President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political

President Obama and Education Reform

Education Policy

Series Editors

Lance Fusarelli North Carolina State University Frederick M. Hess American Enterprise Institute

Martin West Harvard University

This series addresses a variety of topics in the area of education policy. Volumes are solicited pri-marily from social scientists with expertise on education, in addition to policymakers or practi-tioners with hands-on experience in the field. Topics of particular focus include state and national policy, teacher recruitment, retention, and compensation, urban school reform, test-based account-ability, choice-based reform, school finance, higher education costs and access, the quality of in-struction in higher education, leadership and administration in K–12 and higher education, teacher colleges, the role of the courts in education policymaking, and the relationship between education research and practice. The series serves as a venue for presenting stimulating new research findings, serious contributions to ongoing policy debates, and accessible volumes that illuminate important questions or synthesize existing research.

Series Editors

LANCE FUSARELLI is a professor and director of graduate programs in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Adult and Higher Education at North Carolina State University. He is coau-thor of Better Policies, Better Schools and coeditor of the Handbook of Education Politics and Policy .

FREDERICK M. HESS is resident scholar and director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. An author, teacher, and political scientist, his books include The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas and Common Sense School Reform .

MARTIN WEST is an assistant professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He is an executive editor of Education Next and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.

Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Frontlines Chester E. Finn Jr., Terry Ryan, and Michael B. Lafferty

Accountability in American Higher Education Edited by Kevin Carey and Mark Schneider

Freedom and School Choice in American Education Edited by Greg Forster and C. Bradley Thompson

President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political Robert Maranto and Michael Q. McShane

President Obama and Education Reform

The Personal and the Political

By

Robert Maranto

and

Michael Q. McShane

PRESIDENT OBAMA AND EDUCATION REFORM Copyright © Robert Maranto and Michael Q. McShane, 2012.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maranto, Robert, 1958– President Obama and education reform : the personal and the political /

By Robert Maranto and Michael Q. McShane. pages cm.—(Education policy)

1. Education and state—United States. 2. United States—Politics and government—2009– 3. Obama, Barack. I. McShane, Michael Q. II. Title.

LC89.M224 2012379.73—dc23 2012010434

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: September 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-137-03092-4 ISBN 978-1-137-03093-1 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/9781137030931

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-1-137-03091-7

To my dear parents, without whose sacrifices this book, and the education it represents, would never have come to be—MQM

To April, Tony, and Maya—RM

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiii

1 History and Policy 1

25

53

73

93

111

127

145

2 Clashing Interests and Clashing Ideas: Myths, Pluralism, and the Educational Industrial Complex

3 The Obama Education Agenda: The Personal is Educational

4 No Child Left Behind and the Policy Context of the Obama Education Agenda

5 Race to the Top: Introducing Competition for Federal Dollars(with Daniel H. Bowen)

6 Common Core Standards: Developmental, Redistributional, and Contentious

7 Reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Challenging the Education Industrial Complex

8 Moving Forward: Four Trends Remaking Public Schooling and how the Obama Administration Manages the Changes

Notes 163

References 167

Index 183

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Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1 Number of School Districts 1939–2009 8 2.1 Per-Pupil Spending in the United States, 1961–2008 27 2.2 Students and Education Spending as a Percentage of GDP 27 2.3 Student-Staff Ratio 28 2.4 Per-Pupil Spending Compared Across Sectors 29 2.5 Trend in NAEP Reading Average Scores for 9, 13, and

17-year-olds 30 2.6 Percent of Related Children under 18 in Poverty 32 2.7 The Effect of Decreasing Class Size in a Hypothetical

State with 1,000,000 Students 35 4.1 Federal Education Spending 88 8.1 Federal Expenses as a Percent of GDP 149 8.2 Covered Workers Per Social Security Beneficiary 150 8.3 2010 Federal Budget 150 8.4 Number of Teachers Alternatively Certified, 1985–2009 160

Tables

1.1 Notable Federal Education Laws and Their Constituencies 18 2.1 Elitism v. Pluralism 39 4.1 Synopsis of Key Events 82 4.2 AYP Consequences 89 5.1 Response to Race to the Top 95 5.2 Estimates of Effects for RTT Round 1 Score 103 5.3 Estimates of Effects for RTT Round 2 Score (with Senate and

Gubernatorial Contention as Dummy Variables) 104

x FIGURES AND TABLES

5.4 Estimates of Effects for RTT Round 2 Score (with Senate and Gubernatorial Contention as Continuous Variables) 104

104

107

5.5 Estimates of Effects for RTT Round 1 and Round 2 Scores 5.6 Estimates of the Effects from the Nature of the Election

on RTT Scores

Preface

I first became interested in how public organizations work, and sometimes fail to work, while listening to my dad tell tales of work. My dad served

as a soldier in World War II, and then a postal manager for decades. He be-lieved in getting the public’s work done, and generally got the mail delivered on time. Not everyone did. In his organization, as in any, there were many people who worked hard, a few people who worked smart, other people who hardly worked, and a final group of people who would go home tired after spending a full day’s work working hard to avoid doing any work at all. That is the nature of people: we vary, and our organizations can bring out our best—or our worst. Whether in the military, the police, the post office, or even schools, not every public servant really serves the public.

If our organizations can entrap us, so too can our ideals. I first became interested in schools as organizations to better understand my own mediocre schooling. As a high school journalist, I interviewed my county school su-perintendent. A basically honest and decent man, he told me quite candidly that the purpose of public education was not to educate students, but “to pro-vide an education to those few who want it,” while babysitting others so they would not commit crimes or increase unemployment. My superintendent was a good public servant, leading educational mediocrity because he believed in the prevailing educational ideology of the time.

Who could not find such things fascinating? To me, these public schools and the post office bring home the point that

amidst all the rhetoric about education, both reformers and their opponents forget that educators, parents, and students are people. As people, we are pris-oners of our interests, but even more of our ideals and our passions. As psy-chologists tell us, a key passion is the tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them,” and reject the latter even if their ideas make sense. So it is with both defenders and supporters of public education as we know it.

“Us versus them” conflicts define the battles over education reform. It struck Mike McShane and I that there are two kinds of academic treatments of President Obama’s education policies. The first kind, by progressive aca-demics including some of my friends, saw the Obama reforms as destroying American public schools. The second type, by (often libertarian or conser-vative) reformers including some of my friends, saw the president as shoring

xii PREFACE

up a defunct system rather than ushering in replacements. With a bit of ego, Mike and I saw a need for a unique take, our own: given that politics is the art of the possible, President Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan are doing a fine job reforming American public education. As a father of children attending public schools, I appreciate their work. Over the long term, their efforts will do American children and teachers far more good than harm. In the real world of public policy, that is as good as it gets.

—RM

At 12:05 p.m. EST on January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was standing on the steps of the US Capitol reciting the oath of office to become the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. At the same time, I was bent over, holding a microphone to a small speaker on the side of a projector in the small auditorium of St. Jude Educational Institute on the West Side of Montgomery, Alabama. Our ninth-through-twelfth graders had gathered in this room to watch the proceedings on a hastily erected screen. St. Jude is a unique place. It is one of the only remaining historically African American Catholic high schools in the southern United States. Dr. King and the marchers from Selma camped on its grounds the night before marching on the state capitol and for years the St. Jude complex, of which the school was part, had the only hospital that served the African American community.

As I squatted next to the projector, surrounded by my students, one of the officiates at the inauguration instructed the audience assembled on Capitol Hill to “please rise,” and so my students decided to do the same. So there I was, enveloped by my students, transfixed by their hopeful faces as they watched the first person that looked like them accept the highest office in the land.

We simply cannot separate who Barack Obama is from what Barack Obama does. This is why we purposefully titled this work “The Personal and the Political,” to attempt to capture this very construct. At times we may wade through the weeds of the ups and downs of various policy proposals, but know that lurking under the surface is the enormous symbolic significance, especially for education reform, of the first African American president.

This book arose out of a series of conversations between Bob (aka Robert, a generally centrist conservative) and myself (a generally centrist liberal) about what an Obama Presidency would mean for education reform in the United States. Hopefully we gave fair hearing to both sides.

—MQM

Acknowledgments

We would especially like to thank our colleagues at what we believe to be the best education policy program in the country, the Department

of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Their counsel, friend-ship, and support throughout this process have been invaluable. We would also like to thank our families and friends, who put up with our mutterings about “license and capacity” and “development versus redistribution” with great patience. We wish to thank the outstanding educators in the more than one hundred schools where we have done fieldwork. Without your insights, we would be clueless. We would also like to thank Burke Gerstenschlager and Kaylan Connally at Palgrave Macmillan, who helped shepherd this work through production. Finally, we’d like to thank Rick Hess for sitting down and having a beer with Bob and saying, “Yeah, I think that book does sound like a good idea.”

We thank the following for their permission. Parts of Chapter 2 were originally published as R. Maranto and Dirk C. van

Raemdonck, “The Educational Industrial Complex: A Critique of a Concept,” Journal of School Choice , 5(3), July–September, 2011, 300–318. We thank the Journal of School Choice and the Taylor & Francis Press Group for their per-mission to republish.

Sections of Chapter 4 were originally published as R. Maranto with L. Coppeto, “The Politics Behind Bush’s No Child Left Behind: Ideas, Elections, and Top-Down Education Reform,” pp. 105–120 in Bryan Hilliard, Tom Lansford, and Robert Watson, eds., George W. Bush: Evaluating the President at Midterm . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. We thank the State University of New York Press for permission to republish.

Sections of Chapter 5 were originally published as Daniel H. Bowen’s 2010 Politics and the Scoring of Race to the Top Applications . Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute (AEI). We thank AEI for permission to republish.

1

History and Policy

These are our children, their future is our future. And it’s time we under-stand that their education is our responsibility. All of us.

—Barack Obama, speech in Nashua, New Hampshire, November 20, 2007

A Democratic president who is a genuine education reformer is too good not to work [because] the whole thing has such a Nixon goes to China quality.

—a leader in the Democrats for Education Reform

For education policy, the Obama era is either the best of times or the worst of times. Whichever is the case, the American education system is in

crisis. Although expenditures have steadily increased over the past decades almost any measure of performance shows stagnation. National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) scores have flatlined since the 1970s. Dropout rates have remained uniformly high, especially in our nation’s inner cities, where typically less than half of the students who start high school fin-ish it. These statistics were considered acceptable when elites believed that demography was destiny and poor and minority students were incapable of academic success. Luckily, in Barack Obama’s America we know better. His biography shows the power of education to transcend social and economic disadvantage. Education reformers today are tasked with attempting to pro-vide that same opportunity to the millions of students around the country trapped in schools that do not serve their needs.

But education reform is not solely an issue of social justice; it is also about national greatness. A public education system that wastes the talents of poor and minority students harms our economy by limiting human capi-tal. This is a problem not only in inner cities but also in American suburbs. International comparisons show that even our highest performing students fall well behind their global peers. If America is to maintain its status in the world, economically, politically, or culturally, the American education sys-tem must improve.

2 PRESIDENT OBAMA AND EDUCATION REFORM

Depending on whom you ask, Barack Obama is either championing or destroying America’s public schools. On one hand, the president has increased federal financial support of education to a greater degree than any president in history. He has poured tens of billions of dollars into state coffers to stave off widespread teacher layoffs, with few strings attached and promises to spend more in the future. On the other, he has by and large embraced every reform initiative of prior administrations, democrat and republican, even though these reforms have mixed public support. Perhaps most curiously, he has opposed teachers’ unions, at least rhetorically, in embracing reforms such as charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and test-based accountability pro-grams. So what is he, a tax-and-spend liberal pouring resources into ineffec-tive bureaucracies or a cold-hearted free marketer ready to pit public schools against each other for federal funding? As one might imagine, the answer is much more complicated than the typical slogans of contemporary American political discourse might allow.

Traditionally and constitutionally, presidents have had little power over public education. Yet the gradual growth of the presidency as an institution and the role of government in traditionally state and local policy arenas have given presidents new opportunities to make their ideas a reality. This is par-ticularly true since the presidency often operates as a bully pulpit to catalyze widespread elite views. Just as 1960s political and business elites championed civil rights for African Americans, today’s elites see education reform as the next step in our centuries-old struggle to form a more perfect union. This change in elite ideology has enabled the president to punch above his weight, having far more impact on policy than available resources would suggest. An aging population, a rising creative class, more accessible technology, and easier measurement of outcomes of interest have changed the ideologi-cal climate for school reform at the same time that a true-believing African American president with a history of tough talk on education reform was elected. Though the political climate has generally become less favorable over time, elite opinion on the necessity for school reform has not. Because of this, President Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape public schools. In the pages that follow, we will chronicle and evaluate how well he takes advantage of this opportunity.

If nothing else, Barack Obama has changed the conversation on education reform. Frequently, reform opponents will charge that school reformers are racists and elitists, which is an odd charge given that all available evidence shows that public schools do their worst with low income children and chil-dren of color. By championing education reform, the president has made this position logically untenable, which is not to say that politics is always logical. He has shifted the liberal position from support of institutions to support of children and as imperfectly as his policies might serve that end, changing the terms of the debate is a more than incremental step in the right direction. No longer does the debate concern whether or not school choice should be

HISTORY AND POLICY 3

allowed but rather it is concerned with how to best structure school choice programs. No longer can teachers be held above evaluation, but rather how best to evaluate teachers is the discussion. Standardized tests are respected as informative on at least some dimensions of student development and no longer is the pipeline into public education the exclusive domain of schools of education. If for no other reason than changing the terms of these debates, Barack Obama is an education president.

But it could have been far different. As the old white male son of a Navy admiral, John McCain lacked the moral high ground in education reform debates. Moreover, McCain’s education agenda to a considerable degree began and ended with school choice. Had McCain won and pursued this agenda, he would have likely had limited success in Congress. Perhaps more interesting to imagine would be education policy of president Hillary Rodham Clinton. Early in her career, when working with her then-governor husband, Clinton made a mark as an education reformer, fighting for improvements in teacher quality in Arkansas. As her ambitions became national, her education reform goals shrank, as it would be difficult to contradict her senate campaign co-hair, AFT president Randi Weingarten. As Terry Moe ( 2011 ) points out, had Clinton won a few more primaries, the Race to the Top and other Obama education policy reforms would not have seen the light of day. Sometimes elections really do matter.

To shed light on Barack Obama as an education president, we will address the following questions:

1. What is the Obama education agenda? 2. What explains the president’s support for school reform in the face of

significant political opposition, much of it from within his own party? 3. Will the Obama education agenda outlast the Obama presidency? 4. Most important, are the Obama education policies likely to work? That

is, over the long run, will the president’s policies do more good than harm for America’s children?

Before we get to President Obama, we should start with our own biases, in the form of seven maxims.

First, public education is all for the grown-ups. Just as dog food is sold and packaged to appeal to dog owners rather than actual dogs, so too are schools designed for grown-ups more than for kids. To put this in political terms, just as republican politicians vote to support wars they would never send their children to, democratic politicians vote to support schools they would never send their children to.

Second, simply saying something does not make it so: you have to measure. As the lead author’s 1 former bosses in the Clinton administration used to say, improvement requires measurement since what doesn’t get measured doesn’t count. Too often we see education writers and analysts making use of


faith-based social science, making statements with great authority that sim-ply do not stand up to scrutiny. We will make a conscious effort not to do that here, and will provide data wherever possible.

Third, self-evaluation is self-deception (particularly for very bright people). To make a blatantly political point, it strikes us that the well-intentioned edu-cation professors and consultants writing about their wonderful programs sure to take public education to the promised land are not so very different from former president George W. Bush and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who recently penned memoirs defending their decisions in invad-ing and occupying Iraq.

Fourth, government policies are always oversold . Every president promises to make the world anew, in public education and everything else. Yet a stub-born world refuses remaking, as Gillion (2002) writes in That’s Not What We Meant to Do . Accordingly, we will not judge policies as having failed if they fail to live up to their sponsor’s rhetoric, since all policies fail to live up to the rhetoric. Rather, we will judge public policies based on whether they seem to be doing more good than harm.

Fifth, ideas matter . To borrow from John Maynard Keynes, the ideas of intellectuals generally (though Keynes focuses on economists and political philosophers) “both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intel-lectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist” (Keynes 1936, 383).

Sixth, history matters . It is impossible to understand policies without understanding their history, and more important, how policy makers and the attentive public interpret that history (Jervis 1976 ). Indeed, despite talk of constant change, the best predictor of budgets, or anything else in any orga-nization remains what the organization did last year. Or as William Faulkner put it in Requiem for a Nun , “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

Seventh, it helps if you’ve been there. As Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi , “War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.” Accordingly, we will attempt to make use of and explain the views of those in the trenches of education policy-making and in actual schools, particularly effective schools. In the interests of candor, we should note our own back-grounds. The lead author served in government in the Clinton years, in the center-left Brookings Institution before that, and has had ongoing relation-ships with American Enterprise Institute and other pro-market think tanks in the years since. He has two children in traditional public schools, so he has skin in the education game. The other author has taught in an inner city Catholic school, an experience he refers to as “riding the lightning.” Between them, the authors have worked or done fieldwork in more than a hundred schools in nine states.


Of course the notion of legitimacy through experience is a tricky one for education policy makers. As Tyack and Cuban ( 1995 ) show, everyone is an expert on education, because everyone went to school. Yet no one agrees about what we want from public education. Moreover, teachers (and profes-sors) are among the only professionals protected from firing for cause. Not surprisingly, public schools have trouble giving us what we may or may not want from them . As the lead author is fond of observing, his car runs far better than the first one he owned back in 1984 and his computer works far better than the TRS-80 of 1985, yet our schools have stagnated. Despite ever-rising inputs, strenuous efforts by some, and constant reform, public schools seem no better than ever. As Greene ( 2005 ) shows, for the most part, this does not reflect family breakdown and changed demographics. Why don’t public schools improve? And what is better anyway? Through this book, we apply history and social science to these questions, attempting to take the perspec-tive of federal policy makers.

Guided by these maxims and observations, this chapter will offer a brief history of American public education since, again, we cannot understand policy without understanding both policy history and how policy mak-ers and the public view that history. This is demonstrated best in the short history of American public schools, Tyack and Cuban’s ( 1995 ) Tinkering Toward Utopia . As Tinkering shows, educational reforms are always lim-ited by the idea of a “real school,” that is the hazy, rose-colored memory of the school attended by teachers and parents. Teachers and parents typically oppose any reform that departs too much from this vision. This conceptual “stickiness” has been reinforced by the institutionalization of schooling. The original public schools were very small organizations rooted in and entirely controlled by their local communities, typically communities of faith. They were both governed and funded by their communities, and thus could be changed with relative ease as local constituents demanded. Over time, pub-lic schools have evolved into ever larger, more bureaucratic, more complex, less local, and to some degree less personal institutions governed by rules developed by distant bodies, and staffed with bureaucrats armed with spe-cialized degrees, jargon, and not infrequently tenure, making them difficult to influence or dismiss (Franciosi 2004 ; Cutler 2000 ). Indeed, as in much of American political development, the history of public schools is the history of gradual bureaucratization. The one-room, multiaged little red school-house has evolved into what we call the Educational Industrial Complex (EIC). In our discussions of the EIC, we will highlight the role ideas play in policy-making. To a considerable degree, EIC splits have pit progressives against traditionalists , though the meanings of these terms and the goals of those associated with them have changed over time. We argue that President Obama in many respects does not fit into this (or other) neat categories, since in education he often embraces traditionalist means to achieve what we believe are progressive ends. We will conclude with our speculation that


on education at least, President Obama is on the side of history. His policies will likely be followed by his successors, and children and teachers will be better off as a result.

The end of the beginning, that is Chapter 1 , will outline the rest of the book. Here we will outline various social scientific models useful in understand-ing education policy, explain the personal and political motives of President Obama, and go on to describe and critique the administration’s approach to national standards and Race to the Top (RTT), and the proposed reauthori-zation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), whose latest incarnation is No Child Left Behind (NCLB). As we have already implied, we believe that the president’s education policies will do more good than harm, which is, after all, the test of any public policy. Further, in the difficult to change world of public policy in general and public education in particular, doing even incremental good is no small achievement (Lindblom and Cohen 1979 ; Lindblom 1959 ).

