Amid Donald Trump’s campaign to dismantle the Department of Education, a recent report from one of its most respected agencies, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, revealed that more than a third of the nation’s students struggle to read after being in school for eight years. 

The finding was the latest sign of crisis in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools. There are many others. While high school grade point averages and graduation rates are climbing, the testing company ACT reports that only one in five high school graduates is prepared to pass introductory college courses—the lowest level in over a decade. Student absenteeism has skyrocketed; a quarter of California’s ninth graders were absent an average of 40 school days in 2023-24. A majority of those who do show up say they aren’t being challenged, according to a 2024 Gallup/Walton Family Foundation poll. 

But Republicans and Democrats have largely abandoned the hard work of improving the performance of the nation’s 100,000 charter and traditional public schools that educate 90 percent of America’s students. 

Beyond attacking the Education Department (and, in the process, sending a message that the nation devalues education) and opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools and colleges, Republicans have prioritized giving families taxpayers’ money to abandon public education. In the past four years, more than a dozen red states have passed laws allowing any student—regardless of need—to use public funding to subsidize their private, religious, or, in some cases, homeschool education. A lot of the money has gone to affluent families with kids already in private schools. Last year, these “universal” choice programs cost taxpayers $4 billion. The irony is that if the president wanted to help the less-well-educated, working-class voters who helped return him to office, he would also pursue public school reform since public schools are the only educational option in large swaths of Trump country. But that’s not the president’s plan. Expect the administration to back bills circulating in Congress to fund up to $10 billion in federal private school “scholarships” for families with incomes as high as $450,000. 

Democrats, meanwhile, have been largely silent on student achievement. Heavily influenced by the nation’s teacher unions, they rail against the “privatization” of education but back few steps to strengthen public schooling. Often, they reject the academic rigor that parents tell pollsters they want. In taking up the mantle of social justice, for example, many progressives have gone beyond reasonable demands that the breadth of the nation’s peoples and experiences be reflected in school curricula and that teachers be trained to avoid implicit biases, to arguing standards themselves are racist. In November, teacher unions spent $10 million on a successful ballot campaign to end statewide graduation exams, a cornerstone of Massachusetts’ education improvements over two decades. The president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association claimed that the tests mostly measured the impact of structural racism on students. 

Perversely, the flight from rigor has done the most damage to students that social justice advocates rightly want to help. The recent National Assessment report revealed that the achievement gap between the nation’s highest- and lowest-performing students has grown steadily for over a decade. Vanderbilt University researchers have found that high-achieving students from the wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. families are six times more likely to study advanced coursework than equally high-performing students from the poorest 20 percent. The education policy community has called for schools to return students to pre-pandemic achievement levels. But the challenge facing public education today is much greater than that. 

The days of sweeping national public school reform agendas from Washington, like the long-running campaign for standards, testing, and accountability under the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, are over. But there are proven state- and local-level reforms that would strengthen the academic foundations of the nation’s schools and potentially allow them to enjoy significant bipartisan support—even in today’s hyper-polarized environment. Together, they would give many more students a shot at achieving their potential in the classroom and beyond. Here are six: 

Turn the teaching profession into a rational labor market. Not surprisingly, teachers are the most significant in-school factors to students’ success. Yet public schools have traditionally pegged teachers’ pay to their college credits and years in the classroom rather than the demand for their skills and the quality of their work. As a result, thousands of schools lack qualified teachers in math, the sciences, and other key academic subjects because they can make more money in different fields. The pandemic pointed the way out of the problem when desperate school districts started paying bonuses and higher salaries to recruit and retain teachers in shortage fields—often with the approval of local teacher unions. 

Teach reading the right way. Nothing matters more to parents of young children than ensuring their kids can read. And reading is foundational to everything else in education. But U.S. schools have long used a second-rate method of teaching reading called “balanced literacy,” which has students memorize words or guess them based on context clues. States as different as Mississippi and Minnesota have introduced a proven model that combines the systematic teaching of sounds and letters with reading materials based on history, science, and other academic subjects. This strategy, based on the science of reading, pays dividends for students and is a winner with parents in both blue states and red. 

Rethink “gifted” education. The concentration of white and Asian students in advanced programs in U.S. public education has spawned a movement to dismantle gifted-and-talented programs, exam schools, and other advanced programs because they promote racial and economic segregation in public education. But a handful of states and school districts have pioneered a third way, a strategy that embraces both excellence and equity. They have preserved advanced programs but expanded the range of students who participate by creating more pathways into the programs and abandoning the scarcity mentality in advanced education that forces too many talented students to compete for too few seats. North Carolina law, for example, now requires that all high-scoring third graders receive advanced math coursework in fourth grade. Many reformers, including a former president of the National Association for Gifted Children, have abandoned the term “gifted,” signaling as it does that innate ability rather than hard work is the key ingredient of academic success—a notion that Asian nations with many high-achieving students roundly reject—while perpetuating long-debunked stereotypes that differences in educational performance are rooted in race, gender, and class. 

Expand tutoring in public education. Tutoring has long been a successful teaching strategy—think Socrates—and one that has mostly helped students from families with the resources to pay for it. The number of private tutoring centers, out of the financial reach of many families, more than tripled between 1997 and 2016, from roughly 3,000 to nearly 10,000. Then came Covid and the disruptions of school closures, hybrid instruction, and quarantines. Suddenly, tutoring programs were appearing in public schools nationwide, encouraged by new research showing substantial learning gains from high-quality tutoring and the billions of dollars in federal pandemic response funding pouring into state and local education agencies. The result was a significant increase in schools’ instructional horsepower. The challenge is sustaining the tutoring movement after federal COVID-19 aid. Why not make tutoring a part of teacher training? The feds could help pay the way for more college students and young adults to tutor through the AmeriCorps and work-study programs. This is another winning issue in both red and blue states. [See “Tutorize, Don’t Privatize, Public Schools” by Paul Glastris, Washington Monthly, January 5, 2025.] 

Bring communities into schools. The pandemic hammered home the reality that many students have mental and physical health needs and other challenges in their lives that undermine learning. Asthma has long been the single largest contributor to chronic student absenteeism rates that have skyrocketed in the wake of the Covid crisis. Linking schools more closely with local children’s hospitals, housing agencies, mental health clinics, food banks, and other community agencies would create a more coherent support ecosystem for students and build a stronger foundation for student achievement. Currently, many schools don’t even have full-time nurses. Teacher unions and their allies support the community school concept. Others contend that schools should stay in their lane and not concern themselves with the non-academic side of student success. It’s a nonsensical debate. Yes, schools should provide a rigorous education, and addressing students’ very real needs would help them do that. 

Expand school choice in public education. Republican proponents of giving families public money for private schooling have tapped into a vast reservoir of parental demand for more educational “freedom.” But expanding public school choice would generate far more choice and improvement-inducing competition than is possible by giving families public money to attend private schools. The best way to do that is to encourage the creation of more schooling options in both traditional school districts and the public charter sector and opening them up to parents by replacing traditional public school attendance zones with “common enrollment systems” that allow families to select charter and school district programs through a single application process. Public school enrollment has risen steadily in the District of Columbia since the city introduced the concept a decade ago. 

The troubling national decline in academic achievement has been accompanied by claims that schools have mistakenly prepared students for college at the expense of vocational education. More to the point is that millions of students lack the academic foundation needed to earn their way to living wages, regardless of the work they do. That’s the argument that policymakers should champion. We can’t have a strong workforce, social mobility, national cohesion, or even a functioning democracy without a populace that is far better educated than ours is today. 

The post Education Reforms that Can Strengthen the Nation’s Schools appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For most people, the lesson of pandemic schooling was that remote learning was an unmitigated disaster for America’s K–12 students, especially those from lower-income families. Learning loss at all ages was profound. Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled. The achievement gap that separates rich and poor kids widened. 

And the disaffection of that dark period is still with us: Parent satisfaction with education has plunged to a 23-year low. Donald Trump and other Republicans have sought to capitalize on the discontent by pushing for public funding of private schooling in the name of educational freedom.

But just as wars force governments to innovate—think of the GI Bill providing millions of returning World War II veterans with free college tuition—the damage done by the
COVID school shutdowns led to a grand federally funded experiment in education: a vast expansion of tutoring programs in public schools.

In March 2021, President Joe Biden signed the mammoth $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to help the nation recover from the pandemic. The bill earmarked $122 billion for the nation’s schools—the largest single investment of federal education funding in the nation’s history—through a program called Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER). States and school districts spent the windfall, and earlier ESSER monies, on laptops, sanitizing materials, HVAC systems, psychologists, summer school, new textbooks, and much more. But we estimate that $7.5 billion or more went to new tutoring programs. As many as 80 percent of U.S. school districts have launched or strengthened tutoring programs since the start of the pandemic, according to the federal School Pulse Panel, bringing tutoring to millions of low-income students for the first time. 

Three years later, the impressive results of this experiment are becoming clear. Schools that simply made online help available to students who sought it out saw poor results. But schools that implemented “high-impact” tutoring—where students work in small groups during the school day with the same tutor in 30-minute sessions three times a week over several months—have been strikingly successful. Those programs are producing an average of more than four months of additional learning in elementary literacy and nearly 10 months of additional learning in secondary school math, says Susanna Loeb, a Stanford education economist who leads a highly regarded tutoring research center. “The effects we see for high-impact tutoring are larger than what we see for most other education interventions, including class-size reduction, extended day, and technology support for students,” Loeb says. 

When Congress unanimously passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the GI Bill in 1944, it was out of fear that the vast numbers of returning veterans would swamp the U.S. labor market and drive up unemployment. Little did lawmakers know that funneling millions of veterans onto college campuses would create the foundation for a vast expansion of the American middle class. Similarly, when Biden and congressional Democrats funded the American Rescue Plan, they saw it as a temporary measure—the program is scheduled to wind down when the funding expires in September—to avert the worst effects of the pandemic on student learning. 

But now that the value of high-impact tutoring is emerging, policy makers on both sides of the aisle have begun to embrace the strategy. The Biden administration has proposed $8 billion in its fiscal 2025 budget for grants to states and school districts to support academic recovery through tutoring and other strategies. And governors in deep-blue New Jersey and Oregon and red-running Tennessee and Florida have pledged funding to continue tutoring once the federal relief ends. The support prompts the question of whether the nascent tutoring movement could be the foundation of a new, bipartisan campaign to improve the nation’s struggling public schools.

In a sense, it shouldn’t be surprising that high-quality tutoring is effective. Affluent families have long used it to help their kids. One measure of the demand for outside support: The number of private tutoring centers—charging an average of $300 a month and out of the financial reach of many families—more than tripled between 1997 and 2016, from roughly 3,000 to nearly 10,000.

Though students from modest backgrounds didn’t get a lot of tutoring before the pandemic, what they did get helped. A review of 89 tutoring studies between 1985 and 2020 by the researcher Andre Nickow of Northwestern University and colleagues found that the average elementary school student gained four additional months of learning with tutoring. Research led by the University of Chicago found that high-impact tutoring in Chicago public high schools doubled or tripled the amount of math the students were learning. And in 2015, a research review concluded that federally funded AmeriCorps tutors using high-quality methods were “effective in promoting academic achievement, especially at the early grades and for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.” But despite the encouraging results, the public education system provided tutoring to only a smattering of its 49 million students.

That changed after COVID closed the nation’s schools. By the time the pandemic was over, students in grades three through eight had lost the equivalent of half a year of learning in math and a third of a year in reading. The pandemic didn’t just cause learning loss because kids weren’t in school or were attending in remote or hybrid environments that didn’t facilitate learning as well as classrooms. It also widened the spectrum of student achievement so that when students came back into classrooms, teachers were faced with even larger differences between the highest- and lowest-performing students. Congress told school districts they had to use at least 20 percent of their share of the $122 billion in ESSER funds to reverse pandemic learning loss and gave them only three years to do so. In that environment, and with stellar research results piling up, tutoring became a watchword of the education world. New programs proliferated in public schools, and a variety of innovative tutoring models emerged.

Jackson Elementary School in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, is using one of them. The principal, Megan Phillips, calls the school “one of the poorest districts in maybe the poorest state in the country.” The big employer in the area is a state prison. Decades ago, the nonprofit Teach for America trained and placed Phillips at Jackson as a novice teacher. She’s been there ever since. When COVID struck, TFA asked Phillips whether she wanted her school to participate in the new national tutoring program they were launching, called Ignite Fellowship. The program would hire and train mostly undergraduate students to provide high-dosage virtual tutoring in reading or math, tapping into a huge reservoir of tutoring talent on college campuses. 

Phillips jumped at the chance. Soon, Jackson Elementary students in grades one through three were receiving sessions on reading fundamentals multiple times a week with their undergraduate tutors, who log in from around the country to work with the same two or three students for 10 weeks. So far, the work has paid substantial dividends. In the 2022–23 school year, Jackson Elementary saw a 56 percent increase in the number of students scoring “proficient” on their early literacy assessment. 

Meanwhile, TFA’s Ignite Fellowship program grew considerably thanks to the federal funding. Last year, more than 1,500 undergrads from 300 other colleges and universities tutored 3,500 elementary and middle school students across 100 schools in 21 states, making Ignite the nation’s largest tutoring program enlisting college students exclusively. Fifty-seven percent of the Ignite fellows were people of color, and, strikingly, 350 became public school teachers the following year.

Ector County Independent School District in oil-rich West Texas also tapped the ESSER funds, using a different model to bring tutoring to its largely Latino student population. It hired two vendors, Air Tutors and FEV Tutor, to provide remote tutoring via video links. Ector deploys a pioneering strategy called outcomes-based contracting: The district pays the providers more when students show academic growth—and less when they don’t—to incentivize results, saving public money when they fall short. The model has worked: Half the Ector students who scored below grade level on the previous year’s Texas state assessment and received at least 20 hours of tutoring climbed up to grade level, or higher, after only a year.

