Jamaica High School in New York. Photographs by Patrick Harbron.

At the height of the baby boom, Jamaica High School in Queens, New York, enrolled approximately 5,000 students, who attended school in triple session. Each cohort of students had to start and end school at a different time in order to maximize classroom use. There were only two or three deans to address disciplinary issues, and a lone patrolman stood watch in the lobby of the school. It was assumed that a large portion of the school’s graduates would go on to college, while the rest would become society’s secretaries, plumbers, carpenters, printers, and butchers. Although Jamaica High was considered one of the school system’s academic gems, it also provided vocational training that has long since disappeared.

Today the school population has been sliced to 2,500, yet Jamaica High now has eight deans (myself included), who devote much of their time to disciplinary issues; an assistant principal for security; two secretaries, one part time, one full time; and a school aide assigned just to the dean’s office. In addition, ten school security agents employed by the New York City Police Department patrol Jamaica’s halls. The number increases on those days when “random scanning” of students for weapons is in effect.

Schools Under Siege

The extra personnel alone do not even begin to account for the costs of attempting to maintain discipline and safety in the school. Consider the following tales from Jamaica High. In one instance, a teacher saw a student take a gun from his locker and show it to other students. He informed the security agent, who in dereliction of his duty did nothing. Then the teacher came to the Dean’s Office, and I immediately began looking for the student. But the student had fled the building. When he returned two hours later, the police searched him and found nothing. The superintendent was informed, and an investigation of the event proceeded. The student claimed that he had no gun. When asked why he had exited the building, he claimed that a security agent had thrown him out. He could not identify the agent by sex or by race.

Statements were taken from students who had seen the gun, the student’s parents were notified, and a hearing date was set. For the teacher and me to attend the hearing, substitutes had to be hired to cover our classes. At the hearing, after waiting for two hours, we received word that the parent had asked for a postponement by making a telephone call, which was within his rights. It was the end of the school year, so the case was carried over to the next fall. The postponed hearing was scheduled for September 13, which wound up being just two days after the horrible events of September 11. As I walked to the offices located near Madison Avenue and 22nd Street in downtown Manhattan, an acrid stench hung in the air, even though I was some distance from Ground Zero.

At the hearing, the parent of the accused asked me a very good question: Why had we allowed his son back to school if we believed that he had a gun? His son had rights, I said. And it took a couple thousand dollars’ worth of personnel hours to protect them. The hearing officer eventually found in our favor, and the student was transferred to another school.

In another instance, a learning-disabled student in a mainstream class asked a teacher for a hall pass. When the teacher refused to give it to him, the student called the teacher, who had badly injured her hand in a car accident, a “crippled bitch” and threw an object at her. A security agent who had witnessed the event removed the student. The superintendent was informed, and the student’s home was contacted. The next day I confiscated the hand of a store mannequin that the student was carrying around with him. He said he wanted to show the teacher that “he had a hand like hers.” At 16 years of age, the student had earned just one of the 40 credits needed to graduate.

The teacher, the security agent, and I had to appear at the hearing. Again, substitutes were provided to cover our absences. And again, the hearing was postponed, this time at the request of a man who called himself the student’s “grandfather.” Even though he turned out not to be the grandfather, the hearing officer accepted him as the advocate because he brought a letter to that effect signed by the mother, with whom I was never able to speak.

At the next hearing, the “grandfather” asked the teacher, “Do you consider yourself crippled, because if you do, then you are in fact a -crippled bitch,’ and the charges should be dropped.” The hearing officer did not agree and found in the school’s favor. However, the student fell under the protections of the federal special-education law because of his diagnosed learning disability. As such, he was allowed to return to the school premises immediately. After several more suspensions, school authorities were finally able to get him transferred to one of the school system’s “second opportunity schools,” or “SOS” for short.

Multiply this case by thousands, and you will have some notion of the problem of maintaining safety in the city’s schools (see Figure 1). State and federal court decisions intended to protect the rights of students, followed by the schools’ attempts to comply with the mindless bureaucratic directives used to implement these rulings, have made it all but impossible to expel a student unless a flagrant felony is committed that results in the student’s incarceration. As a result, our halls are filled with students who cut nearly all their classes on a daily basis, whose only contribution to the educational process is to harass other students and make it necessary to maintain a phalanx of security officers at the school.

At a large high school like Jamaica, the demands of the school day make it nearly impossible to give these deeply troubled kids the kind of individual attention and support they need. They slip through the cracks and wind up disrupting not only their own education, but also that of the students around them. The schools need to be made safe for education, and those who bring chaos to the school environment need alternative education settings, where teachers and counselors can work with them and their families on a more one-to-one basis. This is especially true of students who have committed criminal acts in or outside of school. The New York City Department of Education took a step in the right direction in February 2003, when officials announced plans to open 17 “New Beginnings” centers for students with the most serious behavior problems. However, these centers will accommodate only a fraction of the students who require placement, and red tape has delayed their opening.

Often these children can be targeted for help merely on the basis of their academic progress, but they rarely are. Our worst discipline problems usually present our biggest educational challenges as well. In almost every instance, an investigation of a serious disciplinary infraction reveals that the student has made little or no academic progress. For students who enter high school unable to read, the game is up unless they are identified and placed in an alternative learning environment outside of the high-school setting. Once inside the large New York City high school, they become lost to everyone except the police and the deans.

A sizable portion of the student body regularly cuts class and keeps school safety and the academic deans at bay on a full-time basis. Photograph from AP World Wide.

Fuzzy Math

It is impossible to account for the pedagogical costs such students exact on the schools: the classroom disruptions, the harassing of other students, and the frustrated new teachers who leave the profession. And the New York City Department of Education has not even attempted to tally the financial costs. Indeed, nobody knows how much of the city’s $12 billion-plus annual budget is dedicated to school safety. But we do know that a significant portion of the funds that are earmarked for instruction and administration is actually used to maintain security.

There are approximately 150 high schools in the New York City school system, and a significant share of them house more than 2,000 students. High schools increasingly make security the sole responsibility of an assistant principal, which is supposed to free the school’s principal to focus on instructional leadership. The responsibility for the day-to-day enforcement of each school’s disciplinary code falls to the dean’s office. School deans, whose number varies from school to school, usually teach only two classes a day. Yet at Jamaica High, the salaries and benefits for the eight deans and three-person support staff assigned to school security are treated as part of the instructional and administrative budget. Another 14 school aides are stationed in the cafeteria, outside bathrooms, locker rooms, and halls, in what can certainly be described as security-related assignments. At least $1 million in salary and benefits is devoted to school safety at Jamaica High alone—and that does not include the cost of the ten school safety officers, who are paid through a separate contract with the Police Department.

The situation is routinely aggravated by administrative decisions that fail to recognize the realities of everyday school life. For instance, schools can administer one of two kinds of suspensions, the “principal’s suspension” and the more serious “superintendent’s suspension.” However, the principal’s suspension was rendered essentially useless when the previous schools chancellor, Harold Levy, ordered that the suspension be served “in house.” This was abetted by new state regulations requiring that suspended students not have their education interrupted.

Before Levy changed the rules, the principal’s suspension was an effective tool because it kept an unruly student out of the building until at least one of the student’s parents accompanied the student to a conference with the principal, the dean, and the guidance counselor. Students prone to misbehaving would think twice if their mother or father had to take off from work to get them readmitted. It also gave school administrators the opportunity to discuss the incident, and usually the student’s general lack of academic progress, with the parent. The same conference is supposed to take place after an in-house suspension, but with the student already in school, the parent would often refuse to show up. The principal’s suspension effectively withered as our first line of defense.

The granting of a superintendent’s suspension hearing allows the student charged with an offense to call and cross-examine witnesses, postpone, and of course appeal the decision. The hearing is held in a special facility with a hearing officer, the dean of record, the victim or victims, witnesses, and a technician who transcribes the testimony. Before the New York state commissioner of education forbade it, students who had charges sustained against them in such a hearing would be moved to another school automatically. Under current policy, if the school believes the student represents a serious threat to the school population, it must initiate an involuntary transfer procedure, involving another round of reports and hearings before the student can be removed. This is essentially a game of musical chairs, only with a guarantee that when the music stops everyone is left with a chair. Should the case involve a “special needs” student, a finding must be made that the offense was not related to the disability. If the disability is ruled to have been a contributing factor, the student is returned to school without consequence.

For instance, one student was hearing voices and stalked a teacher, who had an order of protection issued. The student turned out to be schizophrenic and was removed as an EDP (emotionally disturbed person) on four separate occasions over two years. The father refused to have him institutionalized, despite the recommendation of the school psychologist. He was readmitted again and again. He eventually left the school, much as hundreds of students do each year, just disappearing into the ether without our ever knowing where they wound up. The point is that sizable populations in need of close supervision for a host of problems that often have nothing to do with education are simply left adrift in large city high schools. When their behavior becomes truly disruptive, the system responds with a stream of procedures that expends endless man-hours and appropriates uncountable treasure, often without anything to show for the effort.

At least $1 million is devoted to achool safety at Jamaica High—and that does not include the cost of the ten school safety officers, who are paid through the Police Department. Photograph by Patrick Harbron.

The Hard Cases

In dealing with the more dangerous members of our student population, the system attempts to ensure safety by disrupting their pattern of behavior. Expulsion is no longer an option, so this is accomplished by using the lengthy involuntary transfer procedure to move the disruptive students to other locations. Eventually, however, cliques of students involuntarily transferred to other schools meet up once again. One is reminded of the film Escape from Alcatraz, where Clint Eastwood reconnects with his old cellmates from Joliet and plans his escape from “the Rock” along with them. Recently, the mother of a student who was new to the school called to tell me that her child had been robbed of her new leather coat after getting into an after-school fight with a group of students on Jamaica Avenue. The next day I asked the student, “How were you able to find yourself fighting with another group of students on your very first day?” She said that she had linked up with a bunch of fellow involuntary transfers from Franklin K. Lane High School, who began feuding with girls from Jamaica High. Why we would expect such students to perform any better simply by transferring them to yet another large high school is beyond me.

Since students must be given a fresh start, schools receiving transfers are not informed of the reasons why a new student has been placed in their midst. Even worse, the schools are not informed of arrests outside the school, so felons are admitted without our knowledge on a regular basis. Last year, I spent two months trying to track down a student who had committed a school infraction, only to learn that he had been discharged after 20 days of continuous absence. He was on Riker’s Island, awaiting sentencing. Later, after being placed on probation for armed robbery, he was readmitted to Jamaica High. Court decisions and school regulations have ensured a safe haven for some truly dangerous criminals in our schools. Should a student be arrested in school, he can come back the very next day and await the results of school disciplinary action for several days afterward.

In a similar vein, the schools are mandated to educate children who have been removed from their homes by the courts and placed in group homes within our zone. Often they are the victims of the most horrific domestic circumstances. Placed in a school of 2,500 students, in the middle of a school term, what are the odds that they will successfully adjust? In November 2002, the director of a group home informed me that three of her charges had robbed another student and asked me if I wanted them arrested. When I asked her why they were placed at Jamaica, she informed me that there were no other options.

