
U.S. Department of Education

 

Vox pupils

The Koret Task Force on K-12 education (“Are We Still at Risk?” Forum, Spring 2003) left a crucial group out of its assessment of the education system: students. No students were on the task force, and none was even involved in determining their policy recommendations.

Koret is not alone. The Education Commission of the States requires prospective commissioners to “reflect broadly the interests of the member government, higher education, the state education system, local education, lay and professional persons, and public and nonpublic educational leadership.” The commissioners represent the interests of virtually every education-related group except students.

Before we can determine how best to reform education, we must answer a crucial question: Why are young people not learning? Ultimately, teachers, parents, scholars, and lawmakers can answer this question only to a limited degree. They are not the ones rocketing through adolescence while reading Salinger and studying cellular mitosis.

Current students and recent graduates from junior high and high school understand best what obstacles they and their peers encounter. They are able to reflect on their experiences, identify what works and why, and pinpoint what can be improved. Students, for example, may be indifferent to using technology as a teaching tool, but may insist on the efficacy of smaller classes. Students could answer important questions-but no one is asking them.

GANESH SITARAMAN
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Central planning

E.D. Hirsch contends that certain “nationalized, bureaucratic, nonmarket education systems” such as Japan’s develop higher-order skills not by directly teaching such skills but by paying close attention to the “sequence and coherence of content” (see “Not So Grand a Strategy,” Feature, Spring 2003). The policy implication, Hirsch writes, is that the United States needs a “coherent, specified grade-by-grade elementary curriculum,” not the “local control of curriculum and letting a hundred flowers bloom.”

Hirsch underestimates the deformities inherent in highly centralized education systems. Centrally planned systems do not encourage ideas from the grassroots, thereby ignoring the nature of knowledge and discovery. Market-like mechanisms, not central planners, are the best way to direct resources toward success and away from failure. They are the only way to nurture sustainable innovation-as opposed to K-12 education’s endless fads.

TOM SHUFORD
Ventura, California

Correction: In the second paragraph of “Philosopher or King?” (Richard Kahlenberg, Feature, Summer 2003), the phrase “of all things” was inadvertently introduced.

Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget

By Kieran Egan
Yale University Press, 2002, $25; 224 pp.

“Success has many fathers,” an old saying goes, “while failure is an orphan.” However, in the case of progressive education-a failure if ever there was one-the list of possible parents grows. To the usual names, Kieran Egan, a professor of education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, adds thinker and writer Herbert Spencer, whose 1861 book Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical sold hundreds of thousands of copies during the late 19th century, when schools as we know them were being formed.

Probably because Spencer’s influence has been overlooked for several decades, Egan gives it special emphasis and often uses Spencer to represent progressive thought generally. Egan worries from the start that this will make his work seem “oddly balanced,” and it does. Before he can enumerate the fundamental flaws of progressivism, he must make the case for Spencer as a progenitor of progressive thought.

The most impressive evidence Egan offers is a series of quotations from Spencer that could have been plucked straight from the progressive textbooks used in education schools today. Spencer wrote that the student “should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible,” a central idea in 21st-century progressive dogma. Spencer wrote that “our lessons ought to start in the concrete and end in the abstract,” a notion all too familiar to anyone who has followed the long obsession in social studies with the idea of “expanding environments”-the belief that children can learn effectively only if we start them with what they can see and touch and gradually expand their lessons to include what they can only imagine.

Why has Spencer so seldom been acknowledged as a forefather of progressivism? Egan’s explanation is that some of his other ideas were so embarrassing that people preferred not to recognize him as the source of theories they did embrace. For example, Spencer was against state sponsorship of education, which made it awkward for those interested in incorporating his ideas into state schools to acknowledge their heritage. Spencer was also a Social Darwinist, and his association with the idea that the poor and the weak should be left to their own devices made it impossible for progressives to align themselves with him.

Egan makes a plausible case for the sway of Spencer’s theories, but stumbles in showing the malign influence of Spencer and others. While some of the arguments he offers against progressive education are insightful, others seem to be based on a flawed understanding of progressivism.

Egan objects to “developmentalism,” a school of thought that he says is based not only on the writings of Jean Piaget, who is usually cited, but also on Spencer’s. Developmentalism holds that children can learn certain things only at certain stages in their development, a notion that Egan rightly believes has the damaging result that “children are . . . basically treated as though they can’t really think; they can only do-so we have all those-hands-on’ activities while their huge intellectual energy is hardly engaged with anything significant in the wider cultural world.”

But this is not Egan’s primary objection. His main concern is that developmentalism is theoretically misconceived. It is based, Egan says, on the false premise that acquiring skills and knowledge represents progress. Developmentalism, in Egan’s view, fails because it does not take into account “the cognitive costs to people in literate Western cultures of having writing and rationality.”

There are two problems here. First, of course, is the assertion that literacy and rationality are in any significant way costly. According to Egan, one of the imaginative costs of an education that teaches us to write and to think critically is that we lose the ability to generate metaphors. But this is not at all clear. Is someone who can read and appreciate great poetry really less able to think metaphorically than a preschooler? Not even Egan seems to believe this consistently. “What we know forms a resource for our imaginations,” he writes later in his book.

The second problem is Egan’s claim that progressive educators regard literacy and rationality as unmixed blessings. This isn’t quite right, since Egan’s dismissive attitude toward literacy is most often echoed by progressives and their allies. Canadian scholar Frank Smith, a progressive known best for his contributions to the “whole language” movement, made this case rather famously in a 1989 Phi Delta Kappan article:

Let me stress at the outset that I’m in favor of literacy. I think that people who don’t read and write miss something in their lives. But I think the same about anyone who doesn’t appreciate some form of music. Nevertheless . . . I don’t see buttons or bumper stickers saying, “Stamp out unmusicality,” and I don’t hear lack of musical ability referred to as a national disgrace. Furthermore, I don’t think music would be helped much if war were declared on tone deafness.