Great Oaks Charter School in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which primarily serves low-income students of color, tapped into another promising source of tutors: AmeriCorps members. Under the federal AmeriCorps program, some 36,000 people, many of them young adults, work at more than 9,000 schools up to 35 hours a week for a year in exchange for a stipend, health benefits, and a modest college scholarship. Great Oaks uses its nearly three dozen full-time fellows not just to help struggling students but also to assist with classroom instruction and head off the teacher shortages that plague public education.

Great Oaks designed its school day around tutoring, placing up to six fellows in each of the 304-student middle school’s English and math classes and doubling the duration of the periods. With the extra time, teachers first instruct the entire class, then tutors work with students in small groups during what’s called a workshop period, freeing up teachers to circulate and give extra help where it’s needed. As a result, students get much more individualized instruction than is possible in traditional classrooms. Great Oaks students who started the 2022–23 school year at the 25th percentile or below in math ended the year at the 43rd percentile, on average. And by supporting teachers in their classrooms—AmeriCorps tutors also prepare instructional materials, proctor exams, and grade assignments—and relieving them of many of the non-teaching duties that can make the profession so draining, the Great Oaks tutoring strategy keeps teachers teaching and sources new talent: Half the school’s teachers started as tutors.

While studies have found that a wide range of people can be effective tutors—retired teachers, stay-at-home-parents, and “professional” tutors hired by third-party vendors, among others—there’s evidence to suggest that enlisting college students might pay the biggest dividends. Fewer than 10 percent of the nation’s undergraduates could offer the small-group support at the heart of high-impact tutoring to 25 percent of the nation’s elementary students. The work also helps defray college costs and is far more meaningful than flipping burgers in the college cafeteria. The federal work study program provides a way to pay college students. And there’s evidence to suggest that college students who work as tutors are more inclined to enter the educator workforce. 

Not all of the new federal money is going toward well-designed tutoring programs. For example, many school districts, hoping to spread their federal pandemic funds as far as possible, purchased a low-cost online model that requires students to reach out for help, typically outside of the school day, rather than building tutoring into their school schedule the way Ector County, Great Oaks, and Ignite schools do. Few students, researchers found, reached out for help. 

But at least 10 percent of the nation’s 49 million public school students have received “high-impact” tutoring since the pandemic. At least six studies of the nascent tutoring movement have come out this year, and they found that high-impact programs yielded consistently strong results in their many permutations. In one instance, 800 Florida kindergarteners were randomly assigned to participate in a new model of reading tutoring that has students work with tutors for just 10 minutes at a time, several times a week. Almost 70 percent of tutored students reached the district’s kindergarten reading goal, compared with 32 percent of untutored students—and the program cost $375 per student.

Another innovative organization, Reading Futures, drew on dyslexia research to design a tutoring model for students with learning disabilities or those far behind in reading. In one school district testing the model, students made more than a year’s worth of reading progress in a semester. The intensive program is expensive, at $3,000 per student, but researchers reported that comparable dyslexia tutors charge upward of $5,000 annually. 

Could the early success of high-impact tutoring bring policy makers together for a renewed bipartisan push to improve America’s public schools? Such a movement has happened before. 

In the early 1980s, business leaders and governors of both parties—including two who would become president, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—joined forces to champion higher academic standards and government requirements to hold schools accountable for student results in the name of racial equity and economic competitiveness. The so-called standards movement spurred improvement. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal government’s gold standard measure of student achievement, reported increases in student achievement in reading and math from 1994 to 2012, especially for Black and Hispanic students. But over time, support for the movement collapsed. Teachers’ unions objected to their members’ job security being tied to test results. Middle-class parents balked at the proliferation of tests, which they felt routinized their kids’ classroom experiences. And conservatives opposed what they saw as heavy-handed mandates from Washington. In 2015, President Barack Obama signed legislation that largely gutted federal accountability regulations.

Like the standards movement in its earlier days, right now tutoring enjoys the support of governors from both parties. But unlike the standards reforms, the federal backing for tutoring isn’t highly prescriptive and doesn’t endanger educators’ jobs if achievement lags. Not only has this encouraged schools to innovate, it has also proved popular with teachers, who view tutoring as a boon to their work. It’s no accident that the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has endorsed the tutoring movement. Tutoring represents a rare point of convergence of a national policy priority, solid research evidence, and what educators on the ground need and want. 

And at about $1,500 per student per year, high-impact programs are a relative bargain, given their results. We estimate that it would cost about $15 billion a year to tutor 20 percent of the nation’s students intensively—double the estimated percentage of the public school population that has received high-impact tutoring since the start of the pandemic. That’s a fraction of public education’s $857 billion combined federal, state, and local spending.

But it’s still a lot of money. Will political leaders rally around the nascent tutoring movement as federal pandemic school aid winds down? It’s encouraging that a few states, both red and blue, are putting their own funds into tutoring programs, but it’s not enough to fully compensate for the loss of ESSER money in the fall. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has talked up tutoring, urging colleges and universities to target work study funding at tutoring and prompting school districts to tap the department’s $18 billion program for low-income students and other federal funding streams to pay tutors. There are several other ways, however, that the federal government could put more money into tutoring to replace ESSER funds. 

First, it could increase funding for AmeriCorps’s well-regarded and road-tested tutoring efforts. Second, it could expand the federal work study program to give more students job opportunities in tutoring. Both of those options would provide schools with an increased pool of low-cost, talented tutors. But both would be heavy lifts politically. Colleges jealously guard their work study slots as a source of cheap labor for their institutions. And House Republicans would zero out work study and halve the AmeriCorps budget if they had their way.

A third avenue would be simply to put more money directly into tutoring—in effect, extending the ESSER program, as the Biden administration’s $8 billion budget request would do. Legislation providing future federal funding for high-impact tutoring has been introduced in the House and Senate.

There is scant chance of Congress passing Biden’s proposal between now and November, a Democratic House education staffer told us. But election years are ripe for politicians running for office to advance new policy ideas—especially ones on issues that voters care about, like the quality of their children’s educations, and that have a strong track record of success. 

It’s time to get the word out.

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When Betsy DeVos’s term as education secretary ended in January, so did her crusade to expand federal funding for private school choice. She failed to achieve that goal but a provision in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 has quietly produced hundreds of millions of dollars in tax subsidies for private school tuition, according to data we’ve researched and collected for the first time. Devos claimed that the “biggest winners” of her failed private school scholarship plan would be “America’s forgotten children, who will finally have choices previously available only for the rich.” The 2017 measure, though, has primarily helped wealthier families pay for private and parochial schools.

The federal government established so-called 529 college savings plans in 1996 to help families cover college costs. (It’s named for Sec. 529 of the tax code.) They’re a bit like IRAs, except for education. Families invest in state-administered mutual funds (up to $30,000 a year for married couples), where their money grows tax-free. They then withdraw funds to pay college tuition and related expenses, again free of federal taxes on their capital gains. Depending on where the contributor lives they might earn an additional  state tax break.

The 2017 tax law dramatically extended the 529 program to elementary and secondary education, permitting families to use up to $10,000 in 529 funds per year per child to pay for private and parochial school tuition and related expenses. That’s a boon to wealthier families because they’re more likely to have the resources to invest in the expanded 529 plans, and thus more likely to reap the tax advantages of sending their children to private schools.

The provision was slipped into the 2017 bill late by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. The National Association of State Treasurers, which represents the state officials who administer 529 plans, was concerned that the provision was “just for rich people, people who can afford tuition,” Chris Hunter, the organization’s deputy director, told us.

Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia sponsor 529 plans. (Wyoming is the exception) Thirty-eight of them and D.C. have adopted the K-12 private school expansion so far. With the cost of some private schools rivaling that of the nation’s most expensive colleges (tuition and fees at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, for example, are over $70,000 this year), the windfall for the wealthy is spreading. Yes, the funds can be applied towards more reasonably priced institutions, such as parochial schools. But as with 529 withdrawals used for college this skews upward.

After the president signed the 2017 tax law, it’s no surprise that one commentator said “it would be financial malpractice for accountants and financial advisers not to be recommending to clients that they consider this kind of upfront investment” in their children’s private elementary and secondary education.

There were 14.8 million accounts with some $425 billion invested in 529 plans nationally at the end of 2020, Hunter of the National Association of State Treasurers reports, up from 13.8 million accounts valued at $311 billion at the end of 2018

Only Louisiana tracks K-12 and higher education 529 expenditures separately. There, families have withdrawn approximately $6 million for K-12 school expenses over three years. But by identifying 529 money withdrawn for beneficiaries age 17 or younger—the population mostly likely to be in elementary and secondary schools—the extent of the private school tuition tax break becomes clearer.

12 states shared with us that detailed information for the past three years and the numbers were striking: families cashed out $1.9 billion in private elementary and secondary school payments during that period, $562 million in 2018, $665 million in 2019, and $671 million in 2020.

Families in North Carolina’s plan redeemed $8.9 million for beneficiaries 17 or younger in 2020, up from $3.4 million in 2018. Withdrawals from the Maryland program rose from $44 million to $50 million during the same period. And Maine reported a whopping $320 million in withdrawals for beneficiaries 17 and under in 2020 alone.

Because a majority of 529 plans don’t require participating families to be state residents and don’t require participating students to attend in-state schools, the money from the 12 states in our analysis flowed to private schools throughout the country. Maine’s plan, for instance, is operated by the investment firm Merrill Lynch and offered to families nationwide.

Using modest estimates of market returns and the length of investments and scaling the $1.9 billion in 529 withdrawals for school expenses in the dozen states to create a national picture, the Cruz provision easily has generated hundreds of million dollars in tax breaks to date, according to Hunter. It’s still a fraction of post-secondary withdrawals but it seems likely to grow as more parents and guardians become aware of the benefits.

Late in 2019, President Trump signed the Secure Act, expanding 529 programs to cover apprenticeship costs and to pay off college loans, a move that extends 529 benefits to the working-class students who gravitate to apprenticeships and take on college debt. But the move is unlikely to help those students very much, because students who borrow to attend post-secondary programs are doing so because they lack the resources they would need to fund 529 accounts.

Ultimately, tax breaks on savings accounts whether for colleges or primary and secondary schools are a middle- and upper-class benefit. Recognizing that it’s not an effective way to help lower income students get an education is important to remember as pressure grows to raise the caps on contributions. They’re a way, as the saying goes, for the rich to get richer.

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There have been countless headlines about the American education system’s struggles to educate 50 million students under quarantine. But there’s another, troubling consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic for the nation’s students: the disruption of policymakers’ efforts to improve the financial plight of public-school teachers.

A raft of research leaves no doubt that quality teachers are the biggest contributor in schools to student success. As we learned from walkouts by tens of thousands of teachers in the past two years, educators are severely underpaid in much of the country.

Now, with states slashing education budgets because of the virus outbreak, teachers face even grimmer prospects. Teacher pay hikes have already been shelved in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee. Hawaii’s governor is proposing to cut teachers’ salaries by 20 percent. And the nation’s 3.3-million teachers are at risk of COVID-19 irreparably damaging the states’ already troubled teacher pension systems.

Unless policymakers act right away, the COVID-19 crisis will relegate the teaching profession in many parts of the country to near-subsistence status for years to come. And with one in every 100 Americans working as a public-school teacher, that could have devastating consequences for the nation’s economic recovery.

It cost roughly $740 billion to educate America’s 50 million public school students last year, the National Center for Education Statistics has found, including some $260 billion for teacher salaries (the average teacher salary was $62,760 in 2018). States and school districts put another $60 billion in teacher pension plans, on top of teachers’ own contributions, according to Boston College’s Public Plans Database.

The problem is that only about 30 percent of state and district retirement contributions pay the predicted cost of supporting retired teachers. The other 70 percent—$42 billion dollars a year—is spent backfilling massive shortfalls in the funds needed to pay all future promised pension benefits.

According to the Equable Institute, a non-profit research organization, those deficits—known as unfunded liabilities—skyrocketed from about $250 million in 2007, before the Great Recession, to more than $650 billion in 2018, as state pension boards, governors, and state legislators failed to enact pension reforms and kicked those obligations down the road to fund other priorities and balance state budgets.

The impact on education budgets has been striking. The share of state public school spending on teacher pensions rose from 7.5 percent nationally in 2001 to 9.3 percent in 2009, the height of the recession, according to a recently released Equable study. By 2018, however, pension spending consumed 14.4 percent of state education spending—even as policymakers in many states cut future retirement benefits. That’s billions of additional dollars locked up in pension payments.

Teachers have paid a heavy price. Robert Costrell of the University of Arkansas has calculated that the nation’s school districts spent an average of $1,312 per student for teacher retirement benefits in 2018, up from $530 in 2004, an increase of some $39 billion or nearly $12,000 per teacher. If that money went into teacher salaries, the average U.S. teacher’s pay would increase by nearly 20 percent.

Disconcertingly, only about 20 percent of teachers stay in their jobs long enough to receive their full pension benefits. Roughly half of teachers will leave before they vest, the point at which they are entitled to their employers’ contribution to their retirement benefits. In 16 states, teachers don’t vest until they’ve spent a decade in the classroom.

Pension-less attrition hurts teachers of color disproportionately, since they tend to work in more challenging settings with higher teacher turnover rates. The problem is compounded by the fact that nearly 40 percent of public-school teachers are not enrolled in social security because their state or school district did not choose to participate in the federal system

The good news is there are steps states could take now to avoid the same mistakes they made after the Great Recession. These moves would leave teacher pension systems in better shape when the economy rebounds, and eventually could put more money in teachers’ pockets.

The first is to adopt more reasonable assumptions about future investment returns. States like New York and South Dakota have largely avoided shortfalls that way. South Dakota assumes a 6.5 percent return on pension investments, well below the national average of 7.2 percent. Predicted returns of between five and six percent would be even more prudent in today’s turbulent economy. The more realistic states are about investment returns, the less likely they are to miss their revenue targets and put pension systems deeper in debt.

