While the debate over special education tends to focus on its cost - and how much money it takes away from regular education - Congress will get nowhere on this topic until lawmakers begin to view special and regular education as part of a single system, one that is hampered by an all too pervasive problem: that schools are teaching reading in a way that fails to effectively reach millions of children. So argues Brent Staples in a column in the January 5 New York Times. Half of children who are placed in special ed are there for reading difficulties, he writes. Studies from NIH show that 95 percent of learning impaired children can become effective readers if taught by scientifically proven methods, but less than a quarter of American teachers know how to teach reading to children who do not get it automatically.

The education bill that was signed into law this week attempts to do something about this problem. The Bush administration has pledged at least $900 million a year over six years to the effort to teach reading using "scientifically based" approaches, and an additional $75 million for pre-kindergarten reading initiatives. The administration is sending 328,000 booklets summarizing the findings of the National Reading Panel, which highlighted the importance of phonics instruction, to educators across the country, and later this year the Department of Education will send education officials around the country a guide that analyzes the content of core reading programs frequently used by school districts to see if they are scientifically based, according to an article in the January 9 New York Times by Diana Jean Schemo. Critics of the National Reading Panel report argue that most studies of phonics only examine isolated reading skills like word recognition rather than comprehension, but the research in the report is defended by Susan Neuman, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education and a reading researcher herself.

"How the Clip 'N Snip's Owner Changed Special Education," by Brent Staples, The New York Times, January 5, 2002

 "Education Bill Urges New Emphasis on Phonics as Method for Teaching Reading," by Diana Jean Schemo, The New York Times, January 9, 2002

Now that George W. Bush has signed the "No Child Left Behind" act, the flashbulbs have just about stopped popping, and the policy (and media) focus shifts back to terrorism and the economy, the education world will turn to the low profile but crucial matter of translating this thousand-page bill's dozens of programs and hundreds of provisions into schoolhouse practice. That sounds like a bureaucratic yawner but in truth it matters quite a lot. To avoid deadlock, Senate-House conferees punted some sticky issues to the Education Department to resolve: determining what constitutes acceptable state tests, by what criteria to approve a state's school accountability plan, what are "qualified" teachers, and how broadly to interpret a clause that lets schools avoid sanctions if their various pupil populations are making lesser gains than are required under the "adequate yearly progress" provision at the heart of the bill. With such sizable matters come reams of lesser issues whose handling will determine how much traction this legislation actually gains in millions of separate classrooms.

History offers no grounds for optimism that this will be done quickly or well. Congress habitually builds such long timelines into these measures that the most important changes need not even be made until someone else's term in office. (States have five years, for example, to comply with the new testing requirement.) The last time around, Bill Clinton's Education Department dawdled so long in implementing the 1994 education amendments that today - seven years later - most states still don't comply with some of its core provisions.

Such matters are traditionally entrusted to change-averse civil servants overseen by inexperienced political appointees who are watched closely by their masters lest they offend key governors or Congressmen or make it harder for the President's party in upcoming elections. (As the 2000 race gained momentum, the Clinton White House made the Education Department stop pressing California on education compliance issues.) Implementation thus becomes the stuff of interminable meetings, countless forms, endless delays, and multiple extensions and waivers, as very little changes in the classroom. 

That fate could befall "No Child Left Behind." But Education Secretary Rod Paige and his team are gearing up for a very different approach. Indeed, they see this as their real debut - the White House staff having tightly controlled the legislative phase. Though quiet and self-effacing, Paige is a steely and astute leader whose strong will and administrative acumen made a big difference in Houston's sprawling school system. There he showed himself especially good at distinguishing areas where schools should be free to innovate from those requiring close central monitoring. If he and his able lieutenants at the Education Department approach states in a similar vein, they could reverse the ingrained, dysfunctional pattern of federal education officials, which is to meddle in all the small stuff while paying scant attention to the big issues, such as whether children are learning and rich-poor gaps are narrowing.

All this, however, is just the first act of a three-act education drama. After a brief intermission, the Bush administration and Congress must turn to "special" education - the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) - which, after twenty five years, is in urgent need of top-to-bottom rethinking. The White House has appointed a blue-ribbon commission, chaired by former Iowa governor Terry Branstad, to sort through all this and make recommendations, and recruited a reform-minded New Mexican named Bob Pasternack to head this section of the Education Department. There's no dearth of ideas for bold changes, such as "voucherizing" special ed, as Florida has already done.  But politics presses against any serious reform of this domain. Elected officials are wary of its swarming lobbyists, all claiming to be tending to America's neediest children even as they advance the interests of sundry "experts."

