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The commission called an abrupt halt to this smug contentment. It admonished the nation in forceful, martial language that America faced a threat to its national security and economic vitality. Not since the late 1950s, when Sputnik raised the possibility that the Soviet Union was surpassing us in science and mathematics, had there been such alarm over the weakness of U.S. schools.

By the 1960s, however, that sense of urgency had faded and the focus of reform had turned away from academic performance. Well-intended efforts to address racial segregation, meet the needs of handicapped youngsters, compensate for disadvantage, and provide bilingual schooling for immigrants eclipsed concern about student achievement. They also produced much red tape, litigiousness, and contentious battles over means and ends. Teacher organizations, at the same time, asserted their right to bargain collectively and to strike, which brought them unprecedented power over schools and school systems. The Sputnik-inspired commitment to education quality, in other words, had clearly lost priority. SAT scores peaked in 1964 and declined thereafter, reaching their nadir about the time Risk was unleashed.

Twenty years following the alarm sounded by Risk, by contrast, the commitment to solve the problems that it documented remains keen. The commission has effectively recast many people’s thinking about education from a focus on resources, services, and mindless innovation that absorbed us during the 1960s and 1970s to an emphasis on achievement that remains central today. It has laid bare the truths that equity without excellence is an empty achievement, quantity without quality an unkept promise. But while its reverberations are still being felt, solid and conclusive reforms in American primary and secondary education remain elusive.

What the Commission Said

The excellence commission organized its findings within four broad topics: content, expectations, time, and teaching. Under these headings, Risk issued a 24-count indictment of American primary-secondary education as the commissioners found it in 1983. The spirit of these indictments can be sensed from the following excerpts:

• “Secondary school curricula have been homogenized, diluted, and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose. In effect, we have a cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main course.”

• “The amount of homework for high school seniors has decreased . . . and grades have risen as average student achievement has been declining.”

• “In 13 States, 50 percent or more of the units required for high school graduation may be electives chosen by the student. Given this freedom . . . many students opt for less demanding personal service courses, such as bachelor living.”

• “A study of the school week in the United States found that some schools provided students only 17 hours of academic instruction. [In] other industrialized countries, it is not unusual for academic high school students to spend 8 hours a day at school, 220 days per year.”

• “Too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students. . . . Half of the newly employed mathematics, science, and English teachers are not qualified to teach those subjects. . . .”

The commission’s four major recommendations did not call for sweeping reform of the education system itself, but they demanded higher standards of performance. The commission said:

• High-school graduation requirements should be strengthened so that all students acquire a solid foundation in five “new basics”: English, mathematics, science, social studies, and computer science.

• Schools and colleges should adopt higher and measurable standards for academic performance.

• The amount of time students devote to learning should be significantly increased.

• The teaching profession should be strengthened by raising standards for training, entry, and professional growth.

The Response

It did not take long for Risk‘s analysis and central findings to win acceptance among the general public, editorial writers, business leaders, governors, and other elected officials at the national, state, and local levels. Ten years following its release, commission member and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn Seaborg wrote, “It is now apparent that the pre-college educational crisis and the urgent need for educational reform are broadly perceived as being a top priority.” Today, 20 years after its release, nearly everyone in the United States who attends to such matters, save for a few Panglosses within the education profession, now recognizes that the commission accurately described our flagging academic performance and the insidious threat it posed to our long-term economic strength, cultural vitality, and civic competence.

But what has actually taken place in the years since Risk to ease the crisis? In the end, agreeing with Risk‘s critique and finding the will to make the changes it called for turned out to be two different animals.

Familiar strategies were tried first: new programs, more money, and tighter regulations. Among the additions were some things the commission had urged, such as stiffer high-school graduation requirements, as well as many it had not-yet these add-ons produced little by way of improved educational outcomes. Test scores have remained essentially flat since 1970. Students do no more homework today than they did 20 years ago. Remediation remains the fastest-growing activity on many college campuses. Graduation rates have actually declined-less than three fourths of our young people now earn high-school diplomas, though this slippage is often masked by the suggestion that “equivalency certificates” amount to the same thing. Employers and professors remain dissatisfied with young people’s readiness for work and higher education. And international assessments reveal that American 17-year-olds know far less math and science than their peers in most other modern nations.

As it became clear in the late 1980s that “more of the same” was not yielding acceptable gains, energized governors and business leaders started to make the education-reform crusade their own. They launched bolder strategies, no doubt inspired by Risk but often breaking new policy ground. By 1990, the country was setting national education goals, giving birth to novel school designs, breaking up big high schools, and revamping the National Assessment of Educational Progress to get better information. The first Bush administration briefly tried to create national academic standards, but the effort to do this from Washington soon fizzled. Within a few years, however, prodded by the Clinton administration’s Goals 2000 program, almost every state was devising its own accountability system. By the mid-1990s, a number of innovations were also visible in the delivery of education: charter schools were spreading, vouchers were being tried, and private firms were beginning to operate public schools on an outsourced basis.

Why So Much Change Yet So Little Improvement?

First of all, the commission’s diagnosis was incomplete. It paid scant attention to the K-8 years, seeing them as providing a reasonable level of basic skills, when in fact many children were failing to gain the fundamental knowledge they would need to continue learning in subsequent years.

Second, the commission was either too obtuse or too naïve to take on the basic functioning and political control of the system itself. It seemingly believed that the public education system of the day, given higher standards, better-trained teachers, and more time on task, would move the schools and their pupils toward loftier levels of performance. It trusted the system to do the right thing once that system was duly chastised and pointed in the right direction.

We now know that this was unrealistic, that the commission failed to confront essential issues of power and control. It seemed not to realize that the system lacked meaningful accountability and tangible incentives to improve, that it exhibited the characteristic flaws of a command-and-control enterprise. The commission accepted the system as it was, with all the anachronisms inherent in a political mechanism created in the mid-19th century.

We now know that powerful forces-three in particular-proved far stronger and more stubborn than the commission could have foreseen in 1983:

• Risk underestimated the resistance to change from the organized interests of the K-12 public education system, at the center of which were the two big teacher unions as well as school administrators, colleges of education, state bureaucracies, school boards, and many others. These groups see any changes beyond the most marginal as threats to their own jealously guarded power. Moreover, they are permanent features on the education landscape, whereas the excellence commission detonated its report and then disappeared, with no real successors to shepherd its recommendations through the political minefields.

• Risk underestimated the tenacity of the “thoughtworld” of the nation’s colleges of education, which see themselves as owners of the nation’s schools and the minds of educators, free to impose their ideas on future teachers and administrators regardless of evidence about their effectiveness. Some of the commission’s own expert advisors were advocates of these ideas, in effect poisoning the report from within.

• Risk also underestimated the large number of Americans, particularly in middle-class suburbs, who believe that their schools are basically sound and academically successful. This misapprehension arises mainly from the dearth of honest, standards-based information from objective outside sources concerning the true performance levels of our schools, an immense data void that the commission failed to address.

In counterweight to these forces of inertia, the past two decades have also seen the development of powerful new forces for reform that should strengthen America’s ability to improve its schools as we head into the future. These include:

• The public’s surprisingly durable belief that education reform is one of the most critical issues facing the nation-a belief heartily shared by impatient business leaders and elected officials. Although this sense of urgency seems inconsistent with the oft-reported complacency of parents about their own child’s school, satisfaction levels do not run deep. A majority of American parents believe that private schools are more effective than their children’s public schools and say they would move their children if they could.

• Growing and sustained support for both standards-based and choice-based education reforms has the potential to leverage changes that are farther reaching than those the commission envisioned, though both reform strategies face staunch resistance from established education interests.

• Minority parents are increasingly angry and disenchanted with failing inner-city school systems and are less willing to listen to promises that things will get better if they continue to trust the system and drench it with resources.

Across-the-board raises for all teachers, good and bad alike, do not strengthen pupil learning. Photograph by David Schmidt/Masterfile.

Our Findings

The members of this task force have studied American education for many years. We come from several disciplines and have different interests. But we come together in unanimous support of the findings and recommendations that follow. These encompass the most important lessons we have learned about American K-12 education over the two decades since A Nation at Risk.

1) U.S. education outcomes, measured in many ways, show little improvement since 1970. The trends that alarmed the excellence commission have not been reversed. Though small gains can be seen in some areas (especially math), they amount to no more than a return to the achievement levels of 30 years ago. And while the U.S. runs in place, other nations are passing us by. In the past, we could always boast that America educates a larger proportion of its school-age children than other lands, but this is no longer true.

2) The U.S. economy has fared well during the past two decades not because of the strong performance of its K-12 system, but thanks to a host of coping and compensating mechanisms. These include an endlessly forgiving higher education system; the presence within the U.S. of most of the world’s top universities; huge efforts at research and development; a hard-working populace and an adaptable immigration policy; a society that encourages second chances and invites new ideas; and the world’s largest and best-functioning free-market economy.