States would also help themselves by recognizing that the current workforce is more mobile and that teachers are less likely to stay in education, much less start and finish their careers in a single state’s classrooms. South Dakota provides a high degree of pension portability, permitting teachers to take a large portion of their employers’ contributions with them if they move out of state, keeping teachers on a path to retirement security. Michigan addresses the portability problem by giving teachers the option of putting retirement money in a professionally managed, 401(k)-style personal retirement account.

Ultimately, it’s going to take a lot of cash to pay down the states’ $650 billion in teacher pension legacy liabilities, money that’s going to be hard to come by in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Still, states’ failure to enact reforms in the aftermath of the 2007-08 economic crisis more than doubled the unfunded liabilities in teacher pension systems, helping put the profession in the parlous position it’s in today. The states owe it to the nation’s teachers—and their students—to do better this time.

The post Will the Pandemic Cost Teachers Their Pensions? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Eric Christopher is the kind of young, gifted, committed teacher that any principal would want to hire. A straight-A student from a public high school on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he gave up a chance for an Ivy League education to take care of his sick mother and attend nearby Washington College, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 2006. He spent the next seven years at a public elementary school near his hometown, teaching the Spanish-speaking children of agricultural and poultry workers while earning a master’s degree in bilingual education. But opportunities to advance were mostly based on teacher seniority, the pay was low, and he was eager for a fresh challenge in a new environment. So, in 2013, he moved to the big city—Washington, D.C.

The nation’s capital had become something of a magnet for well-educated, idealistic young teachers like Christopher, many of them drawn to the rapidly expanding network of public charter schools. Some 43 percent of D.C. students were enrolled in charters in 2013, up from less than 15 percent a decade earlier. Many of these schools, with names like DC Prep, KIPP DC, and Achievement Prep, were earning attention for their innovative strategies and strong results. Foundations heaped money onto them, and the young talent entering teaching through prestigious pipelines like Teach for America were keen to work in the schools.

After moving to Washington, Christopher quickly got hired at one of the city’s oldest and largest charter schools, the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy. But not long after he started, reports surfaced that would lead to the indictment of the school’s founder for embezzlement. (The school has since reopened as a non-charter public school.) Christopher found himself planning his departure from Height only a year after arriving.

After that discouraging experience at a public charter, Christopher decided to check out openings in the city’s traditional schools, run by the District of Columbia Public Schools system. To say that DCPS had a poor reputation would be an understatement—the national media had long labeled it one of the worst school districts in the nation. But as Christopher spent time on the DCPS website, he saw opportunities for high-performing teachers to become instructional coaches—just what he was looking for.

He applied, and was surprised by the rigor of the hiring process—much tougher than what he had experienced in previous teaching jobs. He was judged on a video of his teaching, his analysis of another teacher’s instruction, a written test on teaching strategies, and multiple rounds of interviews with central office staff. Once he had run that gauntlet, his name was posted to a central candidate bank where principals, who had the final say in staffing their schools, could choose to follow up.

Several did, but one in particular impressed Christopher. His name was Eric Bethel, principal of Turner Elementary School, located in one of the city’s poorest southeastern neighborhoods, seven miles and a world away from the White House.

It was a hot Friday afternoon in late August when Christopher, who has the close-cropped hair and slight build of a long-distance runner, arrived at the school for his interview. He was sweating in a suit and tie. Bethel, wearing a Turner T-shirt over a dress shirt and suit pants, and the assistant principal, Lisa Rosado, put him at ease with a warm welcome. Bethel asked about Christopher’s background, teaching philosophy, and experience working with impoverished students. It quickly became clear to Christopher that Bethel was as serious as he was sociable—“clearly a man on a mission,” he would later recall. Bethel, then thirty-seven years old and new to Turner, was open about the school’s difficulties. Ninety-seven percent of its students were black, and 88 percent received public assistance. Test scores were among the lowest in the district. But Bethel expressed infectious excitement about assembling a new team of teachers and his commitment to working closely with them to turn the school around.

Bethel was equally impressed with Christopher, especially his commitment to the school’s mission. “This is really tough work,” Bethel would later say. “If you’re not driven by a sense of social justice, you’re not going to last.” At the end of the ninety-minute meeting, he told the candidate to let him know if he heard from other schools. Not taking any chances, he emailed Christopher an offer early Sunday morning. Christopher accepted.

Turner used to be the type of school where many teachers ended up because they couldn’t get jobs elsewhere. But after three years there, Christopher, now thirty-two, has no regrets. During two long Saturday-morning conversations at a high-end coffee shop in an up-and-coming neighborhood near Nationals Park, he explained why he loves his work. Today, he said, there is a “strong sense of professionalism, a sense that we’re a team.” Thanks to his own strong performance over two years as a teacher and instructional coach, Christopher is earning $127,000, more than double what he was making on the Eastern Shore.

After decades of dismal academic results, Turner has begun to change the educational equation in its classrooms. The percentage of students reading at or above grade level has risen from 23 percent in early 2014–15 to 60 percent today. Suspensions are down from 13 percent of the student body to 5 percent. And despite intense competition from charter schools, its enrollment is up 32 percent since Bethel’s arrival, to 520 students.

Turner’s nascent resurgence reflects progress in the DCPS system as a whole. Daily attendance has reached 90 percent, up from 85 percent in 2010–11. Chronic truancy is down by nearly 40 percent over the past four years. Graduation rates have climbed to 69 percent, the highest in the city’s history.

And student achievement has begun a long climb toward respectability. While Washington’s test scores have traditionally been among the lowest in the nation, the percentage of fourth graders achieving math proficiency has more than doubled on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the past decade, as have the percentages of eighth graders proficient in math and fourth graders proficient in reading. Scores have risen even after accounting for an influx of wealthier students. And DCPS has caught up to the middle of the pack of other urban school districts at the fourth-grade level on the national exams.

In addition, the school system’s strongest teachers are no longer leaving in droves for charter schools. In many cases, the flow has been reversed, leaving even Washington’s most prominent charters struggling to compete for talent.

When most people think of school reform in the District of Columbia, they probably remember the Time magazine cover photo of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee with a broom in her hand and a hard look on her face. In leading the school system from 2007 to 2010, she was the polarizing public image of a controversial national strategy to improve public education by cracking down on bad teachers. But in the seven years since Rhee left Washington—and with the national press having turned its attention elsewhere—Rhee’s successors have quietly but persistently continued to pursue change. Teaching in D.C., and in public education generally, had long been a low-status occupation marked by weak standards and factory-like work rules. Building on Rhee’s early work, and learning from her mistakes, her successors have effectively transformed it into a performance-based profession that provides recognition, responsibility, collegiality, support, and significant compensation—features that policy experts, including many of Rhee’s harshest critics, have long sought but never fully achieved.

Ironically, Rhee’s successors at DCPS have redesigned teaching through some of the very policies that teachers’ unions and other Rhee adversaries opposed most strongly: comprehensive teacher evaluations, the abandonment of seniority-based staffing, and performance-based promotions and compensation. They combined these with other changes, like more collaboration among teachers, that these same critics had backed. Just as notably, the transformation is taking place not at charters but in the traditional public school system, an institution that many reformers have written off as too hidebound to innovate.

The story about D.C.’s teacher reform efforts since Michelle Rhee’s departure has gone untold until now. One reason is that her successors have sought to escape the media glare of the Rhee era; they haven’t presented the press with natural protagonists. Another is that amid the trench warfare that the school reform debate has settled into in recent years, with the liberal-left and unions rallying around traditional schools, and moderates and conservatives supporting charter schools, neither side has had an interest in promoting the story.

But in the course of research I have been doing on teacher reform nationwide, I have followed DCPS’s evolving human capital system, interviewing senior school system officials and watching reforms play out in Washington schools. What I’ve found is a story that confounds the traditional battle lines in public education, and gives each side in the school reform war reason both to cheer and to rethink its assumptions.

Eric Bethel knows firsthand what the District’s school system was like before the era of reform. His parents, D.C. natives and part of the city’s accomplished black middle class, were public school teachers before and after his father served two decades in the U.S. Army, eventually as a captain in the 82nd Airborne Division. They moved back to Washington for Bethel’s high school years, and after graduating from a local Catholic school, playing point guard for Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, and earning a master’s degree, Bethel decided to follow the family tradition and apply for a teaching job in the D.C. area.

He was hired at Marie Reed Elementary School, part of DCPS, after a ten-minute interview at a folding table in the school gym. “Back then, if you had a pulse, you got a job,” he told me during one of several visits I made to Turner this year. On his first day, his colleagues walked out of a staff meeting, with the principal in midsentence, at exactly 3:30, the union-negotiated end of the teachers’ school day.

Bethel’s early experiences were emblematic of DCPS’s myriad failings. The patronage-plagued central office couldn’t calculate daily attendance, much less educate students. New hires often didn’t get paid for months. New textbooks gathered dust in warehouses while there weren’t enough to go around in classrooms. Elementary schools mostly didn’t teach art or music. High school electives were rare. And the system was hemorrhaging students to charter schools.

Low pay made it hard for D.C. teachers to live in the city and forced many to take second jobs. When Bethel sought to take advantage of a federal home subsidy program called Teacher Next Door, he tried repeatedly to get documentation from the school system’s central office to verify his teaching status. It never arrived.

In the absence of a common curriculum and citywide teaching standards, instruction in many classrooms was a steady diet of work sheets and other drudgery. “You were never sure what, or how, you should teach,” Bethel said.

Bethel had been at Marie Reed for seven years when Washington’s thirty-six-year-old mayor, Adrian Fenty, named Michelle Rhee chancellor, the day after a desperate city council shifted control of the school system from an elected school board to the mayor’s office. Rhee was the seventh chancellor in a decade. Many commentators characterized her as a tough-talking but inexperienced outsider, an ingénue with an attitude. In truth, she had been working closely with D.C. school officials for nearly a decade as the founder of the New Teacher Project (now TNTP), a national organization conceived by Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp to help urban school systems recruit more talented teachers by skirting the traditional education school pipeline. It was Kopp who recommended Rhee to Fenty. To Rhee, higher-quality teachers were key to exploding the notion that poor kids couldn’t learn—to proving, in her words, that “demography is not destiny.”

She realized that she first had to get a clearer sense of the talent in the city’s classrooms. While upward of 90 percent of Washington’s students were performing below grade level the year before Rhee arrived, 95 percent of the city’s teachers had earned “satisfactory” ratings. Rhee quickly resolved to build a new evaluation system that made performance matter.

Kaya Henderson, who had been Teach for America’s D.C. director and then managed Rhee’s New Teacher Project work in the city, supervised the project as the new chancellor’s chief of human capital. She worked with Jason Kamras, a Princeton graduate who had arrived in Washington a decade earlier through Teach for America and stayed, becoming the national Teacher of the Year in 2005–06.

At the beginning of the 2009–10 school year, Henderson and Kamras launched the most comprehensive teacher measurement system ever implemented in public education. It set citywide teaching standards for the first time ever. In the past, principals would spend a few minutes in teachers’ classrooms every year, looking mostly for quiet students and clean blackboards. Under the new system, every teacher would be observed five times a year—three times by the administrators in their schools and twice by “master educators” from the central office who would provide an independent check on principals’ ratings. Teachers would be gauged on their “commitment to the school community,” such as their contributions to school priorities like lowering suspension rates, and on student performance on nonstandardized assessments, like science projects, known as “student learning objectives.” Principals could dock teachers for chronic absenteeism and other failures of “core professionalism.”

But Henderson also wanted teachers to be measured on their students’ standardized test scores, to send a clear signal that performance mattered. Strategies for fairly comparing teachers with students of varying backgrounds were both complex and imperfect. Undeterred, Henderson ordered that student test scores make up 50 percent of teachers’ ratings if they taught tested subjects and grades. That turned out to be only 15 percent of the school system’s teaching force, but the move stoked anxiety and resentment throughout the city’s teaching ranks.

Rhee’s team deepened teachers’ angst by not piloting the new teacher evaluation system—dubbed IMPACT—despite the fact that many principals weren’t sufficiently trained to use it and that teachers in some schools weren’t briefed on IMPACT until after the school year started. The need for the new system was too great to delay, Henderson argued. Suddenly, teachers were confronted by a new, untested evaluation strategy they barely grasped, with their livelihoods on the line.

Bethel saw the drama play out at Marie Reed. “People were panicked about losing their jobs,” he said. “Everyone thought IMPACT was aimed at getting rid of veterans.” Later, he would spend two years rating teachers as a master educator, often taking part in difficult conversations with teachers distraught at the performance reviews he gave them.

But Bethel supported IMPACT. “I liked the new teaching standards that were a part of the new system,” he said. “And I was tired of looking down the hall at Mr. Johnson teaching work sheets five days a week to his fourth-grade class, knowing that I would have to catch them up the next year in my class.” He was among the 663 of Washington’s 4,195 teachers rated “highly effective” when IMPACT’s first scores were released in July 2010. Seventy-five teachers were labeled “ineffective” and received termination letters with their scores.

The firings brought opposition to Rhee to a boil. Early on, she had gotten rid of dozens of untenured teachers for sleeping in class and other misbehavior. She had removed 250 teachers and 500 teacher’s aides for lacking proper teaching credentials. Within weeks of rolling out IMPACT, she had announced that budget cuts required her to lay off another 266 teachers. She had fired a quarter of the city’s principals, including the one at her daughters’ school; she even showed one principal the door in front of a PBS camera. She had announced the closing of twenty-three under-enrolled schools without telling anyone at the schools ahead of time. And she had declared in a speech at the National Press Club that consensus building and compromise were “totally overrated.”