At any given time a high school of 2,000 or more students will have 300 to 400 students who have made no academic progress over the course of two years. A percentage will be passive and simply go to class and fail most of their courses. But a sizable portion will cut class regularly and keep school safety and the deans at bay on a full-time basis. With no high-quality alternative settings to send them to and no power to eject them from the premises, the school safety officers find themselves either herding them into classrooms or bonding with the worst offenders in a sort of reverse “Stockholm syndrome.”

Snowballing

The loss of building control did not happen overnight. Decisions made on a case-by-case basis usually made sense, but when compounded with other “plausible” solutions, they incubated like one of those mysterious building molds that render a structure uninhabitable. For example, high schools used to have a homeroom at the start and end of the school day. On entry, students would lock up their coats and be marked present. At the end of the day, they would report to the room again and get their coats. Especially during the winter, this would help to control the building. Students could not simply walk out if they felt like it or flee if they were in trouble. School authorities could readily spot an intruder wearing a coat while everyone else was in shirtsleeves. It was also a good way to eliminate the problems of coats’ being stolen and endless confrontations over the wearing of hats and gang-related paraphernalia. During the 1990s, however, the city’s teacher union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), argued that forcing teachers to supervise homeroom was unprofessional. The union was able to get this effective building-control tool abolished through contract negotiations.

Take another example. School aides were put in charge of supervising the cafeteria after the UFT successfully argued that teachers should not have cafeteria duty. Even some of the severest critics of the UFT agreed that it was a waste of teachers’ time for them to be policing the cafeteria. However, teachers knew the students, and the students knew that they knew them. The teachers could keep students in line in a way that school aides never could.

In one fell swoop, the cafeteria became student-gang turf. In Park West High School, a separate cafeteria had to be created for freshmen because they were falling prey to upperclassmen. Naturally, the cafeteria has become a fertile breeding ground for conflict and disorderly behavior that bubbles up daily throughout the school. Students had at least a dose of respect for the school deans and teachers who used to manage the cafeteria. School aides, by contrast, are easily intimidated by students. It is a rare school aide who will confront gang-affiliated students without fear of retribution.

Not only the teachers but also frequently the parents of disruptive students are shocked by the laxity of the school system. My first superintendent’s suspension hearing involved a freshman accused of threatening a female teacher who simply asked him to take his seat and stop cursing. He responded by overturning a desk as he walked toward her, stating he was “going to f— her up.” He was charged with threatening and menacing. The charges against him were sustained, and afterward his mother decided to return him to Trinidad, where the young man was from. When she returned to school to retrieve his records, she informed me that in Trinidad, her son would never have dared to threaten a teacher, and if he did . . . She did not complete the sentence. I would experience this sentiment time and again. Parental disbelief at the level of tolerance for this kind of behavior is palpable. Yet the only response from policymakers and the courts has been the erection of a costly system of adjudicating, tolerating, excusing, and ultimately ignoring deviant behavior.

Those strolling past the library at Jamaica High School can view the plaques honoring the school’s alumni who gave their lives for their country during World War II. Pictures of students, faculty, and athletic teams also adorn the walls. The picture-taking stops sometime during the mid-1970s though. It is as if a geological age had been preserved in a stratified layer of sediment. There was a time, it seems, when the school had a culture and a sense of spirit that invited displays of unity and pride. Something quite meaningful appears to have been lost in the decades since.

Statistically, Jamaica High School falls squarely in the middle of the school system. Learning takes place, and good kids get educated by good teachers, but the presence of a permanent class of “students” who cannot function in this setting continually destabilizes the learning environment, tempts marginal students to behave badly, and squanders untold treasure for no good reason.

-Marc A. Epstein teaches history and serves as an academic dean at Jamaica High School in Queens, New York.

Paper tigers

Terry Moe (“Reform Blockers,” Feature, Spring 2003) writes with his usual analytic elegance and passionate commitment to reform. The only problem is that many of his arguments conflict with the facts. I am no fan of teacher unions, for the same reason that Moe articulates—they too often support the status quo. But Moe’s tendency to regard them as all-powerful does not accord with education politics in the past decade.

Exhibit A is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In this case, most congressional Democrats supported a bill that was largely crafted by a Republican presidential administration. So which is it? Were the Democrats engaged in a collective electoral suicide pact? Did they not fear the unions’ ability to punish them in the next election? Or did their traditional union allies actually support the law’s accountability provisions? None of these scenarios supports Moe’s storyline.

An alternative explanation is that NCLB was all a big sham—the Democrats (and Republicans) pretended that they were seeking real reform; the unions pretended to oppose this pretense of reform; and governors and school administrators will pretend to implement this pretense of reform. This would accord with Moe’s view of education politics. Yet it seems convoluted beyond plausibility. NCLB contains real provisions that will complicate the lives of public school teachers and administrators for years to come. If teacher unions are truly antireform, they lost on this law.

Of course, teacher unions act to protect their members; so do associations of lawyers, doctors, college professors, hairdressers, and undertakers. However, there is nothing inconsistent in wanting both to enhance one’s job and to help the people with whom one works. Does Moe believe that police officers are indifferent to the murder rate in their city? Will firemen stand by while buildings burn down? Will tenured professors at community colleges or state universities shortchange their students as much as they can get away with? Surely there are some time-servers within all these groups, just as there are in teaching. Yet for the most part they are conscientious, hard-working professionals. We ought to assume that the vast majority of teachers also care deeply about their charges.

Moe is correct that core constituents of the Democratic party—”poor and minority families” in cities—endorse choice more enthusiastically than do Democratic elites. (It is worth noting that poor and minority families also endorse lots of other reforms, such as access to decent health care, to which Democratic and Republican elites fail to respond. School choice is not usually anywhere near the top of their list.) However, Moe does not point out that core constituents of the Republican party—middle-class and white families in suburbs—also disagree with their party elites on choice. Just about the last thing they want is choice programs that would open their schools to the children in failing urban schools. Both parties face a radical disconnect between the preferences of their elites and those of their voters, which may explain why fewer than 0.1 percent of the nation’s school-age children are in publicly funded voucher programs.

Jennifer Hochschild
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Bronze Age, at best

Let’s begin with Paul Peterson’s premise (“Ticket to Nowhere,” Feature, Spring 2003) that the schools haven’t matched America’s economic and social progress in the past generation. The A Nation at Risk report warned in the starkest terms that if U.S. schools didn’t shape up, the Germans and Japanese would beat our economic brains out, just as all the post-Sputnik Cassandras of the late 1950s and early 1960s warned that the Russians would win the cold war if the schools did not improve. Those children of the 1950s and 1960s are the ones who produced all the progress that Peterson now celebrates. Meanwhile, we’ve left the Germans, the Japanese, and the Russians in the dust.

The premise of progress is also partially wrong, in a way that illustrates the problems of the schools. For instance, America’s improvements in health care have been horribly distributed, with a large percentage of Americans having no health coverage at all—just as the poorest Americans are generally forced to send their children to the worst schools. Most of the nations with which the United States is compared on international tests have far broader social-service networks, especially for children. It’s wonderful to see conservatives using welfare states like Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and France as benchmarks. In the United States, it’s the teachers and schools that, for the most part, are the front line in dealing with the huge gaps in the social-service system.

Yes, America’s schools are often outscored by other nations on international exams, but to what extent do those comparisons measure schools and to what extent are they reflections of cultural attitudes over which schools have little control? This country offers perpetual second chances and open access to some form of postsecondary education for virtually every student. Societies where high-stakes decisions are made by the age of 13, or even 18, concentrate students’ and parents’ minds wonderfully at a time when Americans, with their anti-intellectual traditions, are often thinking a lot more about Friday night football, cheerleader camps, drugs, and safe sex. It was not the schools that Ross Perot had to fight in the 1980s when he pushed his proposal that no student with less than a “C” average could play football; it was the local Texas football boosters.

Yes, American parents are better educated and wealthier than ever before. But the demographics don’t tell us much about the conditions of parents’ lives, and even less about those of their kids. What we do know is that after hitting a low of 14.9 percent in 1970, the percentage of children living in poverty hovered at somewhere between 19 and 22 percent through the 1980s and early 1990s. It dipped to 15.4 percent at the end of the Clinton years—still higher than 30 years before and considerably higher than in all those European countries. By now, it’s almost certainly up again. Likewise, the percentage of kids who are not native English speakers is far higher now than it has been in nearly a century.

American schools, and particularly schools serving our poorest kids, should be far better, freer of stupid bureaucracies and self-serving teacher unions, staffed by better people, and supported by systems that encourage quality instead of fighting it. But 40 years of observing and writing about schools have also taught me how complex this story is, how interlocked schools are with their communities. We should be doing better, but it’s not surprising that every generation, going back at least a century, has complained that the schools are failing and aren’t as good as they used to be. Our schools were never as good as they used to be.

Peter Schrag
The Sacramento Bee
Oakland, California

Demand side

In the area of teaching (Chester E. Finn Jr., “High Hurdles,” Feature, Spring 2003), A Nation at Risk had it right. Potential teachers should demonstrate competence in an academic discipline and an aptitude for teaching; schools must offer incentives to attract outstanding candidates; unconventional paths to the profession must be forged; and salaries must be based on performance and sensitive to market conditions. Is there any hope that the next 20 years will see these reforms embedded in public education?

I am optimistic. Not because I think the establishment will willingly accept deregulation. Not because I believe multiple approaches will be tried under proper experimental conditions, providing research-based evidence for policymakers. I have no hope for a truce in the “teacher wars.” Research will make a powerful contribution, but partisans will argue endlessly over methodology, and since when has a deep political divide been bridged by research? Chester Finn’s plea for multiple approaches will, I fear, fall on deaf ears.

Nonetheless, I believe that performance will trump the “professionalism” movement. The market will demand it. Effective teachers in science, mathematics, special education, and other areas will continue to be in short supply.

Education is labor intensive. Urban districts typically spend up to 85 percent of their budgets on payroll. A labor-intensive business that cannot manage its workforce cannot perform at high levels. Voters are not going to back away from their demand for student achievement. Without flexible human-resource management policies, school districts are not going to be able to deliver high performance.

Donald R. McAdams
Center for Reform of School Systems
Houston, Texas

Building charters

Bryan C. Hassel and Bruno M. Manno (“Charters Beset,” Forum, Winter 2003) accurately describe the reform landscape as well as the challenges and opportunities for charter schools. Now entering their second decade, charter schools can clearly be considered a disruptive technology. There is plenty of evidence that school districts, service providers, policymakers, and parents are paying far more attention to charters than the U.S. Postal Service paid to Federal Express at a similar stage of development.

However, will these new schools significantly increase achievement, create systemic change, and stimulate innovative practices? Yes, but only if several things occur. First, charter schools must focus on student achievement and show their stuff on states’ high-stakes exams. At a time of high-profile charter failures and evidence of fiscal mismanagement in a few charters, the movement can no longer fly under the flags of choice or competition. Charters must prove their academic value.

The current landscape, with rare exceptions, is filled with school districts that do not want to grant charters. Would Wal-Mart grant Target a charter to open a store across the street? Going forward, states must provide multiple authorizers. Let states, local districts, selected universities, and large-city mayors grant charters. Build the authorizers’ capacity to champion their charters and ensure their success. Assist with a charter’s ability to navigate the uncharted waters of facilities, permitting, and contracting. Consider what would happen if the U.S. Department of Education could grant charters in every state in the nation.