3) We’ve made progress in narrowing resource gaps between schools, but the achievement gaps that vex us remain nearly as wide as ever. This is because the problems that Risk highlighted particularly affect schools that serve disadvantaged children. These problems have not been successfully addressed. Minority youngsters are far less apt to complete school and college, and their average academic performance is markedly lower. On some measures, minority 12th graders score about the same as white 8th graders, who themselves are not scoring well.

4) The preponderance of school reform efforts since Risk has concentrated on augmenting the system’s resources, widening its services, and tightening its regulation of school practices. This has not proven to be a trustworthy path to improved educational performance.

5) Higher-quality teachers are key to improving our schools, but the proper gauge of quality is classroom effectiveness. Across-the-board raises for all teachers, good and bad alike, do not strengthen pupil learning. And stricter regulation of teacher preparation and accreditation only creates shortages and bottlenecks that reduce the supply of capable new instructors for U.S. schools.

6) Standards-based reforms have not achieved their full potential. Though promising, they are hard to get right. “Accountability” has shown in several states that, when done persistently and carefully, it can boost achievement, especially among minority and disadvantaged youngsters. But states find it difficult to gain consensus on a coherent set of substantial and ambitious academic standards, to align their tests with those standards, and to get strong accountability systems working. Standards and tests are essential for parents and policymakers to identify faltering schools and gauge the effectiveness of different programs, but they do not themselves solve the problems that they illumine. Moreover, the steps taken so far in the name of “accountability” fall, for the most part, only on children, not on the adults in the system.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) may help by mobilizing federal muscle to push states and districts in the right direction. But Washington has scant leverage over states and districts. NCLB has long, slow timelines and few sanctions when states and districts do not meet them. It imposes few real consequences on educators whose schools fail. It is likely, therefore, to make the biggest difference in places that share its goals and have the greatest capacity to attain them and to accomplish least in those places-probably the neediest places-where officials may not much care or simply do not know how.

7) Choice-based reforms have not had a fair test. Most evidence to date suggests that they can boost student learning and parental satisfaction, but constraints have kept them from being tried in full. Opponents have hamstrung school-choice programs at every turn: fighting voucher programs in legislative chambers and courtrooms; limiting per-pupil funding so tightly that it’s impractical for new schools to come into being; capping the number of charter schools; and regulating and harassing them into near conformity with conventional schools.

These barriers have kept choice-based reforms from receiving the proper trials they deserve, which is significant on two counts: first, by ensuring that only half-baked versions have been adopted, opponents have made it easier to claim that the reforms were tried but they failed; second, profound changes in a system-the kind of changes that choice would bring to bear-cannot arise overnight. Market systems, in particular, take time to develop.

8) Americans need better, more timely information about student performance. Currently, the only audits of the system’s performance are conducted by those running the system or by organizations that depend on them for future business, including colleges of education and testing firms. As the country has recently and painfully observed in the business world, that’s simply unsatisfactory.

9) We need a thorough reform of elementary and middle schooling. Though U.S. high schools demand attention, too, preschool and K-8 education are far from what they need to be. These are the years when children gain fundamental knowledge about their country and their world, about science and literature, about art and civics. This calls for close attention to the K-8 curriculum, as well as the curricular aspects of pre-K education, and for purposeful steps to help prepare all children to succeed in kindergarten and beyond.

Performance in the classroom should be the chief determinant of whether teachers are retained and promoted.

Our Recommendations

In the years since A Nation at Risk, the incremental changes that passed for “reform” have not improved schools’ performance or students’ achievement. We conclude that fundamental changes are needed in the incentive structures and power relationships of schooling itself. Those changes are anchored to three core principles: accountability, choice, and transparency.

By accountability, we mean that every school or education provider-at least every one that accepts public dollars-should subscribe to a coherent set of rigorous, statewide academic standards, statewide assessments of student and school performance, and a statewide system of incentives and interventions tied to results. The components include:

1) Clear goals. Every state needs a coherent set of challenging academic standards and curricular guidelines, subject by subject and grade by grade, standards that are not confined to basic skills and the “3 R’s” but that incorporate such other vital studies as history, science, geography, civics, and literature. Every state also needs a coherent and corresponding set of “proficiency” levels to be attained by all children in these subjects, levels that encompass essential knowledge as well as necessary skills.

2) Accurate measures. Every state needs tests and other assessments that accurately gauge the performance of individual children, schools, and school systems in relation to its standards. These assessments should form the basis for evaluating the value added by each school, and incentives should be linked to how much schools contribute to student learning.

3) Consequences. Every state needs an accountability system in which the consequences-both welcome and dire-fall not just on students but also on responsible adults. Success should be rewarded. Failing schools should be closed, reconstituted, taken over by other authorities, outsourced to private operators, or their students given the right-and full funding-to leave for better schools. This does not mean just to other public schools in their own district-the limp compromise Congress wrote into No Child Left Behind-but the capacity to transfer to any school, anywhere.

By choice, we mean that decisions made by parents rather than bureaucratic regulation should drive the education enterprise. Open competition among ideas and methods, with people free to abandon weak schools for stronger ones, is the surest way to make major progress. The education system’s “clients” must be free to select other providers that teach their children more effectively and in accord with family and community priorities as well as core American values. Options include:

1) Charter schools. Every state should give charter schools a full and fair chance to show what they can do to provide high-quality options to families. States should exempt charter schools from local district veto and numerical caps. They should provide charter schools with full per-pupil funding and capital funds to support facility costs. In turn, schools that do not add substantial academic value to their pupils-and satisfy their clients-should lose their charters and close.

2) Voucher experiments. While mandating that every publicly funded school should meet rigorous state content standards, every state should explore additional forms of school choice, pushing far beyond the boundaries of within-district public school choice. More states should give vouchers a proper test in selected communities, in tandem with strenuous efforts to renew the public schools of those communities.

3) Full funding for high-risk students. Children who pose difficult challenges to schools should, under a choice regimen, command added resources to pay for their education. Disadvantaged, disabled, and limited-English-proficiency pupils should carry with them substantially larger amounts of funding than “regular” students, both to make them more attractive to schools and to assist schools with the added costs of teaching them well.

4) Teacher quality and incentives. The principle of choice should extend to teachers and administrators as well. Training, recruitment, licensing, and compensation should be redesigned to offer wider opportunities for able, willing individuals. A person who is knowledgeable in a subject should be given a chance to teach it, with actual classroom effectiveness then used as the primary gauge of competence. Performance in the classroom should be the chief determinant of whether teachers are retained and promoted. Teachers in scarce fields should be paid more than those in over-supplied fields. And teachers and administrators who take on challenging assignments should be paid more than teachers who opt for easier situations.

By transparency, we mean that those who seek complete information about a school or school system (not including personal information about individuals) should readily be able to get it. This information should be provided in forms and formats that enable users to easily compare one school, system, or state with the next. Measurement and information systems need to be developed to provide full transparency throughout public education. Though the primary burden of transparency rests on individual schools, school systems, and states, Washington also bears a responsibility. America is overdue for a thorough upgrading of federal education data gathering and analysis, primarily housed at the National Center for Education Statistics, as well as needed strengthening and expansion of-and enhanced independence for-the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Accountability, choice, and transparency are the essential trinity of principles by which to reconstruct America’s schools. Each must be in place for the others to work. In combination, they transform the education system’s priorities, power relationships, and incentive structures.

Accountability means that all participants in the education system-the child, the teacher, the school and district leader-know what they must produce by way of results, how they will be measured, and what will happen if they do or do not attain the desired results.

Choice brings freedom, diversity, and innovation to how education is provided, who provides it, and what options are available to families.

Transparency yields the information needed to ensure both top-down accountability and a viable marketplace of methods and ideas.

Conclusion

This new system will rekindle Americans’ confidence in public education, and this should lead to a greater public willingness-once people understand how and why additional resources will make a difference-to invest more in education. Such new investments, in turn, could lead to even greater gains, such as abler people entering and staying in the teaching field; better preschooling; better technology and textbooks; and better performance in the classroom.

The National Commission on Excellence in Education concluded its historic 1983 report by noting: “Children born today can expect to graduate from high school in the year 2000. We firmly believe that a movement of America’s schools in the direction called for by our recommendations will prepare these children for far more effective lives in a far stronger America.”

Since those words were written, nearly two generations of students have passed through U.S. schools.

Since those words were written, real spending per pupil in U.S. public schools has risen by about 50 percent.

But since those words were written, we have gained little by way of better education results. Twenty years of entering 1st graders-about 80 million children-have walked into schools where they have scant chance of learning much more than the youngsters whose plight troubled the commission in 1983.