Now, she was firing veteran teachers for ineffective teaching—something that had virtually never happened in public education. The nation’s teachers’ unions deployed every ounce of their considerable influence against her. The story became a cable news staple. Rhee was so controversial that the Gates Foundation refused to include D.C. in a $500 million national study to measure teaching effectiveness.

Ultimately, she cost Adrian Fenty, her patron, his political career.

Rhee was firing Washington’s predominantly black educators during the height of one of the worst recessions in the nation’s history. The city’s majority black voters held Fenty, himself black, directly responsible. He lost the September 2010 Democratic primary in a landslide. With a primary victory tantamount to election in the overwhelmingly Democratic city, Rhee resigned in October—but not before another magazine cover, this time Newsweek’s, trumpeted her plans to launch a $100 million anti–teachers’ union lobbying organization called StudentsFirst.

Even in defeat, Rhee couldn’t shake controversy. In March 2011, USA Today ran a front-page story headlined “When Standardized Test Scores Soared in D.C., Were the Gains Real?,” an examination of suspected Rhee-era cheating. The problem turned out to be concentrated in a few schools, and investigations found no evidence of widespread cheating. But the incident cemented the conventional wisdom that teacher reform in Washington was mostly about test scores, and mostly misguided.

In the wake of Rhee’s departure and the controversy that enveloped her, the school system worked hard to stay out of the spotlight that Rhee had welcomed. Kaya Henderson, Rhee’s successor, would largely refuse to talk to the national media at the outset of her nearly six-year tenure as chancellor, which ended last September.

But rather than abandon her predecessor’s commitment to teacher reform, Henderson doubled down. She was smoother around the edges than Rhee, but just as driven. She had spent her early years in public housing just north of the Bronx as the only child of a single mother who was a public educator by day and a postal worker by night. After attending public and parochial schools, she went on to Georgetown University and then back to the Bronx to teach. School reform was personal for her.

[media-credit name=”Pete Marovich” align=”alignright” width=”415″][/media-credit]

Before becoming chancellor, she had led bruising negotiations with the teachers’ union on a new contract that ended a wide range of industrial-era employment practices. In exchange for a 22 percent salary hike for many teachers, the new deal, inked months before Rhee departed, stripped senior teachers’ right to claim vacancies; made performance, rather than seniority, the key factor in layoffs; and effectively ended teacher tenure.

It also scrapped public education’s sacrosanct “single salary schedule”—paying teachers strictly on the basis of their academic credentials and longevity in the classroom—in favor of performance pay. “Minimally effective” teachers would be frozen on the salary scale. But their “highly effective” counterparts would qualify for bonuses and permanent hikes that lifted Washington’s top teachers’ salaries from $87,000 to $132,000.

With the new teacher evaluation system and financial incentives in place, Henderson and her team launched projects to recruit and retain high-caliber teachers, like Eric Christopher, who in the past had mostly shunned the troubled urban school system. It wouldn’t help much to fire bad teachers if they couldn’t replace them with better ones.

Under the leadership of a young Stanford graduate and Rhodes Scholar on Kamras’s team named Scott Thompson, they constructed a “career ladder” based on experience and performance that would provide teachers a range of new opportunities, and higher pay, as they moved up. The important and lucrative work of teaching summer school, for example, would go to the city’s best teachers, rather than merely to the most senior ones.

Henderson revamped teacher recruitment, pouring people and money into marketing D.C. schools to 15,000 urban traditional and charter public school teachers in the Washington region and nationally—a move that prompted local charter school leaders to complain to Henderson and to take their teachers’ email addresses off
their websites.

Meanwhile, the IMPACT system was producing vast amounts of previously unavailable data. For example, Henderson and Jason Kamras, her successor as chief of human capital, learned from studying the ratings that teachers hired by May were 20 percent more effective than those hired in August. So they pressed principals to push up their hiring timelines. University of Michigan researchers discovered that teachers hired under the new, centralized teacher-screening system, called TeachDC, produced sharply higher IMPACT scores than those recruited by principals directly. Henderson and Kamras began marketing TeachDC heavily to principals.

The moves made a difference. Today, three times as many recruits are under contract by the end of the previous school year, more new hires have previous teaching experience, and university research has found that replacements for low-rated teachers produced four or five months’ worth of additional student learning in math and nearly as much in reading over three school years.

Henderson and Kamras worked just as hard to keep top talent from leaving. Beyond the better pay and the career ladder, they made changes to IMPACT to get more teacher buy-in, including reducing the influence of student test scores on teacher ratings. They revamped the central office to better support teachers. They also established the Teacher Retention Team, which feted high performers with personalized thank-you notes, leadership opportunities, membership in the Chancellor’s Teacher Cabinet, and an annual black-tie event at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts complete with Grammy-winning entertainers and a rooftop dinner for 2,000.

The retention strategies paid off. While charter schools and surrounding suburbs once poached Washington talent with impunity, the city last year lost only 6 percent of its top-rated educators, even as “highly effective” teachers grew to 37 percent of the teaching force. That contrasted sharply with the 49 percent attrition rate among teachers rated “minimally effective,” who made up 4 percent of the force.

Even as Henderson and Kamras upgraded their talent pool, they realized that they couldn’t produce the student improvement they wanted with pink slips and thank-you notes alone; they had to ratchet up the performance of the entire teaching force. Brian Pick, another Princeton graduate and TFA veteran in the DCPS central office, worked with dozens of the city’s highest-performing teachers to craft entirely new reading, math, and writing curricula based on the demanding Common Core State Standards. After watching teachers struggle to deliver the new subject matter effectively, Pick’s team created sample lessons for every subject at every grade level to give teachers models, again with the help of the school system’s leading teachers.

Last summer, Henderson and Kamras went further, assigning teachers to learning teams in every school to deliver a comprehensive new teacher-training curriculum. These “LEAP” teams—short for “Learning Together to Advance our Practice”—are weekly ninety-minute sessions, led by subject-matter expert teachers and administrators, in which faculty work together to hone their teaching techniques, deepen their subject-matter knowledge, and review student work and school data. The sessions are followed up with weekly informal observations in every classroom, giving teachers regular feedback without the high stakes attached to IMPACT. It’s the kind of collaboration and support that many public school teachers, isolated in their classrooms, have long asked for but rarely gotten. As Turner reading teacher and seventeen-year DCPS veteran Ericka Logan put it, “Now it feels like people care about our work.”

Henderson and her team also worked to produce stronger school leaders, because research showed that lousy principals were a big reason why top teachers departed. In 2013, Eric Bethel, after his two-year tour as an
IMPACT master educator, became one of the first trainees in the school system’s new eighteen-month principal apprenticeship program, serving in two elementary schools before taking over Turner Elementary.

Turner is a standard-issue-looking public elementary school dating to the Truman administration—a rectangular, three-story redbrick building with a small gym and a cafeteria that doubles as an auditorium. Its classrooms are bright and stocked with attractive new furniture; the gym floor shines, thanks to a renovation the year before Bethel arrived. The din of young children at play rises during recess from brightly colored playground equipment, a basketball court, and an adjacent sports field.

It could be any school in the country, except for the fact that it is surrounded by often-troubled housing projects. Some of the aging, low-slung redbrick housing units have been replaced in recent years by suburban-like townhouses with a vaguely Tudor look. But as Bethel told me on one of the days I visited, “They look a lot better than what’s going on inside of them.” One day in March, as students were leaving at the end of the day, two men in a BMW were raked by automatic-weapon fire five blocks from Turner and crashed their car just outside the school’s entrance. One of the men died.

I sat with Bethel in his office near the end of a school day just before Thanksgiving, talking about a veteran teacher who had vowed that Bethel would burn in hell for giving her a low IMPACT rating during his two years working out of the DCPS central office as a teacher-evaluator. “It was tough work,” he told me, as his walkie-
talkie crackled. “Especially when teachers are working hard but just aren’t effective.” Two big picture windows opened onto the playground, with bands of the city’s townhouses visible in the middle distance. There was a picture of Bethel’s wife and four-year-old son on his desk; on a bulletin board hung a note from a second grader addressed to “the best principle ever.”

When the bell rang sounding dismissal at the end of the day, we walked into the hallway as orderly rows of young students in blue or white polo shirts and khaki pants moved down either side of the hallway, backpacks bulging behind them. Just under six feet tall and dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and pale blue tie, Bethel put his arm around students who paused to say goodbye, addressing them by their names and wishing them a good day in a calm, caring voice.

As students filed past the front security desk to parents and guardians waiting outside, many other adults were entering the building headed in the opposite direction. They were there for the school’s monthly food bank. I watched some 300 students, more than half the school’s enrollment, along with relatives, many of them grandparents pushing strollers, snake through Turner’s gym, filling brightly colored shopping bags with fruit, vegetables, and other basics supplied by a local nonprofit, as City Year volunteers dressed as giant fruit serenaded the kids.

While the food bank was concluding, Bethel and a team of Turner’s math teachers were gathering for an after-school LEAP session around a modern, maple-veneer table in the school’s “professional development room,” a converted second-floor classroom. Assistant principal Rosado, Eric Christopher, and other teacher leaders were also at the table. The school’s latest math results were projected on an interactive whiteboard behind them.

Bethel, pitched forward in his seat with his elbows on the table, jumped into a review of spreadsheets that showed a lot more red, for students below grade level, than green, for those at grade level. The new results were from tests used to help with instruction rather than rate teachers under IMPACT. But Bethel stressed that the interim scores were highly correlated with the city’s new standardized exams and urged the teachers to track their students’ results closely.

“We’ve got to do better with ST Math,” he told the teachers at one point, concerned that the self-paced instructional software that supplements teachers’ instruction was underused. Simple things like logging young children on to their computers proved challenging and cut into instructional time, the teachers responded.

After more discussion of the new results, Bethel turned the meeting over to instructional coach Jessica Johnson, who led a LEAP seminar on the most productive ways of having students do math problems in class. Johnson started by talking about ways to ensure that students grasp what’s being asked of them in word problems. “Ask students to read the question aloud together,” she suggested. “Or have them turn and talk about the problem with the person next to them. Other ideas? Yes, Ms. Gilbeaux?”

“Manipulatives and other visual aids are often helpful,” Janeé Gilbeaux, a second-grade teacher, offered.

“Scaffolding is key,” added Bethel, who had been tracking Johnson’s presentation closely. “You have to make sure students understand what the problem is asking of them and keep adding more levels of explanation until they get it.”

The session continued in this vein—Johnson presenting information followed by a back-and-forth conversation about the nuts and bolts of educating young math students—for two and a half hours. By the time the meeting ended, it was nearly six p.m. and dark outside. As the teachers made their way to the parking lot, it was hard not to be struck by the difference between the culture at Turner and the one that, years ago, had led Bethel’s colleagues to walk out on their principal at precisely 3:30.

There’s no doubt that the school reform stars aligned in Washington over the past decade. There was a rare infusion of talent in the central office; stable leadership enabled by mayoral control of city schools; freedom from key collective bargaining obstacles; and substantial funding, first from grants, then from savings from improvements in the city’s special education system.

By no means is every Washington teacher happy with the reforms and a handful of DCPS schools struggle with teachers leaving during the school year. Teaching in neighborhoods like Turner’s is stressful; Turner’s teacher absenteeism rate is higher than Bethel would like, and a handful of DCPS schools struggle with teachers leaving during the school year. Some principals have been less fully committed to the reforms than Bethel has. The quality of the implementation of the new LEAP initiative has varied from school to school, according to Bridget Hamre, a University of Virginia researcher who is studying the effort.

And despite academic gains, the school system still has a very long way to go. Achievement levels among Hispanic and black students, who make up 82 percent of enrollment, lag badly behind their white peers. Only 15 percent of black students scored “proficient” in reading last year on Washington’s new, more demanding, Common Core–aligned exams, compared to 74 percent of white students.

Still, the transformation of the teaching profession in the nation’s capital has demonstrated that traditional public school systems, not just charter schools, can be laboratories of innovation. And the reforms that the school system’s detractors have opposed most strongly have been central to the transformation. Creating the opportunities to advance within the profession, the substantial compensation incentives, and the culture of collegiality and continuous improvement that LEAP provides would have been next to impossible without abandoning seniority-based staffing, without performance-based pay and a career ladder, and, ultimately, without knowing who is doing a good job in the city’s classrooms and who isn’t.

Henderson, Kamras, and their colleagues have proved that it’s possible to attract talented teachers to the nation’s urban school systems and get them to stay. Teaching can be turned into attractive work with career opportunities, professional support, and substantial pay. No school system can simply wave a wand and overcome the impact of poverty on the students it serves. But by overhauling its teaching corps and teachers’ daily lives in schools, DCPS has given its students a far better chance than they had before. And it has created an important reform blueprint for other leaders to follow.

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Barack Obama has not been shy about exercising federal power over the states, in areas ranging from health care to the environment. That’s been especially true in elementary and secondary education, where Washington spent $42 billion last year. Obama has leveraged federal school aid to promote higher standards, school choice, better tests, and more meaningful measures of teacher performance. When a paralyzed Congress couldn’t make needed fixes to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), he used a regulatory strategy to let states out from under the law’s most troublesome provisions in exchange for commitments to the same reforms.

But just before the December holidays, in a White House ceremony, there he was, like a captive in a hostage video, talking about the importance of “empowering states and school districts to develop their own strategies for improvement.” With that, flanked by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, he signed a new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced the NCLB and put the direction of the nation’s 100,000 public schools and the welfare of fifty million students squarely in the hands of the states and the nation’s 13,500 local school systems—effectively allowing them to do as little as they please to improve educational quality.