A Short History of Education Reform

Like civil service reform, education reform ref lects the character of American government, which quite literally bubbled up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the capital (Schultz and Maranto 1998 ). The first American “public” schools supported by local tax levies, free to local residents, and with academically nonselective admissions were run by the dominant local religious congregation, as was appropriate when churches were the primary local institutions and when learning reading in order to understand the Protestant Bible was a key goal of education (Ravitch 2000 ; Peterson 2010 ). Taxpayers paid for and through school committees, directly governed the schools in their small communities. As Franciosi ( 2004 ) shows, they accordingly saw the typically one-room pub-lic schools as their schools. School teachers were often honored local resi-dents, occupying a position comparable to that of a medium-sized farmer. At the same time, teachers knew that they must please their constituents to maintain their positions, and turnover was frequent. Like Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow , teachers not infrequently wished to marry into land to gain economic security. After the 1840s, such schools were increasingly replaced by what we think of as public schools, schools run by locally elected boards. Though not formally linked to reli-gious sects, schools typically imposed the Protestant King James Bible, even on Catholic children. Indeed until the mid-twentieth century, public schools taught the dominant Protestant faiths and portrayed Catholicism as un-American, which ironically promoted Catholic schools as alterna-tives. Oregon actually outlawed Catholic schools in 1922, though this was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (Buck and Maranto 2011 ).


The original, small, community-based public schools were reasonably effective. Even though most students attended school for only a few years, literacy was close to universal among the white, native-born population. This remarkable success story both reflects attentive parents and consider-able standardization among textbook producers, most notably through the famous McGuffy’s readers (Ravitch 2000 ; Hirsch 1996 ). Indeed, America was perhaps the first nation to enjoy mass literacy, and this helped fuel economic growth.

Massachusetts’ Horace Mann, often considered the founder of the com-mon school, served as the first state commissioner of education in 1837. Shortly before taking the post, Mann declared:

In this Commonwealth, there are 3,000 public schools, in all of which the rudiments of knowledge are taught. These schools, at the present time, are so many distinct independent communities; each being governed by its own hab-its, traditions, and local customs. There is no common, superintending power over them; there is no bond of brotherhood or family between them. They are strangers and aliens to each other. As the system is now administered, if any improvement in principles or modes of teaching is discovered by talent or acci-dent, in one school, instead of being published to the world, it dies with the discoverer. No means exist for multiplying new truths, or preserving old ones (quoted in Cremin 1980 , 155).

Complaining that his state took more care of its livestock than its children, Mann successfully pushed Massachusetts to pass the first mandatory atten-dance law and began the state-level funding and regulation of the Bay State’s then three thousand tiny public schools. Thus began the first movement for centralization and standardization of traditionally local American public schools, a tension that has been with us ever since. 2

Mann’s innovations might be understood through the lens of American political culture. Elazar ( 1971 , 103–114) argues that American political culture can be divided into moralistic , individualistic , and traditionalistic strands. Moralistic political culture, concentrated in New England and the Midwestern and Western regions and settled by Yankee and Scandinavian immigrants, stresses that government should serve all equally and that government offi-cials should be motivated by serving the public. As the name implies, govern-ment should operate to make society better. The moralistic political culture tends to support centralization and bureaucratization so long as those reforms promote equity. In contrast, individualistic political culture, which grew out of the intergroup conflicts for resources characterizing New York and other diverse, middle-Atlantic states, is more pragmatic, seeing government less as an actor promoting social good than as a marketplace in which contending individuals and groups bring (often materialistic) demands. Traditionalistic political culture, reflecting plantation agriculture in the South, shows skep-ticism of markets and sees government as maintaining traditional, person,


and kin-based communities—which of course tend to continue elite domi-nance. It is not surprising that ideas that schooling should be centralized and bureaucratized came from Massachusetts rather than South Carolina. Indeed as we argue below, national government involvement in education policy can be thought of as a moralistic enterprise pushing individualistic and tradition-alistic local institutions to change their practices.

Through the late nineteenth century and nearly the entire twentieth century, progressive administrative doctrine pushed for larger schools and school districts. Gradually, though the 1800s small church-based schools were replaced or subsumed by nondenominational, elected school boards. Ungraded and often one-room schools were replaced with larger and more formal organizations. The number of school districts steadily declined through the twentieth century (see Figure 1.1 ), from over 117,000 districts in 1940 to roughly 16,000 in 1980, even as the size of districts increased (Kirst 1995 ; Franciosi 2004 ).

Increasingly, large schools and school systems found it difficult to repre-sent and maintain close relationships with parents, and indeed this has been a theme of school reformers for decades (Cutler 2000 ; Tyack and Cuban 1995 ). Efforts to force schools to serve parents, or at least parents of special-needs children, by giving new rights have made schools more litigious, but have not improved school-parent relationships (Ong-Dean 2009 ), nor relation-ships within schools (Ingersoll 2003 ; Arum 2003 ). Franciosi ( 2004 ) docu-ments that as school size increased, small school districts were consolidated and local and state governments took over and “professionalized” schooling. This weakened relationships between schools and parents. Reduced paren-tal support for teachers and principals made schools less effective over time. In contrast, private schools have maintained their close relationships with parents (Chubb and Moe 1990 ) and provide somewhat superior education at significantly lower costs than their traditional public counterparts. Even

0

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

140,000

1939 1949 1959 1968 1979 1989 1999 2009

Figure 1.1 Number of School Districts 1939–2009.


so, there has been and remains enormous variation in schooling nationally, regionally, and within states.

Changing Goals of Schooling

The first education law in America came from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647. Called the “Old Deluder Satan Law,” it required all towns of more than 50 residents to build and fund a school to teach youth to read the Bible. The particular puritanical strain of religion that defined the first settlers stressed that in order to get into Heaven, one must be able to read the Bible. Thus, education was a means of circumventing that “old deluder,” Satan, who hoped to keep men ignorant of Scripture. By the early 1800s, within memory of the nation’s founding, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and others saw universal schooling (at least among white males) as a means of binding the nation together through republican values such as patriotism and support for the Constitution. This was no small matter at a time when many wondered whether America could endure. However, the nation’s founders put great confidence in schooling‘s ability to make citizens “republican machines.” Notably, contemporary critics from the left such as E. D. Hirsch ( 2009 ) and from the right such as Victor Davis Hanson ( 2003 ) express concern that pub-lic schools have ignored this mission, at the expense of national unity.

The first American public high school, the English High School in Boston, was founded in 1821 and modeled after classical high schools in Scotland. By the late 1800s, high schools had spread across the nation. Towns saw a high school as offering local bragging rights and as good for business. In an age when the differences between high schools and colleges were hazy, high schools had a classical mission. This began to change in the late 1800s, under the influence of German educators and the presidents of elite colleges. In 1893, the National Education Association (NEA), which at that time was a profes-sional association rather than a union, issued the report from the Committee of Ten, which aimed to standardize high school offerings. The committee, composed of prominent scholars and chaired by Harvard president Charles Eliot, codified and in some respects popularized the idea of a classical liberal arts education as broad, including history, English, foreign language, math-ematics, and science. The Committee of Ten’s support of a broad liberal edu-cation for its own sake still has some influence over how many Americans view the goals of schooling (Mitchell 1981 ; Hirsch 1996 ).

Yet a generation later, much of the work of the ten was undone by what Richard Mitchell ( 1981 ) tartly calls “the Gang of Twenty-Seven,” the National Education Association’s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education and its manifesto, The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education . This commission was made up largely of educational administrators and teachers, along with a few professors from schools of education. Influenced


by the social science of the day and by the demands of business, the admin-istrative progressives who crafted the Cardinal Principals decreed that only very few students, and fewer still from “inferior races” such as Italians, Eastern Europeans, African Americans, and Asians were capable of signifi-cant academic learning (Ravitch 2000 ). In short, scholarly achievement was thought of as a Northern European, primarily male preserve. Echoes of this view can be seen in modern progressives who view preparing disadvantaged students for college as a form of “cultural eugenics,” to use Horn’s ( 2011 ) term. Ironically, this notion that demography is destiny makes strange bedfellows, with “social justice” intellectuals such as Horn (2011) and Glass ( 2008 ) in essential agreement with reactionary intellectuals such as Robert Weissberg ( 2010 ), who says it all in the title of his book Bad Students, Not Bad Schools .

With such a deterministic approach, the goal of schools changed to the tracking of students into career paths at early ages, something charita-bly referred to at the time as social efficiency . As David Labaree ( 2004 , 109) observes:

If school subjects have to be adjusted to the capacities of students and to the requirements of the job market, and if most students have modest capacities and most jobs have modest skill requirements, then only a few classes need provide a rigorous academic content for the college bound elite, while most students need classes that are less academic, less demanding, and better suited to their modest future roles in society. This is a straightforward prescription for diluting academic content.

The commission issued the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education in 1918. Fitting its nonintellectual composition, none of the principles, which included health, worthy home membership, vocation, citizenship, worthy use of leisure, and ethical character, were linked to recognizable scholarly disciplines. Only one, the vaguely worded “command of fundamental pro-cesses,” had anything to do with academic learning as the Committee of Ten had defined it. This single goal was to capture history, English, for-eign language, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and indeed all recognized scholarly disciplines. In the world of what Labaree calls “administrative progressive” education reformers, schools were intended to become large bureaucracies staffed by professionals and practicing a strict division of labor. The schools would “batch process” students, and indeed were pur-posely modeled off of the factories that would employ both dropouts and graduates. Ever since, there have been near continual battles over those who see American public schools as insufficiently rigorous (Labaree 2004 ; Mitchell 1981 ; Bell 1988 ; Ravitch 2000 ; Finn 2008 ; Gamson 2007 ), and oth-ers, typically from inside schools or colleges of education, who see schools as too focused on academics (Glass 2008 ; Berliner and Biddle 1996 ; Noddings 2005 ). For example, Tony Wagner’s ( 2010 ) popular The Global Achievement


Gap argues that schools should teach inchoate “21st Century Skills,” rel-egating traditional academic subjects to six lines on page 261 (followed by two pages of caveats). Wagner makes a good living consulting with school districts on curriculum issues.

The long-term impacts of the Cardinal Principles cannot be overstated, and bring to mind John Maynard Keynes’s observation about the long-lasting impacts of ideas (whether right or wrong). Nearly 60 years after the Cardinal Principles were published, the lead author of this book, then a high school journalist, interviewed the superintendent of Baltimore county (Maryland) public schools, Dr. Joshua Wheeler, who was retiring and accordingly quite candid. When asked whether schools should test students to assure that they had certain minimal skills before graduation, Wheeler responded with patient condescension (Maranto 2003 ):

Your question shows that you do not understand the purpose of the public education system. The purpose of public education is not to educate students. The purpose of public education is to provide an education for those few who want it.

Wheeler went on to explain that if schools had serious academic standards, some students might drop out, increasing crime and unemployment. Similarly, prominent education professor Nell Noddings ( 2005 ) com-plained that No Child Left Behind was deficient since it focuses on com-mand of fundamental processes to the exclusion of the other six goals of the Cardinal Principles. Of course, command of fundamental processes (or at least command of reading and other traditional subjects) can be measured, suggesting a limitation of the mission of schooling, and per-haps on the resources devoted to schooling.

Interestingly, lessening the academic content of schooling proved con-troversial. Traditional high school educators, who have always held more dedication to their academic subjects than their elementary peers, resisted watering down content. Eventually, however, high school was reshaped in part due to the efforts of administrative progressives, who controlled cur-ricula. Further, in the years during and just before the Great Depression, high school attendance expanded rapidly, in part ref lecting efforts to keep young people in school and thus out of the job market. After all, a young person in school is a student while a young person on the job market is likely unemployed. As a rule, political leaders prefer the former statistic to the latter. The rapid expansion of high school meant that high school teachers could be schooled in the new reality of less academic and more “relevant” high schools (Labaree 2004 ; Mirel 1999 ). Indeed, this is a theme of social science generally: organizations are most easily changed when new or when growing rapidly since novice officials can be indoctrinated more easily (Downs 1967 ).


The Changing Role of the Federal Government in Education Policy

As noted, American public schools started locally, with school systems often predating state governments. The federal government has gradually increased its funding and regulation of local public schools, while for the most part leav-ing key administrative powers in the hands of schools of education, private interest groups such as accrediting agencies, and the 50 states and thousands of local school districts. This division of policy labor plays well into what Paul Peterson (Peterson, Rave, and Wong 1986 ; Peterson 1994 ) described as the ideal arrangement of federalism. He argues that states and localities should manage developmental policies as they have an incentive to make their com-munity as competitive as possible to attract tax-paying citizens. The federal government, on the other hand, should manage redistributional policies as the burden of enacting them would be too much to bear for any individual locality. Imagine you are governor of the only state with unemployment insurance. Do you think your state would be populated by businesses (neces-sary to pay for such benefits) or the unemployed (who would seek such ben-efits)? This is why the federal government should administer such programs, because the federal government is better able to align incentives to prevent gaming by more privileged citizens.. Additionally, Americans feel allegiance to their localities and to the states, expressing more affection for their local and state governments (Wilson and DiIulio 2006 ), and communities have a strong incentive to make public schools top-notch so as to increase their tax base, so it makes sense to put as much power in those actors’ hands as pos-sible. Public education is not even mentioned in the US Constitution, greatly limiting the role that the federal government can play.

Initially, the federal government had mainly symbolic impact on school-ing. Federal agencies would collect statistics and disseminate reports such as the Cardinal Principles. But, in the wake of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, the role of the national government expanded, in edu-cation and everything else. The economic crisis of the 1930s overwhelmed state and local governments, requiring federal assistance. Due to the grow-ing stature of the presidency in a time of foreign and domestic crisis, the role of television in increasing presidential power, and more general ideological changes, Americans began to expect the national government (embodied by the presidency) to take charge in what had traditionally been state and local matters. Increasingly “government action” was taken to mean action led by the executive branch of the national government, exemplified by symbolic and sometimes real presidential initiative (Lowi 1979 , 1985 ; Higgs 1987 ). By the 1960s, elite and mass opinion favored an expanded federal role in funding and regulating education, in part to assure technological advances for national defense in Cold War America, and in part to achieve greater equity.


However, in our Madisonian system of constitutional checks and bal-ances, changes in elite or mass opinion do not always lead to changes in policy, at least not quickly. The father of the Constitution, James Madison, developed divided government to limit its power. Contrary to popular opin-ion, this arrangement was designed to block rather than facilitate action (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1995 ). Madison feared faction, which he defined as any group, majority or minority, united in purpose. He believed that such groups, whether economic, social, ideological, or religious, would invariably attempt to take charge of government to impose their will on others. Some polities, such as postrevolutionary France, attempted to cure what Madison called “the mischief of faction” by removing people’s liberty to organize. As Madison wisely counseled, this cure was worse than the disease. Rather than limit liberty, the US Constitution devised by Madison and his colleagues set up separate institutions sharing power, making it difficult for any one faction to dominate all of the institutions of government.

Madison and the framers divided power not only horizontally, through the executive branch, two houses of Congress, and the courts, but also verti-cally, between states and the national government. Further, while they are not mentioned in the US Constitution, localities such as cities, counties, and school districts often have significant powers of their own (Wilson and DiIulio 2006 ; Elazar 1971 ). The wide range of actors potentially involved in domestic policies (such as education) may make for relatively representa-tive policy-making since a large number of factions can have input into both policy-making and implementation. Indeed our system has multiple “veto points,” so those strongly opposed to policy innovations have many opportu-nities to block them, or at least to extract concessions. From interagency con-tention in the executive branch to the committee system within each house of Congress to the filibuster in the Senate, there are several serious hurdles a policy must clear to become law (even within the supposedly majoritarian legislative branch!). The very breadth of representation in American govern-ment makes it difficult for government to be responsible—that is, to address public problems, because so many institutions and associated factions are involved. This tends to make policy-making incremental, with only minor changes from year to year. As we detail in Chapter 2 , this is all too true in education policy. Further, the complexity of our governmental system may make it difficult for citizens to know whom to hold accountable. As we shall see, it is easy for local officials such as school superintendents, in particular, to blame state or federal officials for policies of their own making (Pressman and Wildavsky 1973 ; Moe 2011 ; Rieselbach 1977 ; Lindblom 1959 ).

Blocking becomes more difficult when one party dominates government, or in time of crisis. As in the passage of the economic stimulus in the early days of the Obama administration, one political party can control Congress and the executive branch and have sufficient unity to work its will. In other situations, policy-making is consensual, as when George W. Bush and


a divided Congress quickly authorized military action against Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Sometimes policy-making that is controversial for the public is consensual among elites, who presumably have better information. President Bush’s congressionally authorized bank “bailout” in response to the stock market crash of fall 2008 was an example of united elites moving despite serious public misgivings. President Reagan’s Nation at Risk report is education reform’s corollary. That report motivated elites to push education reform, despite high levels of public support for local public schools.

From the “emergency” Lanham Act of 1940 to the publication of A Nation at Risk in the early 1980s, education policy possessed what Baumgartner and Jones ( 1993 ) call a “policy monopoly,” wherein school systems received ever more resources without much scrutiny or outsider influence. (This is a theme of Chapter 2 ). Elites and the mass public had increased faith in the power of the experts within the national government to solve social problems; thus it was natural to support an increased federal role in education (Lowi 1979 , 1985 ; Higgs 1987 ). In no small part due to these ideological changes, Congress incrementally increased federal funding of public schools.

The Lanham Act gave federal aid to local school districts impacted by the relocation of military personnel and defense workers. Under pressure from Congress members who wanted their constituents to benefit, the Lanham aid was gradually expanded and made permanent in 1950. With the support of agricultural interests, Congress passed the National School Lunch Act of 1946 and the Agricultural (school milk) Act of 1954, thus putting the govern-ment in the business of feeding children. Aid to education was on the national agenda in part because of the growing power of the National Education Association (NEA), which by the late 1950s was among the top 20 lobbying organizations in Washington (Eidenberg and Morey 1969 ).

Of course, even policy monopolies can have their family feuds, and no dominant coalition lasts forever. As considerable research suggests, over time policy entrepreneurs will press for changes until the ideological climate allows for change, at which point policies shift quickly, particularly when the deci-sion-making migrates to a pro-reform venue (Kingdon 1995 ; Schattschneider 1960 ). General expansion of aid to public schools was delayed for many years in part due to ideological opposition of skeptical conservatives who saw public schooling as a state and local concern, but even more so because of Catholics who did not want to support school aid unless their schools also benefited. Added into this mix were racist Southern Democrats who feared (correctly) that federal aid would be conditioned on racial integration, abolishing the dual black-and white-school systems which typified southern communities. Notably, Southern Democrats in this period represented one-party districts and thus tended to serve for long periods. Many had senior positions on US House and Senate committees, including the powerful House Rules com-mittee which could determine the form in which legislation would be voted


on. Thus, this particular faction had power well beyond its numbers. Indeed a key enabler to federal aid to education came with the expansion of the Rules Committee in 1961 (Eidenberg and Morey 1969 , 16–25, 62), weakening its Virginian chairman.