The shrinking globe has made it easier than anyone in 1983 could have imagined for investments and jobs to go anywhere on the planet that seems likeliest to succeed with them. Here we must look to our schools to produce the highly educated citizenry on which America’s future economic vitality depends.

A nation that responded enthusiastically but irresolutely to the excellence commission’s thoughtful yet modest recommendations in 1983 must now find the resolve to carry out a bottom-to-top reconstruction of its system of schooling. Can we do it? The stakes are huge, the challenge historic. We must begin today, in 2003, to make the changes that will transform American public education so that it can deliver on the democratic ideal of equal educational opportunity for students in 2013 and 2023. This is a promise that our nation has made to its children. For their sake, and for the sake of our country’s future, it is a promise that we must keep.

-This is the condensed version of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education’s report, “Our Schools and Our Future: Are We Still at Risk?” released as the first paper in the Hoover Institution volume of the same name and as an independent report. To read the entire report, log on to www.educationnext.org.

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The concerns about school quality expressed in A Nation at Risk reflected declining trends in performance among U.S. students and their mediocre standing relative to students in other nations. America’s failure to address these concerns has led to substantial losses for individuals and for society as a whole. The workers who failed to acquire essential skills can attest to the fact that their earnings have not kept up with those of the typical worker. And the aggregate effects are even more dramatic.

By some estimates, today’s entire K-12 education budget could be funded by the “reform dividend” that might have been expected from improving math and science achievement in response to the calls of the 1983 report. To wit, improvements in the schools would have boosted U.S. economic growth, and the annual windfall by 2002 would have exceeded total K-12 spending for that year.

Quality Matters

Much of the research on the economic impact of education has properly concentrated on the role of school attainment-that is, the quantity of schooling. This focus is natural. The revolution in the United States during the 20th century was the universal provision of a basic education. Moreover, years of schooling are easily measured, and data on years attained, both over time and across individuals, are readily available.

Yet today’s policy concerns revolve around issues of quality much more than of quantity. Completion rates for high school and college have been roughly constant for a quarter of a century in the United States, while the rest of the industrialized world has largely caught up on measures of school attainment. Risk was more concerned with the fact that U.S. students had fallen behind their peers in nations like Japan, the Netherlands, and France on international exams in math and science (see Figure 4, page 44, in Paul E. Peterson, “Ticket to Nowhere“). These concerns sparked the standards and accountability movement, which seeks to define what students should learn and tests to see whether they have mastered the material.

In good part because of the impact of the Risk report, it is now generally recognized that students’ cognitive skills are a crucial dimension of education quality. But it has not, until recently, been clear just how important differences in cognitive skill are for the long-term well-being of a nation’s economy. Fortunately, data are now available that allow one to estimate the connection between cognitive skill and the economy. The conclusions of this emerging body of research are clear: education quality, as measured by test scores, is positively related to the earnings of individuals, national productivity, and economic growth.

Individual Earnings

Just as most parents believe, economists have clearly shown that a student’s achievement in school directly affects his or her earnings later in life, after allowing for differences in the quantity of schooling, experience in the labor force, and a variety of other factors that also influence earnings. Students who do well in school also tend to go on for further schooling, which provides an additional boost to their earnings. As is well known, the economic benefits of a college education have risen dramatically during the past quarter century, and substantial evidence shows that students with good grades or high scores on achievement tests tend to pursue more education.

These facts are part of the reason that so much attention has been paid to the schools as an agency of equal opportunity, ultimately helping to reduce inequities in the distribution of income. Long before the Risk report, the War on Poverty saw schools as key to reducing racial and other disparities in economic opportunity. Through schooling it was hoped that family poverty would not be transferred to the next generation: high-quality school investments would make up for deficits originating in the home.

Today, many believe that the continuing difference between the earnings of black and white workers is due in good part to differences in their educational achievement, as measured by tests of cognitive ability. These continuing differences are especially worrisome, given the fact that the importance of education for the acquisition of well-paying jobs continues to grow, increasing the disparities in income between those with college degrees and those with less than a high-school diploma. Only if skill levels can be enhanced within high schools will many of the more disadvantaged in society have access to the college education that is crucial in a society where high-level skills are fundamental to success.

Economic Growth

No less important is the overall relationship between the quality of the labor force, as measured by tests of cognitive skill, and economic growth. Economic growth rates determine how much improvement will occur in society’s overall standard of living. Moreover, the education of each individual has the possibility of making others better off (in addition to the increased earnings the individual receives). For instance, a more educated society may have higher rates of invention; may make everyone more productive by virtue of the fact that firms are better able to introduce new, more sophisticated production methods; and may lead to the more rapid introduction of new technologies. These “externalities” that make everyone better off provide still another reason for taking measures that will enhance the quality-not just the quantity-of schooling.

Recent work in which Dennis Kimko and I have been engaged has looked closely at the size of the impact of labor force quality, as measured by tests of cognitive ability, on the economic growth of countries. Our study has drawn on information about the mathematics and science performance of students in many countries during the past four decades. In making our estimates, we take into account differences between countries in their level of income, the average number of years students are in school, and population growth rates. We find that a difference of one standard deviation in test performance is related to a 1 percent difference in annual growth rates of per-capita gross domestic product (GDP). This suggests that school quality has a great impact on economic productivity and growth. To some, 1 percent may not appear to be a large number. But a 1 percent increase each year in the growth rate of a country soon compounds to a very large number. Consider the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, for example. In the year 2000, GDP per capita was $34,950. An annual growth rate of 1 percent raises average income to no less than $57,480 in 2050-more than a 50 percent increase over the period. Quite simply, small differences in growth rates have huge implications for the income and wealth of society.

If education has such a dramatic impact on a country’s economic productivity and growth, what are the implications of a less-than-adequate education system for economic growth today and in the future? Can the U.S. economy continue to lead the world when the performance of its students on international tests in math and science has been mediocre at best? Some believe it can, that strengths in other areas compensate for America’s educational deficiencies. The United States, for example, has more open and competitive markets and less intrusive government regulation than do the economies of many other industrialized societies. In addition, its system of higher education is the envy of the world. But these assets only mean that the United States may well have enjoyed even greater economic productivity had it enhanced the quality of its K-12 schools. Had the reform movement sparked by the Risk report led to real improvements in academic achievement, it would have had a dramatic impact on the already strong economy.

Squandered Potential

Consider a hypothetical scenario in which schools instituted truly effective reform in math and science instruction at the time of the Risk report. Had the reforms translated into achievement gains of 0.12 standard deviations a year for the remainder of the decade, with performance constant thereafter, scores of graduates would be one standard deviation higher going into the 1990s and the future. This would have required a Herculean effort, but was within the bounds of expectations. Recall that a 1989 meeting of the nation’s governors set a goal of making U.S. students’ performance in mathematics and science first in the world by 2000. An improvement of the more modest magnitude considered above would have put U.S. student performance in line with that of students in several European countries, but it still would not be at the top of the world rankings.

Such a path of improvement would not have had an immediately discernible effect on the economy, because new graduates are always a small portion of the labor force. However, the impact would mount over time. Figure 1 plots the potential GDP from 1990 to 2002 and adds an estimate of what the school reform sketched above would have implied for the economy. If past relationships between quality and growth held, GDP in the United States would have been more than 4 percent higher than was realized in 2002. The area between the two trend lines shows the “reform dividend,” which totals to $2.5 trillion in the two decades after the release of Risk. With close to a $10.5 trillion economy, the unrealized gain for 2002 alone would have amounted to $450 billion, or more than the nation’s total annual expenditure on K-12 public education.

Measuring Quality

A segment of the education policy community has argued against the current testing regime-either because it does not measure attributes they think are important or because the test outcomes are irrelevant. Nevertheless, the evidence reviewed above demonstrates that differences in performance on existing tests have significant implications for both individual and aggregate success. This is not to say that existing tests are the best possible. It just shows that the existing tests measure something real, something real enough that it has important ramifications for individuals and the economy.

That the acquisition of cognitive skill as measured by tests is important does not mean other aspects of education are unimportant. In fact, some research suggests that other dimensions of individual skill also influence economic performance. For instance, to the extent that aggregate growth is fueled by invention, creativity is likely to be important, and this may differ from measured cognitive skills. Currently it is in vogue to argue that schools must do more than simply teach reading, math, and science. Of course this is true. But such arguments do not deny that cognitive skills are important, and they do not say what should be done if one wants to enhance these other, currently unmeasured areas.