If charter schools are to increase achievement through competitive forces, that theory must be pilot tested. Few neighborhoods, if any, have multiple charter and noncharter public school choices. What would happen if a big-city mayor had the ability to bring six to ten independent charter schools to the same neighborhood? Would the proliferation of public school choices lead to increased achievement? Doing this in ten cities across the country would create a fantastic experiment.

Don Shalvey
CEO, Aspire Public Schools
Redwood City, California

The nimble charter

Bryan C. Hassel (“Friendly Competition,” Forum, Winter 2003) is one of the finest scholars on charter schools, but he may overstate the organizational advantages of for-profit education management organizations (EMOs).

Hassel suggests that EMOs benefit from economies of scale. This is one of the biggest myths going around. First, two-thirds of every school budget is salaries, and no economies of scale are available there. In fact, in a nightmare scenario, Edison Schools may one day find itself organized by the union.

Second, I would guarantee that the overall per-pupil costs for goods and services at our tiny charter school are no greater than those of the EMOs. At the moment we’re receiving $15,000 worth of pro-bono legal work for a real estate matter. Do you think law firms are donating to Edison? Sure, Edison can buy 1,000 Dell laptops and negotiate the price, but we can glom onto the Massachusetts state contract for public schools and enjoy even more purchasing power. Like the school district, the EMOs’ ability to purchase in bulk is far less powerful than our ability to be nimble and quick.

Our “mom and pop” school probably shops more aggressively than individual Edison schools for cleaning contracts, and we probably require less cleaning since part of our school day involves kids’ doing chores like emptying the trash. At the end of the year, I suspect we’re better at getting every textbook returned in usable condition, since we’re small enough to keep an eye on those things.

Upstart Startup: Creating and Sustaining a Public Charter School
By James Nehring
Teachers College Press, 2002

Standards of Mind and Heart: Creating the Good High School
By Peggy Silva and Robert A. Mackin
Teachers College Press, 2002

Central Park East and Its Graduates: “Learning by Heart”
By David Bensman
Teachers College Press, 2000

One Kid at a Time: Big Lessons from a Small School
By Eliot Levine
Teachers College Press, 2001

“Inspiration,” “heart,” “democracy,” “models for national education reform” . . . so advertise the covers of four books from the series on small schools by Teachers College Press. True to promise, the authors deliver compelling stories of students once on the brink of academic failure who have thrived in four small schools, all based on principles from the Coalition of Essential Schools. Tony with Down’s syndrome, Tamika from a broken home, and others similarly afflicted became engaged in learning thanks to superhuman efforts from teachers and student-centered learning.

These stories illustrate the argument in favor of creating smaller schools: students get personal attention, individualized learning plans, and grades based on long-term projects and performance-based graduation requirements. All of these schools, for example, require “senior exhibitions” for graduation, where students present project results to a panel of outside experts. Most of these schools also regularly collect portfolios of student work in an attempt to go beyond standardized test results and provide richer measures of achievement.

This all makes small schools sound very attractive. But if small schools are to live up to their promise as national reform models and broader remedies for inequity, inspiration and heart may not be enough.

As these books demonstrate, operators of small schools share good ideas about how to make their own schools work, but they regularly ignore the fact that they have escaped from a system that prevents others from doing the same thing. Lots of educators who decide to create small schools, often by negotiating special arrangements with the local school district, do so because they don’t have any confidence that the system can be changed in any real way. Their solution has been to try to save as many kids as they can get their hands on. But they act as if anyone could do what they have done. Their denial of their own special circumstances lets them ignore—and even oppose—the system-wide changes that must occur if their valuable ideas are to be widely replicated. They rail against state standards and accountability systems, but offer few practical alternatives for ensuring that all public schools perform at a high level. Any serious reform effort must articulate a credible strategy for replicating successful schools.

Reinventing the Wheel

The strength of these four books is the honest lessons they offer people who are interested in starting new schools. Upstart Startup is the story of a Massachusetts charter school founded by Ted and Nancy Sizer (he the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools). Hand-picked veteran teachers staff the school, and a constant stream of Harvard graduate students scrutinize its workings and volunteer their time. If any school should succeed, this is the one. Yet author James Nehring, the school’s first principal, tells a story of utter chaos in the school’s first year, including scheduling meltdowns, administrative blunders, and a failure to link course objectives with established graduation outcomes.

In Central Park East and Its Graduates, David Bensman describes similar early mistakes and regrettable incidents in the famous small school Central Park East. Now more than a decade old, at various times the school tried consensus-based governance and failed, struggled to get teachers to collaborate on instructional strategies, and butted heads over race and student favoritism.

The majority of new “small” schools are likely to make similar mistakes. The lure of building from scratch and deliberating until every teacher is happy with every decision is strong for small-school founders. And they all seem doomed to learn the same lessons in isolation. School founders have few places to turn for advice about how to avoid disaster. School districts simply do not have the expertise to help—or, worse, actively get in the way—and potential sources of technical assistance like the Coalition of Essential Schools are thinly funded and reluctant to intrude.

Inexplicably, even when lessons, resources, and help are available, school founders resist the notion of replication. Nehring’s attitude is common. He argues that efforts at replicating his program are ill advised—not even a school’s scheduling policies should be imitated. Those interested in starting their own schools are told not only to expect but also to embrace the “muddle through” strategy. Nehring argues that school reform is necessarily this messy and irreducible. By contrast, the entrepreneurial founders of the Met School in Rhode Island (as described in One Kid at a Time) have started a nonprofit to seed other Met-like schools around the country and are developing materials and assistance to make that happen.

Resistance to the idea of replication is a romantic notion that the small-schools movement and disadvantaged students cannot afford. If every school starts from scratch, the prospects are grim for reaching more than a scattered handful of students in every city. With foundations and governments willing to invest in the scaling up of promising schools, it is all the more disappointing when the books in this series fail to help answer the question of how to get beyond the boutique school and “mass produce” many smaller, personalized programs without losing the essential elements that make these schools a success?

Peggy Silva and Robert A. Mackin do believe that their small school in New Hampshire can be replicated, but their faith is misapplied. The story of Souhegan High School in New Hampshire surely describes what high schools should strive to become: oriented around creativity and questioning, designed to ensure that students are known as individuals and will be aggressively targeted for intervention if they begin to fall behind. The implication is that every large urban high school can and should be like Souhegan. Largely ignored is the fact that Souhegan was designed as a new school, not a conversion from an existing program, and in the process attracted some of the best teachers in the country.

In fact, all of the schools in this series were started as new schools, chose their teachers and are chosen by families, and have unusual operating autonomy. It is probably no coincidence that two of the four schools are charter schools. Most advocates of small schools acknowledge privately that operating as a new school and allowing students to choose to enroll are essential elements of their success. However, these realizations are usually buried in the texts of books about successful schools. Policymakers and educators are allowed to imagine that good schools can be woven out of existing bad schools and that the difficult politics of transforming schools and creating choice for families and teachers can be avoided.

There are certainly lessons about scale-up hidden in these books, and they should be used. School incubators like those running in Dayton, Sacramento, Oakland, and other cities, and nonprofit providers of technical assistance could analyze small-school start-up lessons and train new school founders to avoid common mistakes. Districts could hire staff with expertise in supporting small-school development. More schools could imitate the Met by documenting their policies and procedures to make it easy for other schools to copy what they’ve done well. Those who fear that replication efforts will produce cookie-cutter schools are right to worry, but they also have an obligation to encourage the creation of franchises that account for local context and preferences but still maintain quality controls. The need is too great to build one school at a time.

Content Is…Queen

A fundamental—and particularly controversial—aspect of the small schools described in these books is their resistance to prescribed curricular content. According to the authors, students in these schools came away with process skills adequate to allow them to become “lifelong learners.” What about learning major historical events, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, basic knowledge of life sciences, and foreign languages? Students may or may not know about these things without a defined curriculum. It all depends on whether the topics fit their interests at the time. Graduates of these schools supposedly come away with the ability to seek out whatever content is needed to address academic questions as they arise. The theory is that kids don’t retain knowledge unless the subject interests them, so why bother trying to get them to remember events and dates that they could easily look up in an encyclopedia if they ever have the need?

The authors make no bones about their disdain for those in the “content” camp, who wonder why a student should be able to graduate without knowing anything particular about history or math. Nehring, in Upstart Startup, tackles this debate most directly in his chapter titled, “Is Shakespeare Essential?” Nehring’s point is this: of course his students are exposed to content through their project-based learning, but it would be futile for people at the school, district, or state level to try to agree on what content should be required. Nehring derides, for instance, the Massachusetts charter school inspection team that dared to single out the fact that his students didn’t seem to know basic historical facts.

Souhegan High School is an exception; graduates are required to complete a core curriculum in basic areas (math, science, literature, and history). The Met School, by contrast, exhibits the extreme, with no classes, just project-based learning. The other schools teach some content, but it is integrated in teacher-crafted, theme-based modules. Despite their rhetoric, most small-school staffs clearly value content to some degree. Unfortunately, these books do not offer much new or constructive insight on how schools that emphasize process skills can also be sure their students come away with a sufficiently strong content base. In response to outside criticism, Nehring begrudgingly proposes new Essential Content to complement the school’s Essential Skills. The content list is broad enough to accommodate teachers’ judgment and creativity, and is a good and potentially useful model for basic content standards in other Coalition schools. What a shame that innovations like this are so rare and are treated as embarrassing footnotes in these books.

A more middle-ground perspective from small-school founders on the issue of content would be refreshing and productive. Surely we can agree, for instance, that skill in finding and critiquing material is valuable, especially in today’s information-overloaded Internet world. Surely we can also agree that one’s ability to interpret and critique those materials is limited without knowledge of facts.

Standard Hostility

State-mandated standards and tests are not popular in schools where every teacher individualizes content for every student. Not surprisingly, these authors devote considerable space to standards bashing. The arguments range from the persuasive (the standards are too prescriptive, are too broad, or divert attention from teaching of higher-order skills) to the absurd (the tests are beneath us). Dennis Litky (cofounder of the Met School) argues:

I know that states need to hold schools accountable in some way. . . . I’m not asking to be excused from that. What I disagree with is having one way to evaluate every student. Every state says they want students to become good thinkers, problem solvers, and citizens, but then the tests they give have almost nothing to do with those things!

There may be something to this argument, but the solution Litky presents is absurdly subjective: every school should be able to devise its own standards and ways of showing it is achieving what the state claims to value. He writes, “We could videotape every exhibition and the state could randomly select and assess a sample of them.” Litky and his fellow small schoolers can make these claims more reasonably than other schools, since most small schools are schools of choice. Thus they face an even tougher form of accountability than state standards and tests: the ability of parents and students to leave the school if they aren’t satisfied.

Nevertheless, whether or not the authors share legitimate complaints about the constraints that standards place on their professional judgment, the “leave us to our rubrics” attitude marginalizes the small-schools movement. The authors offer thin evidence of whether their schools are in fact teaching and assessing content knowledge and skills in the ways they promise. All four books offer reasonably strong evidence that these schools are keeping kids from dropping out, getting them into college, and helping them do well on standardized reading tests. But descriptions of school-based outcomes and assessments in these schools raise troubling doubts. Litky again:

Do we require a minimum proficiency level? I’d like to say that we wouldn’t graduate a student with a 6th-grade reading level. But on the other hand, there aren’t even any measures that assess reading ability very well.