What brought the president to that moment was an unholy alliance of powerful political forces on the left and the right. One is the Tea Party, the right-wing coalition that has subjected the Common Core State Standards, the latest in three decades of attempts to ratchet up academic rigor, to all manner of conspiracy theories as part of its anti-Washington crusade. Ironically, a primary author of the new federal education law, Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, was George W. Bush’s education secretary and a leading proponent of using federal influence to demand accountability from states and school districts. But, capitulating to the rightward drift of his party, when he took over as chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee last year Alexander set about drafting the new federal education law with conservative colleagues including Indiana Republican Todd Rokita, a Tea Party favorite and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education. The federal government was “overreaching” in education, they argued, usurping authority over the direction of the nation’s $640 billion public education system that rightly belonged with state governments and local school boards. “Federalism is the point of our bill,” Rokita told me last year. “It restores local control in education.”

But Obama would not likely have put his pen to the new law if many of his Democratic colleagues in Congress hadn’t voted with Republicans and abandoned their previous insistence that the federal government be able to require states and localities to do right by students. But they did get on board, and for one main reason: teachers’ unions. Eager to end the Bush/Obama-era focus on school and teacher accountability and the probing light it cast on the performance of their members, the national teachers’ unions—the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—inundated congressional Democrats and the White House with protests against “blaming and shaming” teachers, targeting the use of student test scores in teacher ratings as a way of discrediting school and teacher accountability en masse. They poured money into surrogate organizations like Fair Test to amplify their attacks against more-rigorous testing and encouraged parents to opt their children out of public school standardized testing (a campaign led, ironically, by the kinds of suburban white families who don’t think anything of spending thousands of dollars for hours of private tutoring to ready their students for college admissions tests). By the NEA’s own calculations, it sent 255,000 emails to Capitol Hill, made 23,500 phone calls, had 2,300 face-to-face meetings with lawmakers and their aides, and spent $500,000 on advocacy advertising in key Senate congressional districts on behalf of the NCLB rewrite.

Nor did the Clinton campaign attempt to talk Obama out of signing the new law. Though both Bill and Hillary Clinton have supported higher standards and accountability in education, the teachers’ unions have been pouring people and money into her presidential bid. And the passage of the new federal education law deprives Clinton’s Republican opponents of an anti-Washington stalking horse and allows her to narrow her education focus to preschool instruction and college affordability, two middle-class educational priorities.

What’s most troublesome is that federal demands for standards- and accountability-based reforms, though far from perfect, seemed to have made a difference. Since the NCLB’s signing in 2002, scores for black and Latino students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the gold standard of national yardsticks, have risen, as they have for white students. And arguments from teachers’ unions and many middle-class parents that students are being subjected to excessive testing because of federal accountability rules have turned out not to be true, at least in comparison to other countries. A recent study of the educational practices of seventy developed nations by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris found that the U.S. ranks “just below average” in the amount of testing their students undergo. Moreover, there’s a strong case to be made that the Obama administration’s hard-nosed demands for improvement on two fronts, academic standards and teacher performance, have paid off.

Before passing the NCLB, national leaders had been trying for decades to get local educators to ratchet up standards in response to the changing workplace and societal demands—especially the recognition that “local control” of education had long resulted in disadvantaged and minority students receiving substandard instruction. Back in the 1980s, when the federal government first proposed more rigorous high school curricula, states and school districts responded by channeling tens of thousands of students into watered-down courses where they earned English credits for “word processing,” science credits for “auto body repair,” and math credits for “commercial food preparation.”

But in the face of persistent performance gaps along racial and class lines, President George W. Bush built a bipartisan congressional coalition that pushed through the No Child Left Behind Act, in 2001. The law directed states to create “rigorous” standards, test students’ mastery of those standards, and hold local educators accountable for the results—a model Bush had used in Texas. It brought more transparency to public education and made all of the nation’s educators directly responsible for their students’ achievement for the first time.

The NCLB had plenty of flaws. It defined school success narrowly (the percentage of students meeting a state-set score on standardized tests rather than the improvement in students’ performance over the course of a school year), and remedies kicked in even if a relatively small number of students in a school lagged—causing states to lower standards rather than have many schools get on the law’s wrong side. The NCLB’s tight schedules for reporting student test results led state legislators to buy simplistic multiple-choice tests that were easily administered and quickly scored—but drove down the level of instruction in some classrooms, as teachers taught to the tests. The law’s unrealistic demand that 100 percent of the nation’s students achieve proficiency in math and reading by 2014 was a big tactical mistake that undermined the law’s credibility. And the school choice remedy proved beyond the reach of many students.

With Congress gridlocked, Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, let states work around these problems in exchange for reforms that included the introduction of the new Common Core standards. And there’s evidence that the moves are working and that standards are finally on the rise.

In a recent study from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the researcher Paul Peterson and colleagues reported that no less than forty-five states have raised their standards for student proficiency in reading and math since 2011, when the Obama reforms started to take hold. Peterson, who advised Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign on education issues, attributed the gains to Obama’s reforms and has written that the Common Core “has achieved phenomenal success in statehouses across the country.” Similarly, Achieve, Inc., a Washington policy shop, recently reported that a long-standing “honesty gap” in public education—the sometimes striking differences between the high percentages of students rated “proficient” under many state tests and the much lower proportions of students in the same states rated “proficient” under the more demanding federal NAEP tests—has recently closed significantly.

Obama used the same incentive strategies to persuade states and school districts to get serious about measuring teacher performance. Before the administration stepped in, school systems were spending over $400 billion a year on public school teacher salaries and benefits without any real sense of what the money was buying. The standard evaluation model for the nation’s more than three million teachers was a single, cursory visit once a year by a principal wielding a checklist looking for neat classrooms and quiet students—superficial exercises that didn’t focus directly on the quality of teacher instruction, much less student learning.

Now, more rigorous teacher evaluation systems are under way in more than three dozen states. The deployment of the new systems has greatly strengthened many school districts’ focus on instruction. School officials have incorporated student achievement into calculations of teacher performance on a wide scale for the first time in the history of public education. The new systems are increasingly prioritizing ways to help teachers improve their practice rather than merely identifying bad apples. And the best of them are providing a foundation for a wide range of new, performance-based teacher roles that are making teaching more attractive. These changes simply wouldn’t have happened at anywhere near the scale they have without federal intervention, which is now being withdrawn under the new law.

The Obama strategy hasn’t been perfect. Many of the new teacher evaluation systems are in the early stages and there are plenty of implementation problems, especially with student-achievement measures. Secretary Duncan’s decision to have states use student test scores in new teacher evaluation systems and at the same time introduce the Common Core standards and the new testing regimes—a move some of his senior aides advised against—alarmed and angered much of the nation’s teaching corps and intensified anti-testing and anti-Common Core sentiment.

But instead of building on the Obama successes and addressing the weaknesses in the administration’s initiatives and in No Child Left Behind, the new law effectively gives states and school systems a free pass on educational excellence.

After heavy lobbying by school reformers and civil rights groups fighting what amounted to a rear-guard action against Alexander’s plan, the new federal law retains the NCLB’s requirements that states set standards, test students, report the results, and work with the lowest-performing schools—“guardrails,” in the words of the law’s sponsors. But the law demands only that state and local officials go through the motions in those areas; it’s silent on results and consequences. States can ultimately set standards where they please. And while they’re directed to improve the bottom 5 percent of their elementary and high schools with high dropout rates, there’s no meaningful federal enforcement if they decide to go easy on schools. Indeed, the new law makes it virtually impossible for the U.S. secretary of education to proscribe, enforce, or even incentivize rigorous academic expectations, quality tests, school performance standards, and the measurement of teacher performance—core improvement levers.

And while it’s good news that a relatively high percentage of states are expected to retain the Common Core in some form—now that they have started expending resources to implement the standards—the pressure from the Tea Party and the teachers’ unions has already led states to withdraw from the Obama-funded networks building the rigorous new testing systems based on the Common Core. Membership in one of them, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PAARC, has plunged in four years from nearly half the states to seven and the District of Columbia.

If there’s an argument against federal accountability, it’s that national policymakers shouldn’t micromanage schools. In the end, schools are only as good as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So it’s crucial to get school communities invested in reform. National policymaking should be about expectations rather than execution.

But the new federal education law both gives local educators more day-to-day flexibility and liberates them from external expectations, a strategy that risks returning many students to second-class educational status. Rather than being a path toward a new paradigm in public education where all students are taught to high standards, it invites a capitulation to traditional race- and class-based educational expectations, half a century after the passage of federal civil rights laws and just as the nation is transitioning to a minority-majority school population.

When “local control” in education is looked at through the lens of what’s best for students rather than through the filter of adult agendas, it’s clear that we’re not going to get many of the nation’s students where they need to be without explicit expectations for higher standards in much of what schools do, and without the policy leverage needed to ensure that educators deliver on those expectations.

The post How Obama Got Schooled appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One camp, a coalition of researchers and educators formed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, argued in a manifesto called A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education that tackling poverty’s causes and consequences was the way to free disadvantaged students from the grip of educational failure. “Schools can ameliorate some of the impact of social and economic disadvantage on achievement,” the coalition wrote. But, it continued, “[t]here is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can substantially, consistently, and sustainably close these gaps.”

How Children Succeed:
Grit, Curiosity, and the
Hidden Power of Character
by Paul Tough
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 256 pp.

In sharp contrast, a second reform group, led by then school superintendents Joel Klein of New York and Michelle Rhee of Washington, D.C., and others drafted a competing reform manifesto under the auspices of an organization known as the Education Equity Project that stressed tougher accountability for schools and teachers, governance reforms for failing schools, and the expansion of charter schools. They largely refused to acknowledge that poverty rather than school quality was the root cause of the educational problems of disadvantaged kids, for fear that saying so would merely reinforce a long-standing belief among public educators that students unlucky enough to live in poverty shouldn’t be expected to achieve at high levels — and public educators shouldn’t be expected to get them there.

While one of the few reformers with feet in both camps, Chicago schools superintendent Arne Duncan, was named U.S. secretary of education, the Klein cabal won the policy fight. The Obama agenda has focused almost exclusively on systemic school reform to address the achievement deficits of disadvantaged students: standards, testing, teacher evaluations, and a continued, if different, focus on accountability. The administration’s one education-related poverty-fighting program, Duncan’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative, is a rounding error in the Department of Education’s budget.

Duncan was right to align himself early on with both Democratic factions. Good schools can, of course, make a difference in student achievement just by being good. And the inadequate nutrition, housing, language development, and early educational experiences that many impoverished students suffer are real barriers to learning.

But in the last several years a new body of neuroscientific and psychological research has made its way to the surface of public discourse that suggests that the most severe consequences of poverty on learning are psychological and behavioral rather than cognitive. The lack of early exposure to vocabulary and other cognitive deficits that school reformers have stressed are likely no more problematic, the research suggests, than the psychological impact of growing up in poverty. Poverty matters, the new work confirms, but we’ve been trying to address it in the wrong way.

Former New York Times Magazine editor Paul Tough brings this new science of adversity to general audiences in How Students Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, an engaging book that casts the school reform debate in a provocative new light. In his first book, about the antipoverty work of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Tough stressed the importance of early cognitive development in bridging the achievement gap between poor and more affluent students. In How Students Succeed, he introduces us to a wide-ranging cast of characters—economists, psychologists, and neuroscientists among them — whose work yields a compelling new picture of the intersection of poverty and education.

There’s James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, who found in the late 1990s that students who earned high school diplomas through the General Educational Development program, widely known as the GED, had the same future prospects as high school dropouts, a discovery that led him to conclude that there were qualities beyond courses and grades that made a big difference in students’ success. His inclinations were confirmed when he dug into the findings of the famous Perry Preschool Project. In the early days of the federal War on Poverty in the 1960s, researchers provided three- and four-year-olds from impoverished Ypsilanti, Michigan, with enriched preschooling, and then compared their life trajectories over several decades with those of Ypsilanti peers who had not received any early childhood education.

The cognitive advantages of being in the Perry program faded after a couple of years. Test scores between the two groups evened out, and the program was considered something of a failure. But Heckman and others discovered that years later the Perry preschoolers were living much better lives, including earning more and staying out of trouble with the law. And because under the Perry program teachers systematically reported on a range of students’ behavioral and social skills, Heckman was able to learn that students’ success later in life was predicted not by their IQs but by the noncognitive skills like curiosity and self-control that the Perry program had imparted.

Tough presents striking research from neuroendocrinology and other fields revealing that childhood psychological traumas — from physical and sexual abuse to physical and emotional neglect, divorce, parental incarceration, and addiction, things found more often (though by no means exclusively) in impoverished families — overwhelm developing bodies’ and minds’ ability to manage the stress of events, resulting in “all kinds of serious and long-lasting negative effects, physical, psychological, and neurological.”

There’s a direct link between the volume of such trauma and rates of heart disease, cancer, alcoholism, smoking, drug use, attempted suicide — and schooling problems. As Tough writes, Children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointment, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their yearperformance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses [caused in part by disrupted brain chemistry] and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet.

In particular, such stressors compromise the higher order thinking skills that allow students to sort out complex and seemingly contradictory information such as when the letter C is pronounced like K (what psychologists call “executive functioning”), and their ability to keep a lot of information in their heads at once, a skill known as “working memory” that’s crucial to success in school, college, and work.

The good news, Tough reports, is that studies reveal that the destructive stressors of poverty can be countered. Close, nurturing relationships with parents or other caregivers, he writes, have been shown to engender resilience in children that insulates them from many of the worst effects of a harsh early environment. “This message can sound a bit warm and fuzzy,” Tough says, “but it is rooted in [the] cold, hard science” of neurological and behavioral research, though such nurturing is often in short supply in broken, impoverished homes (and even in many intact households and communities).