External Shocks as Tipping Points

Combined with these ideological shifts were two key environmental changes that neither interest groups nor Madisonian veto points could stop. First, World War II and the postwar rise of communism made it clear that the United States would have a large, permanent defense establishment, some-thing fundamentally new to American democracy. The fact that expan-sionary Marxist regimes that murdered millions followed closely on the heels of expansionist fascist regimes that murdered millions may have led American policy makers to overstate the nature and unity of enemies, ulti-mately leading to American involvement in Vietnam (Jervis 1976 ; Krasner 1978 ). Overstated or not, the existence of significant foreign threats and the increasingly technological nature of warfare demanded that the United States emphasize training in science and technology. Elites and masses were unified in the belief that Soviet technological breakthroughs would under-mine deterrence. Empowered by this fear (combined with the writings of former Harvard president James B. Conant), historian Arthur Bestor and others convinced policy makers that Cardinal Principles–based high schools had undermined academics to too great a degree for too many students. Indeed among the bestsellers of the 1950s were books arguing for more aca-demic rigor, such as Educational Wastelands and Why Johnny Can’t Read . The reformers of the day favored large high schools that could provide spe-cialized teaching in science and mathematics (desirable for national secu-rity) and special tracks to challenge gifted students, without fundamentally altering the mediocre academic preparation afforded the rest. Still, it is not clear that these reformers would have succeeded without an external shock, the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. This strategic surprise created a perceived crisis of American technological and hence military inferiority, enabling education reformers in Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act in 1958, authorizing the then large sum of $1 billion for science, math, and foreign language education (Gamson 2007 ; Eidenberg and Morey 1969 , 16). As Gamson ( 2007 , 193) writes, Santa Clara educational leaders went so far as to use federal funds to produce an instructional film titled The Butcher, the Baker, and the Missile Maker . In short, national defense proved adequate motivation for federal involvement in local schooling. Ultimately, this reshaped both K–12 and postsecondary education (Ledbetter 2011 ).


If Sputnik was one crisis opening a window for school reform, the deseg-regation of Little Rock Central High School proved to be another. While the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka ended legally sanctioned segregation, school districts throughout the South and much of the north continued to operate separate black and white schools and whole school systems, taking advantage of Brown’s conciliatory language, particularly the term “all deliberate speed.” While Brown did give political cover to school districts that already wished to desegregate, it did little to change others. School districts allowed only token desegregation for a small number of African Americans willing to suffer both bureaucratic indignity and threats of physical violence. Other districts insisted that more plan-ning was needed, and sought relief from federal district courts charged with enforcing Brown. The state of Virginia actually closed a number of schools that were under threat of desegregation, and Southern states attempted to use school choice to circumvent integration (Daugherity 2011 ). For some, this racist social engineering forever discredited school choice, even racially egali-tarian choice schemes such as school vouchers for low-income (and typically minority) students.

In Little Rock in the fall of 1957, the school board accepted desegregation and planned to admit a few African Americans to the city’s most prominent high school, Little Rock Central. In reaction, governor Orval Faubus and other leaders disrupted the plans, going so far as to use the National Guard to back up white mobs intent on keeping the students out, a tactic later cop-ied elsewhere. President Eisenhower had to use the US Army’s famed 101st Airborne Division to keep order and escort students through each school day. Later the president federalized all ten thousand members of the Arkansas National Guard to assure their cooperation (Buck 2010 ; Rosenberg 1993 ). In 1963, President Kennedy faced an even more violent conflict over school integration in Birmingham (which some locals called “Bombingham”). To face down governor George Wallace, police chief Bull Connor, and others, Kennedy reluctantly federalized the National Guard and sent in the army (Newell 2012).

The Liberal Moment: The Great Society

Policy makers learn from history. The depth of white resistance to deseg-regation in Little Rock, Birmingham, and elsewhere convinced liberals and moderates that only very firm federal action could force local public schools to desegregate, and members of Congress set about to lay the groundwork for such action in the form of the Great Society laws. Similarly, the business community decided to support much of the civil rights agenda. Firms became reluctant to locate in communities that did not desegregate, and do so peace-fully (Rosenberg 1993 ). To a large extent, this sorting explains the meteoric rise of Atlanta (“the city too busy to hate”) and the lingering stagnation of its neighbor, Birmingham.


President Kennedy’s murder, combined with the ascension of the wily leg-islative tactician Lyndon Johnson, permitted the passage of Great Society leg-islation. President Johnson ran against limited government Republican Barry Goldwater, who had for the most part opposed federal involvement in educa-tion. Johnson won, with substantial coattails in House and Senate races. In the US House, Democrats had more than a two-to-one majority, their greatest since 1938. This gave the new president the moral authority to push his Great Society plans, and address the backlog of civil rights legislation that had built up at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. It also gave liberal demo-cratic congressional leaders more authority and more votes. In the US House, leadership responded by weakening the power of the Rules Committee, thus making it easier to pass popular legislation over the objections of its Southern democratic chairman. At the same time, the Catholic Church became more flexible about federal aid to education after the Kennedy administration (the first and only one run by a Catholic) paved the way. In 1964 and 1965, the Johnson administration and congressional Democrats made further progress by signaling that some federal aid to private and parochial school students might be provided by making a distinction between aid for students and aid for schools (Eidenberg and Morey 1969 , 30–44, 64–69).

Through 1964 and 1965, prominent members of Congress, members of the Johnson administration, and private actors including Catholic education leaders and NEA lobbyists met to discuss a possible federal education bill. The bill they eventually agreed on, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), exponentially multiplied the duties and budget of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s (HEW) Office of Education. Chiefly, ESEA provided significant federal aid to school districts with large numbers of low-income students (Kaestle 2007 ; DeBray-Pelot 2007 ; Eidenberg and Morey 1969 ). ESEA had a significant success. It provided aid to local schools, which gave the federal government the leverage needed to force Southern school dis-tricts to desegregate. Undoubtedly, many district superintendents desired to desegregate their schools, but ran into opposition from the body politic. The influx of federal dollars conditional on desegregation provided the leverage and political cover for change (Rosenberg 1993 ). Arguably, President Obama’s Race to the Top is a similar instance in which federal money gave state and local officials political cover to do what they already considered good policy. Sometimes relatively modest carrots and sticks can enable the implementation of ideas whose time has come. Though ESEA was reauthorized roughly every six years since 1965, the law changed only incrementally until the Clinton administration. ESEA captured the policy ethos of the times, and became the model for future legislation. As Kaestle ( 2007 , 27–28) writes:

The liberal agenda gained steam under an energetic administration and was slowed only by the nation’s deepening involvement in the Vietnam War. Though battered, that agenda survived into the 1970s as the federal govern-ment initiated or increased its responsibility for additional groups of pupils


with special claims: Latinos and other English-language learners, children with disabilities, Native Americans, and women. In sum, then, the trajectory of federal intervention in education is generally upward from 1958 through the late 1970s, even though the federal role in education continued to spur constant debate. A more robust federal role developed, and something approximating an iron triangle emerged in education. Strong staff members specializing in education made careers in the White House, the Office of Education [later the Department of Education], education-related congressional committees, and education interest groups.

To varying degrees, this dynamic describes the passage and later politics of a number of pieces of legislation intended to develop programs to foster edu-cational equality for all social groups, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (which authorized Head Start), the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, Title IX (1972), the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Special Education), and the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 (see Table 1.1 ).

During this time period, federal education policy increasingly took the form of client politics, with the taxpayers as a whole funding programs that benefitted relatively small, identifiable coalitions of citizens, their interest group leaders, officials charged with running their programs, and program champions in Congress. These subgovernments, as we detail in the next chap-ter, cut across conventional institutional boundaries (Wilson and DiIulio

Table 1.1 Notable Federal Education Laws and Their Constituencies

Act Goal Bureaucracy Set-Up Interest Groups Involved

Economic Opportunity Act of 1964

education, job training, general poverty fighting

Office of Economic Opportunity

urban and rural poor

Bilingual Education Act of 1968

increase English ability among immigrant populations

enforced by Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

civil rights advocates

Title IX (1972) prevent discrimination of women


National Organization for Women, Women’s Equity Action League

The Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975

provide equal services for children with disabilities


families with children with disabilities

Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975

give grants to Native American tribes

Department of the Interior and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

Native Americans


2006 ; Kraft and Furlong 2007 ). Not surprisingly, policies attracted consider-able attention from these clients, who had significant benefits at stake, and relatively little attention from the public at large, for whom the costs were usually small. Accordingly, information asymmetries tended to promote pro-gram continuation and expansion, even if a particular program did more to support its employees than to serve the public.

At the same time, the new educational subgovernments caused concerns. As Finn ( 2008 ) and others have complained, the inherently complex nature of education policy and its associated institutions have led to incoherence and inefficiency. In general, more and more administrative mandates have weak-ened the ability of schools to self-govern, making them less effective institutions (Hill, Pierce, and Guthrie 1997 ). Further, as early as 1967, both conservative and liberal critics expressed concerns that federal funding for education was open-ended, with essentially no rewards for educating students, nor conse-quences for failing to educate them. As Thernstrom and Thernstrom ( 2003 , 215) write, Senator Robert Kennedy was so concerned that the federal govern-ment would pour money into schools to help low-income students without actually helping low-income students that he told the US Commissioner of Education that he wanted to amend ESEA “because it doesn’t have any way of educating those damn educators like you, Frank, and we really ought to have some evaluation in there.” Unfortunately, Kennedy’s provision was weakened and essentially ignored, meaning that until 2002 the federal government pro-vided funds with no assurance that children were benefiting (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Finn 2008 ). Indeed, President Johnson had recognized that a serious evaluation provision would have led educators to resist the pas-sage of ESEA (Eidenberg and Morey, 1969 ). Arguably, this is a case of public education being all for the grown-ups.

As this treatment suggests, the later politics of schooling, at least on the federal level, involved ever greater inputs with few or no attempts to measure program effectiveness. Exceptions were few. As detailed in Chapter 4 , enter-prising Nixon domestic policy czar Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his aid Chester E. “Checker” Finn attempted to insert provisions for national testing into ESEA legislation, but these went nowhere. Subgovernment dominance was such that in 1976, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter became the first presi-dential candidate to receive an NEA endorsement. As a payoff, he signed leg-islation creating the US Department of Education, though he did not propose anything like the level of funding desired. At the end of the Carter adminis-tration, the federal government still provided under a tenth of public educa-tion spending (Finn 2008 ).

A Break with the Past

The basic political dynamic of increasing federal involvement with little oversight changed abruptly in the Reagan era. US funding declined and


state and local funding stagnated, starting “policy talk,” as Tyack and Cuban ( 1995 ) put it, about deregulating schooling and encouraging school choice. With the publication of the Nation at Risk report, commissioned by Reagan education secretary Terrell Bell, elites began to demand a more academic focus for public schooling, permanently placing education issues on the national agenda.

Policy makers also became increasingly skeptical of the notion that increas-ing funding for schooling would improve results. Research by James Coleman and others found few or no impacts from increased funding. Social learning occurred, with politicians learning the hard way that public schools would not necessarily use additional funding wisely. Indeed, funding for education at all levels increased rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, as we show in Chapter 2 , but educational outcomes were stagnant. These stubborn facts led politi-cians on both the left and right to consider new policy options such as school choice and increased measurement of outputs such as student learning rather than merely inputs such as funding (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Greene 2005 , Finn 2008 ; Hanushek and Lindseth 2009 ). This social learn-ing was assisted by the rise of “neoliberal” politicians and intellectuals seek-ing to “reinvent government” through increased use of measurement, cutting rules and red tape, and employing competition between service providers. Unlike most conservatives, neoliberals do not want to limit the missions of government agencies, and are dedicated to using government to increase social equality; however, they want to use business practices to improve how government operates. The fall of communism and seeming success of free-market economies increased openness to neoliberal approaches, and there is more than a little evidence that such policies have worked (Maranto 2001; Osborne and Gaebler 1992).

With the notable exceptions of teachers’ unions, the American Education Research Association (AERA), and school administrators and their backers (Glass 2008 ; English 2010 ), those involved in education policy largely agree on needed reforms. To use the terminology of Skowronek ( 1997 ), every presi-dent since Reagan has sought to nationalize and modernize a largely localized and underperforming part of the public sector, copying foreign examples, as typified civil service reform (Schultz and Maranto 1998 ). Indeed, Finn ( 2010 ) actually declared “the end of the education debate” in an essay of that title, arguing:

Much of the problem, [reformers] concluded, stemmed from America’s disre-gard for measurable educational outcomes. And though the teachers’ unions and other staunch defenders of the status quo have resisted it, most reformers (on both the left and the right) have since come to accept the idea that aca-demic performance—as measured by achievement tests, completion rates, and international comparisons, rather than by spending, intentions, or equity of access—should be the principal benchmark for assessing the success or failure of American schools.


Yet as Finn admits, there remain significant fissures both within and between the parties. Democrats remain divided between antistandards, anti-choice teachers’ unions, and pro-reform groups such as the Democrats For Education Reform, which promote charter schools, school standards, merit pay, and chipping away at teacher tenure. Republicans remain divided over allowing the federal government to have any control over education, from standards-based reformers like George W. Bush and Lamar Alexander sup-porting use of the federal government, to strict constitutionalists like Ron and Rand Paul opposing it. Both parts of the GOP tend to argue that if existing schooling is ineffective, then more of it may be a suboptimal use of resources and that more schooling could also weaken families. Further, most Republicans back vouchers enabling low-income children to attend private schools, such as the Washington DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (Moe 2001 ; Franciosi 2004 ; McCluskey 2010 ).

Nonetheless, the significant elite consensus that public schools are under-performing and that the federal government must play a role in their improve-ment offers presidents the opportunity to work across institutional and party lines. As Jones ( 2005 ) argues, this is indeed how presidential power usually works. To use the terms of Nelson ( 1993 ), we would argue that former presi-dents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton were “presidents of prepara-tion,” who supported but could not impose significant education reform. In contrast, George W. Bush was a “president of achievement.” Bush’s No Child Left Behind (detailed in Chapter 4 ) brought unprecedented transparency and focus on results, particularly results for disadvantaged children (Maranto and Maranto 2004 ; Kress et al. 2011 ).

We think it likely that President Obama’s reforms will make him a sec-ond education president of achievement, if he can overcome a challeng-ing political climate. In the rest of the book, we will make this case. The Obama administration has supported standard democratic approaches calling for more schooling: expanding preschool programs and college and junior college attendance, and at least considering longer school years and school days, at least for disadvantaged students. At the same time, the Obama administration has embraced neoliberal policies such as increasing the number of charter schools and, most importantly, increasing efforts to measure school outputs rather than merely school inputs. There is reason to think that President Obama will succeed to a greater degree than most. By continuing the policies of George W. Bush, corrected for obvious and widely agreed upon flaws, we believe that over the long term, the Bush-Obama reforms will change American public schools for the better. The reforms will help kids.

And this is where we continue our story, first outlining several general theoretical approaches to understanding the evolving role of the federal gov-ernment in education, then dissecting specific policy initiatives of both the Bush and Obama presidencies.


In Chapter 2 , we will describe the social and institutional environment in which US education policy operates, and how that environment has changed in recent years. In particular, we will describe the multiple educational insti-tutions we term the Educational Industrial Complex (EIC). Starting with the myths the EIC propagates and moving to both the elite and pluralist models explaining its power, we will outline both the negative effects of the EIC, and what we know about how to mitigate them.

Chapter 3 explores President Obama’s views on education through his life story. His views on education and his personal critique of traditional public schools clearly arise from his upbringing, both in Hawaii and abroad, and his experience as a community organizer as a young man. The chapter will also describe how the president has developed a politically viable reform strategy despite considerable pressure from teachers’ unions.

Chapter 4 explains why president George W. Bush promoted NCLB and what the law entailed, and offers a brief evaluation of it. For the most part, NCLB reflected Clinton-era policy talk put into policy action. This chapter will also outline the debates between standards-focused reformers and mar-ket-focused reformers, explaining why the Clinton and G. W. Bush adminis-trations favored state-level standards.

Written with our colleague Dan Bowen, Chapter 5 will explain how the administration used Race to the Top funds to stimulate state-level educational policy innovation. Further, we will present quantitative tests showing that reforms were influenced by state-level politics: states with closely contested senatorial and gubernatorial races were more likely to score well on subjective factors in the RTT competition, and thus more likely to gain federal funds. We will put this in the context of the broader literature on fiscal federalism.

Chapter 6 will describe what may be the most revolutionary of all Obama education policies, the Common Core, which are stealth national standards. The Common Core Math and Language Arts Standards are being developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and already being implemented in local school districts. Through the Race to the Top competition and collaboration with the Gates and Thomas B. Fordham foundations, the Obama administration has facilitated the devel-opment of common standards and has funded development of assessments for these standards. This marks a radical shift in the federal government’s role in determining what students across the country will learn. This has drawn fire from across the political spectrum, from liberals disagreeing with the content and assessments to conservatives abhorring the increased federal role in what has traditionally been a state-level decision-making process. The chapter will conclude with a debate as to whether the program will, over the long run, do more good than harm.

Chapter 7 will outline the Obama vision of accountability, ESEA reautho-rization. This chapter will critique NCLB and describe the Obama adminis-tration’s ongoing efforts to reform the law, chiefly by focusing accountability


efforts on the lowest performing schools and encouraging the adoption of backdoor national standards through the Common Core initiative. Sources tell us that Democrats have soured on accountability-based reforms. Republicans, in turn, are reluctant to work with the administration on NCLB without a compromise on vouchers. At the same time, if NCLB continues without revision, most American public schools will be designated as “fail-ing,” so as in the case of budget bills periodically raising the debt ceiling; all actors have incentives to cooperate. The administration has reacted with executive orders to modify NCLB until such time as new legislation passes.

Finally, Chapter 8 will summarize previous chapters and look to the future of federal education policy. Broadly, we make four key claims. First, an aging population dependent on government entitlements will put pressure on all public sector institutions, including schools, to become more efficient and effective. Second, the rise of the “creative class” has pushed schools to custom-ize rather than bureaucratize their treatment of both children and teachers. In short, schools now face pressure to become more effective and less hier-archical, to join the modern workplace. Third, technology has enabled mea-surement of educational outcomes, making it possible for schools to become learning organizations rather than hierarchical bureaucracies. Related to this, technology allows education to take place separated from traditional schools in both time and place, as is demonstrated by cyber schools such as Achievement House. Finally, political elites no longer trust traditional routes into teaching and school administration, and have developed new ones, forc-ing schools of education to compete. These four broad trends have by and large been embraced by the Obama administration, and are wearing away EIC autonomy. In the end, we paint a hopeful picture for American children.

2

Clashing Interests and Clashing Ideas: Myths, Pluralism,

and the Educational Industrial Complex

N.E.A. is and always will be opposed to high-stakes, test-driven evaluations.

—NEA secretary-treasurer Becky Pringle, July 4, 2011, at the annual NEA assembly

There is an organized effort to place the blame for the budget shortfall squarely on the shoulders of teachers and other public workers, and it is one of the biggest scams in modern American history.

—vice president Joe Biden, July 4, 2011, at the annual NEA assembly

All of the Republicans are worse on education than Obama. I’m not saying I agree with everything, but you have to pick the least evil, the one who will do the least harm.

—Bertha J. Foley, a middle school teacher from Florida, July 4, 2011, at the annual NEA assembly

(all quoted in Otterman [ 2011 ])

As the three quotes above suggest, neither the Obama administration nor the most powerful teachers’ union has complete power. Mainly,

this chapter concerns power, but it must start out with basic facts. There are numerous misconceptions about the nature, role, and relative success of American public schools, and one cannot properly evaluate President Obama’s plans without knowing the basic facts of schooling. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Ironically, given that the subject is education, to a surprising degree, discussions of education policy occupy data-free zones. Indeed, some scholars in the field argue that the key determination of how a policy should be viewed is not whether the data indicate it will help children,


but rather who proposed it, with voices outside traditional education policy networks as immediately suspect (Glass 2008 , 146). Those on different sides remain convinced of their opinions, even when measurable facts show oth-erwise; hence, our second maxim: you have to measure . We feel that to a sig-nificant degree the public acceptance of misinformation reflects the power of the Educational Industrial Complex (EIC), though increasingly, education reformers have spread myths of their own. Accordingly, this chapter will begin with basic myths spread by the EIC (as well as one myth spread by reformers), and brief refutations of those myths. To cut to the chase, while American public schools are not getting worse, they are staying about the same while receiving ever greater resources. Contrary to myths that demog-raphy is destiny, this increasing in efficiency cannot be explained by changing student demographics. We will follow with various and sundry misconcep-tions about the nature of class sizes, teacher characteristics, and other mat-ters of schooling, relying heavily on the work of our colleague Jay P. Greene ( 2005 ). Having dispatched myths, we offer a very extensive application of social scientific concepts to the nature and power of the EIC, and explain how that dominant coalition is gradually losing power. The EIC’s relative fall from grace offers an opening for the Obama administration to fundamen-tally, albeit incrementally, remake public schooling. As later chapters show, this is in fact what the administration is doing.