The question for the United States is how to create policies that boost achievement and thus economic growth. It would be easy, if we could improve quality simply by spending more or by reducing class size. But, unfortunately, evidence from both the United States and other countries shows that more school resources and smaller classes do not have much of an effect on how much a student learns in school, as measured by tests of achievement. The international math and science scores so important for growth rates are not related to variations in spending on education or other standard measures of school resources, such as pupil-teacher ratios. Similarly, within countries that participated in the 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study, there is no systematic relationship between resources and student performance. Consequently, the policies following Risk failed in large part because they concentrated on simply adding more resources to the pot.

In other words, we need to look for ways other than mere increases in expenditure or reductions in class size if we are going to enhance the quality of our education system. A large body of evidence suggests that differences in quality between schools affect how students learn, but it will take creative policies to tap this potential. What students learn in school impacts their earnings later in life, their productivity in the work force, and, ultimately, the country’s rate of growth. Over time, the cumulative impact of a high-quality education system can be dramatic.

-Eric A. Hanushek is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

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Given Risk‘s impact, it still comes as something of a surprise to me (as it has on other occasions since 1983) to find that the main critical arrow of the task force’s retrospective is misaimed. Observers continue to take exception not to what the report actually said, but to what it failed to say- complaining, for instance, that the report didn’t deal enough with X, Y, or Z, or offered an “incomplete diagnosis” of the problem in American education, or that it wasn’t “radical” enough in its analysis or prescriptions.

Particularly off target is the task force’s allegation that Risk was unconcerned with the problems of elementary education. A careful reading of Risk‘s introduction yields a simple explanation: “The Commission’s charter directed it to pay particular attention to teenage youth, and we have done so largely by focusing on high schools. Selective attention was paid to the formative years spent in elementary schools” (emphasis added). While the commission repeatedly recognized the importance of K-8 education as the foundation for secondary school in both its analysis and its recommendations, its focus remained on secondary education. That was the mandate handed down by Terrel H. Bell, then the secretary of education, and supported via the leadership of the commission chairman, David P. Gardner. Rather than wander from issue to issue, the commission stuck to its charge.

In addition, the Koret Task Force claims that the commission “was either too obtuse or too naïve to take on the basic functioning and political control of the system itself.” While the commission’s obtuseness or naiveté are open to debate, it is true that the commission did not view the political structures of American education as the most blatant problem. The commission was alarmed more immediately by what it saw as a grave national peril stemming from the steady degeneration of (particularly) secondary education into a kind of curricular smorgasbordism.

With the flawless vision of 20 years of hindsight, it is easy enough for any of us to point out that structural flaws of power and control lay at the root of America’s education problems in 1983 and now-flaws which, in the commission’s defense, they were as aware of as today’s second-guessers. But this was precisely where the commission made a wise choice. Rather than stoke the coals of a fruitless debate over the power politics of American education, particularly at a time when the very fate of the U.S. Department of Education was in doubt, the commission chose to address four crucial reforms-of content, expectations, time, and teaching-that could be worked on immediately, irrespective of the power context.

As to whether Risk was “radical enough” in its prescriptions, it again strikes me that only the perspective from 20 years later could make the commission’s recommendations appear retrospectively tame. The atrophy of memory obscures the fact that they simply weren’t seen that way at the time. On the contrary, the operational implications of the Excellence Commission were received in many quarters as wrenching in both their presuppositions and structural consequences:

• No less than a whole new curriculum was envisioned for high schools, one that would be stringent across the board, but particularly so in areas critical to the national interest-mathematics, science, foreign languages, and computer science. The designation of computer science as an instructional “basic” for American education placed it, for the first time, on a par with math, science, English, the social sciences, and the arts.

• The commission insisted on more rigorous and measurable standards, calling for a national (but not federal) system of student assessment. This recommendation was sufficiently radical to guarantee that states would still be wrestling with it in 2003, in the context of the No Child Left Behind legislation.

• The commission’s recommendation on time was a call for longer school days and years. The issue of time was sufficiently beneath the radar in 1983 that it took the Department of Education another 11 years to address it in any depth. Even today, the in-school time of American students, still driven by a calendar from an agricultural age, does not begin to approach that spent by students in many other countries.

• A side-by-side reading of Risk and various reports on teaching that have appeared since reveals the teaching recommendations of Risk to be eerily prescient, if not always sufficiently radical.

• And may I also gently note that Risk‘s passing mention of “current applications of technology“ was still more than has been offered in the task force’s report, which mentions technology hardly at all.
That the task force has found power structure problems to be central to its own generation’s concerns about education does not diminish Risk‘s prescience. Let history be the measure. Will there be retrospectives on the task force’s report 20 years from now? And, if so, will the report be seen as equally bold, or equally “naïve”?

The Platform

The task force has recommended a challenging alternative to the shortsightedness it perceives in Risk‘s call for reform, proffering three broad areas for action: accountability, transparency, and choice. Here, it makes some important arguments.

In its discussion of accountability, the task force rightly lines up behind the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (and, not incidentally, the Risk report itself) in calling for coherent academic standards in every state, in key academic subjects (regrettably omitting the arts, which Risk mentioned and which the National Education Goals expressly included). The task force rightly lauds the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as an important tool for measuring the results of state-applied standards and recommends taking NAEP to the district level. Going beyond Risk, the task force calls for “an accountability system with consequences,” such as rewards and sanctions whose result, it is hoped, will be that taxpayers will no longer have to continue paying for ineffective schools.

All to the good. In some cases, measures as drastic as “contracting out the management of failed schools” may well be called for. For example, my long-ago employer, the Philadelphia school district, has recently contracted out the operation of nearly 50 schools to 5 independent organizations, each espousing a different educational philosophy. With Koret, I want to insist that the key principle be: No matter the education philosophy or the means of delivery for education services, the goal has to be improved student performance. One thing American education reform definitely does not need is more pilot programs that are not held accountable for the results they generate.

One disappointing element of the task force’s report vis-á-vis accountability is its weak endorsement of the No Child Left Behind Act-such as its dissatisfaction over the act’s “relatively slow timelines,” Washington’s “scant leverage over states and districts,” and the “few real consequences on educators whose schools fail.” Perhaps so. But we need to guard against such critiques’ becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. If we are to avoid a 20-year retrospective on the failures of the Bush administration’s education efforts, it seems to me that the new law should be accorded more support than it is receiving.

The most challenging element of Koret’s comprehensive reform strategy is choice. The choice issue is perhaps the line drawn in the sand of education reform and, therefore, deserves more than advocacy. Even if school choice were used only as a means to bolster accountability, it would reconfigure American education on the basis of an entirely new paradigm.

Because the market solution is so politically volatile, some questions need to be answered before choice can move forward. For instance, will we be sure to hold all charter schools to the same standards of accountability as other schools? As the task force suggests, choice advocates want to exempt charter schools from certain regulatory strictures. But the same acid test must be applied. Exemptions from regulations must be granted because it can be demonstrated that they stand in the way of improving student performance.

In addition, can we apply the market model to American education without dislocating children and resources? The rationale for the market model is usually based on the performance of individual schools and the application of whatever rewards and sanctions that performance evokes. But there are roughly 50 million children in the public schools of the United States who need help now. All 50 million of them are entitled to a high-quality education. It should be readily possible, as a function of the market, to provide a high-quality education for some via charter schools and vouchers now. However, we must never lose sight of the fact that, as we encourage experimentation, the benefits of the education laboratory must ultimately accrue to 50 million children. Let’s expand our choices, but never lose our passion to work with and improve all of education.

In its recommendations regarding transparency, the task force is correct to insist that performance data on schools and school systems should be publicly available as a matter of course to whoever wants them, via web sites or other communication vehicles. Full disclosure on performance is the only way to ensure meaningful accountability. The task force rightly argues that it is singularly important for academic achievement to be reported in both absolute terms (compared with school and system standards) and value-added terms (student progress over stated periods). Recalling the problems the Risk commission had in collecting and making apples-to-apples comparisons of performance data, I am certain that the commissioners would have no problem with Koret’s suggestion of a major overhaul for the National Center for Education Statistics.

Left Out

There are two gaps in the task force’s report that seem worth addressing. First, in its rehearsal of the responses, outcomes, and derivatives of Risk, the one advance since 1983 that gets short shrift from Koret (so short that it is virtually unmentioned) is the recent reform focus not just on teachers as linchpins of the education system but on teaching as the very core of what happens in schools and thus of school reform. This focus on teachers and teaching was one of Risk‘s four main areas of concern; it is still largely unmet as a reform agenda item. The task force’s report, for all its focus on student performance, pays sparse attention to teaching.