As important, Tough contends, is research demonstrating that resilience, optimism, perseverance, focus, and the other noncognitive skills that Heckman and others have found to be so important to success in school and beyond are malleable—they can be taught, practiced, learned, and improved, even into adulthood. Tough points to the work of Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist and author of Learned Optimism, and Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, whose research has demonstrated that students taught to believe that people can grow intellectually earn higher grades than those who sense that intelligence is fixed. This commitment to the possibility of improvement, Seligman, Dweck, and others contend, invests students with the ability to persevere, rebound from setbacks, and overcome fears.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth, a protégé of Seligman’s, has done a range of studies—on college students with low SAT scores, West Point plebes, and national spelling bee contestants, among others—and has found that a determined response to setbacks, an ability to focus on a task, and other noncognitive character strengths are highly predictive of success, much more so than IQ scores.

That’s why some of the schools in the highly regarded KIPP charter school network have added the teaching of such skills to their curricula. And they’ve coupled their traditional academic report cards with ”character report cards” developed by KIPP cofounder Dave Levin, Duckworth, and others. Concerned about their students’ inability to make it through high school and college even though they’re prepared academically, they grade students on self-control, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, grit, zest, and social intelligence. Other experts add conscientiousness, perseverance, work habits, time management, and an ability to seek out help to the list of key nonacademic ingredients of success in school and beyond. Students from impoverished backgrounds need such skills in larger doses, Tough argues, because they often lack the support systems available to more affluent students.

To Tough, the logic of the importance of noncognitive qualities to students’ futures is clear: we need to rethink our solutions to the academic plight of impoverished students. The studies of Dweck, Duckworth, and others support conservative claims that individual character should be an important part of policy discussions about poverty. “There is no anti-poverty tool that we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable that character strengths,” Tough writes, a claim that won’t be easy for liberals to stomach.

But, Tough adds, the contributions of character traits to students’ success goes a long way toward refuting conservative “cognitive determinists” like Charles Murray, who claim that success is mainly a function of IQ and that education is largely about sorting people and giving the brightest the chance to take full advantage of their potential.

The research that Tough explores also undercuts claims by Klein, Rhee, and other signers of the Education Equity Project manifesto that we can get impoverished students where they need to be educationally through higher standards, stronger teachers, and other academic reforms alone.

What we need to add to the reform equation, Tough argues, is a system of supports for children struggling with the effects of the trauma and stress of poverty. He urges the creation of pediatric wellness centers and classes that help impoverished parents build the emotional bonds with their young children that are so important to the development of children’s neurological and psychological defenses against poverty’s ravages. He supports KIPP’s efforts to engender resilience, persistence, and other character strengths in its students, both in school and then beyond through support programs like KIPP Through College. Work by David Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin and others have shown that even modest interventions, like teachers writing encouraging notes on student’ essays, motivate children to persevere academically.

Above all, Tough makes a compelling case for giving poverty greater prominence in the education policy debate. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has talked mostly about school choice and states’ rights in education, playing to conservatives and Catholics, as every GOP candidate since Ronald Reagan has done. But the new science of adversity could be the basis of a compelling reform agenda in a second Obama term—one that merges the competing progressive agendas of the last presidential election cycle.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post First-Rate Temperaments appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Bee Eater:
Michelle Rhee Takes on
the Nation’s
Worst School District
by Richard Whitmire
Jossey-Bass, 296 pp.

Less well known is that Rhee is part of a generational shift in school reform. She’s one of a new breed of “social entrepreneurs” who have sought to create a performance-driven brand of public schooling on behalf of the nation’s disadvantaged students. Some of these new education entrepreneurs are shaping federal education priorities as senior officials in the Obama administration’s Department of Education, where they have pushed for school reform through the federal Race to the Top competition and other signature Obama plans.

Like many of the new reformers, including Richard Barth, the chief executive of the well-known KIPP network of charter schools, and Kim Smith, a founder of the venture philanthropy NewSchools Venture Fund, Rhee got her start at Teach for America. Founded in 1990 by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, TFA is a public service program that aims to end “educational inequity [and] the reality that where a child is born determines the quality of his or her education and life prospects.” It recruits students from the nation’s best colleges and universities, who spend at least two years teaching in some of America’s worst schools.

Rhee, herself an Ivy Leaguer, put in three tough years at a failing Baltimore elementary school that had been turned over to a for-profit company. In 1997, she left TFA to launch the New Teacher Project, a TFA offshoot that contracts with public school systems to recruit new teachers from outside schools of education, which attract few of the nation’s best and brightest college students.

In 2007, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, at Kopp’s urging, brought Rhee to Washington and tasked her with fixing the city’s dysfunctional school system, which couldn’t manage to calculate daily attendance, deliver textbooks on time, or keep its buildings clean, much less successfully educate its 48,000 students. With the help of a veritable SWAT team of former TFAers and others, Rhee closed nearly two dozen underenrolled schools, introduced twenty-first-century information technology, slashed the system’s bloated bureaucracy, and replaced nearly a third of the city’s principals. Most notably, she won a new teacher contract that ended tenure, introduced performance pay and a comprehensive new evaluation system, and made D.C. perhaps the only city school system in the country to fire significant numbers of teachers for incompetence. These actions, predictably, made her both a hero to the advocates of urban education reform and the nemesis of teacher’s unions and other traditional voices in public education.

In his new book, The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District, Richard Whitmire, a former education editorial writer at USA Today, provides a lively narrative on Rhee’s personal history and the political and public policy drama that marked her three and a half years in Washington. He delivers an insightful commentary on one of the first pitched battles between the new generation of school reformers and the nation’s urban educational and political establishments.

Whitmire’s portrait is a sympathetic one, and rightly so. He chronicles Rhee’s evolution from privileged daughter of an ambitious Korean immigrant doctor; to student at an elite private school in Toledo and, later, Cornell; and then to a young woman drawn to TFA by a television documentary and subsequently overwhelmed by the task of teaching in inner-city Baltimore (where, to show her young students how tough she was, she reportedly ate a bee she swatted in her classroom). The Baltimore experience radicalized her to the cause of helping impoverished urban kids get a decent education.

What drives Michelle Rhee, and the entrepreneurial wing of school reform as a whole, is disdain for the commonly held belief in traditional public education theory that if students are unlucky enough to live in poverty, they shouldn’t be expected to achieve at high levels—and, more to the point, that schools shouldn’t be expected to get them there. (The frequent refrain is: “We’re doing the best we can with the kids we have.”)

Rhee and her allies also have little tolerance for public education policies that put the interests of adults ahead of those of students. This stance led her as D.C. chancellor to end the long-standing practice of laying teachers off on the basis of lack of seniority rather than inadequate performance, one of many steps that drew the ire of the city’s teacher’s union and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers.

Even though Rhee wrote the introduction to Whitmire’s previous book, on the challenges of educating boys, and his research for Bee Eater was funded by foundations that also back Rhee (which he fully discloses), Whitmire, whom I’ve known professionally for several years, is candid about Rhee’s shortcomings during her tenure in the nation’s capital. His analysis of where she went wrong is a particularly engaging part of the book, both for readers wanting to know more about the celebrity schools chancellor and those thinking about the larger consequences for school reform.

Whitmire reveals the kind of brash and sometimes bullying style and supremely bad judgment that led Rhee to do the Time cover. He tells us, for instance, that D.C. city council members first learned in the Washington Post of Rhee’s plans to close schools in their wards, and that she invited a television camera crew along when she fired a principal in his school. When Whitmire asked her why she had such a hard time finding strong school leaders, she responded, “The problem is we have extraordinarily high standards.”

Mayor Fenty, himself a young, supremely self-confident urban reformer and one of the nation’s few mayors to control his city’s school system, failed to restrain Rhee. Eventually, Whitmire writes, one of the city’s leading philanthropists stepped in to try to rescue her from herself by paying Anita Dunn, the former Obama White House communications director, to handle her public relations. But it was too little, too late.

Whitmire doesn’t shy away from reporting the questions that have been raised about Rhee’s claims of dramatic increases in her students’ test scores during her TFA stint in Baltimore, and he’s careful to attribute the claims to Rhee and her principal in Baltimore, neither of whom could produce evidence to substantiate the statements on her resume. Recently, USA Today published a series of stories suggesting that cheating on standardized tests in the Washington public schools was common during Rhee’s tenure as chancellor. The paper found that there were unusually high rates of wrong answers that had been erased and changed to right ones on student tests at more than half of the system’s public schools between 2008 and 2010. Rhee, who routinely used improving city test scores to justify her reforms, initially attacked the paper’s reporting, but she more recently acknowledged that there may have been isolated cases of cheating and has endorsed a probe of the paper’s findings that is currently under way by the city’s inspector general.

Rhee’s biggest failing, Whitmire argues, was her inattention to the racial dimension of her reforms. The racial side of school reform is not frequently discussed in policy circles, and Whitmire makes a valuable contribution by addressing it head on.

Unfortunately, many of Rhee’s changes in Washington—the purging of patronage hires from the central office dating back to the Marion Barry era; the performance-based firings of principals and teachers; the ending of teacher tenure—led to the undermining of job security for many middle-class African Americans, for whom urban public school systems have long been an important source of stable government employment.

As a result, blacks saw Rhee’s reforms as a threat to a system that sustained many members of their community. As Whitmire writes, “White voters thought Rhee was cleaning house; black voters saw no reason to sweep out a head of household with a steady paycheck.” In addition, Whitmire reports, many of the city’s African Americans saw the large number of predominantly white TFA and D.C. teaching fellows that Rhee recruited to her central office and classrooms not as new talent to help the city’s struggling students but as “cultural tourists.” Whitmire blames both Rhee and Fenty, an African American, for failing to convince the city’s working-class blacks of the connection between performance firings and school quality.

So when Rhee sought to attract both black and white middle-class families to public schools in transitional or mixed-race neighborhoods by introducing programs like preschool education and International Baccalaureate classes, representatives of the city’s many impoverished African American neighborhoods interpreted the moves as Rhee currying favor with white residents at the same time she was laying off blacks. It didn’t help that she was firing working-class African Americans during the height of one of the worst recessions in the nation’s history.

Rhee also hurt herself by introducing a plan to make teachers’ jobs and pay dependent on their performance before she had put a defensible teacher evaluation system in place. Washington teacher evaluations, like those in most school systems, were cursory and undependable when Rhee arrived. Declaring that she was going to end tenure and introduce performance-based pay before teachers knew how they were going to be judged guaranteed that they and their unions would oppose the plan.

Nor could Rhee bring herself to build more health screening and other student and family assistance into her reform agenda, a strategy that Fenty’s deputy mayor for education, Victor Reinoso, advocated. That move would have improved her many needy students’ readiness to learn and signaled to teachers and principals that she recognized the many challenges they faced in educating students from impoverished backgrounds. Doing so would have won her allies without spending a lot of additional money or relinquishing her commitment to high standards and accountability.

By the time Rhee introduced the new system, in 2009, opposition to her reforms was already widespread among the rank-and-file. The enmity toward Rhee among Washington’s African Americans contributed to Fenty’s resounding defeat in the city’s black wards in last fall’s Democratic primary and spelled, shortly afterward, the end of Rhee’s important work in Washington. She has since launched a national advocacy organization, Students First, to counter the influence of teacher’s unions.

Rhee’s crusade in Washington was about transforming a system driven by bureaucracy to one shaped by performance incentives. This shift remains the core challenge facing reformers in urban school systems and public education generally. That Rhee got as far as she did is a testament not only to her take-no-prisoners personality but also to the importance of mayoral control of urban school systems. If Rhee had had to deal with a traditional elected school board, and if Fenty hadn’t cleared a political path for her, she might not have been able to push through the most important reforms.

It’s hard to overestimate how much Rhee accomplished, despite her flaws—or perhaps in part because of them. Reformers have sought for decades, without much success, to implement many of the changes she was able to make in Washington during her brief tenure. She put an end to hiring and firing by seniority. She shrunk D.C.’s famously bloated central office and closed struggling schools. She created a new staffing model with clear standards and a state-of-the-art teacher evaluation system built not just on student test scores but on classroom visits by both principals and trained school system observers.

It’s an impressive system, albeit one that needs to be improved to win teachers’ respect, a key to its longevity. The other key to its longevity is political support, and that, surprisingly, seems assured, at least for a while: Fenty’s successor, Vincent Gray, has named Rhee’s deputy and close ally Kaya Henderson to replace her as chancellor.

Of course, the ultimate measure of any set of reforms is whether they improve student performance. In D.C., despite the allegations of cheating on the city’s standardized tests, students’ scores on the federal NAEP test, which is very hard to cheat on, rose during Rhee’s tenure. If those increases continue under Henderson, it will be hard to argue that the system Rhee created wasn’t worth the pain it took to build.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post Rhee Engineering Education appeared first on Washington Monthly.

But the school has done just about everything right in recent years. Principal Conce Rodriguez has introduced reforms that require students to wear uniforms and teachers to submit weekly progress reports on every student in every subject. There’s an expanded pre-kindergarten program, teacher-attendance incentives, and a big tutoring project. Rodriguez even hired a “community liaison,” who has expanded the school’s PTA membership to 700, the largest in Dallas. On a typical day, there are 50 parents volunteering at the school. Marcus’ 97 percent student attendance rate is one of the highest in the city.

The changes at Marcus have paid dividends in the classroom. Under NCLB, the Dallas schools must test kids in reading and math every year between 3rd and 8th grade, and under Dallas’ system of rating those test results, Marcus placed 19th out of the city’s 206 schools, a significant accomplishment for a school with such difficult demographics. Marcus produced six more months of learning in a single school year than some other Dallas schools with equally disadvantaged students.

But that’s Dallas’ system of rating schools. The state of Texas, as required by NCLB, reads the scores differently. Under that federally-mandated rating, Marcus fares much worse–it gets a middling “acceptable” score, which places it only 76th in the city. That’s one step away from being labeled failing under NCLB.

The discrepancy isn’t the product of fuzzy math. It’s the result of competing ideas about how to use test results. NCLB’s strategy is to cast a bright light on student performance and impose reforms on schools that don’t measure up. To do this, it mandates that student populations be judged once a year against a fixed state standard, while Dallas measures changes in individual student performance from one year to the next.