Education Myths

The Cutback Myth

It is difficult to have sensible discussions about school funding given such widespread ignorance regarding both its current level and its effects. As Mark Twain put it, “It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” So it is with public education. By and large, Americans believe that their public schools are underfunded and strug-gling to get by on declining resources. Among America’s fourteen thousand school districts and five thousand odd charter schools, we often hear sto-ries of individual cutbacks. For example, National Public Radio in recent months reported (at least) twice that some Detroit public schools might have 60-student classes as a result of recent cutbacks—not “would” but “might” (National Public Radio 2011). Is this sort of thing typical? What are the facts? First, as our colleague Jay Greene ( 2005 , 10, 11, 16), points out, in real dol-lars, education spending in the United States increased from $1,214 in 1945 to just under $10,500 in 2008 (see Figure 2.1 ), growing more or less steadily through the period (Maranto and van Raemdonck 2011). Expressed as a per-centage of the GDP, total public education spending has been fairly stable as the GDP has increased, while the percentage of students in the population has declined (see Figure 2.2 ).

CLASHING INTERESTS AND CLASHING IDEAS 27

Compared to other government expenditures over time, education spend-ing (as expressed by state and local revenue from their own sources) has seen greater prominence, save compared to health care (Maranto and van Raemdonck 2011 ).

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Additionally, public school per-pupil spending is roughly five times what the median voter estimates it to be (Greene 2005 ; West 2010 , 281–282). As Guthrie and Peng ( 2010 ) point out, mean per-pupil spending controlling for inflation has continued to grow since 2001 and by most measures now tops $10,000 per child, as Figure 2.2 shows.

How did schools become so much more expensive? From 1950 to 2006, the number of students per staff member fell from 19.3 to 8.0, as shown in Figure 2.3 . Indeed, through early 2010, in part as a result of the Obama administration’s stimulus funding, state and local public sector employment did not see nearly the declines the private sector did (Dadayan and Ward 2011 ). Simply stated, fears of school cutbacks are greatly exaggerated.

The Money Myth

A related myth, the money myth, holds that more money leads to better edu-cational outcomes. Of course at some level, this has to be true. If spending fell to a few dollars per pupil, as indeed was the amount spent for African American students early in the twentieth century, then more money would almost certainly improve outcomes. Those days are, thankfully, long gone. Since at least the 1960s, all public schools have spent at levels well above those of Catholic schools, which seem to provide an adequate education for

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most students (Bryk et al. 1993 ). They also spend substantially more than public charter schools, as Figure 2.4 shows. Further, since the 1960s, school funding has grown far more equitable, so that city schools now often spend more than those in the suburbs (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ). Yet this has not had the desired impacts. Looking at a range of studies measur-ing educational outcomes before and after spending increases, Hanushek and Lindseth ( 2009 ) find little evidence that more spending improves out-comes. For example, in a court-imposed settlement, Kansas City tripled per-pupil spending in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with little or no apparent school improvement. Instead, such matters as whether incentives are aligned (Greene 2005 ; Ritter et al. 2009 ) and simple organization culture (Payne 2008 ; Whitmire 2011 ) matter more. Or, as education secretary Arne Duncan said of Washington public schools, “D.C. has had more money than God for a long time, but the outcomes are still disastrous” (Turque and Glod 2009 ).

Just as the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) spent more than its communist rivals and still was outfought in the end (Krepinevich 1986 ), so too do some schools flounder despite spending very large sums. Quite simply, above a certain threshold, money may not matter as much as whether teachers and administrators believe children can learn, whether they have a basic level of skill, whether they and others measure results, whether schools have rea-sonable leadership continuity, and whether schools have good curricula (Hess 1999 ; Payne 2008 ; Whitmire 2011 ; Hirsch 1996 ). Given all these nonmonetary factors, simply pumping more money into dysfunctional school systems will do little more than sending aid without oversight to the Afghan government. Elites in both major political parties seem to have learned this, which probably explains why courts are less likely now to intervene in school funding than back in the 1970s and 1980s (Hanushek and Lindseth 2009 ).

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Figure 2.4 Per-Pupil Spending Compared Across Sectors.Source: Traditional Public School spending figure from NCES, Charter School figure from the Center for Education Reform, and Catholic school figures from The Annual Statistical Report of Schools, Enrollment and Staffing, the National Catholic Education Association.


The Myth of Decline

Of course not all the mythmaking is on the behalf of the EIC. By the 1980s, the public had come to believe that public schools were getting worse. This was a theme of the Nation At Risk report (Bell 1988 ), and one picked up by numerous education intellectuals including Ravitch and Finn ( 1987 ), Wooster ( 1993 ), Hirsch ( 1996 ), former education secretary William Bennett ( 1992 ), and more recently by Bauerlein (2008), in his provocatively titled The Dumbest Generation . There is in fact some evidence that school safety and order eroded in the 1960s and 1970s (Arum 2003). Further, the absolute numbers of students scoring very well on the SAT have declined, so there is clear evidence that American public schools are doing a poor job serv-ing high-performing students. In general, however, as Greene ( 2005 ) points out, the mean National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores from 1971 (when comparable data starts) to 1999 were essentially flat, as Figure 2.5 shows. NAEP provides better measures than SAT or ACT scores since the latter might tend to fall over time as a greater percentage of stu-dents take the tests.

In short, critics who claim that public schools are falling apart overstate their case. Public schools are not getting worse; rather, they are spending more and staying about the same. It is not surprising that this should cause controversy, particularly since comparative data which became available in the 1980s showed that the public schools of other postindustrial nations boast

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higher (and more equitable) levels of academic achievement while spending comparable amounts (Greene 2005 ; Hirsch 2009 ). As Hanushek and Lindseth ( 2009 ) point out, over the long run this will harm American economic com-petitiveness. Even now, our educational underperformance damages our democracy by producing citizens who know too little about American gov-ernment to make informed voting decisions. Americans know precious little about their nation’s history, about the historical analogies used by today’s politicians, and about where public resources (budgets) go. Indeed, by some surveys, pluralities of Americans think that their government is hiding space aliens, and up to a third think that the government played a role in the 9/11 attacks (Hirsch 1996 , 2009 ; Maranto, 2012). Further, while traditional pub-lic schools are not getting worse, they are clearly not doing an adequate job serving minorities (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Buck 2010 ) or boys (Sommers 2000 ).

To repeat from Chapter 1 , over the long term this does threaten economic decline by failing to develop our human capital. This makes Americans less productive and less innovative in an increasingly globalized economy in which we compete with other nations with better school systems. Further, failing to educate disadvantaged children perpetuates and deepens eco-nomic inequity (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Hanushek and Lindseth 2009 ).

The Myth of Demographic Decline

Defenders of traditional public schools (Berliner and Biddle 1996; Glass 2008 ) who see calls for school reform as a “manufactured crisis” have propagated a widely held myth that demographic changes have made the work of American public schools more difficult. Considering demographic changes, stagnant NAEP scores should be considered successful. This argument has great cur-rency among teachers and administrators. The notion that “you just can’t teach those kids nowadays” has comforted old pedagogues since the ancients, but there is precious little data suggesting that children now are any more (or less) dysfunctional and uneducable than their parents and grandparents. As Greene ( 2005 ) shows, this argument stands only if one ignores census data. Most demographic changes suggest that American public schools should be more successful than ever. Families are smaller (meaning that children get more money and adult attention), child poverty has generally decreased since the 1950s ( Figure 2.6 ), environmental improvements such as reducing lead in the environment have cut retardation rates, parents have more years of educa-tion than in the past, parents increasingly make use of tutoring software and tutoring businesses such as Kumon, and rates of family breakdown have not increased substantially since 1980. Among challenging demographic groups,


only the percentage of students labeled as “English Language Learners” has increased. However, the trend lines might look different if we could take them all the way back into the 1800s, when a large number of immigrants flooded into America and the local language of instruction was often something other than English.

It is of course possible that some sort of unmeasured and perhaps unmea-surable variable has made students more difficult to teach than in the recent past, but in the absence of measurement, this strikes us as faith-based social science , best left to theologians.

Further, public schools have been slow to adopt technologies that have the potential to improve learning (Moe and Chubb 2009 ; Jacob 2011 ) and have failed to harness the energy of parents (Ong-Dean 2009 ; Valle 2009 ; Descry and Martin-Bemer 2001 ). Accordingly, it is misleading to criticize the critics of the EIC as racist or reactionary “enemies of public education,” as do EIC backers such as Glass ( 2008 , 10, 147–148), Berliner and Biddle (1996), English ( 2010 ), and to a lesser degree Ravitch ( 2010 ). It seems to us that methodologically competent policy analysts have an obligation to raise questions when public bureaucracies receive ever more resources to produce essentially the same results, particularly when other nations and in some cases other sectors within our nation (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Merseth 2009 ) achieve both more and more equitable academic achievement with the same or lesser inputs. Further, as Moe ( 2011 ), Hess and Osberg ( 2010 ), Hershberg and Robertson-Kraft ( 2009 ), and Williams

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( 2005 ), among others, show, EIC defenders who criticize any attempt to reform traditional public schools or to redistribute their resources from less effective programs to more effective ones may themselves be thought of as the enemies of the public’s children, since they are blocking reforms that may improve student well-being.

Finally, as we have noted above, opponents of school reform consistently paint reformers as “racist.” See, for example, Glass ( 2008 ), Berliner and Biddle (1996), and the works within Kovacs (2011). This might make sense if traditional public schools were engines of integration, and had successful records teaching minorities. Unfortunately, as a wealth of evidence shows, this is not the case. African Americans, in particular, graduate at rates far lower than those of whites, and those who do graduate score several years behind on achievement tests which predict future earnings (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Buck 2010 ). Even where formally integrated, public schools often relegate minorities to different tracks and even different floors (Greene 2005 ; Van Kerckhove 2007 ). Middle-class parents and middle-class white parents in particular already have a considerable choice of schools: they can move to neighborhoods with better schools, they can enroll their children in Catholic and other private schools which are affordable to most of the middle class, and they often have political savvy and clout to gain within-district school transfers. In short, middle- and upper-class people generally and whites in particular already have school choice under the existing system, and many use it. It is therefore not surprising that most of the energy of the school reform movement generally and school choice movement in particular comes from communities of color, particularly African American communi-ties (Williams 2005 ). In this, Barack Obama is not alone.

Schools Don’t Matter Myths

Moving on to policy myths, some EIC defenders argue that schools on their own cannot improve student learning because real improvements in educa-tion can occur only after broader social changes (Berliner and Biddle 1996; Glass 2008 ; Kovacs 2011). This postulates that schools are a dependent rather than an independent variable. While this is a more common argument from the left, at least a few on the right argue that broken families, or even group-level genetic endowments determine student success, and there is precious little schools can do about it (Hernstein and Murray 1996; Weissberg 2010 ). It strikes us that the first set of arguments are Marxist while the second are racist. More importantly, neither is accurate.

Fundamentally, this mind-set stems from a belief, held by those on the left as well as those on the right, that poverty is destiny. As University of Chicago professor Charles Payne shows in So Much Reform, So Little Change ( 2008 ), many educators believe that disadvantaged children simply cannot learn.


Similarly, a Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) principal in Houston told the lead author that he works well with other educators who share his view that most poor children can learn: “Once that assumption is shared with people you are talking to, then it is all about problem solving. The problem is if the people you are talking to don’t believe that kids can learn, then it is a not useful conversation because it becomes a rabbit hole of but, but, but, but, but.”

The notion that schools are mere dependent variables with no ability to shape student outcomes rather than independent variables that can teach students quite simply does not fit reality. There is now a whole body of lit-erature (e.g., Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Chenewith 2007, 2009; Merseth 2009 ; Mathews 2009 ; Maranto and Maranto 2006; Whitman 2008 ; Maranto and Shuls 2011 ) on how individual schools and networks of schools have overcome the effects of student poverty. Supporters of the schools as dependent variables approaches simply have not engaged with this empirical reality, with the partial exception of the works within Kovacs (2011), which argue that test scores are not good gauges of student outcomes, and that high poverty/high achievement schools have their students and staff work too hard. The first point is an empirical one, which has been disproven by Thernstrom and Thernstrom (2003) and Hanushek and Lindseth ( 2009 ), among others. The second point is normative. Here, it strikes us that many of the successful high poverty/high achievement schools are schools of choice such as the KIPP schools, Yes Prep, and the Dove schools. To us, it seems paternalistic in the extreme for privileged college professors to declare that disadvantaged parents choosing hard work for their children do not know what they are doing.

Related Input Myths

A second, occasionally distinct set of EIC defenders argues that schools can improve student outcomes, but only through smaller class sizes, more professional development, and more credentialed teachers (more certified teachers and teachers with master’s degrees). Such views win support from teachers’ unions who want more members, professors in colleges of educa-tion who want more students, and consultants who want more professional development contracts (Moe 2011 ; Brill 2011 ). Very little empirical evidence suggests that any of these matters much. Master’s degree programs serve as cash cows for universities and have been made easy to attract students, who get pay raises for the degrees. Politicians like to offer pay raises for master’s degrees and more professional development since they offer the appearance of doing something to improve schools. Similarly, unions like these poli-cies since they determine teacher pay through predictable, low-effort inputs rather than whether children learn . Unfortunately, there is little evidence that


more master’s degrees and more professional development improve student learning (Moe 2011 ; Hanushek and Lindseth 2009 ; Greene 2005 ; Hershberg and Robertson-Kraft 2009 ). The evidence on teacher certification, similarly, is mixed at best (Greene 2005 ). Indeed, as we detail in Chapter 8 , every recent major party presidential nominee studied at private schools under un certi-fied teachers. Yet no one thinks that Barack Obama, John McCain, Al Gore, John Kerry, George Herbert Walker Bush, and George W. Bush did not learn enough to succeed. In fairness, Sarah Palin did study at public schools under traditionally certified teachers.

Class size impacts are more complex. Clearly, at very high numbers, say the hypothetical 60-student classroom in Detroit, class size matters. For some groups of students, such as certain special education students, lower class sizes have positive impacts. There is also some evidence for positive impacts in lower elementary grades. Yet these measured impacts are mar-ginal, and lowering class size is a very expensive intervention. The best way to think about class size reduction is at the system-wide level (see Figure 2.7 ). Imagine a state teacher labor market. In theory, the teachers they choose to employ would be the highest quality teachers available. If the state decreases class size, that would require the state to hire lower quality teachers. So, while anyone who has set foot in a classroom knows that a good teacher teach-ing fewer students would be an improvement, the important question in the class size debate is, who would teach the other students? Not to mention that in a tighter labor market, schools in disadvantaged areas will have more

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Figure 2.7 The Effect of Decreasing Class Size in a Hypothetical State with 1,000,000 Students.Source: Author calculations.


trouble finding teachers; thus paradoxically, lowering class sizes may harm the performance of disadvantaged students (Hanushek and Lindseth 2009 ; Greene 2005 ; Hershberg and Robertson-Kraft 2009 ; Solmon and Agam 2006 ; Maranto and Maranto 2006 ).

The Reformers are Elitists (Partial) Myth

Finally, EIC defenders such as Glass ( 2008 ), Ravitch ( 2010 ), and the works within Kovacs (2011) have criticized education reformers for relying on a “billionaire boys club” of philanthropists like Bill Gates, who as we dis-cuss in Chapter 6 , played a key role in funding and facilitating the Obama administration’s proposed Common Core Standards. We agree that the Gates Foundation has not always operated transparently. At the same time, it must be said that its critics have not found fault with foundations (or teachers’ unions) that have funded their programs. Further, for the most part the Gates Foundation has partnered with rather than dictated to the secretary of education and state and local education authorities, supple-menting rather than supplanting public authorities. We wish to make two final points on this matter. First, we think it admirable that some wealthy individuals attempt to use their money and influence for idealistic rather than materialistic goals. More important for our purposes, EIC defenders fail to note that the resources of those seeking to reform the EIC are dwarfed by those of EIC backers, which include most traditional foundations such as the Ford and Annenberg Foundations, organizations of educational admin-istrators, and teachers’ unions. This is rather like a military strategist pre-tending to underdog status by cataloguing the resources of enemies while ignoring those of allies, which as Jervis ( 1976 ) shows is in fact a common psychological pattern among decision makers. Glass ( 2008 , 245) complains that the top 11 pro-school choice organizations spent roughly $255 million in the 2002–2005 period, most of it for scholarships to low-income stu-dents. Oddly, the author fails to note opponents to school reform typi-cally spend much more. For example, the National Education Association spent over $388 million in 2009 alone , while the American Federation of Teachers chipped in more than $207 million (Maranto and van Raemdonck 2011). This says nothing of spending by and the lobbying clout of schools of education, textbook publishers, the AERA, the National School Boards Association, various associations of school administrators, and teachers associations other than unions such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. In short, it would seem that the EIC still massively outspends its reform rivals. While they raise far less money than teachers’ unions, administrators associations, in particular, often have considerable clout in state legislatures, where school superintendents are often acknowledged as


the experts on education. All these groups oppose school choice, suggest-ing that the increased popularity of choice options such as charter schools and vouchers to private schools reflects something other than the desire of politicians to maximize campaign expenditures. In our pluralistic system, on issues such as school reform, politicians often find money no matter which side they support. Paradoxically, this often frees them to vote their preferences.

Power, Privilege, and the EIC

Like all coalitions, the EIC seeks to maintain and increase power by empower-ing its stakeholders (unions, administrator groups, bureaucrats, consultants) while delegitimizing others. This does not make the EIC sinister; it simply does what networks of interests always do in our pluralistic democracy (Moe 2011 ; Chubb and Moe 1990 ). The EIC can maintain its power if the body politic remains in the dark regarding the realities of the American education system. EIC members spread this information to protect the status quo (Moe 2011 ; Williams 2005 ; Greene 2005 ) and force politicians who support school reform to pay a significant price (Moe 2011 ; Whitmire 2011 ; Williams 2005 ; Brill, 2011 ). How does this continue to work? It is a complex web of interests, but is based on the fundamental reality that public education is genuinely popular. As the eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson declares (quoted in Greene 2005 , ix):

Education occupies a privileged position in American life, but that privilege, though it confers many benefits, also imposes some real costs. So committed are Americans to the value of education that they will support almost anything that seems to help that endeavor. Any suggestion that the legislature spend more money on schools or offer higher salaries to teachers is likely to have decent support . . . The privileged status of education means that legislators and their constituents are disposed to believe almost any argument that appears to support public schools.

Seemingly, Wilson means that public education is “privileged” in that it gains increased resources over time, that actors supporting public educa-tion can and do limit the influence of their opponents by describing them as illegitimate, and that in this way supporters keep policy options they oppose off the agenda. Assuming for the moment that Wilson’s claims are true—and as we detail below, they are not wholly correct—this does not mean that public education is a unique policy domain. Indeed public intellectuals routinely claim that sectors they criticize are self-governing elite cabals insu-lated from the normal workings of democracy, while defenders of those sec-tors question the motives of critics. For example, famed Defense Department


whistleblower Ernie Fitzgerald ( 1972 ) questioned the privileged status of the military- industrial complex in The High Priests of Waste . Fitzgerald was called disloyal and unpatriotic for his troubles. The same fate has befallen Jay P. Greene, Chester E. “Checker” Finn, Eric Hanushek, Frederick M. Hess, and others who have questioned the supposedly privileged position of American public schools (English 2010 ). As we note above, in a book much beloved by school superintendents we have interviewed, Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips , Arizona State University education professor Gene Glass ( 2008 ) lam-basts the critics of public schools as “ultra-conservative” and “racist,” labels that do not seem intended to invite dialogue, and do not do justice to the complexity and depth of those seeking to reform public education, many of whom, like President Obama, would seem to be neither conservative nor racist.