Act three of this drama involves higher education, whose massive federal subsidy programs come up for renewal two years hence. As with special ed, the policy challenge is to bring the "No Child Left Behind" mindset, with its emphasis on academic achievement and institutional accountability for student learning, to bear on America's sprawling higher education system. The federal role here, too, should shift from an obsession with inputs and services to a clear focus on results. But the politics of higher education also work against fundamental reform - and the status quo is buttressed by the widespread and carefully nurtured illusion that U.S. colleges are doing fine just as they are.

Plenty of other education challenges will punctuate the play's intermissions, including such low profile but consequential topics as Washington's handling of education research and statistics. As with special ed and higher ed, these would benefit from the impatient, results-minded focus that George W. Bush urged a year ago when he launched the education bill just signed. In the best of all possible worlds, that would turn out to be Bush's true education legacy: institutionalization in Washington of the view that what matters in a federal program is not what rules are followed, what services are provided or what's spent where, but whether young people are actually learning what they should from institutions that are accountable for such learning within their walls. This may be too much to expect. But what's a new year if not a time for optimistic resolutions.

This editorial is a condensed version of an article that appears in the most recent issue of The Weekly Standard. For the full version, see "Leaving Education Reform Behind," by Chester E. Finn, Jr., The Weekly Standard, January 14, 2002. (available to subscribers only)

Education Week, January 10, 2002

Few in the world of education would argue with the notion that many skills and attitudes required for a life of successful learning have their roots in the nursery, yet providing an appropriate environment for early years' learning for all children is no easy matter. The sixth annual Quality Counts report, published by Education Week this week, examines what all 50 states and the District of Columbia are doing in their efforts to provide quality early-learning experiences for children under the age of five. During a typical week, 11.9 million children younger than 5 in the United States spend part of their waking hours in the care of someone other than their parents. The report notes that 39 states and the District of Columbia provide state-financed pre-kindergarten for at least some of their 3-to 5-year olds, up from about 10 in 1980. Annual state spending for such programs now exceeds $1.9 billion. Despite this increased spending, however, there is a huge discrepancy across states, and even within communities, in the quality of learning experiences afforded young children. One of the primary reasons for this variation is that less than a third of the states have specified what under-fives should know or be able to do. Also working against the goal of high-quality early learning experiences for all children is the abysmal pay of preschool teachers, who had an average annual salary of $19,610 in 1999, less than half of the salary of the average elementary school teacher.  As always, Quality Counts also rates the 50 states on many aspects of K-12 education, organized under the headings of student achievement, standards and accountability, improving teacher quality, school climate, and resources. To view Quality Counts 2002 or to order a hard copy, go to http://www.edweek.org/qc.

Holly Holland and Kelly Mazzoli, 2001

This 306-page book offers an insider's account of an urban school reform initiative in an unnamed, mid-sized Midwestern city.  Authors Holly Holland and Kelly Mazzoli describe how one of the largest private donations ever made to a single high school is giving a troubled urban school a new lease on life.  To help students overcome such obstacles as high poverty, low expectations, inadequate teacher training, bureaucracy, and astonishing parental neglect, school officials created a comprehensive freshman academy where faculty members pledged to become so involved in kids' lives - through targeted and aggressive academic and emotional support - that no one would fall through the cracks.  End-of-year surveys suggest that the academy is having an impact; school leaders have set many - but not all - failing students on a more promising path to higher academic achievement, better manners, and more constructive personal habits.  To order a copy of the book, contact the publisher at Heinemann, 88 Post Road West, P.O. Box 5007, Westport, CT 06881; phone 800-225-5800; fax 203-750-9790.  Holland and Mazzoli published an article describing the reform initiative in the December 2001 issue of Phi Delta Kappan (not yet available online).