Smith went on to claim that “literacy doesn’t make anyone a better person,” that “literacy doesn’t generate finer feelings or higher values,” and that “literacy won’t guarantee anyone a job,” and concluded that literacy was being oversold.

With its lavishly romantic views of childhood, with its belief that it is oppressive for adults to visit their knowledge on the young, progressive thought is the perfect seedbed for the notion that literacy is of doubtful benefit. That Egan is confused on this point is surprising.

A similar confusion pervades Egan’s last chapter, wherein he condemns empirical research in education. Now, there is certainly a lot of bad research in education, and some of it rides under the banner of empiricism. But there is also good empirical research that has provided valuable guidance. I think of the meta-analyses done by the National Reading Panel in 1999 that showed the benefits of systematic phonics instruction. I think of the late Jeanne Chall’s survey of 25 years of research comparing student-centered with teacher-centered instruction. “The methods with the highest positive effects on learning are those for which the teacher assumes direction,” Chall concluded.

Because Spencer’s misguided theories had a scientific gloss, Egan seems to entangle empiricism with progressivism. The truth is that empirical research is anathema to progressives today, since it undercuts favored notions like whole-language instruction and child-centered classrooms.

Nevertheless, Egan’s general animus toward progressivism is redeeming. In a section called “The Joys of Rote Learning,” Egan observes that “the emphasis that has led away from rote learning, and in this way eventually learning by heart, has been one that gradually and greatly impoverishes minds.” He also makes a fine case for teaching history as a separate discipline, instead of lumping it together with social studies.

Egan should also be praised for taking up an important topic: “current education and how the persistence of powerful progressivist ideas continues to undermine our attempts to make schooling more effective.” But he would have done this topic more justice had he depicted progressive thought more accurately.

Lynne V. Cheney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993.

Mark Twain once said, “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Despite the irony, Twain may have been on to something when it comes to standards-based education reform. Ignorance and confidence were about all I had going for me when I was elected to serve as president of the Virginia Board of Education. The day my colleagues on the board selected me president was my first meeting as a newly appointed board member.

The politics of my selection is a story for another day. I mention it only to make the point that when I became deeply involved in implementing standards-based accountability in Virginia, I had no preordained agenda to fulfill other than to make Virginia’s reform agenda, the Standards of Learning (better known as the S-O-Ls), work not only in theory but also in practice.
Although I was a citizen appointee (and a full-time partner in a law firm), this job became my primary occupation. It consumed my days and nights. There wasn’t a wedding reception or other seemingly innocuous social event when someone eager to share an opinion about public education didn’t corner me. For my employer (and fortunately for me), my salary became the practical equivalent of a charitable donation to public service.

Before my appointment, I was ignorant of the extent to which policymakers rely on the power of assumptions. I’ve since learned that the higher the level at which decisions regarding education policy are made, the more likely that little-examined assumptions drive those decisions. For example, at one meeting a board member wanted to change Virginia’s school-accreditation regulations to deny local school districts the right to petition the state board to increase the number of credits the districts required for high-school graduation. Had the measure passed, local school districts would never be allowed to raise academic standards by increasing course requirements.

I wondered what could be motivating this proposal. During a recess, the member confided that the measure’s real goal was to “stop schools from using block scheduling.” Students with block schedules typically have more credits at the end of four years than those with traditional schedules. Thus, unless required to earn more credits, they could graduate much earlier. Regardless of the pros and cons of the real goal, it took some pretty grand assumptions to think that everyone in the system would respond to this change by dropping all block scheduling in their schools. This is what happens when policymakers who are several steps removed from the classroom try to force the system to change without regard for the unintended consequences of their decisions.
Too often, policymakers get so trapped in the rhetoric of “principles” that they lose the flexibility to manage the assumptions driving their decisions. It becomes easy to operate within the parameters of the rhetoric and leave the details to someone else.

About midway through my term as board president, when I was knee-deep in implementing Virginia’s SOL program, I sat on a panel with an education official from another state who also supported standards-based accountability. However, we had different messages for the audience. He talked tough about not retreating from accountability and leaving no child behind. My key points were seeking reasonableness in reform policies, paying attention to details, and fine-tuning problems. While he came across strong, I appeared soft. The audience clapped loudly for him, softly for me. He was probably just a more engaging speaker, but there was another difference as well: his state had not implemented any type of testing program with consequences for students and schools. He was possessed of both ignorance and confidence. I can only hope that Twain was right.

-Kirk T. Schroder is a partner at LeClair Ryan, a Richmond-based law firm. He served as president of the Virginia Board of Education from 1998 to 2002.

Most states require that school principals and superintendents be licensed. To earn a license, they must take courses in administration at a college of education. Are these rules really necessary?

Clearly, nothing is more critical to a school’s success than the ability of the principal

to establish a sense of mission, set goals, and motivate staff and students toward meeting them. Yet many schools today suffer from leaders who lack the skills and energy to meet today’s challenges.

Is the problem due, in part, to the very rules once designed to give us effective school leaders? What kind of training is needed today?

In the forum that follows:

Frederick M. Hess in “Lifting the Barrier” calls for the abolition of licensure

Marc Tucker in “Out with the Old” designs new training regimen for principals

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Broad Foundation in “The Power to Perform” profiles a few good leaders