Other Dallas schools are finding themselves similarly penalized by NCLB. Schools ranked 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 16th under the city’s rating system were ranked 94th, 77th, 83rd, and 107th in the Texas NCLB regime. At the same time, the school that placed 3rd under the state system was ranked 25th under Dallas’.

The sense that Texas’ NCLB ratings are unfair has demoralized the staff at schools like Marcus. Several of Rodriguez’s veteran teachers have left in frustration for wealthy suburban school districts where they felt their achievements would be more fairly recognized, staff members at Marcus say. Keeping good teachers is always a struggle for inner-city schools, and in many cases, NCLB has made things worse.

Since shortly after its passage, the law has been under heavy attack–from congressional Democrats who say the administration hasn’t invested the money it promised to implement the law, from Republican state legislators who resent the federal intrusion, and from teacher union leaders who never liked test-based accountability in the first place. But there have been other, less widely publicized, indictments of NCLB from parents, teachers, and principals who support high-stakes testing but see how NCLB is playing out in the classroom.

Educators in impoverished neighborhoods argue that the law’s criteria for school success don’t sufficiently take into account of how immensely far behind many of their students are when they start school. Educators and parents in affluent communities, where students routinely score above state standards, have a different complaint: that the NCLB accountability system is leading to a dumbing down of their schools’ curricula. Many testing experts, meanwhile, point out that NCLB creates a host of perverse incentives, including encouraging states to set their academic standards low to reduce the number of their schools labeled “failing” under the law–the opposite of what NCLB’s authors intended.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has responded to these charges with modest retreats, loosening some of the criteria by which schools are labeled failing so that fewer of them will be. These steps may buy the administration some short-term political relief. But they don’t address the law’s core problem: NCLB doesn’t accurately measure the extent to which schools are improving student achievement.

This is no small flaw. The failure of public schools to educate America’s most disadvantaged students is the country’s most glaring and abiding social and moral problem. Over nearly two decades, a rough national consensus has developed to improve schools by holding them accountable for their students’ performance via high-stakes tests. But the belief that the test ratings are fair and accurate is the linchpin of this whole system. And that belief is weakening. Even the Bush aide who helped design NCLB has his doubts. That’s why it’s worth looking at the Dallas school system, not just as an example of what’s wrong with NCLB, but as a model of how to fix it.

Why does the Dallas school rating system do a better job of identifying high-performing schools than Texas’ NCLB-driven system? The answer lies in the different ways the two systems define student performance. Under NCLB, Texas measures school performance based on a system called “adequate yearly progress,” which calculates the percentage of various student populations that annually meet or exceed the state’s academic standards; in other words, NCLB measures the progress of student groups towards a universal fixed point.

Dallas, by contrast, measures individual student progress from a relative starting point. It compares a pupil’s current test scores with the same pupil’s scores a year earlier. A school in Dallas wins a high rating if its students on average score higher than would have been predicted based on those same students’ prior level of achievement and if the school’s performance overall is better than that of other schools with the same demographics. It earns a low rating if its students perform worse than would have been predicted.

Unlike NCLB, the effect of Dallas’ approach is to factor out the disadvantages (or advantages) that students bring to school because of the quality of prior instruction or their family backgrounds. Instead, it measures only the amount of knowledge that the school itself–or indeed, an individual teacher–is responsible for imparting. It calculates, in other words, the amount of “value added” by each school.

By doing so, the “value added” school-rating metric provides a more accurate picture of which schools are actually educating their students well. It is also fairer to schools and teachers working with the most disadvantaged kids. It pressures them to perform without penalizing them for taking on the hardest assignments in education. Conversely, the system doesn’t reward rich schools with privileged students merely for standing still. Passing the state test, an easy task for many of their students, is not good enough.

This greater accuracy and fairness in turn provides a host of other advantages. It offers districts and states a firmer basis upon which to mete out rewards to good schools and sanctions to bad ones. It gives teachers clearer pictures of how individual students are progressing, making it a more useful diagnostic tool. It gives principals a system of measuring teacher ability–a system that even most teachers who work under it think is fair. It potentially offers parents much more accurate and fine-grained information than they can currently get on how individual schools and teachers are performing, thus making the job of choosing the right school easier. And it avoids some of the perverse incentives that NCLB has created to set standards low or otherwise game the system.

Experience has borne out these benefits. In places such as Dallas where a value-added metric has been tried, district officials say, it has proven superior in pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of different teachers. When Dallas researchers looked at the city’s schools with the highest ratings under its value-added system, it found that they indeed had all the attributes associated with good schools. They were orderly and safe. Teachers knew their subjects and their students well. Students who fell behind were able to get help outside of class. And principals were able to recruit top teachers and, perhaps most important, push out bad ones.

Robert Mendro, the district’s research director, says that the Dallas schools such as Marcus that have used the student and teacher information that value-added testing gives them to target reforms have outperformed their peers. His only regret is that more Dallas schools haven’t done so. Indeed, district-wide test scores have fluctuated in Dallas since the introduction of value-added testing in the early 1990s–a function, he says, of the fact that the Dallas accountability system offers only modest rewards for high performing schools and lacks tough consequence for schools that fail to improve.

Tennessee has also put the value-added metric to good use. In 1992, education officials began giving every school a value-added rating and they taught educators how to use the value-added analyses to target schools and teachers for improvement. Subsequently, Tennessee test scores trended up during the 1990s. Researchers at the University of Tennessee found that average math scores rose in 40 percent of the state’s school districts and declined in only 8 percent between 1991 and 1999. Half as many districts improved in reading, but an even higher percentage moved up in language arts and science. What’s more, the study found that the improving districts improved a lot. Their students opened a 1.7-year gap in math proficiency between the 3rd and 8th grades, and a 2-year gap in reading. “You could definitely see the systems that were using the value-added information and those that weren’t,” state testing director Mary Reel told me. The lesson: No school rating system will raise test scores by itself. But when a value-added system is tied to in-school follow-through, the results can be impressive.

Recently, I spoke with Sandy Kress, a veteran school reformer now with the law firm of Akin Gump. Dallas’ value-added school rating system, he told me, is a “sophisticated tool” and “more appropriate” than the NCLB rating system. And Kress should know. He helped design both systems.

A Treasury Department aide in the Carter administration and later chairman of the Dallas Democratic Party, Kress was chosen in 1990 to lead a school reform commission for the district. Looking for a way to motivate the city’s schools, Kress learned that the district’s research staff had tinkered with a school incentive system in the mid-1980s that had used simple value-added ratings. The staff hadn’t had the resources to resolve the technical challenges they faced, and they shelved the plan. Kress dusted it off, worked with statisticians on his task force (one member was an epidemiologist), the district’s staff, and outside researchers to refine it, and made it the cornerstone of the commission’s recommendations.

The Dallas school board embraced Kress’s reform blueprint, and in 1992, the value-added testing model became the basis for a citywide accountability system that gave substantial financial rewards to top-rated schools and targeted low performers for reform.

Kress’s work on the commission, and in particular his innovative accountability plan, landed him a seat on the Dallas school board in 1992. It also attracted the attention of Texas Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, a friend of Kress’s since law school. Bullock named Kress the head of the accountability sub-committee of a statewide education reform commission that he was leading for Democratic Gov. Ann Richards. By 1993, Kress had created for the state’s Democratic leadership the Texas school accountability system that eventually helped George W. Bush win the White House.

Bush had sought out Kress when he captured the Texas governorship in 1994 and turned to him again in crafting the no-child-left-behind theme that played so well during the 2000 presidential campaign. Bush brought Kress, by then a friend and ally, to Washington with him as a special assistant, and the former Carter official played a key role in shaping and winning congressional passage of NCLB, the signature domestic policy accomplishment of the president’s first term.

But as Kress’s reform efforts progressed from Dallas to Austin to Washington, the value-added concept fell away. Texas policymakers (and later officials with the Bush presidential campaign and the White House) were looking for a practical concept that liberals and conservatives could agree on; arguing that every student should be held to a single standard made sense to most voters. Judging students not against some objective standard but against themselves, they worried, would merely create a double standard–one for high achievers, one for low. Moreover, the value-added method was a relatively new idea, and few states had the computers or skilled statisticians to administer it.

I first discussed NCLB with Kress in late 2001 in his large corner office in the White House’s Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just as Congress was about to pass the law. He was straightforward in suggesting that value-added ratings were “a whole lot fairer” to schools than the NCLB rating system would be. The NCLB system would favor wealthy schools, he acknowledged.

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle were just as aware as Kress was of NCLB’s shortcomings–and of the importance of seizing the moment. George Miller, a California liberal and the ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, in particular, saw NCLB as an opportunity to pressure schools to help poor and minority students. Miller and his allies were willing to use a far-from-ideal system of rating schools because they had a chance to focus national attention on traditionally underserved students. “If we waited for statisticians and psychometricians to get [school evaluation] right [in every state] we’d never get anything done [for disadvantaged kids],” said Miller’s education aide at the time.

So, eager to make good on his campaign claim that he was a “compassionate conservative,” and with even congressional liberals backing his plan, the president introduced NCLB on his third day in office. Eleven months later the bill was back on his desk for signing.

NCLB’s accountability system was, Kress and the others believed, the best that could be achieved in 2001, and they were probably right. But the flaws in its testing mandate have become more and more evident with each passing year. In particular, education insiders say that NCLB’s rating system holds schools responsible for factors they can’t control. Studies have shown that such things as English proficiency, family income, and parental education have a major influence on test scores, but NCLB, by judging schools on the basis of whether enough students pass a set of tests once a year instead of on how much schools increase students’ learning over the course of a year, as the value-added model does, fails to account for that reality. Respected measurement expert and accountability advocate Stephen Raudenbush of the University of Michigan has declared NCLB “scientifically indefensible.”

The flaws in the law virtually invite schools to game the system in various unproductive ways. To increase their scores, critics say, many schools lavish disproportionate attention on so-called “bubble” students–those who score just below the state standard. The rationale is clear, if cynical: The easiest way to avoid being labeled failing is to push these marginal students over the line. The more difficult students often get less help as a result. And while timetables built into the law will eventually force schools to deal with those students, there is, perversely, no incentive in the law for schools to focus on their more capable students. Indeed, research by value-added advocate William Sanders has shown that the rate of progress for high-achieving students in low-performing schools in Tennessee has actually declined since the implementation of NCLB.

The value-added methodology, by contrast, doesn’t create such incentives to focus on a handful of students. Under the system, every child’s improvement counts the same towards the school’s overall rating. And the methodology itself is widely seen by those who use it as fairer and more accurate. Value added should thus make it easier for teachers to accept the idea of higher pay for outstanding performance and for working in the toughest schools–changes many see as important next steps in reforming education. Indeed, Dallas is already doing this. Teachers at schools with high value-added scores get financial bonuses.

Many of the obstacles to the widespread use of value-added ratings have been overcome in recent years. Thanks in part to the passage of No Child Left Behind, schools all over the country are on their way to testing every year from 3rd to 8th grade–a prerequisite for the value-added methodology. States are also beefing up their computer and statistical resources. Researchers are still working to address some of the toughest technical issues raised by the value-added method, such as how to measure students who move from school to school and how to compare scores on a subject year-to-year when the curriculum changes. But enough progress has been made that more and more states are looking at the value-added idea.

Ohio and Pennsylvania have launched their own value-added systems, and New York City, the nation’s largest school district, plans to do the same. In the United Kingdom, the Blair government is instituting a national value-added school-rating program. And even U.S. Secretary of Education Spellings has arranged a panel to consider assessment alternatives that might include value added. If Spellings doesn’t wind up advocating the value-added metric for NCLB, Kress hopes Congress will. “[Value added] ought to be one of the central improvements made to NCLB when it’s reauthorized in two years,” he told me.

There’s an argument for replacing the adequate yearly progress method mandated by NCLB with value-added. But the political obstacles to doing so would be considerable. The idea that there should be one standard for all students, regardless of race or income, and that all schools should be held responsible for meeting those standards, is the gravity that holds the liberal and conservative sides of the school reform movement together. Moreover, setting that single standard for all students does seem to have the effect of lifting the aspirations of parents, students, and teachers in many low-income schools, and sparking a sense of panic that is not unhelpful given the dismal performance of many of these schools. Dropping the standards approach entirely makes no sense politically or policy-wise.

One solution might be to publish scores from both the standards-based and value-added methods but to tie rewards and sanctions only to the latter. Another would be to combine the two ratings strategies. That’s what Dallas has done in recent years, Tennessee wants to do, and value-added advocates like Sandy Kress support.

From the outside, Marcus Elementary doesn’t look like much. The front yard is a derelict landscape of dirt and crab grass. Torn shades hang awry in the school’s aging window frames. But its library is bustling, its classrooms are lively, and its hallways are filled with students’ work. It’s not what you’d imagine a school filled with desperately poor, non-English-speaking students would be like. But seeing it up close, you can begin to imagine a better future for American education.

Marcus’ Principal Rodriguez, a short, cheerful man in his mid-30s, told me when we met in his spare, painted-cinderblock office, that his emotions were split between an excitement at the possibilities offered by value added and the problems he has to deal with because of No Child Left Behind. He was pleased that the Dallas rating system has recognized Marcus for the strong school that it is–even as he chafed at the fact that under NCLB he’s expected to produce the same results as his counterparts in rich school systems like nearby Highland Park. “One system’s fair,” he told me. “One isn’t.”