Richard M. Ingersoll, American Educational Research Journal, Fall 2001

In this review published in the American Educational Research Journal, Penn education sociologist Richard M. Ingersoll pokes imaginatively into the question of whether high teacher turnover rates arise from immutable demographic shifts, fundamental supply shortages, individual teacher characteristics, or organizational characteristics of the schools themselves. Mind you, he went in search of the latter. And he found some interesting evidence that various school characteristics cause lots of teachers to leave (about 15% per year of late). He concludes that "School staffing problems are primarily due to excess demand resulting from a 'revolving door' - where large numbers of qualified teachers depart their jobs for reasons other than retirement." He thus partakes of the field's common assumption that teaching ought to be a lifetime career, not something that one simply does for a while before or after doing something else. But if you share his assumption, you must be alarmed by his conclusion that no supply-enhancing efforts in K-12 teaching can possibly succeed until and unless steps are taken to curb the "excess demand" that he identified. (Incidentally, the highest turnover rates he found are not in public schools at all but in small private schools.) What is going on? Ingersoll says that "Retirement accounts for a relatively small number of departures, a moderate number of departures are reported due to school staffing actions, a larger proportion of teachers indicate they depart for personal reasons [e.g. health, family], and an even larger proportion report that they depart either because they are dissatisfied with their jobs or in order to seek better jobs or other career opportunities." Policy makers should ponder these findings, which suggest that many sources of teacher turnover are, or could be, amenable to policy intervention. You can get a copy by emailing [email protected] or by calling 202-223-9485.

While the costs and benefits of annual tests were debated at great length last year, analysts of the new "No Child Left Behind" education legislation are getting more excited about an opportunity created by those tests: the ability to identify effective schools and teachers using annual test scores.  In a 9-page paper for the Lexington Institute, Robert Holland explains how statistical analysis of annual testing data can determine how much value teachers add to the learning of individual students.  In the paper, Holland traces the development of the value-added assessment system developed by Bill Sanders in Tennessee, provides an example of a teacher report from this assessment system for an individual teacher, and compares the Tennessee model with a different statistical model used in other districts. Once these techniques are honed, we will have a fair and objective system for identifying the most effective teachers and schools, which will bring much-needed praise to teachers and schools that do a superior job helping low achieving students, Holland writes.  "Indispensable Tests: How a Value-Added Approach to School Testing Cold Identify and Bolster Exceptional Teaching," by Robert Holland, Lexington Institute, December 2001. William J. Bennett and Chester E. Finn, Jr., make many of the same points in "Adding Value to Education," an op-ed that appeared in The Washington Times on December 20, 2001. (available for a fee at www.washingtontimes.com)

In Chicago, 55 percent of public high school students attend schools outside their neighborhoods.  The mobile students are often the better students, who can today apply to a growing array of magnet schools and programs throughout the school district.  A series of articles in last month's Catalyst take a close look at the schools left behind.  The 12 least popular neighborhood high schools in Chicago are losing 62 to 77 percent of the students in their attendance boundaries and find themselves facing a high concentration of hard-to-teach students. "There are more discipline problems, less support from parents, students are less prepared," explains once principal, and this takes a toll on teachers.  From 18 to 28 percent of the students are in special education in these 12 schools and all 12 are on academic probation. In interviews with parents and teenagers, the top 3 reasons for leaving neighborhood schools were: 1) the schools are perceived as gang-infested and dangerous, 2) they lack special vocational programs that will help kids land jobs, and 3) they have poor academic reputations. How to turn neighborhood schools around? Some think the answer is to spend money to recruit better teachers for the neighborhood schools, some say the schools should be shut down and reopened with new staff, and some think that dividing them into smaller, semi-autonomous schools within the same building will do the trick. Others believe that the solution is to add more choices or to impose open admission policies on the city's elite magnet schools. For more, see articles under "High School Choice: The Impact of Student Flight on Schools of Last Resort" in Catalyst: Voices of Chicago School Reform, December 2001.

Welcome to 2002. Allow me to open it by recalling nine great obstacles to serious education reform in America - and the (mostly obvious) changes we must make to break through them. You may, if you like, regard the latter as New Year's resolutions.

1. We know more about the quality of our dishwashers than the quality of our children's schools.  Most Americans have little understanding of the effectiveness of their children's education or don't think the achievement gap has much to do with their own schools. Despite lots of testing, we face an astonishing dearth of accurate information about school results vis-??-vis academic standards. Reliable outside audits are scarce. For the most part, the system controls - and vigorously spins - the data about its own performance. Poor and minority families sense that their kids' schools are failing to educate them, sometimes even to keep them safe. But much of America's vast middle class is smug about its suburban schools. Complacency is a potent reform retardant.
    