Even if we buy the idea that teachers at the Met are so talented that they should be trusted to demand high performance from every student, what about schools with less skilled teachers and lower expectations? These are the schools that standards, standardized assessments, and state accountability systems are designed to identify and fix. By failing to take the need for states to address this problem seriously, small-schools advocates seem to ignore the broader issues of social justice that they work so hard to address in their own schools.

Instead of devoting so much energy to dismissing the standards movement, small-schools founders and advocates would do well to engage the discussion and help refine or redefine state standards and statewide accountability systems in the name of equity. Schools based on inspiration and heart may be enough for reformers who are willing to settle for localized quality and impact, but the small-schools advocates I know aspire to a lot more. They believe true equity depends on universal access to good public schools. For that to happen, small schools must mature into a stronger movement by formulating serious proposals for assessments and accountability, throwing their vocal political support behind school choice, and insisting on new, innovative efforts to reduce the learning curve for those who wish to start small schools and their overseers.

-Robin J. Lake is associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

Why Schools Matter: A Cross-National Comparison of Curriculum and Learning
By William H. Schmidt et al.
Jossey-Bass, 2001, $29; 400 pages

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) began with a chance meeting between Torsten Husen of the University of Stockholm and a group of University of Chicago researchers in the mid-1950s. The scholars at Chicago’s Comparative Education Center, C. Arnold Anderson, Mary Jean Bowman, and Ben Bloom, believed that the whole world should be seen as an educational “laboratory.” The first results from IEA’s international surveys appeared in 1964. Since then, there have been 29 IEA-sponsored cross-national studies. The most famous of these was the 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the main subject of Why Schools Matter.

Up to 45 nations participated in at least one aspect of this cooperative study of schools, teachers, students, and learning in math and science at three age levels, making it perhaps the largest survey ever undertaken in the social sciences. As in previous surveys, the results suggested that the typical U.S. student knows less math and science than do students in many other industrialized nations. What TIMSS has taught us is that these differences are compounded over time: children in the United States drop lower in the rankings as they age.

One explanation is that curricula in U.S. schools are characterized by too much breadth and not enough depth—in more familiar words, they are “a mile wide and an inch deep.” William Schmidt and his colleagues, the authors of Why Schools Matter, are largely responsible for this notion. They found that school systems in the United States cover a broader range of curricular topics than any other country save Switzerland. However, Swiss textbooks are more selective than American texts, making the U.S. curriculum the most “splintered” in the world.

Unlike the national curricula used in Europe and East Asia, curricula in the United States are uncoordinated, with insufficient attention paid to what students learn as they progress from grade to grade. In a highly mobile nation like the United States, this is particularly nettlesome when children change schools and discover that their new school district teaches geometry in 7th grade, while they took it the previous year.

Curricular variation complicates international comparisons as well. The TIMSS test for 13-year-olds included 44 different mathematic concepts. Some of these concepts weren’t taught in all nations, while many others were taught at one age level but not at another or in different sequences. Does this mean that the tests were unfair? No. In fact, even when there were differences in coverage and sequence, these differences turned out to yield important information. It may be the case that children in the Netherlands are asked to move at a quicker pace, with a more logical sequence of topics, and thus learn more mathematics by the time they graduate. This information has proven useful for U.S. policymakers as they search for ways to upgrade the education system.

Students can even vary from nation to nation in their approach to these tests, further complicating comparisons. The international tests are low stakes in the sense that no consequences are attached to a student’s performance. However, in some cultures, students may view all testing as a challenge to be taken seriously. In other cultures, students may not care in the slightest how they perform unless it “counts.”

The Size of Minnesota

What Why Schools Matter fails to say is that countries themselves are often an arbitrary choice as a unit of analysis. For instance, the United States has a range of demographic, cultural, and social-policy differences that make a comparison with Sweden, a country with a population the same size as Minnesota, somewhat artificial. If other factors were used in defining a legitimate unit of analysis—size, wealth, and school functions—states might be the only units meeting the criteria in the United States.

Why Schools Matter also fails to discuss—mostly because it was not included in the TIMSS surveys—how teachers’ knowledge and skills differed across countries and what effect that might have on achievement. Nor did the TIMSS study have any data on the amount of money nations invested in education. That TIMSS paid no attention to spending was no accident. Decisions concerning which data would be collected were made by IEA committees in which experts had to reach consensus. The committees themselves were overloaded with specialists on subject matter and methodology. No education economist, and few education sociologists, sat on a TIMSS committee. When the time came to decide on the focus of TIMSS, the subject-matter specialists had a virtual monopoly. Consequently, the measurements of the social contexts in which learning takes place are superficial. Schmidt and his colleagues do take a brief and superficial detour to see if their results change when they adjust the data to account for a nation’s per-capita income (they did not change).

Nonschool factors such as a child’s social background seem to make a difference on the TIMSS tests at all levels. The book does not ask, however, whether this difference is the same in all countries or whether it varies in some systematic pattern. Research performed by William Loxley and myself in 1983 found that the influence of a student’s socioeconomic status on achievement varies from one nation to another. The lower a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), it appears, the more influence the school seems to have. This finding has been a principal rationale for the investment in school quality by the World Bank, USAID, UNESCO, and many other international development agencies. Although recent re-analyses have challenged the strength of the earlier findings, the fact remains that the influence of socioeconomic status on achievement is by no means uniform across nations, age/grade levels, gender, and subject matter.

Why Schools Matter may be of marginal interest to general readers, but it is an excellent book based on a study of unprecedented sophistication and quality. It tells us that if U.S. schools are to improve, much more attention must be paid to the depth and focus of their curricula.

–Stephen P. Heyneman is a professor of international education policy at Vanderbilt University.

At the Bronx Preparatory Charter School we enjoy the talents of a master teacher, Frederick Shannon. He had been teaching 5th grade in the classroom next door to our principal, Marina Bernard Damiba, when she began her career through Teach for America ten years ago. As a new teacher, Marina had camped out in his classroom during free periods and absorbed every nuance of his technique. Then he retired. But as Marina moved into leadership positions, first at the KIPP Academy and now at Bronx Prep, she coaxed him out of retirement.

“You need to coach the next generation,” she implored.

During his 25 years in teaching, Mr. Shannon developed the “Shannon Plan” of effective instruction. It works. He knows how to teach children and how to coach fellow teachers. He assists our young staff members with their lesson plans and visits their classrooms to offer suggestions for improvement. He demon-strates model lessons in math and reading. Our teachers are becoming more and more effective, thanks to Mr. Shannon’s commitment and expertise and to the tailoring of their training to the context of their own classrooms.

To the new teacher who is struggling to get students settled at the beginning of class, he suggests the time-tested “do now,” a silent opening exercise in which the teacher writes an assignment on the board before students enter the classroom. Students see the assignment under the “do now” heading and immediately focus on the task at hand.

Other techniques reflect his unique style of making lesson components more visually or physically compelling. With his support, our 6th-grade reading teacher has developed her signature hamburger lesson. Dressed as a hamburger, one of her students models topic and closing sentences that give the paragraph its structure (the bun) as well as the meaty support sentences and details inside. In another lesson, to help students remember that plot = conflict + resolution, teachers take students through a series of Shannon’s hand signals that are part boxing, part mime.

Unfortunately, the state of New York does not recognize the holistic, integrated, practical training Mr. Shannon provides as valid preparation for a state teaching license. Currently, schools like ours, in an area of documented teacher shortage, are permitted to hire teachers with one-year emergency licenses. But this allowance will be phased out by 2004. Our teachers will then have to be certified. So each evening they scramble off to schools of education and to on-line learning programs to get the credits they need to stay in the business of teaching.

Credits are expensive. They also take time away from planning lessons, and they usually have little to do with the day-to-day reality of educating kids. Course offerings like the “Environments of School” may be intellectually stimulating, but what new teachers really need is practical, hands-on experience. Some teachers contemplate the aggravation and expense of becoming certified and bolt to private schools. Countless others evaluate the field’s barriers to entry and pick another profession.

Good principals, like managers everywhere, know how to evaluate potential teachers. First, recruit well-educated candidates. Then, give them a class of 25 students for 45 minutes and see what the students learn. Call references to assess their ability to work with a team. Get beyond first impressions: meet with them several times before making the offer.

In an environment of choice and accountability, a principal’s commitment to students should provide all the motivation necessary to select the best candidates. Teaching does not pay well, but there is nonetheless a pool of talented, motivated people eager to educate the next generation. Why is the state working so hard to narrow that pool?

-Kristin Kearns Jordan is the founder and executive director of the Bronx Preparatory Charter School.

The No Child Left Behind Act granted children the right to transfer out of failing schools. The question is, Will school districts let them? Illustration by Eric Dinyer.

The debate over school choice may be about to take a new turn. For years, reformers of left and right have dueled over whether the best way to shake up poorly performing public schools is to provide parents with the opportunity to switch to private schools (through vouchers) or to allow parents to move their children to better public schools (through public school choice). The federal No Child Left Behind Act, which President George W. Bush signed into law last year, represented a victory for the advocates of public school choice: the law rejected funding for private school vouchers, but did mandate that districts allow children in persistently failing schools to transfer to public schools that perform better.

The law thus established a nationwide test of public school choice as a means of both providing better opportunities for individual kids and creating pressure on schools that are performing poorly.

The early results of that test are now coming in—and they don’t look very encouraging.

From coast to coast, school districts large and small report that hardly any students in failing schools are using the choice provisions of the federal law to move to other public schools. Even in some of the nation’s largest cities, the number of kids traveling across town to attend better schools on any given morning might not fill a single school bus.

In part, the law’s impact may be tempered by parents’ inertia, lack of knowledge, or reluctance to upset routines and friendships by removing their children from neighborhood schools. Another problem is the sheer lack of high-quality public school alternatives within reasonable driving distance of many a failing urban school; given the choice between the low-performing school in their own neighborhood and the mediocre school ten miles away, parents may stick to the path of least resistance.

So far there is little evidence that suburban schools are opening their doors to refugees from the urban systems. The federal law encourages such transfers, but does not require them, and most urban superintendents have found little enthusiasm for the idea among their suburban neighbors. In Dayton, Ohio, for instance, Superintendent Percy Mack says that he was turned down by half a dozen suburban districts when he asked them to accept children from the poorly performing city schools. “Basically what they said was they did not have space within those districts for any of our kids,” he says. This is a problem familiar to education reformers: a voluntary 25-year-old program that sends minority students from Boston to surrounding suburban districts has a waiting list that exceeds 12,000 kids because the receiving schools say they don’t have enough space to accept more children.

These obstacles are compounded by the fact that few districts are making it easy for parents to exercise their right to choose or to avail themselves of the related option that offers “supplemental services,” such as after-school tutoring, to students who remain in schools that have failed to improve student performance.

Massive resistance might be too strong a term to describe the way in which local school officials are implementing these new options for parents. But not by much. Using both subtle and overt strategies, school districts of every size have made it difficult for parents of children in failing schools even to learn about the new choices, and they have structured the programs in ways that make them less attractive to the parents who might be interested. “The only way you make something like this work is to fully inform parents what their options are and how to exercise their options, and school superintendents aren’t doing that,” says William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, a liberal advocacy group.