Rather than engage in such invective, we argue that policy is policy: there is nothing unique about education . Accordingly, we intend to define and ana-lyze the EIC as an example of a longstanding social science concept, the policy network. Quite simply, we propose that those of us studying public education can learn from concepts and theories explaining other policy areas, particu-larly national defense. These teach us that “privilege” is not a myth: certain actors or networks of actors have more power than others, and may manip-ulate speech and agendas to maintain their policy dominance; yet no such privilege lasts forever. As we will detail below, judging by both its resources and its (now limited) influence over policy debates, the EIC no longer has a policy monopoly.

Elitism, Pluralism, and Policy Monopolies

Classic elitist models of policy-making (e.g., Mills 1956 ; Niskanen 1971 ; Peters 1992 ; Gaventa 1980 ; Kraft and Furlong 2007 ) see society as divided into the few who govern and the many who are governed, as shown in Table 2.1 . The few who govern, the elites, may do so based on their money, but just as fre-quently based on their position, knowledge, or special expertise. For example, a congressional staffer, regulatory agency bureaucrat, or an officer in a teach-ers’ union may have relatively little income or status, but still have enormous impacts on public policy. Particularly in relatively moralistic political cul-tures and in time of crises, elites are often motivated by their ideals rather than by material interests.

Public policy is dominated by subgovernments (also called iron trian-gles) such as the “military-industrial complex.” These interests cut across the conventional governmental divisions set up in our Madisonian sys-tem. Subgovernments are largely self-governing, budget maximizing, and insulated from broader scrutiny by the press, the public, interest groups,


Congress, and if operating on the national level, even the president. For elite theorists, a small coalition can dominate policy-making in a sector in part because their expertise creates information asymmetries, allow-ing privileged actors to marginalize those from outside the network. For example, defense contractors, the uniformed military and civilians within the Defense Department, and Congress members from states and districts dependent on defense spending (which dominate the US House and Senate Armed Services Committees, where much of defense policy is made) all support more resources for and relatively little scrutiny of national defense (unless such scrutiny leads to more resources). Defense journalists, most of whom have military backgrounds, may share the basic worldview of the subgovernment as a whole, in part because their friendships and even jobs may depend on maintaining good relationships with others in the network. Similar dynamics describe and explain policy-making in agriculture, bank-ing, housing, and other economically important sectors, though for a cri-tique see Blais and Dion (1991). Such subgovernments explain more than just public budgeting. For example, until the late 1970s the regulation of transportation and telecommunications was characterized not by conflict, but rather by cross-institutional cooperation among Congress members, executive agencies, unions, and businesses (Derthick and Quirk, 1985 ). For a time, like-minded interest groups, bureaucratic agencies, Congress members and staff, and supportive journalists may in fact dominate policy-making in a sector.

As Baumgartner and Jones ( 1993 , 7) suggest, these “policy monopolies” use control of one or more institutions to limit participation by outsiders: insider status is required to be taken seriously as an expert or policy maker. Further, “a powerful supporting idea is associated with the institution.”

Table 2.1 Elitism v. Pluralism

Elitism Pluralism

Defining Political Division haves v. have nots multiple competing groups Power Structure hierarchical polyarchal Interactions in Leadership consensus over values

and goalsconflict over values and goals

Sources of Leadership common backgrounds diversity in backgrounds Direction of Influence down from elites

to massesup from masses to elites

View of Public Policy reflects elite preferences reflects balance of competing groups

Protection for Democracy elite commitment to democracy

competition amongst groups

Source: Adapted from Dye and Zeigler ( 2000 ).


Within defense policy, for example, there was widespread agreement for many years that defense spending should be a very high priority, that mili-tary officers should have considerable autonomy, and that defense policy should for the most part be bipartisan (Maranto 1993). In general, for a pol-icy monopoly the supporting ideology defines both the issue and who has the legitimate expertise to engage in policy-making. Such policy regimes can dominate for decades, producing incremental policy- making for the most part on terms set by the policy monopoly (Hayes 2003 ).

Similarly, Ginsberg et al. ( 1998 ) and Lowi ( 1979 ) respectively make the case that elections matter less than in the pre–New Deal era, while insti-tutions and their long term party and sectoral coalitions matter more. At least since the Reagan era, the military-industrial complex has been allied with the Republican Party. For its part, at least at the national level, the EIC has been allied with the Democratic Party. Paradoxically, this may make it easier for Republicans to reform the defense sector and Democrats to reform education because of the “Nixon goes to China” dynamic. It is dif-ficult to claim that any republican president is antidefense, and similarly difficult to claim that any democratic leader is antieducation. This robs reform opponents of an important symbolic weapon in the political war of ideas.

Elite models clearly explain some domains for certain time periods, but do not capture the dynamism of policy-making. More sophisticated pluralistic models (Truman 1951 ; Lowi 1979 ; Kraft and Furlong 2007 ; Krasner 1978 ) describe such narrow, elite dominated policy-making, but see it as fragile. Politics is not as stable as dominant players would like. Pluralistic models propose that while elites exist, they are divided by ide-als and in competition for power. Elites in a given policy area compete for the support of other elites outside the issue network (including jour-nalists, business interests, and policy makers), and for public support in the form of contributions, public approval, and votes; hence for plural-ism, elections really do matter. Pluralism seems a particularly apt descrip-tion of American politics since the 1960s. Indeed, in recent years a broad range of interests have gained representation (Lowi 1979 ), leading to what Rauch ( 1999 ) terms “hyperpluralism.” Even before these changes, when sufficiently engaged, presidents and central management agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) could usually overcome subgovernments by bringing attention (transparency) to or redefining the legitimate parameters of policy deliberations (Krasner 1978 ; Derthick and Quirk 1985 ). New actors and institutions can rise to counter dominant coalitions, creating what Mucciaroni ( 1995 ) calls “reversals of fortune.” As defense cutbacks in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s show, seemingly domi-nant subgovernments do not maintain their privileged status indefinitely. Just as the subgovernment literature has given way to the more f luid (and more realistic) issue networks literature (Heclo 1978 ), no “privilege” lasts


forever. As Anthony Downs ( 1967 , 1972 ) writes, a given issue may domi-nate the attention of policy makers for a time, but eventually fades and is replaced by new causes. Within bureaucratic politics, whenever a small agency championing a given issue grows quickly, bureaucratic competitors for resources soon mobilize to limit it. In short, external shocks, new insti-tutions, new ideas, and policy entrepreneurs eventually undermine policy monopolies. This is particularly true because to a considerable degree, power is based on reputation, so a single unexpected defeat can have a disproportionate impact on a policy monopoly, opening a “policy window” to change (Kingdon 1995 ; Baumgartner and Jones 1993 , 2002; Mucciaroni 1995 ; Gaventa 1980 ).

Examples abound. Regimes often go from unchallenged to beleaguered in very short periods of time. To take the example of the military-indus-trial complex, perceived defeat in Vietnam and congressional committee hearings uncovering waste and abuse in procurement programs moved the military from a dominant position to a beleaguered one in just a few years, essentially from 1966 to 1969. Policy entrepreneurs in the media and Congress used events such as the Tet Offensive (Krepinevich 1986 ) and the C5-A (airplane) cost overrun scandal and the Pentagon’s attempted cover-up to change perceptions (Fitzgerald 1972 ), making it politically safe and indeed politically advantageous to increase oversight and regulation of a bureaucracy seen as both ineffective and corrupt. Previously, the policy monopoly would have defined such oversight as illegitimate.

Often, policy monopolies are local regimes. As political analysts since Madison (in Federalist #10) have recognized, it is easier for a small cohort of like-minded elites to maintain control in a smaller and less diverse local-ity. Accordingly, those wishing to upset local policy monopolies will often attempt to change the venue of decision-making, bringing in the attention of the national media or state and national policy makers (Alinsky 1971 ; Schattschneider 1960 ). For example, union organizers in a coal town fac-ing violence succeeded, at least in the short term, by attracting national media attention and federal support (Gaventa 1980 ). Similarly, during the civil rights movement Dr. Martin Luther King consistently worked to change local public opinion, but also to bring in national media and federal authorities to confront local racist institutions. This had impor-tant impacts. In part as a result of King’s strategy, federal civil rights laws threatened federal funding of local programs, giving local taxpayers and elites powerful incentives to change. Equally important though less under-stood, businesses increasingly refused to locate in locales with “racial trou-ble,” giving local elites and taxpayers powerful incentives to work with rather than confront civil rights activists. As noted in our introduction, it is no surprise that in the 1950–1980 period Atlanta, which cast itself as “the city too busy to hate” thrived, while troubled “Bombingham” lan-guished. Defining what was respectable and good for business may have


given civil rights activists victories far more important than those in court (Rosenberg 1993 ).

Transparency poses a threat to policy monopolies, and it is important to note that generally, policy-making on the federal level is much more trans-parent than policy-making at the state and local level. On the federal level, a more representative range of institutions, interest groups, and news media outlets are engaged, making it more difficult for a single elite to dominate. Accordingly, changing the venue of decision-making from relatively non-transparent state or local bureaucracies to more transparent national ones is likely to make longstanding elite domination more tenuous (Rauch 1999 ). For example, as we will discuss in Chapter 6 , national education standards will almost certainly get far more attention than state or local standards, which will likely be dominated by EIC members, who may have incentives to lower standards in order to maintain the reputation of state education authorities and local schools. For interesting examples from the world of textbook adop-tion, see Ravitch ( 2003 ).

The Educational Industrial Complex and Size

First referred to as “The Blob” by education reformer Bill Bennet, the Educational Industrial Complex has been described as, “More than 200 groups, associations, federations, alliances, departments, offices, admin-istrations, councils, boards, commissions, panels, organizations, herds, f locks and coveys” (Allen 2009). Key parts of the EIC include the teach-ers’ unions (the NEA and AFT), which represent teachers and provide tens of millions of dollars to political campaigns (Lieberman 1997 ; Moe 2011 ), schools of education which train teachers and administrators, dominate the American Education Research Association, and influence the 50 state education bureaucracies (Hirsch 1996 , 2009 ), various accreditation bodies which typically have not enforced rigor, textbook publishers which follow pressures from various interest groups of the right and left (Ravitch 2003 ), major foundations supporting initiatives such as universal preschool (Finn 2009; Fuller 2007 ), and supportive lawyers, journalists, and politicians (Finn 2008 ; Williams 2005 ).

The most important unifying factor of these groups is that they gener-ally oppose education reforms that do not increase the size and power of the EIC. Accordingly, EIC groups favor “reforms” such as more money, lower class size, a longer school year, and more training for teachers, while oppos-ing transparency, measurements of academic results, merit pay, and paren-tal choice, even though there is a strong empirical case that the latter array of reforms have proven more successful at promoting student achievement (Chubb and Moe 1990 ; Hanushek and Lindseth 2009 ; Greene 2005 ; Moe


and Chubb 2009 ; Hershberg and Robertson-Kraft 2009 ; Ritter et al. 2009 ; Ouchi, 2009 ). Typically, EIC members fail to note these empirical studies. Indeed, some go farther. Gene Glass ( 2008 , 146), for example, writes:

The public, but professionals as well, are apt to ask one or at most two ques-tions of any proposed reform: Will it improve students’ academic achieve-ment? What does it cost? While important, these questions are secondary to questions too seldom asked: Why this proposal and not others? Who is pro-posing this reform? Who wins and who loses (money, prestige, status, free-dom) if we go down this path?

If institutional power and group solidarity (us v. them) rather than the well-being of children is the paramount concern, then there is in fact little reason to consider education reforms not benefitting EIC members. In fairness, the life of many EIC members, school superintendents in particular, is often quite difficult. Like other public servants, they are subject to considerable criticism from the public and interest groups, as well as the unpredictable conflict that comes from reporting to a school board. Little wonder many stress solidarity and stability over reform (Polka and Litchka 2008 ).

EIC power is not new. For example, as the previous chapter explains, schools of education have had substantial influence since the turn of the last century (Ravitch 2000; Hirsch 1996 ; Labaree 2004 ). Perhaps most importantly, the National Education Association (NEA), allied with schools of education and the federal government, issued the influential Cardinal Principle of Secondary Education , the effects of which we detail in Chapter 1 (Mitchell 1981 ).

Locally, in rural and urban areas with few employment alternatives, the power of public education leaders can approach dominance (Hess et al. 2001 ; Rich 1996 ). As we detail in Chapter 3 , young community organizer Barack Obama ( 1995 , 256–257) lamented that Chicago public schools served primarily to employ politically important middle-class African Americans rather than to educate politically unimportant disadvantaged African Americans, a point we will return to in the next chapter. As Hess ( 1999 ) suggests, local versions of the EIC can typically outlast education reform-ers. Rich ( 1996 ) refers to the education sector in African American–led cit-ies as “the public school cartel”—it’s relatively impervious to local political challenges, though occasionally vulnerable to state-level policy makers and funders (Rich and Chambers 2004 ). Williams ( 2005 ), similarly, argues that at least in low-income areas, typical parents lack the political and economic resources to hold cartel members accountable. Even in a policy domain in which statutes give parents particular advantages, such as special educa-tion deliberations, parental power over education “experts” is in fact lim-ited because education bureaucrats usually hold far more information and may be in positions to punish the children of noncooperative parents. This


is particularly true for low-income and single parents (Ong-Dean 2009 ; Valle 2009 ). Indeed, public school officials themselves do not recognize the legitimacy of parent input, and thus channel parent activism, whether on behalf of their own children or for general school improvement, into non-threatening activities such as bake sales (Descry and Martin-Bemer 2001 ; McDermott 1999 ; Cutler 2000 ).

Open System Defenses

Seemingly, the EIC has managed to gain more resources to produce the same academic results, while to at least some degree marginalizing edu-cation reformers. Yet the autonomy of the EIC should not be overstated. As “open system” organization theorists (Downs 1967 ; Hult and Walcott 1990 ), policy theorists (Heclo 1978 ; Truman 1951 ; Downs 1972 ), and leader-ship theorists (Haass 1999 ) show, both individual organizations and whole policy networks are subject to influence from outside actors, who may act as funders, supporters, competitors, and real or potential opponents. In a pluralistic polity, an establishment cannot marginalize all others. Savvy leaders know this, including savvy leaders of educational institutions (Wallace 1996 ).

This basic insight suggests that much of the power held by the EIC may reflect real popular and elite support, rather than manufactured consent. As Tyack and Cuban ( 1995 ) point out, most Americans like the schools they attended, and accordingly have a sentimental attachment to them which limits the extent of change, whether from reformers or from the EIC itself. Indeed, child-centered reforms have often foundered politically since they are contrary to the public’s definition of a “real school”—that is, the sort of school they attended. In short, much of the power of the EIC rests on its popular support, which is at least in part linked to support for the pro-cess and results of schooling as it operates, rather than as intellectuals and political elites would like it to operate. Similarly, Franciosi ( 2004 ) makes a case that, save in large cities, local educational authorities (LEAs) are relatively open systems representing their political environments, if not always individual parents. He argues that local control increases public support for public schooling, and protects it from serious resource reduc-tions. Deckman ( 2004 ) makes roughly the same points in her studies of local school board elections. Abernathy ( 2005 ) finds that at least in upper-income districts, principals feel limited by local elites and potentially active members of the attentive public; thus school leaders calculate possible pub-lic reactions when considering new initiatives. Brouillette ( 1996 ) finds the same to be the case of school superintendents, particularly in recent years. Again, local control constrains bureaucratic power. Along the same lines, Berkman and Plutzer ( 2005 ) find that local school districts do not always


win elections for tax increases; knowing this, they must consider public opinion and potential public reactions. On the state level, Smith and Meier ( 1995 ) argue that public demands lead to new legislation which gradually affects schooling. In short, whether on the school, school system, or state level, all the open system theorists argue that EIC gets support because it earns support. It is perhaps not surprising that the greatest support for edu-cation reforms, whether market- or accountability-based reforms, comes in states with large and less effective school systems which are seemingly less able to represent and serve their often fractious constituents (Maranto and Maranto 2004 ; Moe 2001 ).

Yet an open system is not necessarily a fair system, and political support does not necessarily indicate social equity. Fieldwork by Abernathy ( 2005 ) and Hess et al. ( 2001 ) and the journalistic accounts of Williams ( 2005 ) and Whitmire ( 2011 ) make clear that traditional public schools can keep politi-cal support for decades in some communities, even if they do not do a good job serving disadvantaged students, so long as they please upper-class and politically important families and interests. From who gets construction contracts to whose children get picked for cheer, or conversely, whose chil-dren are assigned to a rookie teacher, social and economic class often deter-mine who gets scarce resources in public schools, and who is listened to by school officials. Indeed, this may explain part of the failure of traditional public schools to serve disadvantaged children: school boards and education bureaucrats lavish fewer resources and less attention on socially and eco-nomically disadvantaged constituents. Considerable empirical work shows that the disparity of economic and other resources allocated within school districts dwarfs the inequities across school districts (Hess and Osberg 2010 ; Roza 2010 ; Heuer and Stullich 2011 ). In short, as we argue above, the current system is institutionally racist and classist in results if not in intent, and this basic fact animates many education reformers.

Losing a Monopoly on Expertise

The EIC is far less powerful than it once was, and this offers the Obama admin-istration an opening for reform. Certainly the EIC has not had a monopoly on the national conversation about education reform. As noted in Chapter 1 , periodically since the time of the Committee on Cardinal Principles, and more or less continuously since the 1983 Nation at Risk report, public schools have been under attack for poor performance (Tyack and Cuban 1995 ; Greene 2005 ), particularly as regards disadvantaged students (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ). In other words, while the public education sec-tor did not until 2010 face significant budget cuts (Guthrie and Peng 2010 ; Hess and Osberg 2010 ), it would be wildly inaccurate to say that it has gone unchallenged in recent years. From President Reagan’s initial rhetoric about


abolishing the US Department of Education, his administration’s Nation at Risk Report and later successful effort to reform the NAEP tests to allow state-by-state comparisons, to George H. W. Bush’s Charlottesville education sum-mit, to President Clinton’s support for charter schools and his Goals 2000 law (which in its proposed form resembled No Child Left Behind ), to George W. Bush’s NCLB, to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, every recent president has done something to discomfort the EIC. One can add to this, state-level efforts to expand alternative teacher certification, policies decried by EIC supporters, particularly those in schools of education, which now dominate certification and rely on it for funding (e.g., Glass 2008 ). Similarly, for more than a decade policy makers have encouraged alternative pipelines into educational leadership (Hess 2010 a) at all levels. As Kerchner et al. ( 2008 , 17) point out, “educational amateurs” such as former litigators, admirals, and others from outside the EIC now run at least 22 of the nation’s largest school districts. Large school districts now constantly try new modes of organiza-tion such as mayoral control, seldom with the enthusiastic support of EIC members (Boyd et al. 2008 ).

Reformers complain that on national, state, and local levels, the EIC has watered down its proposals. Still, weakening efforts aimed at accountability and choice is not quite the same as defeating them, or better still, keeping them off the agenda (Finn 2008 ; Ritter et al. 2009 ; Moe 2011 ). And this is to say nothing of the attacks on alleged political correctness in public education, which have resonated with both Republicans and Democrats (Ravitch 2003 ; Zimmerman 2002 ). In short, among national policy makers of both major parties, public education’s dominant coalition remains strong, but lost its unchallenged status after the Carter administration (Finn 2008 ). Indeed, EIC sympathizers such as Jeff Henig ( 2008 ) can now make plausible claims that education reformers gain more and better press than reform opponents, at least in the mainstream media. Further, reform superintendents such as Joel Klein in New York have enjoyed significant and enduring elite and popular support, along with generally favorable press coverage, much to the chagrin of EIC backers such as Diane Ravitch ( 2010 ).

