Chicken Little's lucky day

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

7.18.2001

The main reason important reforms don't get made in American K-12 education may be termed the Chicken Little Syndrome: the assertion that the sky will surely fall down if this change is made or, more temperately, the suggestion that the sky MIGHT collapse but we can't be sure so let's not take chances.

To watch this syndrome on display, observe the school establishment's reaction to vouchers: we don't know whether they'll work and we're not sure what will happen, so we daren't take the risk. Or the response to "charter states" and other forms of funding flexibility: we can't be sure what innovations those squirrelly states might try so we'd best not gamble. Or "alternative certification" of teachers. And so forth.

Mostly, this is the characteristic response of timid people and organizations with deep vested interests in the status quo. They fear change or believe it would adversely affect them. Their method of fending it off is to emulate Chicken Little, warning that the heavens will crash down upon innocent children if any such innovation is introduced.

Sometimes, though, we have actual experience to draw upon in predicting the likely outcome of a course of action. Sometimes Chicken Little's raindrop should be taken seriously, not as foreshadowing the sky's collapse but as a clue that there's going to be another downpour.

In those situations, it's foolish not to learn from the past. In rainy weather, after all, it's smart to carry an umbrella. Ignoring the first few drops is pretty stupid. Recall the definition of insanity as persisting with the same behavior that didn't work before in the expectation that this time it will yield a different result.

That's how I've begun to view the pending move on Capitol Hill to impose a new standards-and-testing regimen upon the land. And that's why, when New York City schools chancellor Harold Levy and Los Angeles superintendent Roy Romer warned the other day that the present federal push for higher academic standards and sterner accountability might actually lead to lower standards, I didn't think "Chicken Little is back with more false alarms." Rather I thought: it's probably going to rain again.

For we've been down this path before. And we got rained on. Recall the setting of "national education goals" in Charlottesville in 1989. Remember the goal that said "By the year 2000, American students will leave grades four, eight, and twelve having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography; and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well...."

President Bush (I) and the governors gave the nation eleven years to attain that laudable outcome. Yet we never got close. Twelve years later, the main fact about academic achievement in U.S. schools is how flat it's stayed-some blips up and down, to be sure, some gap narrowing (and some widening), some progress in math, some regress in reading, etc. All this despite Bush (I)'s America 2000 program, Clinton's Goals 2000 program, quite a lot more spending, and all the new requirements of E.S.E.A. 1994, which stipulated that every state must spell out its standards, devise a testing system, track yearly progress, and intervene in faltering schools.

The goal was swell. The intent was praiseworthy. The federal programs were meant to help the country get there. But they didn't. Instead, states and districts chased their own karma. Some got better (including Bush II's Texas, which was embarked on its reform strategy long before Charlottesville). Some dithered. Some faltered. The national goals probably helped raise consciousness. The federal programs undeniably provided money. But the results, over a dozen years, came to just about nothing.

Now Senate-House conferees are going to deliberate long and hard about whether to give states and schools ten or eleven or twelve more years to set new standards, administer new tests, intervene in failing schools and thereby get every single child up to par. Federal dollars will again flow. The Education Department will again regulate. There will again be much talk of compliance. But why do we expect the result to be different this time?

Optimism is a good thing, to be sure. If we had no hope for the new day, we'd never get up in the morning. Maybe this time things really will change. But note what is NOT being altered by the pending legislation: the same things we didn't alter after Charlottesville, or in Goals 2000 or in the 1994 ESEA round. Chicken Little has, in fact, already carried the day, having again scared Congress away from the kinds of reforms that might actually yield different results. So once again we're not changing how we train, certify and deploy teachers and principals. We're not changing the 180-day school year or the 6-hour day. We're not abolishing "whole language" reading, fuzzy math or "expanding environments" social studies. We're not turning off the national TV set or making parents read to their kids. We're not mandating research-based pedagogy in every classroom. We're not empowering parents to move their children to schools that work. We're not freeing states or districts to innovate and experiment.

When you get right down to it, we're not really changing much of anything about the K-12 "delivery system." Chicken Little squawked, and the Congress balked. Yet we somehow still expect that unchanged system to produce sharply better results. Indeed, by insisting that every state raise every single child to academic proficiency, we're expecting something that the present system has never accomplished anywhere, at least not without lowering the definition of "proficiency" to cellar level.

We are, in sum, repeating something that didn't work the last time while expecting it to yield a different outcome. Chicken Little's fear of change has kept us from changing the ground rules. Hence those who earnestly seek a better result-beginning with President Bush (II)-must now predict that this time, somehow, the old system will deliver a new outcome for kids. History suggests that their optimism is misplaced. But having repelled the real reforms, Chicken Little has no business predicting that the education sky is still going to fall. It's going to stay right where it always was. All that those raindrops signal is that we're about to get soaked once again.