The lack of enthusiasm—and in some cases overt hostility—toward the new requirements underscores the difficulty of implementing any reform that requires school districts to impose changes that challenge their bureaucratic self-interest. It also raises questions about whether public school choice, as presently constructed, can have anywhere near the impact its supporters have long hoped. The coming debate will be over whether the solution is to create a more sweeping form of public school choice or to revive private school vouchers to create the alternative the public system has so far squelched.

Resistance Movements

The public school choice and supplemental services provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act were to be the most tangible lifelines for parents whose children attend low-performing schools. Schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” in improving student performance on standardized reading and math tests for two years in a row are subject to the act’s sanctions. Their students must be allowed to transfer to a better school, with the school district paying the transportation costs. Alternatively, children who choose to remain in low-performing schools are eligible for after-school and weekend tutoring once their school fails to make adequate yearly progress for three years’ running.

This approach was meant both to widen opportunities for students and to place competitive pressures on the schools. Schools that didn’t improve would risk losing students and the accompanying state financial aid. They would also be forced to divert some of their Title I money into providing transportation and after-school tutoring programs. This was supposed to give schools and districts powerful new incentives to improve.

Or to resist the law.

In its first year, the transfer provisions of the new federal education law have had as much impact on the operations of the major school systems as a Ping-Pong ball fired at a battleship. In Chicago, of the 125,000 kids in 179 failing schools who were eligible to transfer to other public schools last September, fewer than 800 have switched. In Los Angeles, where about 200,000 students in 120 schools were eligible, fewer than 50 have changed schools. In New York, where 220,000 children in more than 300 schools were eligible, just 1,507 moved.

It’s not only in the largest cities where the law has fizzled. In Cleveland, where 15,000 students in 21 schools were eligible, just 36 children requested transfers in the fall semester—and, of those, nine eventually returned to their original schools. In Boston, where students in 65 schools were eligible, apparently no students have used the new law’s provisions to change schools. Likewise, no students have moved in Dayton, Ohio, though 10 of the district’s 25 schools were on the state’s list of failing schools. In Louisville, Kentucky, 2,900 kids in the Jefferson County Public Schools were eligible to transfer. Only 180 have moved.

What went wrong? The answer varies from city to city, though similar threads run through many of the tales.

In Chicago, local and state officials limited the program in ways that severely reduced its attractiveness to parents. Last summer, the state legislature passed a law saying that schools with selective enrollment—such as centers for gifted children—and those considered to be operating over capacity did not have to accept transfers from the poorly performing schools. (The federal law allows such exemptions as long as they were in place before July 1, 2002.)

Then the district offered transfers only to students in 48 of the 179 schools that had failed to make adequate yearly progress. All of the 48 schools were elementary schools. In the end, even with these limits, about 2,000 parents requested transfers, says Phil Hansen, the chief accountability officer at the Chicago Public Schools. But because of capacity constraints at the schools designated to receive the transfers, just 1,100 applications were granted. By the time school was under way, many parents had second thoughts, and fewer than 800 children had moved.

The Neighborhood School

For the city, Hansen says, the moral of the story was that most parents don’t want to move their children from their neighborhood school, no matter how miserable its scores on standardized tests. “The lesson we learned, which we kind of knew already,” he says, “is that Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. Parents take pride in their neighborhood school; even if it is a low-performing school, parents feel closeness to that neighborhood school. What we heard from parents more often than not is, I don’t want my children to go to another school, but what are you going to do to make my school better?”

Madeline Talbott, the lead organizer for Illinois ACORN, a group that advocates on behalf of low-income families, doesn’t entirely disagree. Parents, she says, are reluctant to send their children to a different neighborhood, one that they might have difficulty reaching in an emergency. But she says the way the city limited the choices gave parents little incentive to accept that risk.

“There were a lot of reasons we felt the way the thing was set up was pretty useless,” she says. “We felt the choice provision, at least here, was something of a sham. It was a very expensive transfer of kids from one school to another that wouldn’t necessarily be an improvement and would not necessarily have the support of the parent.”

The problem began, she noted, when the state exempted many of the best schools in the city from accepting students from the low-performing schools. The way the federal law measures schools compounded the difficulty. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools are ranked by the trend, not the absolute level, of their students’ performance on the standardized reading and math tests. That meant a school might be designated “needing improvement” because it had failed to raise scores over the past several years—but still could have a higher absolute score than a school that had met the federal standard because it had made steady gains from a lower base. The result was that Chicago, in some instances, offered parents a chance to transfer their children into schools whose overall test scores were lower than those of the schools they were already attending.

In the end, ACORN supported the city’s proposal to limit choice to just the 48 schools and to use most of the money that would have gone into busing to fund improvements in the failing schools. “If we could have constructed a plan that gave children in low-income, low-performing schools a real opportunity, we would have supported it,” Talbott says. “But we looked and looked and could not figure one out.”

The lack of better alternatives for parents in poorly performing schools may be an even greater problem in smaller cities. In Dayton, Ohio, the initial state review concluded that all 25 of the district’s schools had failed to make adequate progress. After further analysis, the state concluded that test scores had improved enough at 10 of the city’s schools to lift them out of that category. “However, those 10 schools resembled the 15 that did need improvement,” says schools superintendent Percy Mack. “Some of them even had lower scores” than the 15 schools that remained on the state’s list of failing schools.

In that circumstance, he says, the district decided that it made little sense to offer parents a chance to transfer to schools that were no better than the ones they were attending. It’s a problem, he says, that is likely to be common in smaller and older cities. “In the major cities, where you are covering major areas of space, where some of the city schools extend out into the suburban areas, then you may find you have different looks and achievements in the schools,” he says. “But in the smaller areas . . . you are going to see a lot of the schools look very similar.”

Didn’t You Get the Notice?

In New York City, the deficiency was less in capacity than in motivation. “There is a lot of blame to go around,” says Eva Moskowitz, a centrist Democrat from the east side of Manhattan who chairs the City Council’s education committee. “I think on the local level there really is resistance to embracing choice.”

The breakdown began, she says, with the New York City Department of Education’s decision to let each school district in the city decide how to contact parents about the option to transfer from poorly performing schools. Rather than writing directly to parents, she says, many districts apparently sent the notice home in children’s backpacks—an excellent way to ensure that few parents ever see it. And for those who managed to fish out the notice from the swamp of old homework assignments, baseball cards, and snack wrappers in the backpack, the letters themselves weren’t much more illuminating.

“The letter was not a particularly encouraging letter, and it was quite difficult to understand,” says Moskowitz. “I have a Ph.D. in American history and I had to read it about three times to figure out exactly whether this choice was guaranteed, and who do I contact, and am I going to have to pay for the transportation? It also wasn’t clear if I could pick a school out of my district.”

As a result, few parents seem to have known about their options. A December 2002 poll by the Foundation for Educational Reform and Accountability found that 85 percent of New York City parents with children in failing schools were unaware that the schools were on the state’s list of low-performing schools. The Albany-based foundation, which supports school choice, also found that 94 percent of the parents were “likely” to request a transfer if they were made aware of the option.

Even parents who understood their rights then found themselves confronting the labyrinth of the city’s often impenetrable school bureaucracy. As in Chicago, “Parents who wanted a choice complained that the choice they were given had worse scores than the school their child was in,” Moskowitz continues. “Others found that . . . if they had questions, and they wanted to see the school [available for transfer] they were told they weren’t allowed to visit. The stories run the gamut, but it does seem there was either passive or active resistance to offering parents real choice.”

Similar problems later resurfaced in the way the school districts notified parents of students who were eligible for the new after-school tutoring services established under the federal law. After the New York Times revealed last November that only 10,000 of the nearly quarter-million eligible students had signed up for the supplemental services, the city was forced to extend the deadline for applications. The problem, one city Education Department official acknowledged, is that districts did not want to lose the Title I money they would have to give to parents to obtain the after-school tutoring—and so did little to make parents aware of the opportunity. “Part of the problem is folks wanted to keep the money within the system,” said the official. “Did the folks on the ground do an adequate job of saying to parents that the resources were available? The answer is no.”

The breakdown in both the choice and the tutoring programs was so overwhelming that last December, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein, the new, Bloomberg-appointed schools chancellor, announced that they were taking over the process. Now, Bloomberg said, the central Department of Education would assume responsibility for notifying parents and establishing a process that would allow students in failing schools to transfer to better schools across the city, even outside their home districts. Watching the announcement, Moskowitz was encouraged but not entirely convinced. “I guess I am of two minds,” she says. “It’s hard to imagine it getting any worse…. Having said that, it’s not as if the central [school administration] has any track record of doing this, or anything else, particularly well.” New York City’s intransigence even provoked a class-action lawsuit filed in January 2003 by parents claiming that the New York and Albany school districts had denied students their rights to transfer and to free tutoring.

New York was hardly alone in cloaking the new options. One potential reason that so few students transferred in Cleveland, for instance, is that the district didn’t notify parents that the choice was available until four days before school began—at which point understandably few were enthusiastic about uprooting their children. In Los Angeles some parents were not notified until after the school year began. The breakdowns extended up the bureaucratic line; many states didn’t notify cities which schools were failing until late in the summer, which gave them little time to contact parents. And many states were late in designating the firms that could provide after-school tutoring, with the result that districts, once again, had less time to notify parents. Illinois education officials initially told the Chicago schools they would not have to offer the tutoring services in failing schools until September 2003—which left district officials scrambling when the federal Department of Education decreed that they would have to begin offering the services this past winter.

Not all school districts have been so resistant. Officials in Portland, Oregon, have gone out of their way to make parents aware of their opportunities. In October 2001, even before the federal bill had passed, the district sent letters to parents of students in three high schools it expected to land on the failing list, notifying them that the transfer option might be available for the next fall. During the summer of 2002, the district mailed a follow-up notice telling parents that the law provided transportation money for any students who wanted to leave those schools. Looking at test results in fall 2002, the district concluded that an additional middle school was likely to fall onto the failing list for the 2003-04 school year. Once again, it notified eligible parents and urged them to attend an annual school fair where they could learn more about the schools available for transfer.

Yet even with this ambitious effort—which far exceeds the outreach in the vast majority of cities—only about 140 parents sought transfers, says Lew Frederick, director of information at the Portland Public Schools. The reasons that so many parents decided to stay put, says Frederick, include: loyalty to neighborhood schools; reluctance to travel long distances; concern about how their children might be received in a new school; the already available opportunities to transfer under magnet programs; and a desire to gain access to the after-school tutoring services that are promised to students who remain in failing schools.

The record is clear that most districts could make it much easier, and more attractive, for parents to move their children from failing schools. But the factors suppressing participation in Portland—which appears to have made a good-faith effort to implement the program—suggest that there may be a natural limit to how many parents will move their children from one conventional public school to another. The experience in Dayton, and to some extent in Chicago, defines another limit on the current programs: in many places, the schools that students can transfer into may not be enough of an improvement on the schools they are leaving to make it worth the trouble.

Turf Battles

In the months ahead, the limitations of the choice provisions established under the federal education law are likely to drive the debate in two different directions. From the left may come increasing demands that children in failing inner-city schools be guaranteed the right to transfer into neighboring suburban schools.