Second, I invite the task force to take another leaf from Risk‘s book. Toward the end of its review of the commission’s work, the task force states, “Education reform will only come about in the United States when the delivery system itself is reconstructed around clear principles, sound ideas and learning-centered rules, incentives and power relationships.” The road ahead must lead, the task force argues, from reform all the way to reconstruction. That assessment is on the money, but to echo the task force’s own assessment of Risk, it doesn’t go far enough. In its concluding word to parents and students, Risk added a further, vitally necessary dimension: “Finally,” Risk encouraged parents to “help your children understand that excellence in education cannot be achieved without intellectual and moral integrity coupled with hard work and commitment. Children will look to their parents and teachers as models of such virtues.” Risk admonished its student readers that “you forfeit your chance for life at its fullest when you withhold your best effort in learning. . . . When you work to your full capacity, you can hope to attain the knowledge and skills that will enable you to control your destiny. If you do not, you will have your future thrust upon you by others.”

The final piece of the reform puzzle, then, is morals and character. Civic well-being and societal health depend on both the intellectual and moral status of our citizens. We who seek to improve education must always remember that this, in the end, is why we educate.

–Milton Goldberg is distinguished senior fellow at the Education Commission of the States. He served as executive director of the National Commission on Excellence in Education.

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At first glance, the metaphor-a rising tide of mediocrity-seems inapt, even odd. Do tides simply rise? Don’t they ebb and flow? And when they flow, don’t good things typically happen? Perhaps a heedless swimmer may be unpleasantly surprised, but flowing waters refresh tide pools, float boats, and enchant the child who watches surf pound against the headland.

Yet as peculiar as the metaphor first seemed, it has acquired meaning with the passage of time. As the globe warms, the slow rise in ocean levels has caused great concern. As glaciers and ice caps melt, Louisiana is losing land to the sea and barrier islands are gradually slipping beneath the watery surface, drowned by a slowly rising tide, a process suggested by the cover photo.

Mediocrity can slowly engulf our education system in this same insidious way-imperceptibly, an inch at a time, without definitive scientific proof of its causes or consequences. Vested interests can deny it. The media can ignore it. Scholars can try to document it, even if never to everyone’s satisfaction. The public can sense it, but not quite understand what to do about it.

Today, on the 20th anniversary of A Nation at Risk, the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education finds the tide of mediocrity still rising. At a time when America needs greater intellectual, moral, and technological strength than ever before, the nation’s education system remains well behind those of the high-performing countries of East Asia and much of Europe. Far from stemming the tide, the recommendations of the national commission were only selectively adopted, leading to reforms more symbolic than substantive, say the 11 members of the Hoover Institution-based Koret group (who also serve as editors and editorial board members of this journal).

The issue begins with a condensed version of the Koret Task Force report (the full-length version is available at www.educationnext.org as well as from the Hoover Institution). The Koret group argues that the famed 1983 report did a better job of diagnosis than of prescription. It focused on the right issue-educational excellence-but provided an inadequate set of solutions. The commission thought higher expectations, more time in school, and more money for education could stop the rising tide. Not so, says the Task Force, calling instead for systemic change that will hold schools accountable, give parents more choices, and provide citizens with a transparent education system whose accomplishments they can assess. Only if these systemic changes are realized will the public find it worthwhile to invest more resources in our country’s schools.

This issue’s forum spotlights four commentaries on the Koret report. In “Leftover Business,” Milton Goldberg, the executive director of the 1983 commission, defends its work as ahead of its time. Former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt in “Unrecognized Progress” detects more progress than the Koret group finds. In “The Long Haul,” Patricia Graham, former dean of Harvard’s education school, sees the problem as rooted more in society than in its schools and calls for as much emphasis on equity as on excellence. Former Arizona schools superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan in “Help Wanted” says the Koret recommendations will not mean much unless backed by strong educational leadership.

Following the forum are feature articles by individual members of the Koret Task Force. Their essays provide detailed assessments that support the argument stated in the main report. Given the importance, timeliness, and urgency of the topic, we have devoted nearly all of this issue to these essays. However, we also invite you to read our book reviews and enjoy our last page, which, in this month of presidential birthdays, provides a thought-provoking account in “Honest Abe” by William Miller of the moral and educational development of our nation’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln.

-The Editors

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Schooling is an important but by no means comprehensive educational intervention. The culture surrounding adolescents is far more powerful than schooling-and also more difficult to “reform.” Today’s children live media-saturated lives. The power of culture-and its effect on student achievement-is evident in adolescents’ lesser concentration on academic endeavors as they focus more on television, video games, and excessive employment during the school year. It is also apparent in their conspicuous consumption of nonessential goods.

Second, educational problems are most acute among children from low-income families, particularly minority families, whose schools are much weaker and whose homes and communities are less likely to provide resources such as museums, libraries, books, healthy recreational activities, and a culture of success based on educational achievement. Many reforms adopted in the post-Risk era, such as graduation exams that determine whether students can receive diplomas, tend to punish these students, since they are unlikely to receive, either at home or in school, the instruction that would allow them to score well. Their teachers and parents often did not receive such instruction, and they find themselves unable to teach children what they themselves do not know, however much they may want to do so.

In addition, the working conditions in urban schools serving low-income children are likely to be rigid, rule-bound, and unpleasant, none of which facilitates enthusiasm among teachers or fosters academic learning. Consequently, these schools suffer very high teacher turnover, forcing them to hire inexperienced and often unqualified teachers while successful, experienced teachers move on to schools with more pleasant working environments, thereby widening the gap between the educational opportunities of the rich and the poor.

The intractability of the achievement gap is just one example of the third explanation: that fundamental school reform takes a long time. Americans, including many of the authors in this issue, wish educational improvement to occur immediately. Such expectations fly in the face of reality. Twenty years, while encompassing the schooling lifetime of one entire generation, has not been long enough for significant education reforms to take hold in the past. For example, in 1882, 20 years after the Morrill Act created the land grant colleges of agriculture and engineering, evidence of instruction in those subjects was spotty indeed, and research nonexistent. In 1974, 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education, many communities still had schools segregated by race.

Consider another example: the Progressive Education Association officially expired in 1955, yet 20 years later many schools were still providing the curriculum recommended by its Life Adjustment subsidiary-that 20 percent of high-school students should receive vocational training, 60 percent a “general” curriculum, including such courses as “marriage and the family,” and the remaining 20 percent academic instruction. Such practices were still dominant when the National Commission on Excellence in Education reacted so fervently.

Paradigm Shifts

During the past century, educators reacted to at least four fundamental shifts in the priorities for their schools: assimilation, adjustment, access, and achievement. Throughout the period there was always an expectation that some children, both rich and poor, would excel academically, but never was there an assumption that all children would achieve at high levels, as we now insist. Each of these priorities had value, and over time the first three were gradually achieved.

In the early 1900s, schools were expected to “Americanize” immigrant children, so that as adults they would become loyal, productive citizens. This process involved curriculum, particularly the learning of English and of the nation’s cultural traditions (George Washington’s mutilation of the cherry tree was a favorite tale). But the process also extended beyond the formal curriculum to include other aspects of school life. For example, in New York City the nascent school lunch program eschewed the ethnic cuisine of the students’ families, preferring the boiled/baked staples of the Anglo-American diet. Similarly, athletic programs emphasized American basketball and baseball, ignoring European soccer.

In reaction to the jingoism and authoritarianism of the traditional school, Progressive educators of the 1920s fashioned a critique of teachers and teaching: that they were too rigid, too hidebound by tradition, and not adequately supportive of students. They insisted that a teacher’s primary obligation was not simply to teach a subject, but rather to help children “adjust to life.” Curriculum was out, caring was in. The new ideas of teaching the “whole child” and developing children’s creativity, social skills, and self-esteem were natural extensions of psychological principles that were just becoming popular. For youngsters whose home and community resources ensured that they would master the basics of reading and arithmetic regardless of school practices, progressive education provided a marvelous experience. The story was quite different for children who depended on school to introduce them to academic topics. Those children who inhabited the ever-growing “general” track in high school were denied a decent education. They were expected to “adjust” to a life that was seriously limited by their lack of preparation.

The paradigm shifted again during the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil-rights movement gave rise to a push to grant all children access to decent schooling. Federal mandates to desegregate schools, to provide extra help to disadvantaged children, and to include disabled children in regular classrooms, while all clearly necessary, placed the focus on contentious politics rather than on student learning. These were policies that many teachers and administrators either didn’t know how to implement or, in many cases, didn’t want to implement in their communities.

The priorities of adjustment and access were dominant when many of today’s senior teachers and administrators entered their professional lives. On average, today’s teachers are older and hence their preparation for teaching occurred when academic achievement was not recognized as the primary purpose of schooling; their professional experience was in institutions that did not demand academic performance from them or their students. The median age for teachers in 1900 was 26. By 1976, it had risen to 33; by the mid-1990s, the median age was 44. Beginning teachers are generally much more amenable to accommodating new school-imposed priorities than are experienced ones. Thus, reordering school priorities to focus on achievement-as Risk tried to do-was much more difficult with teachers and administrators who assumed their professional identities in an era when other priorities for schooling were in effect.