   Remedy: Make schools transparent institutions that pump out clear, reliable, prompt, comparable information about what they're doing and how well they and their students are performing.
    
2. More emphasis is placed on what goes into education than what comes out. Despite much talk about standards and results, the bulk of our reform efforts have focused on school inputs: more this or that poured into the system, more dollars, more teachers, more technology, more staff development, more homework - all this despite a conspicuous lack of evidence that pumping billions more into schools has yielded stronger results and notwithstanding plentiful research showing no clear link between a school's resources and its outcomes.
    
   Remedy: Schools should be strictly accountable for their results - whether their students are learning what they should - but not for complying with a thousand rules or running a hundred programs or spending their budgets in fifty prescribed ways.
    
3. Adult feet don't get held to the accountability fire. Even when we focus on results, there are few consequences for not producing them, at least not for the grown-ups in the education system. In the name of "accountability," many states and districts now come down hard on youngsters who don't meet standards or pass tests, but teachers and principals (and superintendents, board members and state officials) generally keep their jobs and suffer no great embarrassment, hardship or inconvenience. Indeed, it is still true in America that the likeliest policy response to a failing school is to send it more money.
    
   Remedy: A proper accountability system doesn't just crack down on non-performing kids (and reward those who meet standards). It confers suitable rewards and sanctions on everyone involved, especially the adults who work in schools.
    
4. Consumers lack clout. In the eternal struggle for control of key decisions, education's producers - the system's employees, managers and suppliers - hold far more power than do parents and students. Only well-to-do consumers, armed with the power of their own checkbooks, can navigate around bad schools and cartel-like arrangements for teacher training, curriculum and textbooks. Members of that cartel are superbly organized to cling to power and repel reform. Education's consumers, by contrast, are poorly represented in policy councils. School children employ no lobbyists.
    
   Remedy: Along with school competition on the "supply side" must come consumer choice on the "demand side." That will shift power from those who run schools to those who decide which schools to attend.
    
5. Weak competition encourages weak performance. Few public schools face competition - and few families have meaningful choices about where to educate their children. American K-12 education operates as a quasi-monopoly. We know that monopolies do badly at efficiency, productivity, and customer service. Though cracks in this one can be glimpsed - e.g. charter schools, the outsourcing of some troubled public schools to private managers - these are, as yet, tiny openings through which few can escape.
    
   Would-be teachers face a monopoly, too. The system's fear of competition and innovation leads it to deny entry into teaching by people without state certification (even as private schools hire whomever they like). Some states have "alternative" paths for teachers but the cartel is doing its best to give them the same hairpin turns as the regular path.
    
   Remedy: Encourage educators and policy makers to differentiate schools from one another, to cherish institutional diversity, to make schools compete for students (and resources) and to enable all sorts of well-educated people to enter the classroom without needless hurdles.
    
6. Too few of the best and brightest come work in schools. For a host of reasons, public education does not attract enough of our ablest people, much less our keenest entrepreneurs and innovators. Mediocre pay is one factor, but red tape and monopoly are at least as important - and they intersect with pay through such absurd practices as uniform salary schedules that don't distinguish between highly effective and terminally mediocre educators. Working for the school system more closely resembles a civil service job than one in the private sector. Not surprisingly, it tends to attract people with the drive and imagination of civil servants - and then gives them lifetime tenure at the age of twenty-five so that actual performance never again affects their job security. It's a wonder that we have as many dedicated, energized teachers and principals as we do.
    
   Remedy: Reconstruct the personnel system around different rewards and incentives, different assumptions about compensation and tenure, different arrangements for making decisions. Educators should be paid - and retained - according to the scarcity of their skills, the value they add to their pupils and the difficulty of the challenges they face in school. 
    
7. The education profession is awash in fads and bad ideas. It favors curricular and instructional strategies grounded in ideology and wishful thinking over those based on scientific proof. In the crucial area of reading instruction, for example, colleges of education continue to induct new teachers into "whole language" methods despite decades of evidence that phonics-based methods work better with most youngsters. Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch have brilliantly traced the profession's abiding affinity for "progressive," "child-centered" methods that accord with its beliefs even though they don't work very well for children. If physicians behaved similarly, hospitals would still feature leeches, incantations and mustard plasters.
     Remedy: Out with the snake oil. Only research-based practices should be tolerated in our classrooms - and only bona-fide scientific research should be tolerated by the leaders of this profession and those who run our schools.
    