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The problem, it turned out, was that the law required the policy and evaluation division to make the calculations much faster than it had ever done before, using an assessment formula many times more complex than it was used to. Padia’s office simply didn’t have the capacity to rank, in a matter of days, 9,000 schools with 6.3 million student test scores broken into the dozens of different categories required by NCLB. Making matters worse, California, like many other states, was in the midst of a financial crisis; Padia’s staff had been cut by more than one-quarter the previous year. And because the NCLB law has begun to create intense demand for a limited pool of experienced and knowledgeable testing experts, some of Padia’s best people had been poached by testing companies and affluent school systems that could offer higher salaries. Once two-thirds of his 31 staffers had held doctorates, but by the time of the NCLB debacle last summer, only two did, one of whom was Padia himself.

Similar problems have surfaced in a host of other states, from Florida to New Hampshire to Idaho. In December, Illinois’ state education agency acknowledged that it had mislabeled at least 300 schools under NCLB. Connecticut discovered that the private firm scoring its tests made so many errors that the state had to halt publication of its school ratings. Michigan had to delay issuing schools report cards for months as it struggled to meld federal scoring requirements with its existing evaluation system, a common problem in many states. When the cards arrived, few Michigan parents could understand them.

All over America, parents, educators, and politicians are in an uproar over NCLB, a law Bush has been hoping to run on in ’04 as the signature example of his “compassionate conservative” philosophy. During the early Democratic primaries, presidential candidates competed with each other to denounce the law–even though many of them, including Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John Edwards (D-N.C.), had voted for it. Yet the anger at NCLB is now as bipartisan as its support once was. In January, the Republican-controlled Virginia House of Delegates voted overwhelmingly to ask Congress to exempt their state from the law. Last month, as a protest against NCLB, Utah’s Republican-led legislature voted to spend no state money implementing the law.

To some extent, the backlash against NCLB isn’t surprising. For decades, state and local governments that control public education in America have allowed thousands of low-quality schools to go on, year after year, providing substandard education to millions of students, especially poor and minority students. NCLB is the first serious attempt by Washington to hold states, districts, and schools accountable for remedying the situation. Little wonder that many are rebelling on behalf of the status quo.

But there is more to the backlash than hidebound resistance to change. Teachers and parents legitimately complain, for instance, that the simplistic, largely multiple-choice tests that many states use lead to a dumbing down of what’s taught in the classroom. Such problems are beginning to be aired in the media and may well be dealt with by Congress. But there is another problem, little discussed, which if not dealt with could undermine the nation’s entire school reform effort. As the California testing fiasco shows, the state agencies that NCLB relies on to carry out its sweeping mandates simply don’t have the capacity to do so. Like 220 volts of current being forced through a 110-volt kitchen appliance, the system is becoming overloaded, and the smoke is rising.

And if these agencies are overmatched now, just wait. Identifying failing schools is, in fact, one of the least demanding, of the law’s rolling mandates. Students in schools that don’t make the grade must be given the option of transferring to another, better public school. Then they must be provided “supplemental services,” like private tutoring. If the schools’ scores still don’t improve, then the state must directly intervene. “Each state,” the law declares, “shall establish a statewide system of intensive and sustained [assistance] and improvement for local education agencies and schools.” The law prescribes a series of actions each state must take to turn around failing schools, from ensuring that the schools have “improvement plans” and “support teams” to, if they continue to under-perform, assigning them to outside managers or even taking the schools over and firing the entire staffs.

These interventions by the state are where the rubber of NCLB will really meet the road. Again, California is ahead of most states in this area. For several years, its department of education has been putting together “turn-around teams” of highly trained veteran teachers, and administrators to go into the state’s worst-performing schools and make necessary changes. Last year, these teams intervened in 24 California schools. But here’s the rub: This year, according to the results of the NCLB tests, California is supposed to start fixing another 600 schools. Two years from now, that number is expected to grow to 3,600 of California’s 9,000 schools, as NCLB’s progressively-tougher testing standards push more California schools into the “failing” category.

State departments of education have never been equipped to do the kind of work that NCLB now demands of them. Since the emergence of full-scale public education systems more than a century ago, the organizing principle of elementary and secondary education has been decentralization, known colloquially as “local control.” The U.S. Constitution gave authority over public education to the states, but states delegated most of that authority to local school districts. And the nation’s 14,500 districts have sought aggressively to preserve that power.

The federal government began to play a significant role in public education when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a Great Society program designed to help needy students. But while piping money into disadvantaged schools, the law did little to make state governments more responsible for academic outcomes. State education departments served mainly as conduits for and accountants of federal funds; it was officials at the district and school level who were responsible for whether there was actually any learning going on in the classrooms. And despite big increases in federal spending for low-income schools, achievement levels there hardly improved.

Attitudes began to change in the mid-1980s after the federal government’s “A Nation at Risk” report warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in America’s schools. In 1989, at a summit meeting in Charlottesville, Va., then-President George H.W. Bush and the nation’s governors, led by Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, broke with the tradition of local control, establishing national education goals. In 1994, then-President Clinton bolstered the nascent national movement for school accountability by signing legislation that mandated that states set achievement standards, measure student performance against them, and reform schools with students that didn’t make the grade.

But the 1994 law didn’t require states to move quickly to crack down on schools that didn’t measure up. That happened only in 2001, with the passage of NCLB. Today, state education agencies, not local school boards, are responsible for reshaping their education systems to produce higher student performance. Overnight, state regulators were to become reformers. “It’s a complete shift” in the departments’ roles, says Abigail Potts of the Council of Chief State School Officers, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that represents the 50 state departments of education.

But while the expectations and responsibilities of state education bureaucracies have suddenly and utterly changed, their actual structure has not. Consider the California State Department of Education, which occupies a modern, six-story office building on N Street in Sacramento, around the block from the state capitol. With a payroll of 1,452, it’s a sizable agency. But it is hardly a leviathan, considering it manages 41 percent of California’s core budget and is responsible for overseeing a system that educates one out of seven American school children. Moreover, the vast majority of those 1,452 employees spend their days in activities that have little or nothing to do with school reform. One hundred and fifty-five finance experts, for example, share the second floor with 144 special-education regulators; there is a whole division of lawyers, a team to draft safety standards for school buses, and many technologists. Sequestered in a section of the fourth floor are the 100 or so statisticians, experts in school leadership and others–about 7 percent of the department’s staff–in charge of the department’s most important work under NCLB: identifying and turning around California public schools that are failing to educate their students effectively. And California has a far bigger school reform staff than almost any other state.

Some state education agencies have proven effective at intervening to improve failing schools, at least when the number of such schools has been kept at a manageable level. Two states in particular, Kentucky and North Carolina, produced among the nation’s best achievement gains during the 1990s using a strategy similar to NCLB’s: comprehensive testing to identify failing schools against clear student achievement standards, followed by state intervention for those that performed the worst. Since 1997, North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction has sent “assistance teams” into 56 of the state’s most dysfunctional schools. All but four have been lifted from the bottom category of the state’s school performance rankings, and more than half have gone to the top. In Kentucky, schools deemed failing are assigned a school-improvement expert for two years. Over 90 percent of the 356 failing schools that have participated in the turnaround program since its inception a decade ago have met Kentucky’s student achievement standards within two years.

The North Carolina and Kentucky programs make clear, however, that turning around failing schools is labor-intensive–and not inexpensive (both states spend about $6 million to turn around a small number of schools, and currently have neither the money nor the staff to do much more). Some accountability advocates suggest that the threat of sanctions or the loss of students alone can be enough incentive to improve school performance. In practice, however, such schools typically still require outside help to do it. For schools in the worst shape, which are often in chaos, with leaders who are weak and ineffective, stronger incentives to do the right thing won’t make much difference. Says Ted Stillwell, Iowa’s commissioner of education: “You cannot just give them a booklet on how to be better schools.”

But NCLB doesn’t give states much help in providing this kind of assistance, certainly not on anything like the scale required. As a result, the legislation threatens to overwhelm even those that have made real pro-gress fixing failing schools. Why? Simple arithmetic. Under NCLB, instead of a dozen schools, North Carolina faces the prospect of having to turn around 500–nearly a quarter of all the state’s schools, says Elsie Leake, associate superintendent for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. The situation is the same in Kentucky. “We’re set up to handle tens of schools,” says Director of Assessment William Insko. “NCLB is requiring us to work with hundreds.”

There’s a reason why NCLB is causing so many more schools to be labeled as failing (some 26,000 schools, or one in four nationwide, failed state standards this year and face sanctions if they do so again next year). It is that the new federal law requires far more detailed demographic analysis of test scores than most state-mandated tests do. Under NCLB, each school’s scores must be broken down and reported by gender, race, family income, etc. Students within each group must make progress every year towards a prescribed benchmark. If any one of the groups fails to make its “adequate yearly progress” target for two years in a row (and it can be a different sub-group from one year to the next), the whole school is graded a failure. As a result, many schools that once thought they were doing well because, say, their white middle-class students were getting decent test scores, are now being labeled as failures because some subgroup within the school, say Hispanics, isn’t doing nearly as well. NCLB was specifically designed this way to make sure schools would not be able to ignore the academic needs of these disadvantaged groups. It is why several civil rights groups supported the law, and why the president can rightly claim that the law’s intent is to “leave no child behind.”

The ambition of the No Child Left Behind law, then, is right on target. The problem is that states are a long way from having the capacity to carry out the law’s mandates. By identifying so many schools as failing–as North Carolina and Kentucky suggest, the numbers are often exponentially more than even the most rigorous state accountability systems turn up–NCLB has also created a pair of perverse incentives for states and schools to act in ways directly counter to the law’s intent.

First, by targeting such a large portion of the nation’s public schools, NCLB has hyper-charged demand for a very limited supply of people who have the competence required to turn around low-performing schools. But because neither state agencies nor low-income districts which need them the most can afford them, these experts are being employed by wealthier districts, who need them the least. The Boston Globe recently reported that NCLB has stirred a bidding war among suburban schools in Massachusetts for superintendents and principals. As those executives’ salaries have spiraled upwards, they have been lured away from working-class and urban schools.

The second perverse incentive is caused by the fact that the framers of NCLB did not set national standards for what schools would have to meet each year to avoid the law’s sanctions. They left that task to the states. Some states chose to set high standards, while others, in an effort to avoid the impact of the sanctions on large numbers of their schools, lowered their standards, sometimes into the basement. Thus, the way the law works, states with high standards will soon have to deal with huge numbers of failing schools, while states with low standards will have fewer such schools to deal with and thus will appear to be doing a far better job, when in fact the contrary is true.

Can anything be done to keep the No Child Left Behind law from undermining its own goals and creating chaos? The answer, fortunately, is yes. First, we need a short-term fix. The rules governing the calculation of sanctions on schools not making the grade should be changed so that the states are required to provide assistance only to the schools that need that help the most. States shouldn’t drown in an attempt to intervene in a vast number of schools, many of which have missed the present requirements by inches rather than miles. These new rules should be structured in a way that removes perverse incentives to lower standards. States that have set their standards very low in the attempt to avoid sanctions should be required to address the needs of roughly the same proportion of all their schools as states that have maintained high standards.

Second, we need a long-term solution, which can only lie in building the capacity of the states, districts, and schools to reach the kinds of goals contemplated by the framers of NCLB. This is not a simple matter, but a vast, man-to-the-Moon kind of challenge. It means finding people with the data management experience to build and administer the very complex systems called for by the law. It means recruiting experts who can help create truly world class curriculum standards so that teachers will know what they are supposed to teach and students will be able to reach the standards. It means identifying and training thousands of educators who have succeeded in improving their schools to provide on-site assistance at other failing schools, and recruiting still others who can take those schools over if the current staff cannot or will not rise to the challenge. It means creating and expanding networks of talent-laden organizations–universities, think tanks, for-profit and non-profit school companies–that have the skill, experience, and management capacity to turn around individual schools and entire districts. And it means greatly strengthening the capabilities of the agencies that will coordinate this massive effort: state departments of education.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate just how unprepared these departments are for the task, or how vital the federal government’s role in preparing them will be. To take just one example, each state will need teams of specially trained statisticians to oversee the development and administration of state tests. This is crucial not just to improve the very low quality of many tests currently in use, but also to avoid the kind of errors that have befallen California and other states in the last six months. Right now, however, the nation’s education schools produce just 36 graduates with these skills each year. These testing experts are the equivalent of Arabic-speaking U.S. soldiers and spies in Iraq: We simply don’t have enough of them, and the lack of such talent is costing us dearly. Washington needs to mount a crash effort to create that talent.

Over the last few months, there has been a loud political back-and-forth in Washington and on the campaign trail about whether NCLB has been sufficiently funded. Democrats have charged that the administration hasn’t provided as much money as it promised. Bush administration officials argue that the federal government has increased education spending enough over the past several years to permit states to hire all the additional staff they need to respond to NCLB.

Neither side quite gets it. In the long run, making NCLB work will almost certainly require far more money than the Bush administration, or even many Democrats, have imagined. But currently, notes Rich Cannon, a consultant who tracks NCLB funding, millions of dollars in new money for school reform are being “largely wasted,” used “mostly to plug holes in district budgets” rather than to strengthen the capacity of state agencies to assess and turn around failing schools.

Unless something is done soon, the already shaky public support for NCLB will crumble. There are those who would welcome this outcome. Some liberal defenders of the education establishment never liked the accountability movement and are rooting for NCLB to fail. Many conservatives have never accepted the idea that Washington should have any role at all in local schools; others are eager to spin an eventual failure of NCLB as evidence that the public education system is unfixable, and vouchers are the only alternative.

The truth is that failing schools can be turned around, as North Carolina, Kentucky, and several other states have shown. There’s no reason to think that these successes can’t be greatly expanded upon if the lawmakers in both parties who vigorously supported NCLB become just as energetic in fixing it. They can start by making sure the key actors–the state departments of education that are supposed to lead the whole effort–have the capacity to do so.

Marc S. Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington-based non-profit that consults with states and provides technical assistance and staff development to districts and schools. Thomas Toch is director of the NCEE Policy Forums program and a frequent contributor to The Washington Monthly.

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