Progressive educators of the 1920s insisted that a teacher’s primary obligation was not simply to teach a subject, but rather to help children “adjust to life.”

The Next Wave of Reforms

If the Koret Task Force’s recommendations are to work, it is important to recognize that the principles of accountability, choice, and transparency are all policy positions. In education the issue is not simply to change the policy, but also to change the practice-a tricky translation, particularly when the policy requires fundamental change in the behavior of both adults and children. A state sets an “accountability goal,” such as requiring students to pass an examination, and uses that score as a marker for academic achievement. Yet at present it is impossible to ensure that the child has actually been taught the material tested by the exam or that the exam in fact captures the breadth of knowledge that the student should have. Changing policy is much easier than changing practice. It is easy to mandate tests, but much more difficult to ensure that all children learn and are capable of using that knowledge in a productive manner.

Like the conclusions of Risk, the task force’s recommendations pay scant attention to the educational influences that affect children outside of school. Schooling is certainly an easier object of policy focus than youth culture, but unless the values of schooling and of youth culture are congruent, then schooling is likely to lose. Among many affluent families who want their offspring to attend elite colleges, the school/home/culture values are quite well aligned, and as a group these youngsters have high levels of academic achievement. What remains to be seen is whether widespread public support for universal academic achievement can be maintained when the youth culture is against it, when significant fractions of young people are dropping out of high school, and when others are failing high-school exit examinations.

The recommendation that “decisions by parents rather than bureaucratic regulation should drive the education enterprise” limits education decisions in America to those who have children of school age. As a nation, we all have a stake in how our young citizens learn. Certainly parents have a special role, as acknowledged by the Supreme Court in the 1925 Pierce v. Society of Sisters case, where parents seeking religious education for their children in Roman Catholic schools sought to have that schooling recognized as meeting the compulsory education requirements. But it is after all the government that requires parents to make sure their children all get an education, whether the parents want it or not. Thus the higher authority is the nation, committed to preserving itself through the effective education of its young, that has a fundamental role in providing and supporting education. When that education is inadequate, as many today would assert is the case for our children, particularly those born to disadvantaged families, the issue is how we help those children learn.

The task force is right to emphasize the need for transparency in the education system. Society as a whole and parents in particular need to be able to understand how our children’s education is progressing. This information needs to be presented in a manner that is both accurate and understandable. Too often schools have failed this test miserably, sending home report cards that are meaningless and producing school transcripts that are incomprehensible. The reports nearly always present a rosier picture of the student’s progress (and by implication of the teacher’s effectiveness) than other measures might reveal. Parents are still relatively more satisfied with their children’s school than with the nation’s schools, but gradually social concern has been building about the quality of education for all.

One of the consequences of the extraordinary decline (nearly 90 percent) in federal support for education research over the past 25 years, as reported by Richard C. Atkinson and Gregg B. Jackson in their 1992 report for the National Academy of Sciences, has been the profound loss of rigorous inquiry into how schooling can be improved academically for all and how youth culture can become more attuned to the deferred gratification of academic achievement and less oriented to the immediate imperatives of money, clothes, and other amusements. Funding for policy work, such as this document, has been more readily available from private sources than has money for systematic research, both quantitative and qualitative, about education, its theory and its practice. Only with more knowledge, carefully developed, will we be able to effect the transformation of American schooling that would make academic achievement universal.

A well-educated populace will not guarantee either a strong economy or global security or even a democracy (as Nazi Germany demonstrated in the preceding century), but all three are highly unlikely without one. As Thomas Jefferson presciently observed in 1816, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” The authors of Risk and of the Koret Task Force report correctly concluded that greater academic achievement among all living in this country is essential. The value is not in doubt. However, the means of achieving this goal immediately are illusory.

-Patricia Albjerg Graham is a research professor of the history of education and former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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I was governor of North Carolina in 1983 when the National Commission on Excellence in Education released A Nation at Risk. Against heavy opposition, I had pushed hard to begin statewide testing of our public school students. Our early assessments had revealed major deficiencies. Risk showed that this was a nationwide phenomenon. Many policymakers sensed that the report would provide a major boost to our efforts to bring about serious change in education.

As chairman of the Education Commission of the States (ECS) at that time, I pushed other governors and corporate CEOs to address the problem with a high-level “Task Force on Education for Economic Growth,” thus establishing the vital link between education and economic growth that has fueled so many of the ensuing efforts to improve schools at the state level. Its calls for higher standards in schools and mastery of the basic competencies required for a globally competitive work force were warmly received by the National Governors Association (NGA). Candidates who might once have touted themselves as the “Jobs Governor” suddenly found that the way to attract employers to their states was to become an “Education Governor.”

The release of Risk acted like a meteor hitting the ocean, creating tidal waves of reform everywhere. Another report of the mid-1980s, the Carnegie Corporation’s A Nation Prepared (see Chester E. Finn Jr., “High Hurdles,” p. 62), sparked a long focus on excellence in teaching in an effort to define what Tom Kean, former governor of New Jersey, termed “what accomplished teachers need to know and be able to do.” Nearly every leader of the NGA, Republicans and Democrats alike, made education, standards, and economic competitiveness a theme of his chairmanship. Then, in 1989, the governors and President George H.W. Bush held the nation’s first education summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, and formulated national education goals for America.

Three major developments of the past 20 years are now bearing fruit: 1) the creation of standards and accountability; 2) research on how the brain develops in early childhood and its implications for pre-K education and child care; and 3) an emerging focus on the single biggest factor in student achievement-teacher quality.

Standards and Accountability

While the Koret report finds that “standards-based reforms . . . though promising . . . are hard to get right,” the truth is that most states have been working hard to “get it right” and have met with good success. Groups like Achieve, the Business Roundtable, ECS, and the recent summits led by IBM CEO Louis Gerstner have had a real impact. Most of the nation’s governors have gotten the message: if you aren’t pushing hard to set high standards and making considerable progress toward achieving them, your state will not be “the place” for business to locate and jobs to be created.

Only a handful of states now lack standards. Most need better standards than they have, but they have made a good start. In 1983 only a handful of states had any standards, and we were measuring progress in education almost solely by the increase in spending rather than achievement.

It is easy to criticize the work of states and school districts on standards, but dedicated teachers, principals, superintendents, and curriculum experts have spent untold hours trying to build their systems. They deserve our commendation. Some were especially bold. Virginia and Massachusetts can attest to the agony involved in setting high standards and, as a result, having many students fail the exams. But they can also attest to the value of sticking with this venture-providing greater support to students and teachers and thus seeing test scores climb dramatically. Others are emulating them.

Any fair assessment of the events of the two decades since Risk must conclude that we are well on our way to high and rigorous standards and accountability. We should be proud of that progress and committed to do a lot better.

Ready to Learn

The Koret report hardly mentions one of the most important developments since Risk: science’s remarkable progress in understanding how a child’s brain develops in the earliest years and the ensuing efforts to provide the early child care and education necessary for school readiness.

We now know that all children are born with about the same number of brain cells, billions of them. But the capacity for intelligence is largely set early in the child’s life, when those brain cells are connected up. These connections are formed largely from stimulation-hearing sounds, seeing colors, feeling things, responding to love and care.

We also know a great deal now about what is happening when in a child’s development. This enables educators to help young, inexperienced parents know what to look for and how to be most helpful to their child’s development.

This knowledge is part of the research base that has propelled quality child care and education to the forefront as a strategy for educational success. Roughly half of the “achievement gap” is already present when poor, minority children enter the schoolhouse door. The inescapable conclusion is that we must help these children get a better start early in life.

Teacher Quality

The Koret report misses the mark most seriously with regard to teaching. It states, “Higher quality teachers are key to improving our schools, but the proper gauge to measure that quality has nothing to do with paper credentials.” It goes on to say that the only true gauge of teacher quality is “classroom effectiveness.” Of course that is the best measure. But how do we get teachers who are effective in boosting student achievement? How do we improve their knowledge and skills? How do we keep them in the classroom? Fortunately, lots of people have been working on answers to those questions.

In 1996 the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future challenged the nation to provide every child with what should be his or her educational birthright: “access to competent, caring, qualified teaching in schools organized for success.” It urged the nation to get serious about teacher standards, reinvent teacher preparation and professional development, put qualified teachers in every classroom, encourage and reward teacher knowledge and skill, and create schools organized for student and teacher success. Twenty states joined together as partners to implement the recommendations, while others have taken some action.

Major business groups have taken up the quest for better teaching and are pushing for higher standards for teachers, better preparation and professional development, and higher pay linked to performance. They also urged the creation of a corps of “master” teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Today there are nearly 24,000 national board-certified teachers found in all 50 states. They meet rigorous standards. They receive extra compensation in many states and districts-$6,000 per year more in Mississippi and $7,500 more in South Carolina. They are superb teachers for their students and mentors and role models to fellow teachers.