8. Even Houdini couldn't escape the red tape. Public education's governance structures are uncommonly hard to alter, even to penetrate. Five levels of decision-making - federal and state governments, the local district, the individual school, and the teacher with her door closed - shape what happens in the classroom. Each can effectively block changes launched from another level. This system's innate response to any problem is to devise more regulations, impose more procedures and demand more resources. The only change it welcomes is more dollars.
    
   Remedy: Rethink public education's governance arrangements, with fewer layers of decision makers and clearer alignment of authority with responsibility. The federal government should trust states (while verifying their results); states should work directly with schools - which should also be accountable to their customers. The "local school system" as we know it is an anachronism.
    
9. Schools are expected to solve all of society's problems.  School occupies just nine percent of most children's lives. The other 91% is spent under the sway of family, peers, neighborhood, television, etc. Lots of academic skills and knowledge can be imparted during the schools' 9% if the 91% cooperates. But when the 91% pushes in other directions, 9% offers too little leverage to counteract it. And when society decides that the failings of the 91% must also be solved within the schools' jurisdiction - thus adding character education, drug education, sex education, tolerance education and whatnot to their curriculum - there is simply no way that this relatively weak system can produce all the desired results.
    
   Remedy: For kids who need it, expand the school's 9% to confer greater leverage in their lives, whether through pre-school, extended days, reconfigured years, or cyber-education that breaks through the school-home barrier. An education system that is expected to do more for its young charges needs more scope in which to do so.

It's no wonder our recent education reform efforts have accomplished so little. They're not nearly as powerful as the forces that resist them. Breaking through that resistance is the main work of serious education reformers in 2002 and over the next decade. While the needed breakthroughs are easily described, they're politically arduous to put into place. Some will say they're pipe dreams. Yet so long as these (or kindred) changes remain unmade, the education status quo will continue to prevail, our schools will remain unfixed and our children will continue to be poorly educated.

Will the new feeling of national unity in the aftermath of terrorist attacks set the stage for a turn away from multicultural education, which de-emphasizes the common American culture and teaches children to take pride in their own racial ethnic and national origins instead? In a short essay in the Brookings Review, Diane Ravitch describes how schools eschewed their traditional role of assimilating newcomers into the national melting pot and embraced multiculturalism in the 1960s and 1970s. She identifies some practical problems with teaching children to appreciate their racial and ethnic heritage in the public schools, including 1) it means that what is taught in school depends on who attends the school (and it's unclear what students in a mixed school will learn), and 2) public schools lose a sense of a distinctive American culture forged by people from different backgrounds. She concludes that neither assimilationism or multiculturalism is sufficient, and urges schools to avoid dividing children along racial and ethnic lines and instead give all children access to the best of America's heritage while honoring the strong and positive values that immigrants bring to America. "Diversity, Tragedy, and the Schools," by Diane Ravitch, Brookings Review, Winter 2002.

While the costs and benefits of annual tests were debated at great length last year, analysts of the new "No Child Left Behind" education legislation are getting more excited about an opportunity created by those tests: the ability to identify effective schools and teachers using annual test scores.  In a 9-page paper for the Lexington Institute, Robert Holland explains how statistical analysis of annual testing data can determine how much value teachers add to the learning of individual students.  In the paper, Holland traces the development of the value-added assessment system developed by Bill Sanders in Tennessee, provides an example of a teacher report from this assessment system for an individual teacher, and compares the Tennessee model with a different statistical model used in other districts. Once these techniques are honed, we will have a fair and objective system for identifying the most effective teachers and schools, which will bring much-needed praise to teachers and schools that do a superior job helping low achieving students, Holland writes.  "Indispensable Tests: How a Value-Added Approach to School Testing Cold Identify and Bolster Exceptional Teaching," by Robert Holland, Lexington Institute, December 2001. William J. Bennett and Chester E. Finn, Jr., make many of the same points in "Adding Value to Education," an op-ed that appeared in The Washington Times on December 20, 2001. (available for a fee at www.washingtontimes.com)