Control of Resources

Money is among the most important resources in politics, and here Vice President Biden’s quotation to start this chapter is in part correct. Whatever its failings, the EIC is probably not bankrupting the nation. From the US Digest of Education Statistics , (shown above in Figure 2.1 ) education spend-ing rose rapidly as a percentage of GDP through the 1800s and early 1900s, but has not changed much since. As a percentage of GDP, K–12 public edu-cation spending has been remarkably stable, rising from 3 percent of GDP in 1945 to 4 percent in 1969 and nearly 5 percent in 1978, reflecting both


increasing numbers of students and the Sputnik shock which increased education funding. After the buildup, reflecting declining numbers of stu-dents, it fell back below 3.5 percent in the 1980s (even as spending per pupil in real terms continued to rise), before again rising to 4 percent in 2003. Interestingly, as Figure 2.1 suggests, the percentage seems to track closely with the percentage of school age population until 1984; yet from 1984 to 2006, the correlation between the two is a mere .014. (We could not calculate correlations from prior years because the data was in incompatible incre-ments.) In short, while public education spending is certainly not bank-rupting the public sector—health care may be—school spending does seem partly insulated from cutbacks when the numbers of students fall or more efficient means to teach them are invented (Guthrie and Peng 2010 ; Hess and Osberg 2010 ; Moe and Chubb 2009 ). This does suggest that the EIC, even while under attack, can partly buffer itself from normal economic and political feedback, at least regarding spending. A partial, but only partial exception regards teacher benefits, which were traditionally far more gener-ous than those for other workers. At the threat of fiscal crisis, increasing numbers of states are reforming their pension systems, naturally with sub-stantial union opposition.

Similarly, the relative transparency assured by NCLB has caused embar-rassment, but not unemployment for school teachers and principals (Finn 2008 ). This is, after all, one mark of powerful groups (Hayes 2003 ). OECD figures from 2001, using slightly different metrics, put the percentage of GDP spent on public education in the United States at 5.2 percent, essen-tially identical to the 5.1 percent mean of the 28 nations reporting; thus it is not clear that the American EIC has more strength than foreign counterparts.

A final chart showing EIC growth is in order. As Figure 2.3 shows, the stu-dent-staff ratio changed from 1950 to 1980 in ways recalling C. Northcoate Parkinson’s ( 1957 ) admonition that even as bureaucratic work declines, the number of bureaucrats increases (Parkinson’s original examples noted that the British colonial bureaucracy expanded even as the empire imploded, and that as the British Navy lost command of the seas, bureaucratic growth made a magnificent navy on shore). The ratio of students to staff in American public schools fell from 19.3:1 in 1950 to 9.8:1 in 1980, and was on a linear path to reach a 1:1 ratio by 2006. This could be called a Parkinsonian, or perhaps a Great Society growth rate. Yet after 1980, the slope of the decline suddenly leveled out, such that the pupil-to-staff ratio reached 8:1 in 2006, something one might call a Thatcher or Reagan growth rate. Of course, this may hide the use of contractors and consultants, as with any public sector organization (Light 1999 ). Still, this graph suggests certain natural limits to growth in staff-student ratios: it seems unlikely that even the most dogged EIC backers want a 1:1 staff-student ratio. Combined with the relative sta-bility of education spending as a percentage of GDP, this also suggests that,


as Moe ( 2011 ) and Moe and Chubb ( 2009 ) complain, public schools have chosen to have relatively large numbers of relatively poorly paid staff rather than small numbers of elite staff made more efficient through technol-ogy. Moe and Chubb believe that this reflects the goal of teachers’ unions to have large, politically influential memberships. On the other hand, it could represent the popular view that schools should keep doing what they have always done, which is to hire more staff whenever possible (Tyack and Cuban 1995 ; Hess and Osberg 2010 ). As noted above, even as school spend-ing has steadily increased, the public fears that public schools are struggling to get by on declining resources (Greene 2005 ; West 2010 , 281–282).

Conclusion and Next Steps

In contrast to some polemics, our literature review and growth data suggest a relatively nuanced view of the EIC. We have shown that while public edu-cation certainly has not suffered cutbacks, at least not until 2010, nor has it grown without limits. For the most part, EIC growth has kept pace with GDP growth generally: the EIC has grown, but not faster than the economy as a whole. Per-student spending has grown, but in large part due to GDP growth and proportionally smaller numbers of students. While the EIC has seem-ingly been able to convince the public that it is starved of resources, it has not significantly increased its share of the GDP. While the numbers of EIC staff per pupil grew rapidly, growth actually slowed in the Reagan years and since, suggesting that democratic feedback affects EIC growth and that its size has certain natural limits. Further, since the Reagan years the EIC has lost its policy monopoly and with it, control of national and, increasingly, state and local education debates. Indeed, most Americans think that public schools are getting worse, even as NAEP scores indicate that academic outcomes have been relatively stable. Since 1980, both republican and democratic presidents have by and large supported more rigorous academic standards, testing, and even some expansion of school choice, though Democrats have been reluc-tant to back vouchers to private schools. Both parties have also supported breaking the EIC monopoly on the training and certification of teachers and school leaders (Hess 2010 a; Brill 2011 ). Indeed, EIC supporters lament the relative bipartisanship of the education reform agenda (Ravitch 2010 ), which has proceeded even though most Americans more or less like their local public schools. Further, student achievement data made available by NCLB and other reform measures has stimulated research on what works and what does not work, particularly in disadvantaged communities where most agree that public schools most need improvement. Over the long run, this trans-parency is leading to pressures for the EIC to make significant changes in order to copy and bring to scale successes (Chenoweth 2007 , 2009 ; Merseth


2009 ; Ouchi 2009 ). As usual, such pressures to improve are lamented by EIC backers (Glass 2008 ; Ravitch 2010 ).

In a long line of open system approaches to school politics, we suspect that the EIC has held on to considerable support in part since in most of the United States, local public schools provide more or less what parents and vot-ers want, especially what local elite parents and voters want. Why then do national and some state and local elites seek school reform? We can see at least four reasons. First, as a precondition for change, elites now have more comparative education data than ever before. They can compare the United States to other nations, school districts to similar districts, schools to similar schools, and even teachers to other teachers, as we note in our conclusion. There is some evidence that this new knowledge is changing the culture of schooling generally, and indeed it clearly has impacted the culture of high-achieving schools (Maranto 2010 ; Maranto and Shuls 2011 ). This is indeed what Reagan education secretary Terrell Bell ( 1988 ) proposed in the 1980s, when he lamented that each state school officer cherry picked data to claim that his or her schools were “above average.” Much of the push for reliable achievement data was bipartisan, with both democratic and republican Congress members, congressional staffers, executive branch bureaucrats, and business lobbyists joining together to push for better measures, against the opposition of teacher unions and often other members of the EIC (Finn 2008 ; Moe 2011 ; Brill 2011 ). Academic achievement measures were a precondition for the other factors pushing change.

Among those factors were that most elites, Democratic and Republican, have serious concerns about educational inequities. Even if most public schools work adequately, public schools serving disadvantaged students fail. In contrast, many charter and private schools serving those same students with the same or fewer resources succeed (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ). As noted above, traditional public schools also underperform with boys.

Second, we argue that among elites, social learning (Lindblom and Cohen 1979 ) has undermined the authority of the EIC. Increasingly, policy makers know about the relative ineffectiveness of EIC-backed reforms, and know that foreign systems routinely post better academic outcomes with the same or fewer resources. Many elites, including President Obama and education sec-retary Arne Duncan know that merely increasing resources, the traditional EIC approach, has not improved schooling for disadvantaged children, sug-gesting that more extreme reforms are needed (Greene 2005 ; Hanushek and Lindseth 2009 ; Obama 1995 ). These simple facts have undermined the EIC policy monopoly, leading elites to create outside sources of expertise, a devel-opment praised by reformers (Finn 2008 ; Brill 2011 ) and lamented by EIC defenders (Glass 2008 ; Ravitch 2010 ).

Third, policy elites increasingly understand that economic success is linked to educational success, and indeed this link pops up often in the speeches of


politicians from President Obama to local mayors and city council members (Hanushek and Lindseth 2009 ). Less educated workers are less productive, and far less likely to create information-age product innovations.

Fourth, much to the chagrin of EIC backers such as English ( 2010 ), policy entrepreneurs such as “Checker” Finn ( 2008 ), Frederick “Rick” Hess ( 2010 a, 2010b, 2010c), E. D. Hirsch Jr. ( 1996 , 2009 ), Paul Peterson ( 2010 ), and Jay P. Greene ( 2005 ) have changed elite perceptions about what works in school-ing, as have education journalists such as Joe Williams ( 2005 ) (now at the Democrats for Education Reform), Jay Mathews (2009), Steven Brill ( 2011 ), and Richard Whitmire ( 2011 ).

As we have argued, the relative fall from grace of the EIC can be likened to that of the military-industrial complex, which went from dominance to a position of constantly contested power. Indeed one can compare how traditional educators view education reformers with how traditional mili-tary officers viewed whistleblowers. In some respects, an even more apt analogy may be that of enforced segregation in the South, a peculiar and long-lasting set of institutional practices across levels of government. From Reconstruction to the 1960s in states such as Alabama, rigid segregation was institutionalized through state and local governments including the police and school systems, private organizations, the media, and even churches, all representing the dominant local ideologies of segregation. It is well-known that African Americans could not vote or attend school with whites. Less well-known is the incredible level of economic oppression. State and local government regulations, though sometimes neutral on their face, in practice and intent did not allow African Americans to undertake a wide range of occupations from carpenter to teamster. African Americans were denied business licenses. African Americans were only allowed to live in designated areas. In some cases, African Americans even had their property taken by corrupt local governments for alleged nonpayment of taxes. Racial injustice was simply omnipresent, and was enforced by white-run state and local governments largely beyond the reach of federal action, or even federal notice (Williams 1982; Lowi 1979 ). Indeed, for years, when northern liber-als attempted to pass legislation enforcing civil rights, Southern Democrats in Congress, who often held positions of seniority, used those positions to block action (Eidenberg and Morey 1969 ). Yet in a remarkably quick time period, public opinion changed in both the South and the North, in part through the efforts of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, in part through supportive journalists and television coverage, and in part due to prior ideological changes with the struggles against the twin evils of racist nazism and oppressive communism. These informal social and ideological changes helped lead the federal government to pass civil rights legislation that cut off funding to local governments, including school districts that failed to desegregate. Likewise, segregation was known as “bad for business.” Rosenberg ( 1993 ) makes a solid case that it was these multidimensional and


multi-institutional changes caused by broader ideological shifts rather than court cases such as Brown that led to the remarkably rapid dismantling of a century-old institutional system of segregation. Once enforced, segregation lost its popular legitimacy; its days were numbered. As one 1960s student leader who plotted with alumni and trustees to integrate his all-white uni-versity recalled in a 1990s talk attended by the lead author, he thought he was doing something bold, “but now I realize that we were just down on the beach, letting in the tide.”

To make a similar analogy, there is a tide of education reform. The EIC remains powerful, but no longer dominant. It is losing the war of ideas, and thus is forced to react to the reform agenda rather than impose its own (Moe 2011 ; Brill 2011 ). This leaves openings for entrepreneurial education reform-ers, particularly Democrats, to use relatively modest carrots and sticks to nudge state and local education authorities to make significant changes that those officials already want to make , rather like giving cover to a school superintendent in 1965 who already wanted to desegregate his or her schools. The lead education reformer is President Obama, who did not attend public schools, but nonetheless saw the failings of the worst American public schools close up.

3

The Obama Education Agenda: The Personal

is Educational

Our kids only get one shot at a decent education. They cannot afford to wait any longer

—Barack Obama, Washington, DC, September 23, 2011 .

As previously stated, the Educational Industrial Complex is best viewed as a rational coalition protecting its perceived material and ideological

interests. Often, education debates devolve into a series of “who loves kids more” competitions replete with ad hominem attacks and accusations of ill intent. This is not helpful. In order to reform education, or anything else, for that matter, leaders should understand that those working in organiza-tions have complex motivations (Downs 1967 ). Of course, one primary goal is their continued employment. This does not make them “bad” people—it just makes them people. People enjoy getting paid, and holding all other things constant, would like to continue to be employed, preferably with more money and less work. The sooner leaders figure this out, the sooner they can harness the human capital of their employees and serve the mission they envision for their organization.

It is not clear whether this is the way President Obama views the world. At times, Obama attempts to govern more through moral persuasion than politi-cal horse trading. From tone deaf cajoling of politicians to put aside their par-tisan bickering to reach a deal on a debt reduction plan when it was clearly in their best interests not to do so to calls for young Arabs to overthrow regimes the United States had spent the better part of the last half-century propping up, it is clear that President Obama often advocates for what he thinks is right, regardless of the political optics. Education is no different. While a healthy degree of moral outrage might move some to reform schools, it is only when the president chooses to view the system as comprised of rational individuals


advancing their own interests that he will be able to leverage serious change. When he has chosen to act in this way (as we will see later with the Race to the Top initiative), he has met with success; when he hasn’t (as with the reauthori-zation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program), he has not.

Barack Obama, Education and Morality

Education reform fits Obama’s values. The fact that disadvantaged inner city students lack the sort of educational opportunities that suburban and wealthy or well-connected urban families (like the Obamas) have, vexes Obama, who stated in his first speech on education that America suffers from “these kids syndrome,” characterized by

the tendency to explain away the shortcomings and failures of our education system by saying that “these kids can’t learn” or “these kids don’t want to learn” or “these kids are just too far behind” and after a while, “these kids” become someone else’s problem (Obama 2007 ).

Early events in a politician’s career typically have a disproportionate impact on his or her worldview (Jervis 1976 ; Renshon 2011 ). For Barack Obama, community organizing in Chicago opened his eyes to the ills of the EIC and galvanized his resolve to reform it. This likely explains why he has spent con-siderable time and energy on school reform, and why he has backed reform even though it has dampened support from teachers’ unions and traditional liberals while leading to only modest gains, at best, in the media and the busi-ness community. 1 In a speech to the Urban League, he openly reflected on his time as a community organizer:

I remember going to a school back in my organizing days and seeing children-young children maybe five or six-eyes were brimming with hope, had such big dreams for the future. You’d ask them, what do you want to be when you grow up? They’d want to be a doctor; they’d want to be a lawyer. And then I remember the principal telling me that soon, all that would change. The hope would start fading from their eyes as they started to realize that maybe their dreams wouldn’t come to pass- not because they weren’t smart enough, not because they weren’t talented enough, but because through a turn of fate they happened to be born in the wrong neighborhood. They became victim of low expectations, a community that was not supporting educational excel-lence. And it was heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking. And it reinforced in me a fundamental belief that we’ve got an obligation to lift up every child in every school in this country, especially those who are starting out furthest behind (Obama 2010 ).

In truth, despite stereotypes that politicians lack principles, many embrace unpopular issues because they believe that they are right. Most presidents

THE OBAMA EDUCATION AGENDA 55

actually do have an idealistic streak (Dowdle et al. 2011 ; Renshon 2004 ). As Renshon ( 2011 ) argues, Barack Obama’s moralistic streak leads him to seek out policies that will bring national “redemption” from past wrongs, with fairness as a central goal. While Renshon mainly focuses on foreign policy and health care, we believe that for President Obama, education reform is one such moralistic issue. Through education, America can redeem past (and more than a little present) discrimination against African Americans, with-out threatening white people. Or, as a leader in the Democrats For Education Reform gushed about then candidate Obama, “he gets it!”

In addition to his idealism, Barack Obama has boundless self-confidence, arguably to the point of arrogance. This, of course, typifies presidents. No one who is less than insanely ambitious and confident in his or her abilities will run for the post, much less earn victory (Brown 2010 ). Yet Barack Obama’s rise from a broken family to business success, and further to become the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review followed by a meteoric political rise, no doubt fueled his self-confidence. His remarkably short polit-ical career included only one defeat, when he challenged popular incumbent congressman Bobby Rush. Rush claimed with some accuracy that Obama was not really a creature of South Side Chicago, and defeat stung Obama even after his election to the US Senate years later (Renshon 2011 , 201–202).

Why doesn’t Barack Obama take a more individualistic view of educa-tion (and other) policies like a typical Chicago politician? Inheriting two wars and an economic crisis, and with significant political incentives to look elsewhere, why should President Obama tackle education reform? 2 In part, Obama, like Bush before him, wants to be a great, regime-constructing president as described by Skowronek ( 1997 ), not an incremental, poll-driven reformer. While some have argued that President Clinton’s poll-driven cen-trism improved the nation (Galston 2011 ), both Obama and George W. Bush shied away from his perceived ethical cynicism (Renshon 2004 , 2011 ) Yet it seems likely at this writing that over the long term, Clinton will be judged the more successful president generally—though not as regards education.

But even in his earlier years, Obama had confidence in his ability to charm others, even his own mother (Obama 1995 , 94–95), in part simply by being an unexpectedly courteous young African American who did not directly ques-tion the motives of others. As Renshon ( 2011 ) points out, through his time as a student and later in his career Obama was good at learning how to blend in to any environment, from modulating his voice differently in predomi-nantly African American and white settings to playing golf while an Illinois state legislator. Obama ( 1995 ) even managed to blend in reasonably well in his trips to Africa. Yet over confidence may make it difficult for Obama make midcourse corrections. This problem clearly plagued the George W. Bush administration generally and the president and vice president in particular (Maranto and Redding 2009 ). It remains to be seen if President Obama will learn that lesson.


But confidence might not be the best word for President Obama’s attitude. Perhaps his psychological predisposition could best be characterized as mor-alistic inflexibility. In the wake of a repudiation in the 2010 election, political analyst Charlie Cook commented (quoted in Renshon 2011 , 226), “President Obama is so supremely self-confident, so self-assured of the righteousness of his positions, that perhaps he believes if he does what he thinks is best and lets the chips fall where they may, everything will eventually work out.” It would appear that Obama believes that others will eventually come around to appreciate the intelligence of his views.

This boundless self-confidence led President Obama to accept a “big bang” view of the presidency. He believed that immediate crises and longstanding pent-up demands for government growth gave him license to undertake numerous initiatives all at once, including economic stimulus, health care reform, green jobs programs, financial services regulatory reform, remaking the auto industry, and education reform. Though he has shown considerable pragmatism on foreign policy and defense, on matters of domestic regula-tion and the size of government President Obama has proved a conviction politician of the left. For example, the president penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing limitation on regulations, while doing just the opposite in policy. Similarly, the president has praised deficit reduction while imme-diately retreating from the recommendations of his own deficit reduction panel, and becoming coy whenever Republicans showed some flexibility on revenue increases (Renshon 2011 , 235–38). Moderate (e.g., Galston 2011 ) and conservative (e.g., Renshon 2011 , 223) academics doubt that the American people have quite the appetite for so much liberal reform at once. As dem-ocratic pollster Douglas Schoen has argued (quoted in Renshon 2011 , 226), President Obama “has systematically put forth policies the American people do not want.” Yet President Obama consistently blamed the 2010 election set-back not on his own over-reach, but rather on either public relations failings or the American people reacting to change with fear rather than logic, as if those of different ideals could not be rational in their reactions (Renshon 2011 ). Similarly, regarding education, there is reason to think that the presi-dent views opponents to education reform as less than rational, rather than simply actors advancing their own ideals and self-interest , as reformers like Moe ( 2011 ) would characterize them.