Faced with examples of suburban schools’ refusing to take transfers, liberal education reformers are beginning to argue that suburban districts should be required to accept such children. In effect, they are using the logic of the education reform law to reopen one of the most divisive issues of the school desegregation era: whether largely white suburban districts should be required to accept black and Hispanic inner-city children. In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, the Supreme Court ruled that courts generally could not require busing across district lines to achieve racial balance; but the coming months may see more calls from liberals for moving kids across district lines to fulfill the promise of the federal law. “Choice within districts does not provide real opportunity to most of the students who need it,” Goodwin Liu, a former education official in the Clinton administration, wrote recently. “The reality is that most high-performing public schools are located in the suburbs.”

Conservatives take a different lesson from the disappointing results of the law’s public school choice provisions. Many argue that the resistance from local public school bureaucracies shows that the only way to create genuine alternatives for children in weak schools is to provide them with private school vouchers. “There has never been more powerful evidence about the need for private school choice than the data that are coming out about public school choice,” says Clint Bolick, vice president of the Institute for Justice, a conservative legal group. “In order to make the promise of No Child Left Behind meaningful, it’s clear we have to look to every possible alternative, including private schools.”

Some Bush administration officials are reaching the same conclusion. Eventually, President Bush may use the bureaucratic resistance to public school choice to revive the proposal for private school vouchers that he dropped early in the negotiations over the education bill in 2001. “That’s definitely something we have given a lot of thought to,” said one senior official.

In the meantime, the administration is trying to nudge districts toward more enthusiastic implementation of the law. In October 2002, the federal Department of Education distributed nearly $24 million in grants to Arkansas, Florida, Minnesota, and districts in six other states to expand their public school choice programs. More important, last fall the department also issued regulations announcing that districts could no longer use a lack of capacity as an excuse to deny transfers to students in failing schools. That alone will require many cities to intensify their efforts. “We know we are going to have to be much more aggressive next year,” says Chicago’s Hansen.

Whether that will be enough, in Chicago and elsewhere, to provide real opportunity for children trapped in failing schools remains very much in question. Liberals and conservatives may not agree on the cure, but both increasingly believe that the federal law’s current approach to school choice is fatally flawed. The cool response to the transfer option in cities as different as Chicago and Portland suggests that, whatever choices are offered, many parents would rather see money and effort directed toward improving their neighborhood school. However, parents who want to vote with their feet (as Ronald Reagan once said) may need more opportunities than the federal reform law has provided so far.

-Ronald Brownstein is a national political columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

An international look at the relationship between class size and student achievement. Photographs by Getty Images.

Reducing class sizes is one of today’s most popular education reform strategies. The Education Commission of the States estimates that such efforts cost states $2.3 billion during the 1999-00 school year alone. The federal government contributed another $1.6 billion in 2000-01 toward meeting the Clinton administration’s goal of decreasing class size nationwide in the early grades to no more than 18 students. During the past year or so, the deteriorating condition of state budgets and the Bush administration’s new emphasis on accountability have made class-size reduction less of a priority. Yet it remains popular among parents, teachers, and the teacher unions, which often promote it as an alternative to vouchers.

The motivation for reducing class size is intuitive: with smaller classes, teachers should be able to devote more time to each student, both in the classroom and in giving feedback on homework and tests. The concern is at least threefold. First, reducing class size is remarkably expensive, since it requires hiring more personnel. There may be less costly reforms that are at least as effective as class-size reduction. Second, hiring more teachers may dilute the quality of the workforce, thereby negating any gains among the students of good teachers. Finally, the intuitive relationship between class size and teachers’ effectiveness may not actually hold true—teachers may be no more successful with 18 students than with 23.

The most persuasive evidence of the benefits of class-size reduction has come from the Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) experiment in Tennessee, where students were randomly assigned to classrooms of varying size. Smaller classes appeared to yield substantial gains among kindergartners and possibly 1st graders in the first year of the program—gains that were maintained throughout their school years. However, a large body of research literature on class-size reduction contradicts the findings from Project STAR.

In just two countries, Greece and Iceland, did smaller classes appear to elicit superior student performance.

To lend a fresh perspective on this issue, we use data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to compare the effects of class size around the world. While Americans squabble over whether class size should be 18 or 25 students, teachers in Korean schools routinely face classrooms of more than 50 students. These and other differences, such as the quality of a nation’s teachers, can be valuable tools in discerning where, if ever, class-size reductions are likely to be beneficial.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Two Strategies

Ascertaining the effect of class size is less straightforward than it might appear. The central problem is that students are not assigned to classrooms randomly. For instance, schools often establish small remedial classes for lagging students or small enrichment classes for the so-called gifted and talented. In addition, school systems may direct students into schools with different average class sizes on the basis of their performance.

Parents also may influence their children’s class sizes. They may work hard to move their children to schools with smaller classes, where they are likely to receive more attention. Thus variation in class size may be simply the result, rather than the cause, of differences in student achievement. Estimating the true effect of class size on student performance requires a strategy that looks only at variations in class size that are unrelated to students’ previous achievement.

In principle, two such strategies are available. The first is to conduct a randomized field trial along the lines of Project STAR in Tennessee. Unfortunately, while it used a powerful research design, the Tennessee study was flawed in its implementation. For one thing, no data were collected on students’ performance before they were assigned to their classrooms, making it impossible to know whether the assignment was truly random. In addition, the teachers were aware of their participation in Project STAR, as in almost any true experiment. This has led some to question whether its findings can be expected to hold under more typical conditions. It is also worth noting that the evidence here comes from an experiment conducted in a single U.S. state during the mid-1980s, in which classes were reduced from 22-25 students to fewer than 17. In that sense, the findings may not apply to school systems in other parts of the world.

The second strategy, quasi-experimental research, relies either on special types of variation in class size or on econometric techniques to make appropriate comparisons. However, the conditions that must be met in order to use this approach make credible quasi-experimental studies possible for only a small number of school systems. For example, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton used data on black students in South Africa during apartheid to measure the effects of class size. They argued that the black population of South Africa during this time lacked the power to influence class sizes, making the assumption that students were randomly assigned to classrooms of different size more plausible. But the South African school system under apartheid was obviously unique; in some districts, the average class size reached 80 students.

While Case and Deaton found that smaller classes were modestly beneficial, Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby’s careful quasi-experimental study of elementary schools in Connecticut suggests that Case and Deaton’s results may not be relevant for more developed countries. Hoxby analyzed variation in class size due to random fluctuations in the number of births and restrictions on maximum class sizes. She found no evidence of even trivial class-size effects. However, her approach requires a long panel of rich data and has yet to be applied in other contexts.

East Asian countries feature large classes, with an average of more than 30 students. Photograph by Getty Images.

International Evidence

Taking data from TIMSS, we used a quasi-experimental design to take a broader look at how class size affects student achievement in different nations around the world. Conducted in 1994-95, TIMSS was the largest international study of student performance ever, with more than 40 countries participating initially. Each country administered the test to a nationally representative sample of middle-school students, defined as those students enrolled in the two adjacent grades that contained the largest proportion of 13-year-old students at the time of testing (grades 7 and 8 in most countries).

Our strategy takes advantage of the fact that data were collected on both actual and average class sizes and on students’ performance and socioeconomic backgrounds for more than one grade level in each school. We looked at whether 7th graders in a particular school performed better than the same school’s 8th graders (relative to the national average for their respective grades) when, on average, the 7th-grade classes were smaller than the 8th-grade classes. With this strategy, the variation in class size we considered is strictly a consequence of fluctuations in the cohort size from one grade to the next. This excludes variation in class sizes within the same grade and from school to school, both of which can be subject to the influence of parents and school-system policies that tend to sort students into classrooms by their performance. The remaining differences should be essentially unrelated to student performance.

This evidence suggests that capable teachers are able to promote student learning equally well regardless of class size.

This approach forced us to restrict the sample to schools in which both a 7th-grade and an 8th-grade class were actually tested and in which data on the actual class sizes and average class sizes were available for each grade. We ultimately conducted our analysis on the 18 countries in which data for at least 50 schools in both mathematics and science remained after applying these criteria.

As shown in Figure 1, Portugal exhibits the lowest average combined test scores in math and science among the 18 countries in our sample, Singapore the highest. Iceland has the smallest average class size, with just 20 students per classroom. At nearly 53 students per class, Korea has by far the highest average. The other East Asian countries also feature large classes, with an average of more than 30 students. In general, the countries with the smallest classes tended to be the worst performers. The reverse is also true: high performers tend to have larger classes. While this does not say much about the effectiveness of reducing class sizes in various environments, it does demonstrate that it is possible to have a high-achieving school system with relatively large classes.

Results

Let’s look first at the results of a straightforward comparison that adjusts the data on student performance for students’ socioeconomic background and grade level (since 7th and 8th graders were tested), thereby attempting to isolate the effects of class size. This initial analysis is of interest primarily because it is analogous to the approach used in most research on class size. Comparing these results with those obtained by a more reliable strategy will provide an indication of what biases may exist in other studies.

In 11 of the 18 nations, the estimate of the effects of class size were positive and statistically significant, suggesting that students in larger classes perform significantly better than students in smaller classes. In other words, a naïve strategy that does not account for the ways in which students are sorted into classes of different size leads to the counterintuitive result that students fare better in larger classes. Moreover, this result seems universal: it emerges in western Europe (Belgium, France), eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Romania), Australia, and East Asia (Hong Kong, Japan). No country showed students in smaller classes outperforming their peers in larger classes.

Let’s turn now to the preferred strategy, which controls for the fact that students performing at different levels may be sorted into smaller or larger classes both between and within schools. The first notable feature of this approach is the disappearance of the counterintuitive result that students do better in larger classes. In 16 of the 18 countries, none of the results was statistically different from zero. In the other two countries, Greece and Iceland, smaller classes did appear to elicit superior student performance. Moreover, the benefits appear to be substantial: Students scored just over two points (or 2 percent of the international standard deviation) higher for every one student fewer in their class.

The evidence suggests that capable teachers are able to promote student learning equally well regardless of class size. Photograph by Getty Images.

Precision Testing

What can be learned from the 16 countries where the results were statistically insignificant? Does this suggest the lack of a causal relationship between class size and student performance? Or is it merely the result of statistical imprecision? In four of the countries, Australia, Hong Kong, Scotland, and the United States, the standard error of the estimated effects of class size was extremely large, indicating that little confidence should be placed in the results. The lack of precision in these cases seems to be a direct consequence of our research strategy’s rather demanding data requirements. These school systems simply exhibit little variation in average class size from one grade to the next—the type of variation on which our strategy relied.

The remaining 12 countries can be further distinguished by comparing their results with those from other studies. We chose first to compare our results with those reported by Princeton economist Alan Krueger in his reanalysis of the Project STAR data from Tennessee, which produced some of the highest estimates of class-size effects among credible studies. Krueger performed a very rough cost-benefit analysis, in which the economic benefits of class-size reduction, in terms of the increase in future earnings due to higher test scores, appeared to approximate the costs.

Krueger’s results indicate that students in kindergarten classrooms that had 7 to 8 fewer students than regular-sized classes performed about 3 percent of a standard deviation better for every one student fewer in their class. Converted to international scores on TIMSS, this is equivalent to three test-score points. This is greater than the two-point gain we found in Iceland and Greece, but it is within the standard error of these estimates, suggesting that the actual effect of reducing class size in Iceland and Greece could be as large as Krueger found in the United States.