In North Carolina, where I had the honor to serve as governor for 16 of the past 26 years, we have made a consistent effort to improve our schools and student performance. Our leaders have worked at this in a bipartisan manner, joined by the legislature, state board of education, department of public instruction, universities and colleges, and educators throughout the K-12 system. The business community has been especially supportive of new policies and greater resources. These efforts have yielded some impressive progress, noted by observers from Education Week to the RAND Corporation. Our standards, assessments, and accountability arrangements have been widely applauded. North Carolina now has the most “board-certified” teachers in the country-5,111, one of every 17 teachers in the state.

Most important, student performance has improved dramatically. The percentage of students scoring at or above grade level on the state’s proficiency tests has risen from 56 percent to nearly 75 percent in just six years. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress confirm these gains: during the 1990s, North Carolina experienced the highest gains of any state on the 4th- and 8th-grade math exams.

I attribute much of this success to our high-quality early-childhood initiative, Smart Start, and to our rewards for improving student learning. In North Carolina each teacher earns a $600 bonus for the year if the school’s students, on average, make a full year’s growth in learning. If the school exceeds a year’s gain by 10 percent or more, the teachers get an additional $600 bonus. If all the subgroups delineated by the No Child Left Behind Act make a year’s progress, the teachers each get another $600. That’s a total of $1,800 of compensation per year tied directly to student performance.

The Koret Agenda

The three principles-accountability, choice, and transparency-that the Koret report puts at the core of efforts to change incentive structures and power relationships in schooling are valid.

I believe that choice should be exercised within the public school system. Let the public schools compete for students; public universities in my state certainly compete against one another successfully.

Transparency is worth special attention. As the task force says, the current system is “opaque” nearly everywhere we look. We need to examine systems, at both the state and the district level, to see how schools, students, and teachers are performing. But we especially need to report to parents and students about their own schools. They should receive annual report cards showing the qualifications of teachers and records of student and teacher performance. My experience is that parents and the school respond positively if these things are done with care and honesty.

New means of accountability, such as the Standard & Poor’s School Evaluation Service and Just for the Kids, provide powerful ways of analyzing school performance (including financial data) and can be easily accessed by parents via the Internet. The popularity of these services illustrates how much demand there is for information on school quality.

It is true, as the task force insists, that we cannot improve the schools of America by just “throwing more money at them.” We must reform them in a thorough way. But we also can’t bring about dramatic improvements without a significant investment of new resources.

One example makes the case. Low-performing schools need better principals and teachers. They may also need better facilities and services for students. Let’s measure how the teachers and principals perform and pay them more if they get good results. But let’s recognize that this will take more money, not less. We will have to compete in the marketplace to get these people, and we will have to pay for them.

In fact, I believe it is high time that we commit the full resources required to reform and improve every school in America so that every child is learning, so that every child is at grade level or above.

Many of these funds will have to come from the federal government. Right after the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed in 1965, the share of my state’s “education bill” paid by Washington was about 14 percent. Now it is down to about 7 percent. As we all rally to “leave no child behind,” why don’t we commit to get that proportion of federal support back up to 14 percent, where it used to be?

When we as a nation are threatened by Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, money is no object. We are paying dearly to fight them and to bolster homeland security. I fully support doing both. But, as Risk said, the threat to our country from mediocre education is very much like that of war. We should fight the battle for excellent schools with equal fervor.

-James B. Hunt Jr. is chairman of the board at the James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of North Carolina and the former governor of North Carolina.

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Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt
by Raffaella Cribiore
Princeton University Press, 2001, $39.50; 288 pages.

In Rome, toward the end of the 1st century C.E., Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, an 11-year-old boy, won honorable mention in a poetry contest by improvising some 43 verses in ancient Greek on a mythological theme. When shortly thereafter the talented boy succumbed to a disease, his devoted parents made sure that his verses were inscribed on a grave monument, which showed him in his toga holding a book-roll in his left hand. Too bad that Maximus, unlike his namesake the gladiator, will never be the subject of an award-winning film.

Nonetheless, we can learn something about ancient education from young Maximus’s monument. Maximus, whose first language was presumably Latin, had learned to read Homer and other epic poets in Greek. He could compose in a metrical pattern that followed strict conventions. He had studied his mythology and knew how to construct an argument. Although the hexameters that young Maximus composed are not notable for their originality, either in style or content, his parents went to the great expense of having them preserved in stone. They were wealthy and proud of an achievement that would enable the boy to hold his head high among the lifeless shades in the Lower World. In ancient Rome, education was accessible only to those who could afford it, and only a small fraction of the population was able to read. Nonetheless, education mattered to the elite, then as now, and the purposes of an education were both cultural and practical.

We cannot discover from literary sources alone exactly how and why young Maximus was educated. Educated Greeks and Romans wrote much more about the final stages of rhetorical training than they did about the early stages of development. To learn about the practical details of elementary education, we need to turn to the students themselves and to their anxious parents. They recorded their thoughts in letters, which were written on papyrus. Since papyrus was preserved in the dry climate of Egypt, but lost in damper climates, most of what we know about elementary education comes from Greek settlements in that country. Almost all of the letters that have been preserved were written in Greek, even when the writers were Egyptians. They are difficult sources to work with. Fortunately, Raffaela Cribiore, associate curator of papyri at Columbia University and the author of a specialized study, Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (1996), has the considerable expertise needed to make sense of the letters and bring them to life. Her new book, Gymnastics of the Mind, makes the complex and foreign world of ancient education accessible to nonclassicists, provided that they have at least some background knowledge of the ancient world.

Cribiore gives a detailed account of how children learned to write and read. Writing came first. Children copied letters and phrases, apparently without always understanding what they were copying. Then they learned to read by pronouncing nonsense syllables formed by combining consonants with vowels, such as ba-be-bi. Then they learned to decipher words and phrases, specially prepared for them by their teacher. Learning to read a sentence or paragraph required greater skill, even if it was written in a clear hand on a clean surface, because words in ancient texts were not separated from one another, lower-case letters were not used, and punctuation was at best sporadic. The accents and other diacritical marks we now use to write ancient Greek are comparatively late inventions. In antiquity even skilled readers needed to mark their texts. As Cribiore points out, the Greek word for reading, anagignoskein, literally means “know again.” To read is to recognize and recollect.

If a student could learn to read, he or she would then copy texts and take dictation, most often short pithy phrases, including some from the great ancient poets. The Greeks used the letters of the alphabet plus three additional characters to represent numbers, and some students would learn at this stage the multiplication tables and fractions. One of the surprises in this book is that parents occasionally sent their daughters as well as their sons through these initial stages of education. There were no schools, at least in our sense of the word. Schole, the ancient word from which our word school derives, literally means “leisure.” In other words, learning was available only for the rich, people with the wealth to afford free time. A small group of students met at the house of a teacher. As in a one-room schoolhouse, they were not divided into grades, and they were kept in line by the use of physical force. Most of the teachers (but not all) in the elementary stages were men. It was a trade that might be passed on from generation to generation in one family.

Only a relatively small number of students who learned to read advanced to the next stages of education, where they were taught by grammarians, teachers who were proficient in letters (grammata)–that is, literature. These teachers (and their students) were almost always male. They studied and memorized long passages from the works of the great Greek poets who had lived centuries before their own time. The most popular text, even in Egypt, was the Iliad, particularly Book 2, which contains the Catalogue of Ships, the list of all the heroes who came to Troy. The grammarians preferred Euripides to the other tragedians, because his language was simpler and his style more rhetorical. Their favorite among his dramas was a play that few people today have even heard of, the Phoenician Women. It contains some fine set speeches, along with a fast-moving account of the fate of Oedipus and his children.

By committing at least large portions of these texts to memory, students acquired a ready store of poetic phrases and vocabulary. They also learned how to structure a speech and present their arguments. They learned how to give a “true” account of a word (etymologia) by using puns to make it mean whatever would best suit their purposes. By memorizing the words of others, they learned how to structure the elements of their own compositions. It was this kind of education that the precocious young Maximus drew on when he composed his remarkable mythological “impersonation.” It is not a curriculum that would appear to have encouraged exploration or originality, and it would not have won the approval of John Dewey. Nonetheless, as Cribiore points out, it instilled a lasting respect for hard work. The same learning, drill, and impersonation lie behind the work of the greatest poets of the time, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, to name just a very few.

-Mary Lefkowitz is a professor of classical studies at Wellesley College and the author of Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History.

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Nevertheless, Risk said, all was not lost. Its authors made a number of policy recommendations that they believed would improve American education before another generation fell victim to its empty promises. Now that everyone knew what the problem was, someone would surely get around to fixing it.