In short, President Obama is a bold, conviction politician likely to trust his own instincts more than experts, and experts more than polls. Yet his style is very different, and may reflect lessons from community organizing. As famed organizer Saul Alinsky ( 1971 ) argues, a competent organizer should seem nonthreatening if possible, and should allow others to take the lead. One can see this tendency in much of what the administration says and does. For example, President Obama has largely continued the foreign policies of the last two years of his predecessor, keeping Guantanamo open, maintaining a presence in Afghanistan (and until recently Iraq),upping the tempo of drone


attacks on suspected terrorists, and expanding targeted assassinations. Yet his policies have attracted far less opposition than those of the Bush adminis-tration, in part due to the preeminence of economic concerns and because of a “Nixon goes to China” dynamic in which Democrats are reluctant to attack a president of their own party. Yet, an additional factor is the administration’s nonconfrontational, and where possible, multilateral approach. Similarly, the president allowed Congress to take the lead, and arguably much of the blame, on health care reform. Regarding school reform, on signing on to aid Jon Schnur’s proposed grants for school reform (which became the basis for Race to the Top), President Obama said that while he has proposed such reforms for a long time, the administration should mind its diplomacy saying, “just don’t poke the unions in the eye with this” (as quoted in Brill 2011 , 7). Stylistically, Barack Obama likes to avoid fights when possible, or at least tone down fight-club rhetoric while avoiding unnecessary battles. He wants to rely on charm when possible, at least with fellow Democrats. Finally, as Alinsky proposes, the Obama style is to point out when opponents are not being true to their self-professed ideals, with the notion that public shame, calibrated diplomati-cally to attack positions more than people, can serve as a force multiplier.

Presidents, Structures, and Personality

Political scientists often argue about the degree to which presidential behav-ior is determined by the role of the office rather than individual personal-ity. Structural theorists such as Graham Allison (1971) and Walcott and Hult (1995) argue to varying degrees that presidents confront like challenges in like fashion. President Obama, for example, kept on two of the three economics crisis managers appointed by President Bush, and continued both Bush’s war policies and the secretary of defense who implemented them, despite pressures by some on the left to take very different approaches (Dowdle et al. 2011 ). After all, as Jones ( 2005 ) points out in his magisterial The Presidency in a Separated System , ours is not a presidential system. Both political environments and events and other institutions (Congress, courts, and states and localities) hem in presidential power. On many strategic issues, for both political and techni-cal reasons, presidents of varying parties and psychological predispositions tend to act in like fashion. As Chapter 2 details, on education every president since Reagan has to varying degrees encouraged school choice and school standards even in the absence of significant political pressure, suggesting that bipartisan elite ideology and structural considerations are at work. On the other hand, presidential personality also has a role in determining presiden-tial behavior, as a plethora of studies show (Renshon 1998, 2004 , 2011 ; Jervis 1976 ). For example, president George W. Bush’s bold personality, idealism, prior experience, and relative inattention to detail played a role in his making education standards a priority; just as his bold personality, idealism, relative


in experience, and inattention to detail played a role in the decision to invade Iraq and in how that decision was implemented (Maranto and Redding 2009 ). Of course in the real world, to a greater degree than in social science models, both structure and personality come into play. For example, as Krasner ( 1978 ) shows, presidents over a half-century period confronting raw materials policy issues consistently subordinated the economic interests of individual firms to security of supply for the nation as a whole, and to an even greater degree to broader foreign policy goals such as limiting the spread of German, and later communist influence. Still, presidents varied in their tactics, choosing dif-ferent mixes and types of diplomacy and force. In short, both structure and personality matter.

Paradoxically, presidents may have more power in areas that matter less to the office. There is simply not much of a precedent for presidents to meddle in education, which even in an age of growing presidential powers has gener-ally been seen as a state and local responsibility. Education is a policy area in which presidents have long engaged in grandiose “policy talk” (Tyack and Cuban 1995 ) but limited policy action; thus it is an area in which activist presidents can make up their own traditions. The very novelty of presidential educational involvement can serve as a force multiplier, particularly when presidents know something about schools. In areas in which people and elites have not expected presidents to play a major role, their very arrival on the scene attracts notice. George W. Bush, for example, established his creden-tials as a moderate “compassionate conservative” by engaging in education reform, we argue (in Chapter 4 ), more or less successfully. President Obama may have an ever-greater impact over the long term. The president’s knowl-edge of education and his willingness to invest political capital in the area combined with the economic slump that made public schools more depen-dent than ever on federal dollars allows President Obama to have significant impact on education policies in a relatively short time in office (Moe 2011 ; Brill 2011 ).

In part, structural conditions enabled President Obama to develop a politi-cally viable reform strategy despite considerable pressure from teachers’ unions and conventional educators, who have by and large opposed the presi-dent’s education agenda (Ravitch 2010 ; Mathis and Welner 2010 ). In part, the administration’s rejection of school vouchers and support for increased fund-ing for public schools in a time of recession combined to give the administra-tion political space to pursue reforms. Scorned by the Republicans, teachers’ unions see themselves as having no one to turn to save Democrats, a theme of Chapter 2 . This gives democratic politicians favoring school reform more than a little freedom to disregard union demands (Spring 2010, 87) in order to show their independence. In addition, a pro-reform press encourages political leaders to back school reform (Henig 2008 ), and, to the chagrin of EIC backers (Ravitch 2010 ; Glass 2008 ), pro-reform foundations now offer employment to out-of-work politicians and political staffers who backed school reform when


in office, weakening the political threat of teachers’ unions and other reform opponents (Moe 2011 ; Brill 2011 ). Further, the Obama school reforms will have the most impact on inner city schools, where parents will vote demo-cratic under any circumstances. They are likely to have far less impact on and thus less controversy in politically more powerful and politically more contested suburban terrain.

These structural factors are important, but insufficient to explain the Obama education strategy. Indeed, as Terry Moe ( 2011 , 369) notes, had Hillary Clinton won a few more primaries, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top would never have seen the light of day, and No Child Left Behind might well have been repealed rather than reformed. It turns out that in the real world of policy-making, it is not only impersonal structures and forces that count—so too do leaders. Elections really do have consequences. As we note throughout, with the notable exception of vouchers to private schools, Barack Obama has been consistently pro school reform, probably more so than any recent president of either party. What accounts for the president’s interest in education and his particular brand of reform? Why has the president chosen to pursue reforms with relatively little political payoff, reforms that indeed could divide his party? We mean to provide answers in this chapter.

The Obama Biography and Education

Key to understanding the president’s approach to public schooling is his own personal critique of traditional public schools, as presented in his autobi-ography and in his campaign rhetoric. Perhaps more than any recent presi-dent, Barack Obama was made by education. With an unstable family life in which Obama had no fewer than four names used at different periods (Hayes 2010, 5), school proved an anchor. Yet he had almost no exposure to American public education, being taken to Indonesia with his mother and stepfather after only a few months of public kindergarten. As a child, young “Barry” Obama ( 1995 ) attended a rigorous, elite Catholic school in the Indonesia of his stepfather, where he was regarded as an average student. Obama’s mother, the former Ann Dunham, was irreligious and something of a romantic, but did take education very seriously, eventually earning a PhD in anthropol-ogy. In Indonesia, she awakened her son early each morning to study English and other subjects taught in the United States, often through correspondence courses. Not surprisingly, this affected his views on education. Many years later, in his second State of the Union address, he would opine:

And so the question is whether all of us- as citizens, and as parents- are willing to do what’s necessary to give every child a change to succeed. That responsi-bility begins not in our classrooms, but in our homes and communities. It’s family that first instills the love of learning in a child. Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and the homework gets done (Obama 2011 a).


One could almost imagine him envisioning his mother’s dutiful early morn-ing tutoring sessions as he said those words.

After four years, with tensions in her second marriage, Obama’s mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. Here, the future presi-dent won a scholarship to the prestigious Punahou School, which had edu-cated generations of Hawaii’s elites. In short, in both Indonesia and Hawaii the future president studied with children of privilege, as did Michelle Obama and as do the couple’s children. In his first speech on education, he openly stated the importance of this and similar experiences:

That’s why I can stand here today. Because somebody stood up when it was hard; stood up when it was risky. Because even though my mother didn’t have a lot of money, scholarships gave me the chance to go to some of the best schools in the country. And I am running for President of the United States because I want to give every American child the same chances that I had (Obama 2007 ).

Top Punahou graduates typically attend the best colleges in the nation, with even the lower half of the class landing at good colleges. Here, too, Obama was a solid but not brilliant student, playing sports, partying, and not fully living up to his potential. He also struggled with his identity as a mixed race adolescent essentially without a father or mother on the scene, occasion-ally clashing with his basketball coach and resenting his white classmates, who could not understand the pressures of a lone African American. Obama reached out to the few African Americans in his community through basket-ball. Despite a certain level of adolescent angst, made worse by his minority status and his unusual (at least for elite students) family situation, Punahou’s rigorous academics and pressure from his family assured that college would be in his future, and he received sufficient preparation for collegiate suc-cess. Earning admission to the Punahou School changed young Obama’s life course, paving the way for his later success at Columbia and Harvard (Obama 1995 ; Scott 2011 ).

Obama’s Punahou experience may explain at least two of the admin-istration policies detailed in later chapters. First, Hawaii has an unusually large and relatively successful private school sector, which as in many states, predates the public school system. The public school system, in contrast, is the only one in the nation run directly by the state board of education and bureaucracy rather than by local school boards. Traditionally, this has made Hawaiian public schools insulated from public pressure and unresponsive to public demands, particularly demands from ethnic minorities. Hawaiian public schools suffer from ethnic violence and low student achievement. Exposure to Hawaiian schooling may have made Obama relatively open to school choice and other measures likely to empower parents and communi-ties rather than central bureaucrats. Obama is open to seeing such reforms


as progressive rather than “racist,” as some EIC members charge (Buchanan et al. 2011 ).

Obama’s time at Punahou may explain a second administration policy detailed in later chapters: the effort to expand pipelines of alternatively cer-tified teachers and administrators. As Wayne and Youngs ( 2003 ) report in the prestigious Review of Educational Research , results from more than 20 studies suggest that students learn more from intellectually able teachers, but not from certified teachers. Here, research accords with Barack Obama’s life story, as well as the experience of many other elites. Barack Obama’s Punahou School does not even consider certification when hiring new teachers (the lead author called their personnel office). In Chicago, Barack and Michelle Obama rejected the notoriously poor public schools, which are staffed by certified teachers, to send their daughters to the much storied University of Chicago Laboratory (“Lab”) School founded by John Dewey. When asked whether she hires certified teachers, the Lab School’s personnel director replied, “We do not look at that; it doesn’t make any difference.” John Kerry attended St. Paul’s in New Hampshire. St. Paul’s personnel director said, “We do not con-sider teacher certification in hiring . . . I would estimate that out of our 110 fac-ulty only two or three are certified.” It’s the same at Sidwell Friends, Al Gore’s alma mater; at Episcopal High School, whose alumni include John McCain; and at Philips Academy (aka Andover), attended by both presidents Bush. In short, all the recent major party presidential nominees studied under un cer-tified teachers, and seemingly learned enough to succeed. In fairness, Sarah Palin did study under traditionally certified public school teachers, as has the general public. We suspect that these facts explain the disdain that Barack Obama and other elites have for traditional educational certification mech-anisms, and for the teachers’ unions and education professors who defend them.

Obama first attended Occidental College, where he found his political voice by leading an antiapartheid demonstration. At this time, “Barry” changed his name back to Barack. Obama found the racial situation at Occidental tense, with the small number of African American students either avoiding conflict by acting “white,” or else establishing their identities as completely and very self-consciously “black.” Middle-ground, such as might suit a half-white African American raised by white grandparents, was difficult to find, particularly since Obama’s course of study seemed to emphasize the role of Eurocentric oppression in history. After two years, Obama transferred to Columbia University, largely so he could study in an urban environment. In a real sense, Obama’s early years reflected a certain rootless cosmopoli-tanism, with an uncertain identity, no permanent family, no real home, and a great variety of temporary mentors rather than more enduring relation-ships. Indeed, the very title of his well-regarded autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance , reflect the young man’s search for roots. School, university, and later work were arguably the most stable


and enduring ties in Barack Obama’s early life (Obama 1995 ; Renshon 2011 ; Hayes 2010 ).

At New York’s Columbia, a somewhat more mature Obama felt more com-fortable than at Occidental or in Hawaii. Here his race did not stand out so much, and his Ivy League pedigree marked him for future success. Upon graduating from Columbia, Obama briefly worked for an economic consult-ing firm, where it was clear that his race was no barrier to success; indeed, in his own telling, he was regarded as someone who might someday run the company, an image he found tempting for a time. At both Columbia and later at Harvard Law School, Obama found that his race did not matter so much as his preparation and eventually his credentials. White elites were no longer so prejudiced as to reject African Americans simply by dint of color; rather, capable and credentialed African Americans could succeed at the most elite occupations (Obama 1995 ). Given his mixed race background and his com-ing of age well after the heyday of the civil rights movement, Obama could see what African Americans with family roots in the time of slavery and Jim Crow could not: in the relatively color-blind milieu of modern American elites, for the first time education could really be the great equalizer. An edu-cated, talented African American could in fact earn promotion to the top. Indeed, one’s racial identity, if used in a non-confrontational manner, could even prove a political asset, with whites showing their tolerance by supporting a clearly capable African American (Renshon 2011 ; Gresham and Maranto 2002 ).

In many respects, this marks Barack Obama as a political liberal, but a racial moderate with little patience for blaming personal condition on racial crimes. For example, in his 2009 back to school speech for American young people, the president recalled his own struggles at school and urged young people to reject excuses, respect their elders (to a greater degree than he had), and “put in the hard work it takes to succeed.” In America, there is “no excuse for not trying . . . here in America, you make your own future.” The president further invoked patriotism: “If you quit on school, you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.” Ironically, Republicans delivering similar speeches have faced liberal accusations of racist “blaming the victim,” while President Obama was accused by some in the GOP of politicizing education (Maranto 2009 ). In effect, the presi-dent was invoking traditional Horatio Alger notions of success, that with sufficient effort anyone could gain the skills to succeed, with a new twist. In the new century, those skills were to be had in school, not directly in the marketplace; thus school reform schooling is essential to class mobil-ity, and to breaking down the permanent underclass found in many cities. Notably, Barack and Michelle Obama emphasize the importance of educa-tion to their own children, who attend elite private schools, a theme we will explore further below.


In several subsequent speeches, Obama reiterated his calls for Alger-like effort for future success. At a speech to the Urban League, he spoke directly to young African Americans, saying:

At certain points in our lives, young black men and women may feel the sting of discrimination. They may feel trapped in a community where drugs, vio-lence, and unemployment are pervasive, where they are forced to wrestle with things no child should have to face. There are all kinds of reasons for our chil-dren to say, “No, I can’t.” But it is our job to say to them, “Yes, you can.” Yes you can overcome. Yes you can persevere. Yes you can make of your lives what you will (Obama 2010 ).

In Miami, Florida, speaking to Miami Central High School he said:

So first of all, you can’t drop out. You can’t even think about dropping out. You can’t even think about dropping out. But it’s not going to be enough just to graduate from high school. You’re going to need some additional education (Obama 2011 c).

And he finished a speech at Kenmore Middle school in Arlington, Virginia, by saying this:

We are at a place that believes every child, no matter where they come from, can grow up to be anything they want; where Katherine, or Roberto or a skinny kid with a funny name like Barack Obama can grow up to be President of the United States. That’s who we are. That’s the commitment we make to the next generation (Obama 2011 b).

Again, Obama’s race makes it difficult to argue that school reform is racist, or that succeeding in school is “acting white” (Buck 2010 ).

As noted above, conspicuously absent from Obama’s schooling years was time spent in American traditional public schools. Similarly, Michelle Obama was educated at an elite public magnet school, before attending Princeton (Hayes 2010). Moreover, Barack Obama’s limited exposure to American public schools did not prove positive, with the future president stymied in his heart-felt efforts to reform what were then described as the worst public schools in America, the Chicago public schools. While working as an economic con-sultant, Obama felt the call to public service for the poor, and so applied to become a community organizer in Chicago. This was a heady time for lib-eral reformers in Chicago, with Harold Washington serving as the city’s first African American mayor. Washington had an enormous symbolic impact on Chicago African Americans, who felt they had long received relatively little city patronage. Yet his time as a community organizer proved vexing to Obama. Even with Washington as mayor, African American communities


received too little help to compensate for the deindustrialization that hit the inner city. While white and Asian residents had the skills to succeed in the suburbs or in the central business district where growth concentrated, African Americans were left behind (Obama 1995 ).

Obama’s work as a community organizer led him to appreciate the impor-tance of good schooling, and also reject standard liberal views that more money could fix schools, in part because inner city schools are oriented more toward employing the middle class than teaching the underclass. As he put it in Dreams from My Father (1995, 256), too many inner city public schools suffer “a teachers’ union that went on strike at least once every two years; a bloated bureaucracy, and an indifferent state legislature.” Further,

the biggest source of resistance was rarely talked about, though—namely, the uncomfortable fact that every one of our [black] churches was filled with teach-ers, principals, and district superintendents. Few of these educators sent their own children to public schools; they knew too much for that. But they would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before (256–257).

Obama went on to detail how a principal saw Obama’s proposed tutoring program primarily as a means to employ family members and friends, not to help children. In short, the moralistic Obama had tried to work with the indi-vidualistic school system and failed. Possibly, as some have argued, middle-class school quality can be assured by political forces, which push for at least a reasonable level of schooling (Abernathy 2005 ; Childress et al. 2009 ). And in any event, middle-class parents can always exit poor public schools by work-ing the system to arrange transfers, gaining admission to test-based public magnet schools, paying tuition at private schools, and if all else fails buying a house in another community. No children of means are trapped in bad schools. On the other hand, as Rich ( 1996 ) and Williams ( 2005 ) show, disadvantaged parents often cannot exit and have no ready political means of holding the urban public education “cartel” accountable. Indeed, their children may face reprisals if they try, being assigned the worst teachers and even being denied diplomas. This situation may be worse still in African American–dominated cities, where interlocking networks of teachers’ unions, school bureaucracies, local political machines, and even church networks, fraternities, and sorori-ties may see public schools primarily as sources of jobs for the middle class rather than education for all, as a sort of nouveau Tammany Hall. In many cities, teaching and administrative jobs are prized for their near ironclad job security and relatively high salaries. Not without reason, African Americans may see good private sector jobs as reserved for whites. Given the history of white oppression that has characterized most American cities, it is not sur-prising that some middle-class African Americans have come to see public schools as a sort of cosa nostra (our thing) in terms of symbolic power and


gainful employment (Rich 1996 ; Henig et al. 1999 ; Williams 2005 ). Survey research suggests that for African Americans, though not for whites, support for school choice declines as income increases. In short, rather than fulfill-ing the moral objectives of public schooling, many inner city public schools instead serve either individualistic incentives (by providing jobs for the polit-ically connected), or traditionalistic ones (maintaining the power of elites who can offer jobs to supporters). Moralistic reformers like Barack Obama and former Washington mayor Adrian Fenty thus may not represent political elites within African American communities; indeed, this in part explains Fenty’s failure to win reelection (Whitmire 2011 ).

Further, the middle-class African Americans employed by school dis-tricts often hold negative (and arguably racist) stereotypes about underclass African Americans (who indeed often voice the same views), as demonstrated by Sniderman and Piazza ( 1993 ), among others. This is in fact a theme of Obama’s organizing time in Chicago (Obama 1995 , 133–206). Middle-class African Americans, some generations removed from poverty (Sowell 1978 ), often feel that if they worked harder, impoverished African Americans could pay for their children to attend private schools or else succeed in existing inner city traditional public schools. In short, more than a few middle-class African Americans “blame the victim.” Such arguably bigoted ideals enable teachers and principals of all races to ignore rather than learn from the lessons of suc-cessful inner city schools, and hamper the efforts of education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. If school professionals are powerless to teach disadvantaged children, then they might not try, and may instead simply work to discredit more successful schools (Payne 2008 ; Whitmire 2011 ). Barack Obama even admits to being aware of this kind of thinking, responding to it in a speech to a Miami High School:

Now, turning around these schools isn’t easy. A lot of people used to argue, well, all they need is more money. We also have to reform how things are done. It isn’t easy to turn around an expectation of failure and make that into an expectation of success. In fact, it is one of the hardest things you can do. And there is always plenty of naysayers out there who will say it’s not even possible . . . Here’s what I say. I say I am not willing to give up on any child in America. I say I’m not willing to up on any school in America. I do not accept failure here in America. I believe the status quo is unacceptable; it is time to change it. And it’s time we came together—just like Jeb (Former Governor of Florida Bush) and I are doing today- coming from different parties but we come together not as Democrats or Republicans, as Americans—to lift up all of our schools- and to prepare students like you for a 21st century education. To give every child in America a chance to make the most of their God-given potential (Obama 2011 c).