For 11 of the 12 countries with relatively precise yet statistically insignificant estimates, the possibility of class-size effects of the same size as Krueger found can be rejected with at least 95 percent confidence. There could still be class-size effects in these nations, just not of the magnitude estimated by Krueger. Note, however, that Krueger’s effects were found in kindergarten and 1st grade, while these estimates are for students in 7th and 8th grades.

We further tested to see whether a one-student reduction in class sizes would increase TIMSS scores by just one point, or 1 percent of an international standard deviation. An effect of this size would be so small as to be essentially negligible from the standpoint of public policy; a one-point gain is too little to justify the expense of class-size reduction. Regardless, even the possibility of this small an impact can be rejected with at least 90 percent confidence in 6 of our 12 school systems with reasonably precise results.

In short, the effect of class size on student performance varies across the 18 countries in our sample (see Figure 1). We can rule out even a minimal relationship between class size and TIMSS scores in the middle grades in six school systems: those of Flemish Belgium, Canada, Japan, Portugal, Singapore, and Slovenia. In an additional five school systems, we can rule out the possibility of large class-size effects: French Belgium, the Czech Republic, Korea, Romania, and Spain. These results cast doubt on the desirability of class-size reduction in the middle grades as a reform strategy in many countries. In Greece and Iceland, by contrast, smaller classes were clearly beneficial. (In five countries—Australia, France, Hong Kong, Scotland, and the United States—our strategy led to inconclusive estimates that do not allow for any confident assertions about the effects of differences in class size.)

Quantity versus Quality

Why would class-size reduction elicit improvement in Greece and Iceland but not elsewhere? One might expect class-size effects to be related to such characteristics as a nation’s overall level of resources. For instance, it is feasible that countries with relatively large classes would glean substantial benefits from reducing class sizes. However, there is no clear pattern in countries’ average class sizes that distinguishes the two countries where substantial class-size effects exist from either the six countries where we ruled out any noteworthy class-size effects or from the five countries where we ruled out at least large class-size effects. Greece’s average class size is similar to the mean class size among the nations where no class-size effects were found, and Iceland’s average class size is substantially lower (see Table 1).

One possibility is that class-size reduction has a large impact in relatively ineffective school systems. Both Greece and Iceland performed considerably below the international average on TIMSS, while the countries where class-size reduction did not have even a small effect performed above the average. Also, even though Greece’s class sizes are roughly at the mean and Iceland’s were substantially lower than the mean, education spending per student in both countries is substantially below the average of the two comparison groups. This suggests that Greece and Iceland spend rather little per employed teacher, which is reflected in the data on teachers’ salaries. Teachers’ salaries in Greece and Iceland are below the mean of the other countries in absolute terms, in terms of salary per teaching hour, and relative to the country’s per capita GDP (see Table 1).

A low average salary for teachers suggests that a country may be drawing its teaching population from a pool of less-skilled workers. If this is the case, different countries appear to be making different tradeoffs between the quantity and quality of their teachers: with class sizes low, Greece and Iceland employ many teachers of low quality. The countries where class-size effects were not observed appear to employ relatively fewer teachers, but of higher quality.

This assumption is borne out by the available data on teachers’ educational attainment. In Greece, the highest level of education reached by the vast majority of teachers is the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree without any teacher training. In Iceland, about one-third of the teachers surveyed by TIMSS had not even completed secondary education, with only some basic teacher training. Meanwhile, about 60 percent of the teachers surveyed in the other countries held either a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in addition to their training as teachers.

This evidence suggests that capable teachers are able to promote student learning equally well regardless of class size (at least within the range of variation that occurs naturally among grades). Less capable teachers, however, do not seem to be up to the job of teaching large classes.

This interpretation is corroborated by teachers’ responses in TIMSS when they were asked to what extent their teaching was limited by a high student-to-teacher ratio in their classroom. In Greece and Iceland, 45 percent of teachers reported that their teaching was limited “a great deal” by a high student-to-teacher ratio. The comparable statistics averaged only 19 percent and 25 percent among countries where no class-size effects and no large class-size effects were found, respectively. This is despite the fact that average class sizes in Greece and Iceland were lower than in either comparison group.

In short, our evidence suggests that the existence of class-size effects is related to the quality of the teaching force. Smaller classes appear to be beneficial only in countries where average teacher quality is low. If teacher quality is a key input in education, this interpretation can explain why class-size effects exist in some countries but not in others and at the same time why the countries in our sample where we did find sizable class-size effects also exhibit poor overall performance. Greece and Iceland exhibit class-size effects and poor performance because they employ a population of relatively less capable teachers, while other countries exhibit no class-size effects but high overall performance because they employ good teachers. This suggests that it may be better policy to devote the limited resources available for education to employing more capable teachers rather than to reducing class sizes. The merits of this admittedly speculative conclusion are a promising topic for future research.

Martin R. West is a research fellow at the Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance and the research editor of Education Next. Ludger Woessmann is a senior researcher at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Germany.

During the 1970s, nearly every state in the nation began instituting tests of basic skills for high-school students as the leading edge of the so-called “first wave” of education reforms. These reforms were a response to the widespread impression that test scores and the quality of public schooling were in decline. According to critics, the high-school diploma, once a true accomplishment, had been debased in an era of social promotion and low standards—to the point where it held no real meaning for postsecondary institutions or potential employers.

The pace of reform was greatly accelerated with the release in 1983 of the blue-ribbon report A Nation at Risk. A chief cause of the nation’s educational decline, the report ventured, was the “cafeteria-style curriculum” that allowed students to pursue a diffuse and unchallenging course of study. The report recommended that states require students to take a minimum number of courses in core academic subjects in order to graduate from high school. As a result, by 1992 nearly every state had increased its graduation requirements in the core academic areas. However, only three states, Florida, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania, had met the standard recommended by the Risk report: four years of English and at least three years each of social studies, science, and math.

Such reforms, with their focus on testing and higher academic standards, are the precursors of today’s controversial accountability movement. Yet there has been surprisingly little study of their consequences. For instance, did the requirement that all students pass a minimum-competency test in order to graduate from high school encourage more students (in particular, minorities) to drop out of high school, as many critics feared? Did such exams, as supporters hoped, make the high-school diploma more valuable, thereby improving the job prospects of graduates?

These questions continue to be relevant as the states ramp up their testing programs and impose ever-harsher sanctions on failing schools and low-performing students. Judging from their continuing prevalence in policy debates, such questions also remain mostly unanswered.

Did requiring all students to pass a minimum-competency test in order to graduate from high school encourage more students to drop out?

Controversies

Minimum-competency exams were by far the more controversial of the two major first-wave education reforms. In the end, few critics object to tougher course requirements. The controversy arises when states attempt to test whether students have met a certain standard—and especially when they attach consequences to the results of such exams. In the beginning, most minimum-competency exams were intended simply to identify low-performing students and to direct them toward sources of remediation. However, several states also mandated that students pass the minimum-competency exam in order to graduate with a standard high-school diploma. By 1992, graduating high-school seniors in 15 states were required to pass a basic-skills test.

Typically, students would first sit for these exams in the 9th or 10th grade and enjoy multiple opportunities for retests. The conventional wisdom has been that these tests were “legislated as a lion but implemented as a lamb.” To wit, the exams were usually set at only the 8th- or 9th-grade level. The standards were sometimes set even lower in the face of politically unacceptable failure rates. As a consequence, the ultimate pass rates among high-school seniors were extremely high. The still-open question is whether these pass rates were artificially high, given that some students may have chosen simply to drop out if they thought they had little chance of passing the test.

Placing students at increased risk of dropping out is one of the major objections that critics lodge against any kind of testing regime that imposes harsh penalties on students. The intent of these reforms is both to raise academic standards and to give students the incentives to meet them. But critics say that standards-based reforms may simply exacerbate existing inequalities if sanctions are applied to low-performing students without giving them the resources and help they need to succeed. Furthermore, standards could lower the achievement of high-performing students if they signal that learning for its own sake is not worthwhile.

Economists Julian Betts and Robert Costrell have argued that students whose prior academic record provides a clear indication of how they will perform on the test (pass with flying colors or fail miserably) face little incentive to change their study habits. It is students at the margin who may feel most of the impact of a test- or curriculum-based sanction. Some will respond by redoubling their efforts to ensure that they pass the test or accumulate the proper number of credits in core academic subjects. Others may grow discouraged and eventually give up.

So the marginal students who choose to work harder may benefit from higher testing and curricular standards. High standards, argues Cornell economist John Bishop, may also shield bright students from the harassment and peer pressure that often accompany excelling in academics (as opposed to, say, athletics). After all, if all students must meet a defined external standard, there may not be much glory in failing and being subject to a consequence as harsh as not graduating. High standards may also generate broader educational gains as schools, teachers, and students struggle to attain them. Even students who fully expect to drop out may expend more effort in the short term as they are forced to progress through a state-mandated set of core academic courses. Thus both dropouts and graduates may reap the rewards of higher standards, if the standards signal to employers that the average ability of all students has increased.

To shed light on these debates, I examined national data on a variety of outcomes for students to assess the impact of the first wave of education reforms. The outcomes include both school-based achievements, such as students’ course-taking and their level of educational attainment, and students’ later experiences in the labor force.

Did such exams make the high-school diploma more valuable, thereby improving the job prospects of graduates?

Contradictions

The available evidence on the influence of minimum-competency exams and higher curricular standards on educational attainment and employability is not only scant but often contradictory. One possible explanation for these conflicting results is that almost all previous empirical studies have relied on comparisons of students in states that adopted these reforms with students in states that did not. But test scores and other outcomes related to education vary dramatically from state to state, often for cultural, socioeconomic, and political reasons that are difficult for researchers to measure directly. In addition, these factors, which are unique to each state yet difficult to account for, may influence a state’s decision to adopt reforms like minimum-competency tests and higher curricular standards. That makes it quite difficult to credibly isolate the effects of such reforms using traditional comparisons across the states.

To address these concerns, I used 1990 census data (the Public Use Micro-Data Sample), which allowed me to construct before-and-after comparisons of students from within the same states. I compared individuals of different ages, some of whom attended high school before the first-wave education reforms were implemented and others who attended afterward—and were thus required to take minimum-competency exams and more courses in academic areas in order to graduate. I made these comparisons by matching each state’s graduating class to the policies that were in effect the year they graduated—whether students had to take a minimum-competency exam and whether they faced high course requirements in order to graduate. High course requirements were defined as a high-school curriculum that includes at least three years of English, two of social studies, one of science, and one of math. In the initial analysis, I assessed the impact of these reforms on the chance that students would graduate from high school and enter college. I then examined their effects on subsequent participation in the labor market and average weekly wages as adults.

In order to eliminate the influence of other national trends, I compared the changes within states that introduced first-wave reforms with the contemporaneous changes in states that did not. I also adjusted the data in both analyses to account for a variety of other within-state factors that changed over time and could have influenced student outcomes. For instance, first-wave reforms were sometimes part of omnibus education bills that included other policy changes, such as increased spending on K–12 education. To address this, I controlled for real per-pupil spending in the state when the survey respondents were 16 to 17 years old (in other words, respondents who were 18 years of age in 1980 were matched to their states’ school spending during the 1978–79 school year). My results are also adjusted for the state unemployment rate when respondents were 17 years old, since high unemployment rates can provide an incentive for students to stay in school.