No one did.

To be sure, some progress has been made over the past two decades. For example, we have determined definitively-meaning with scientific research, not simply because someone said it in print-that there are some basic ingredients that are necessary for a good education. We know, for example, that teacher quality counts more than almost any other external factor, including class size or neighborhood attributes, in determining academic success. We know that phonics instruction produces the kind of real results that gimmicky “whole language” approaches can’t replicate. We know that competition-through vouchers, charter schools, and even simply a diverse array of school districts and private schools in a geographic area-creates an environment in which successful schools thrive.

Yet we risk another damning and depressing report 20 years from now if we simply assume that our advanced knowledge of what works can make it real for all of the nation’s children. Vast repositories of best practices and sage advice do no more to educate a child than a blueprint does to get a house built. Ideas need to be put into action, not just onto paper. Doing so is easier said than done, and, unfortunately, we don’t always make it easy on ourselves.

School Leadership

First of all, the nation suffers from a distinct confusion over who is in charge of what. We may know that learning depends on teachers’ solid understanding of their subjects, their clear appreciation of and enthusiasm for those subjects, and their willingness to tailor their instruction to the needs of each student. But that means little unless we also understand that the only people capable of ensuring quality instruction in a school are that school’s leaders. Governors, legislators, and even local school boards may all say they know “what works” in instruction, but they simply cannot create that quality with the stroke of a legislative pen, such as when they mandate phonics instruction.

They are also often unaware that the rules, policies, and laws that they have written or simply enforced may be direct impediments to creating an ideal classroom setting. Funding students based on where they reside, rather than where they attend school, for example, is a practice as old as the system itself, and just as outdated. That same finance system also mandates that districts receive their appropriation based on their enrollment at a single date during the year, funding schools for an entire year for a child who may have left his school the next day. Archaic funding policies like these do little to encourage innovation within the system.

Proactive teachers, principals, and administrators are both the gatekeepers and the keymasters of education reform. Any changes in the system must be carried out by educators working at the school level. Without great school and classroom leaders to make sure reforms are implemented, even the most ambitious and sweeping policy changes can sputter out by the time they hit your children’s classrooms.

In the world of schooling, the majority of highly successful turnaround cases seem to be those where an individual educator had not only the right idea about instruction, but also the tenacity to bend or break those rules that would have prevented meaningful changes at the school level. But it should no longer be the case that only the lucky students get to learn in schools where teachers have decided to work against standard expectations.

It is critical, then, that education reformers begin recruiting, grooming, and mentoring potential leaders not just for key policymaking positions in the hierarchy of education, but for positions in which they would lead, innovate, teach, and inspire. Those who matter most in the reform movement are those in the school. It’s time to start putting leaders in place in the classroom and at the school level first.

It won’t be easy. As the Koret Task Force’s report continually observes, the resistance to change within the system is not only intense, but also, in the majority of cases, overwhelming. Any effort to improve or change education is usually met with a backlash from unions and other organizations that sense that changes in the way the system works can often cut into their power base.

In 2000, for example, Arizona voters approved Proposition 301, an initiative meant to inject funding directly into classrooms, implement performance pay for teachers, encourage school-based management, and complete a statewide system for collecting and reporting data. Voters understood that passage of this proposition would mean more money in their classrooms, better pay for the teachers in their schools, more control at the local level, and more information for parents.

That didn’t sit well with the unions, however. After the proposition passed, state union representatives immediately lobbied the state attorney general to issue a “clarification” explaining that performance pay actually meant an across-the-board bonus for every teacher in a school or district, regardless of performance, and that funding classrooms directly actually meant passing the funding through the district first so the district, rather than the school, can make the major funding decisions. That was the end of direct classroom funding, and school-based management went with it-and that was essentially the end of the reforms of Proposition 301. Where the voters had seen an opportunity, the unions saw a threat. It’s likely to continue that way for quite some time.

It is reasonable to assume that the next generation of potential leaders will come from pipelines other than colleges of education-a virtual breeding ground for educational stagnation-such as alternative certification programs for teachers. The Koret report rightly endorses choice, but choice must apply to the adults, as well as the children, in the education system. Alternative certification programs like the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence-which provides teachers with a certification based on their mastery of subject area and excellence in classroom management-need to be endorsed by states as a viable route to ensuring excellence in the classroom. Teachers need to be recognized for their ability to teach, not for their ability to toe the party line in a teaching college. Only in this way can we hope to truly professionalize the teaching profession and pave the way for needed changes in tenure, performance-based pay, and other policies that contribute to the transparency in the system that Koret envisions.

Unintended Consequences

Shaming the education establishment into doing the right thing-as Risk attempted to do-only motivated educators to defend their turf and the status quo more creatively. As a result, reformers have let the establishment define the terms of the debate. Advocates for school choice suddenly become “anti-public school.” Those who want to professionalize teaching are labeled as unsympathetic to the “plight” of teachers. Those who push high academic standards for all students are scolded for supposedly forcing poor children to drop out of school.

Reform is presently being resisted in an act of self-preservation, which the unions have cleverly labeled “looking out for the best interests of children.” Don’t believe it. Only the interests of structures and systems are being safeguarded, not those of children. And reformers need to stop apologizing for advocating reforms that are good for children, but might cause some adults somewhere a bit of discomfort. Again, leadership matters.

Another unintended effect of Risk was the proliferation of federal education programs shortly after its publication, as policymakers struggled mightily to respond to the report and its recommendations. Gimmicks and fads-such as efforts to reduce class size or to create parent education programs-suddenly became federal policies as legislators scrambled to find the Next Big Thing to improve education. When the nation’s governors lent their voices to the demand for change in education in the late 1980s, President Bush put together the America 2000 proposal, which eventually became President Clinton’s Goals 2000 program, which was mothballed when it became apparent that it, too, wasn’t doing much to increase education achievement. Meanwhile, federal funding on programs mushroomed, without any noticeable gains in student achievement.

As a result of the legislative activity of the past 20 years, school systems have grown in size and power, under the mistaken assumption that more funding and more authority would give educators the clout and resources they needed to improve achievement. It didn’t happen-and in the meantime, as the system grew, very little was done at the federal level to empower families or any others served by the system.

All that is starting to change, and change for the better. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 swept away much of the legislative clutter that had littered the education landscape for more than a decade, in favor of programs based in good science and research. High academic standards and quality teaching-two of the cornerstone recommendations of the Risk report-were finally embraced formally and built into the law. A number of state-based initiatives that favored parents and parental choice were reflected, albeit sometimes only partially, in the final legislation, including new requirements for school choice and supplemental services for children trapped in chronically failing schools.

While No Child Left Behind represents the most comprehensive and substantive change to education policy in more than 30 years, there has been some concern that the act overreaches, both in scope and in structure. Some have argued that not only are its objectives too lofty and ambitious, but in its haste to effect change immediately, the bill also arbitrarily makes some decisions that should be left to state and local decisionmakers.

For example, provisions in the law that require supplemental services, such as tutoring, and school choice for schools that have failed to improve have led some critics to bemoan these actions as a federal power grab. “This law moves against the tradition of local control in a fundamental way,” said one midwestern school board member in the autumn of 2001. “We all seek nationally defined excellence, but we must be free to adapt to local conditions.” What needs to be pointed out is that these same local decisionmakers have always had the authority to put such programs in place, but have simply refused to do so out of a need to protect their power base. Choosing not to act must no longer be considered “adapting to local conditions.”

The requirements of No Child Left Behind-which include, for the first time, real consequences for schools that do not show academic progress for all students-are beginning to break the stranglehold that entrenched interests have had on our schools for far too long. If local autonomy has been somewhat impeded by the new law-a debatable conclusion-then it could also be argued that this is a self-inflicted wound. Because the system could not be shamed into moving 20 years ago, the federal government has finally tried to move the system itself.

It is clear that Risk underestimated the influence of the education establishment in framing education policy and overestimated its interest in doing the right thing for children. While teacher unions and other organizations representing administrators, policymakers, and school chiefs all claim to be acting on behalf of children, they are all by their very nature really only looking out for their own best interests-that’s what they’re there for. Self-preservation is a strong motivator, and breaking the stronghold on the system of these interests-what Teddy Roosevelt would have called “trust busting”-will likely continue to be a major challenge for educators and policymakers.

Such trust busting will require a new generation of educators who not only know what works in education, but also know how to do it. Ensuring that these innovators have the authority to make the necessary changes to the system will take time. Until then, we need to hold those who presently have the authority to create successful schools accountable for doing so. The price for inaction is another 20 years of unrealized promises and another generation of unrealized student potential.

-Lisa Graham Keegan is chief executive officer of the Education Leaders Council and the former superintendent of public instruction in Arizona.

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