There is also evidence that educational attainment can be influenced by the relative size of a birth cohort. At the college level, this can occur if enrollment space at local colleges and universities is not expanded to accommodate temporary population booms. At the secondary level, larger student populations may increase class sizes and strain school resources, thereby lowering school quality and reducing the benefits of staying in school. For these reasons I introduced an adjustment for the size of students’ birth cohorts. I also included a measure of the real costs of postsecondary tuition based on the in-state rate at “lower level” state colleges and universities when the respondents were 17 years old. Finally, as a control for within-state changes in socioeconomic conditions, I matched respondents to the poverty rates in their states when they were 17 years old.

One further note: I performed several tests to check whether my results were indeed more reliable than results using comparisons of students across states rather than within the same state. One method is to estimate the effect of a state-level policy that, in theory, should be totally irrelevant to educational outcomes. In this case I chose whether a state had any executions when the student was 18 years of age. In the across-state comparison, capital punishment generated large and statistically significant reductions in the probability of high-school completion and college entrance, clearly an implausible result. By contrast, the effects of capital punishment as estimated in the within-state comparisons were negligible, as they should be. This strongly suggests the increased reliability associated with using within-state comparisons.

Higher course requirements significantly reduced the probability of graduating from high school for blacks and for white males.

Education and Employability

For all students, the minimum-competency exams showed no statistically significant effect on the probability of graduating from high school. By contrast, higher curricular standards reduced students’ probability of graduating from high school by 0.5 percentage points (see Figure 1). An effect of this size represents a 3 percent increase in the probability of dropping out. Another way to frame the size of this estimate is to note that high-school completion rates among 18- to 24-year-olds increased from 82.8 percent in 1972 to 86.5 percent in 2000. My results suggest that in states that adopted high curricular standards these average gains were 14 percent less than they otherwise would have been. (Note that these percentages—as well as the data set I used—considered students who passed the General Educational Development, or GED, test to be high-school graduates. Thus my findings may actually understate the true reform-induced reduction in high-school completion.)

For all students and for subgroups broken down by race and gender, the first-wave reforms had statistically insignificant effects on the probability of entering college. This makes sense since these reforms were not aimed at the relatively high-achieving students who are considering college.

However, in looking at the results for students separated by race and gender, both types of reforms had fairly large and statistically significant effects on the probability of completing high school for some groups. For instance, higher course requirements significantly reduced the probability of graduating from high school for blacks and for white males, but not for white females. Among black students, higher curricular requirements reduced the probability of graduating from high school by roughly 2 percentage points—four times the impact that these reforms had on white males. Similarly, the only statistically significant effect of introducing a minimum-competency exam was among black males, who experienced an estimated 1.3 percentage point drop in the probability of completing high school. These estimated effects are fairly large relative to the recent growth in educational attainment among blacks. Between 1972 and 2000, the high-school completion rate of 18- to 24-year-old black students increased from 72.1 percent to 83.7 percent. (Once again, these percentages include GED recipients.)

These findings are largely consistent with the concerns sometimes raised by critics of standards-based reforms. The introduction of high-school graduation standards led to reductions in educational attainment that were particularly concentrated among minority students. But a full evaluation should also consider the implications of these reforms for students’ performance in the labor market, especially since local business leaders concerned with the quality of their workforce were often instrumental in the adoption of first-wave reforms. As noted earlier, higher standards may benefit students (even those who drop out) by creating an incentive to work harder in school, an effort that is rewarded in the labor market. Higher standards may also increase the prestige of being a high-school graduate and correspondingly reduce the stigma associated with being a dropout.

My findings suggest that both first-wave education reforms had no statistically significant effects on adult wages for all groups. However, the effects on adult employment were more substantial (see Figure 2). Higher course requirements appeared to increase the probability of adult employment by roughly 1 percentage point for white males and by 3 percentage points for blacks, even after controlling for educational attainment. Furthermore, the introduction of minimum-competency exams increased the probability of adult employment among black males by 1.6 percentage points. One useful way to underscore the magnitude of these policy effects is to note that, in these data, white males were roughly 19 percentage points more likely to be employed than black males. Since the employment gains attributable to each first-wave reform were roughly 2 percentage points larger for black males than for white males, states that implemented them closed the black-white employment gap by roughly 11 percent.

Taken together, these results indicate that higher course requirements had educational and labor-market consequences for almost all students. The effects of minimum-competency exams, by contrast, were narrower, observable only among black males. These results are consistent with the anecdotal evidence suggesting that minimum-competency exams were often weakened in response to political realities. These results also suggest that, when binding, higher standards of either type had decidedly mixed consequences. They had negative effects on students’ educational attainment, particularly among black students. But they also generated some employment rewards, again mainly for black students.

How can we compare these gains and losses? For those students who dropped out only in response to the new requirements, the loss was large: according to these data, high-school graduates can expect to earn approximately 33 percent more than the average dropout. This was only partially offset by improved prospects for employment. However, those students who would have dropped out regardless of the graduation requirements experienced significant gains because they were more likely to be employed.

Another way to frame the question is to ask how either type of reform might change the expected wage for students who were uncertain about whether they would be high-school graduates. My back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that the expected wage benefits of higher curriculum standards due to their positive effect on employment exceed the expected wage costs due to their adverse effect on graduation rates by a factor of six. This suggests that a risk-neutral person might prefer a regime with higher curricular standards. However, a full cost-benefit analysis would need to account for not only the labor-market consequences but also the disparate impacts on various ethnic and socioeconomic groups and other social losses that might accompany increased dropout rates.

Higher standards contributed substantively to the upgrading of high-school curricula, particularly in English and the sciences.

Standards on the Ground

How did the first-wave education reforms influence students’ course-taking in high school? During the 1980s, national data show that course-taking in the core academic subjects did increase significantly, particularly in mathematics and science. Yet the extent to which this increase was driven by states’ new graduation requirements remains unclear.

Also at issue is the impact of these reforms on academic engagement. Critics have suggested that minimum-competency exams and stricter coursework requirements will indicate to students that learning for its own sake is not worthwhile. In particular, these standards may encourage otherwise high-achieving students to avoid challenges and simply choose the path of least resistance to satisfy their requirements. Two decades ago, the authors of A Nation at Risk expressed a similar worry, suggesting that minimum-competency exams ran the risk of becoming “maximum” standards and thus lowering expectations for high-ability students.

To investigate the claim that course requirements and basic-skills tests may dampen the efforts of high-ability students, I analyzed whether higher graduation standards did indeed encourage students to take more courses in the core academic areas. I also investigated whether these requirements narrowed curricular effort by looking at students’ course-taking in the visual and performing arts. To explore how these reforms may have influenced the intellectual engagement of students, I examined changes in time spent reading for pleasure, watching television, and doing homework.

The data for these evaluations were created by pooling observations from two of the National Center for Education Statistics’s major longitudinal studies: the sophomore cohort from the High School and Beyond study and the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. These surveys provide student-level data for nationally representative samples of 10th graders in 1980 and 1990—before and after the period when most first-wave reforms were implemented. Combining these data sets allowed me to adopt an analytic approach similar to the one I used to examine the effects of more stringent graduation requirements on educational attainment and employment.

My results uniformly suggest that the introduction of minimum-competency exams reduced course-taking in the four main academic areas, though these findings were statistically significant only in the sciences and in mathematics. This evidence suggests a lowering of intellectual aspirations among students who clearly exceeded the testing standards. However, an alternative interpretation is that schools and teachers redirected their efforts to respond to the needs of lower-performing students. Or it could simply reflect a reduction in curricular effort among those eventually encouraged by these reforms to drop out. But other evidence suggests that this is not the case. For example, the introduction of minimum-competency exams only increased the probability of dropping out among black males. But the reductions in course-taking associated with minimum-competency exams were more uniform across demographic traits and were particularly large for female students. Furthermore, the new tests also led to large and statistically significant reductions in credits for taking calculus, a margin relevant only for high-achieving students.

In contrast to minimum-competency testing, higher course requirements appeared to generate significant increases in the number of credits students earned in most of the core areas. For example, a high course requirement increased the number of credits earned in science by almost 0.4 Carnegie units, or 16 percent. Only in social studies was the estimated effect of a high course requirement statistically insignificant. These results suggest that higher standards contributed substantively to the upgrading of high-school curricula over this period, particularly in English and the sciences. The effect associated with higher course requirements, for instance, is equivalent to roughly 60 percent of the average growth in science credits over this period.

Were these gains in the core areas achieved at the expense of other valuable subjects, such as the visual and performing arts? The evidence is not entirely clear since the effects of first-wave reforms on students’ participation in school arts and music activities were statistically indistinguishable from zero. However, I found that the first-wave reforms did adversely influence the amount of time students spent reading for pleasure, watching television, and doing homework. Higher course requirements were associated with large and statistically significant reductions in the amount of time spent reading for pleasure and doing homework and a corresponding increase in television watching. These results suggest that course-taking standards harmed the intellectual engagement of students. However, the apparent reduction in time spent on homework also raises the possibility that newly required courses were more demanding in prospect than in reality.

Lessons

In the end, these findings indicate that the first wave of education reforms elicited many of the positive and negative consequences predicted by supporters and opponents. For example, both minimum-competency testing and increased coursework requirements led to reductions in educational attainment that were most pronounced among black students. Furthermore, minimum-competency testing led to some apparent reductions in the amount of courses completed, while increased coursework requirements appear to have had modest pejorative effects on the amounts of time students spend watching television, doing homework, and reading for pleasure. However, both types of reforms also increased students’ subsequent likelihood of being employed. And higher coursework requirements were partially responsible for the apparent upgrading of high school curricula during this period. In light of these mixed results, what can the nation’s experience with earlier reforms contribute to the current discussion of standards, testing, and accountability?

One lesson from our experiences with first-wave reforms is that standards-based reforms can generate a variety of costs and benefits, which can be compared only on subjective grounds. Some proponents of standards argue that we should implement targeted initiatives that soften the harsh consequences of standards by helping those at increased risk. However, any enthusiasm for that approach should be tempered by the knowledge that many of the state-level first-wave reforms were actually bundled with such efforts.

Our experiences with first-wave reforms also provide some suggestive evidence on the design of standards. In particular, these findings suggest that so-called “process” standards, such as higher course requirements, may be more effective than test-based standards, at least when testers seek only to establish a minimum level of performance necessary to graduate. While improved curricular standards yielded benefits in employment and in course-taking, minimum-competency testing had relatively few of the desired effects on educational attainment and early labor-market experiences. These results are consistent with the widely held perception that these test-based standards were often quite weak because of political pressures and the relatively easy and veiled manner in which they could be subsequently lowered. In contrast, newly introduced course requirements for graduation created binding standards for students and were also largely immune to political redesign.

Of course, whether these comparative first-wave results can be applied to the current generation of accountability systems is clearly open to conjecture. Perhaps the strategy of testing and tracking students’ progress throughout their education will prove more effective than a single high-stakes exam at the end. But the early state-level experiences with minimum-competency testing provide a promising yet cautionary tale.

Thomas S. Dee is an assistant professor of economics at Swarthmore College and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.