Public servants, like humans generally, often find it easier to justify their cur-rent lack of success than to search for and implement more successful (and


often higher effort) means of doing their work (Downs 1967 ). Barack Obama clearly disagrees.

The Secretary Selection

The most important education decision President-elect Obama made was his selection of Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan for secretary of edu-cation. Behind the scenes of the “no-drama Obama” presidential transition, education reformers and teachers’ unions waged an all-too dramatic battle over the choice for secretary of education. In picking Duncan, Obama chose a reformer who would take on the Educational Industrial Complex (EIC), but with sufficient charm to survive politically.

Candidate Barack Obama took conflicting positions—sometimes back-ing education reforms, but at other times suggesting a typical allegiance to the status quo. Indeed, his positions were so inconsistent that both the Democrats for Education Reform and the antireform National Education Association claimed him as their own. Duncan’s choice, on the other hand, reassured school reformers that the president was really one of them (Buck and Maranto 2008 ; Brill 2011 ).

During his tenure in Chicago, Duncan pushed for more flexible union contracts and more decision-making authority for principals. He also backed more charter schools. Though critics doubt Duncan’s strategy (Ravitch 2010 ), there is evidence that Duncan’s efforts paid off, with Chicago showing the ninth largest gains among 60 urban school districts on the respected National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) exams during the last three years of Duncan’s tenure (Council of Great City Schools 2010 ). In sharp contrast to controversial superintendents such as Michelle Rhee, Duncan pursued reform incrementally, with considerable charm, and at times by letting others take key public roles. This helped maintain his political viability in a light-ning rod position, and seemingly fits the Obama community organizer style. In describing his own style, Duncan said, “I try to bear-hug everyone. But at the end of the day this is about the children, not the adults. If the adults want to cooperate, fine. If not, that’s too bad. We have to do this” (quoted in Brill 2011, 236).

Though praised by reformers, the selection of Duncan was controversial in democratic policy circles. Reform skeptics, including teachers’ unions and Obama insider Christopher Edley, pushed for the selection of Stanford University education dean Linda Darling-Hammond, who generally opposed education reform. A Secretary Darling-Hammond would almost certainly have worked to limit school choice, end the test-based accountability enshrined in No Child Left Behind, and limit alternative teacher and administrator cer-tification. Duncan’s choice, in contrast, sent a clear signal that the Obama administration would embrace the reforms promised in the campaign (Brill


2011 ). For example, on the campaign trail, candidate Obama promised to seek ways to pay teachers more for serving in disadvantaged schools. The goal would be to enable inner city and rural schools to offer salaries above those of suburban counterparts, thus encouraging talented teachers to go where they are needed most. Second, Obama argued that more effective teachers should be paid more. Both of these reforms are huge breaks with the status quo, in which teachers are paid based on their years of experience and professional development (typically courses taken), regardless of whether they are effec-tive, and whether they are teaching in high-need areas or posts. Reforming teacher pay to reflect student needs will be controversial, but might be worth the fight. Too often, the debate over teacher pay revolves around the simplis-tic question: the same versus more. But if teacher salaries are raised across the board, bad teachers are equally rewarded along with good teachers, and high-poverty schools are unable to entice good teachers to move there. Real reform would increase salaries in a way that gives teachers an incentive to improve, or to serve the neediest children. Further, evidence suggests that merit pay has promise, though like any reform, it can be oversold or poorly implemented (Ritter et al. 2009 ).

Duncan’s selection also clearly signaled that the Obama team would mend rather than end No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the bi-partisan reform that requires schools to keep track of how all students are doing and try to improve the achievement of poorer, minority children. As we show in Chapter 4 , this accountability scheme has pushed adults to focus on children’s needs. As a superintendent from an affluent, well-regarded Pennsylvania school district told one of us, “The biggest requirement of NCLB was to report data by group. Eighty percent of our kids achieve well, but when we disaggregate data by poverty and race the data doesn’t look too good . . . we’re going to put more effort into teaching minority kids.”

Defining Moments: Central Falls and the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program

Two events occurred under President Obama’s watch that may have forced him to choose between personal convictions and political needs. In February 2010, teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island, refused to cooperate with the superintendent of the district in the restructuring of Central Falls High School, and the superintendent, Frances Gallo, threatened to fire all of the teachers. The superintendent demanded the teachers to perform extra duties, including tutoring and extra professional development, and accept $30 an hour for their additional services. The teachers demanded $90. The teach-ers and the unions that supported them held firm in their refusal, and on February 12, 2010 , the superintendent announced that she would fire the entire staff. When the American Federation of Teachers sent representatives


to the state to advocate for the teachers, Secretary Duncan stood behind the superintendent and school leadership. Quoted in the Providence Journal , Duncan said that he “ ‘applauded’ them for ‘showing courage and doing the right thing for kids,’ ” going so far as to say, “This is hard work and these are tough decisions, but students only have one chance for an education . . . and when schools continue to struggle we have a collective obligation to take action” (Jordan and Borg 2010 ). In May of 2010 , the teachers accepted Gallo’s terms and kept their jobs (Jordan 2010 ).

This offered an example of new style education reform leadership, using public shaming to push antireform interests to moderate their demands (Alinsky 1971 ). It sent a message, almost in the manner of President Reagan’s stand against striking air traffic controllers, that the old rules no longer applied. Further, given the administration’s massive financial support for public schools, it is difficult to argue that this criticism came from an enemy of public education, though of course some might (e.g., Ravitch 2010 ). Of course it remains to be seen whether such actions will have broader ripple effects on contract negotiations elsewhere, or whether education reformers can be waited out by political professionals in the EIC.

In another challenge, the successful but politically unpopular DC Opportunity Scholarship Program lost its funding without a fight from the president. Indeed, the government’s own evaluation of the program 3 was released late on a Friday in a clumsy effort to bury it. In early 2010, Senator Joseph Lieberman introduced amendments to a series of bills that would have continued the funding of the voucher program that provided scholarships of up to $7,500 for low-income, predominately minority students to attend pri-vate schools in the District of Columbia. These amendments failed, and nei-ther President Obama nor Secretary Duncan stood up to the teachers’ unions that plotted its demise. Although all of the students currently in the program were grandfathered in, no new students were allowed to join the program. On June 22, 2010 , the final report by the federal government’s Institute for Education Sciences was released, stating that participation in the voucher program (which enjoyed strong support by the Washington Post editorial board) increased the likelihood of high school graduation by 12 percentage points (Wolf et al. 2010).

But the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program would not die as easily as opponents may have liked. Initially reintroduced in January of 2011, the SOAR (Scholarships for Opportunity and Results) Act was reintroduced in the House by soon to be Speaker Boehner and in the Senate by Lieberman. While the bill passed in the house 225–195, it stalled in the Senate. The presi-dent, for his part, issued a Statement of Administration Policy outlining his opposition. In it, he argued that “private school vouchers are not an effec-tive way to improve student achievement” and that “rigorous evaluation over several years demonstrates that the DC program has not yielded improved student achievement by its scholarship recipients compared to other students


in D.C.” While keeping to the letter of the law (the Department of Education’s study did not find an increase student achievement , rather student attain-ment ), such a bold statement did not accurately represent the findings of the research on the program. The statement left out, for example, that parents were much more satisfied in their schools and were by and large happy with the choices that they made. From a more philosophical perspective, the state-ment closed by arguing against “targeting resources to help a small number of individuals attend private schools rather than creating access to great public schools for every child.” If the DC public schools need something to do better, it is not money. Estimates as to the cost of an education for a public school in DC range as high as $24,600 per student, more than three times the amount awarded in vouchers (Coulson 2008 ).

We must note that while publically opposing vouchers, Obama quietly sig-naled to House Majority Leader Boehner that he would be willing to sign a broader bill that included voucher funding. Some insiders believe that the administration did not mind this “defeat.” After stalling in the Senate, the reauthorization of the program was tacked on to the continuing budget reso-lution of April 2011 along with $300 million in increased funding for the DC public schools, and passed without great fanfare.

In one case (Central Falls), the administration boldly stood up to teachers’ unions; in the other (DC vouchers), it did not. To us, this shows that Obama’s moralistic resolve is not without limits or calculation. The DC voucher pro-gram served only a small number of students, and supporting that program would burn a terrific amount of political capital needed to fight unions else-where. In short, the administration chose to pick its battles, and of course in the end, the vouchers did continue.

An Education President of Achievement?

Generally, the American political system is not a presidential system (Jones 2005 ), and this is even more true of state and local policy areas like educa-tion. The US president and secretary of education cannot act in the manner of their European counterparts. American public schools are and to a con-siderable degree will remain institutions managed through 50 state capitals and fourteen thousand local school districts. That said, changing ideas about both public education and the role of the presidency have made it structurally safe for presidents to play a more active role in school reform. Presidential rhetoric, along with relatively small federal carrots and sticks, may give state and local officials cover to pass and implement policies that they have already come to believe in. In effect, presidential action can help break through the EIC, since the latter has lost its ideological legitimacy, just as pro segrega-tion forces had by the mid-1960s. In addition, the economic crisis has pushed school systems to depend on federal largesse, increasing Washington’s power.


Further, President Obama’s background and determination has made edu-cation reform an administration priority. The personal really is political, and this explains why President Obama has embraced education reform. To use the terms of Nelson ( 1993 ), we believe that presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton were “presidents of preparation,” who supported but could not impose significant reform, and made elites and even parts of the EIC used to the vocabulary of school reform through policy talk . In contrast, in the education realm, George W. Bush was a “president of achievement,” as we argue in Chapter 4 . President Obama may become more successful still.

Over the long term, the Bush–Obama reforms seem likely to change American public schools for the better, often in surprising ways. By introduc-ing the Common Core Standards (discussed in Chapter 6 ), the administra-tion has introduced common metrics, which over time should enable policy makers and the business community, which values schooling (e.g., Chubb and Moe 1990 ), to compare progress made by local school systems and individual schools. Among other things, this should benefit disadvantaged students, who tend to move from school to school (Hirsch 1996 , 2009 ). School-to-school and district-to-district comparison and adaptation are particularly likely since the reauthorization of ESEA (detailed in Chapter 7 ) seems sure to contain value-added components, making it possible to compare individual schools, school districts, and teachers on what they can actually affect: what a child learns in a given year. Combined with merit pay, weakening of tenure rules, and efforts to allow new entrants into the teaching and educational leadership professions, these reforms will encourage organizational adaptation to maxi-mize student academic success, rather than merely comply with bureaucratic regulations. In addition, the Obama administration recognizes that the more effective charter school networks have had considerable success in teaching at-risk children (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ), and accordingly used Race to the Top (detailed in Chapter 5 ) to push states to expand their charter caps. There is some evidence that over the long term, this too may push tradi-tional public schools to adapt to parent demands (Greene 2005 ; Maranto et al. 2001). These reforms are extremely controversial within schools of education (Ravitch 2010 ; Glass 2008 ). Indeed, using highly selective literature reviews and eschewing foreign examples, AERA-linked researchers have presented a set of papers critical of the Obama education agenda (Mathis and Welner 2010 ). In contrast, an objective reading of the quantitative research suggests that over time the Obama reforms will stimulate local level innovation which will improve schooling, particularly for the disadvantaged students who need it most (Belfield and Levin 2002 ; Hirsch 2009 ; Greene 2005 ; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Grissmer et al. 2000 ). Further, these reforms can be thought of as in the broad tradition of reinventing government, which in edu-cation and other areas seems to have improved public service without signifi-cant failings (Maranto et al. 2001).


One caveat seems in order. As Kotkin ( 2010 ) writes, much of the Obama agenda, including much of the education agenda, seems centered on the needs of urban areas, where the president has spent essentially all of his adult life, and where nearly all policy makers agree education reform is most needed. They will have substantially less impact on the suburbs, where in fact most Americans are reasonably happy with their schools. For example, Secretary Duncan’s plans to focus on the bottom performing “dropout factory” schools (detailed in Chapter 7 ) may disrupt urban education cartels, but seem less likely to affect the suburbs, which have dropout issues of their own. This basic fact may make key reforms more palatable to the Republicans, who now run the US House of Representatives, but may also limit their scope.

4

No Child Left Behind and the Policy Context of the

Obama Education Agenda

The philosophy behind the law [NCLB] is pretty straightforward: Local schools remain under local control. In exchange for federal dollars, how-ever, we expect results. We’re spending money on schools, and shouldn’t we determine whether or not the money we’re spending is yielding the results society expects?

— George W. Bush January 8, 2009

Of course, we also have to fix the broken promises of No Child Left Behind. Now, I believe that the goals of this law were the right ones. Making a promise to educate every child with an excellent teacher is right. Closing the achievement gap that exists in too many cities and rural areas is right. More accountability is right. Higher standards are right.

— Barack Obama September 7, 2008

Much maligned but little understood, No Child Left Behind set the stage for education reform in the Obama presidency. Replacing a

system that was previously relegated to data-free discussions of schools believed to be failing, NCLB forced schools and school districts to mea-sure and report student achievement disaggregated by demographics . With NCLB information, the federal government and states pushed school dis-tricts to attempt a wide variety of approaches to improve. Some of these interventions worked, others did not, and most were simply circumven-tions of the requirements of the statute. Still, NCLB did far more good than harm by bringing into the sunlight that which had previously been in darkness, and by highlighting the successes of some public schools that closed achievement gaps.


History

On January 8, 2002, after nearly a year of negotiations in Congress, presi-dent George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, a six-year reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). NCLB won high praise. No less than David Broder, the dean of the Washington press corps, suggested that the law “may well be the most impor-tant piece of federal education legislation in thirty-five years” (Maranto with Copetto 2004, 105). In fact, the 681-page NCLB left intact the highly complex structure of federal education policy, with its 54-odd elementary and sec-ondary programs and hundreds of provisions—each with its own congres-sional, bureaucratic, or interest group constituency. NCLB did not directly challenge EIC subgovernments (Finn 2002, 1; Kafer 2002; Rudalevige 2002 ). Yet NCLB broke new ground by pushing states to stress school and district level accountability. NCLB requires annual proficiency testing in reading and math for grades 3 through 8 using state tests. It also forces states to pub-lish results of school-level testing broken down by subgroup (ethnicity, spe-cial education, free lunch status, and LEP status). At least in theory, NCLB encourages reconstitution of failing schools, and allows parents in failing schools to attend other public schools and use Title I money for tutoring. Finally, NCLB promoted experiments with alternative teacher certification and provided money for more phonics-based reading approaches, though these provisions have had little impact (Maranto with Copetto 2004). Why did President Bush choose NCLB as the cornerstone of his domestic policy agenda? Simply put, like President Obama, President Bush cared about edu-cation for personal reasons, but unlike Obama, he had political incentives as well.

George W. Bush and Education, the Personal and the Political

President George W. Bush’s interest in education was both personal and politi-cal. Personally, Bush suffered a traumatic transition on moving from a medio-cre Texas public school to the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover. Days after arriving, the normally ebullient Bush asked friends, “how am I going to last here a week?” (Minutaglio 1999 , 64). He fell on the margins academi-cally, “terrified of flunking out of Andover and the embarrassment it would cause himself and his family” (Hatfield 2000 , 29). Inferior preparation handi-capped Bush, but he “worked hard, buckled down, and learned a lot” (Bush 1999 , 20). In the end, he recalled, “The high standards lifted me up” (Hatfield 2000 , 29). Bush holds his personal success as evidence that any student can meet academic standards. Even such Bush critics as Ivins and Dubose ( 2000 , 123, 136–140) admit that, unlike his predecessor, Ann Richards, Bush risked

POLICY CONTEXT OF THE OBAMA EDUCATION AGENDA 75

substantial political capital trying to equalize Texas school funding, facing opposition from his GOP base.

Both personally and politically, Bush’s support for public education com-plemented his goal to welcome immigrants into American society. Unlike such 1990s republican leaders as California governor Pete Wilson (and more than a few GOP leaders today), Texas governor Bush refused to attack Mexican immigration, even after immigrant-bashing Pat Buchanan was endorsed by 25 of the 62 members of the Texas State Republican Executive Committee in the 1996 GOP presidential primaries. When Buchanan criticized Mexican immigrants in Dallas in 1995, Bush countered that “it is easy for some to pick on our friends from the South . . . and I don’t like it” (Beinart 1998). Bush opposed English-only laws and proposals to expel the children of illegal immigrants from school (Beinart 1998 ). In part, this reflected the needs of businesses dependent on cheap labor, free trade, and cross-cultural under-standing. As Soskis ( 2000 ) writes, Texas’ “supposedly reactionary business elite . . . has largely accepted multiculturalism as a way of life.” Bush backed business politically (Burka 1999 ), but Reed ( 1997 , 26) also sees a personal ele-ment, quoting Bush:

The desire to provide will never be squelched. I understand why these people are here . . . there are a lot of jobs people in Texas won’t do—laying tar in August or chopping cedars. People argue that if we don’t educate [immigrants] they’ll go home, and that’s not true. If we educate them, at least they can become more productive members of society. This is good public policy. I would be willing to defend this position as the best position not only for Texas, but for the nation.

According to a friend, young George’s “deputy mom” was an immigrant housekeeper, and the issue “is almost Biblical with him.” In sharp contrast to critics, such as Glass ( 2008 ), who see school reforms as racist, the personal and political journey of both Bush and Obama suggest that many political elites see education as key to uniting rather than dividing America.

Of course, Republican outreach to Hispanic voters also makes political sense (Bryce 2000 ; Keen 2000 ). Even so, Bush took risks. New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof ( 2000 ) saw the presidential candidate repeatedly remind white, conservative audiences in a must-win primary state of the nexus between education and upward mobility for minorities:

[Bush] almost never talked about the importance of improving education with-out noting the strides that he said Hispanic and black students in Texas had made. He answered every question he received about illegal immigration—a source of intense vexation for some South Carolinians—by reminding voters that many Mexicans streamed into the United States simply to seek a better life for their children.

Bush’s views on immigration and poverty may stem from his Christianity and his seeming embrace of “compassionate conservatism” as devised by


occasional Bush adviser and University of Texas professor Marvin Olasky. An Evangelical Christian, Olasky argues that traditional welfare state pro-grams fail by providing material goods without the spiritual and intellectual empowerment for independence: welfare produces clients rather than citi-zens, fostering self-destructive behavior. In contrast, he argues, faith based social services both feed people and build their character (Olasky 1992, 2000 ). But Evangelicals are not the only advocates for such “spiritual” assistance. Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel’s 2000 book The Fourth Great Awakening makes similar arguments, saying that it is “immaterial” and not material inequalities that drive social problems in America.

Bush seemingly felt religious and class-based obligation to help the poor help themselves, but unlike Olasky, he also has faith in large secular institu-tions, particularly corporations and public schools. In this respect, he is a traditional Texas conservative:

The [Texas] conservative ideology does not reject all government. Instead it opposes those government policies that are not designed to promote economic growth and development. The business of Texas government, therefore, is business (Mladenka and Hill 1986 , ix).

Not surprisingly, particularly on education, Bush had better relations with Texas’s pro-business Democratic state legislative leaders than with the often hard-right state GOP (Barnes 1998 ; Beinart 1998 ; Burka 1999 ; Bush 1999 ; Ivins and Dubose 2000 ). As Chapter 3 suggests, while being less pro-business, President Obama shares much of the Bush education mindset, seeing school improvement as essential to assuring upward mobility for the disadvantaged and for new immigrants.

Education Reform Texas Style: Standards Trump Choice

Though most studies suggest that school choice improves schooling (Belfield and Levin 2002 ; Greene 2005 ), the education policy community has for years fought over whether top-down standards forced on schools by central bureau-cracies or parental choice and free markets can best improve education (see for example, Maranto 2001, and the works in Wang and Walberg 2001). Bush’s faith in large institutions, including traditional public schools, explains why in both Texas and Washington he supported public school standards rather than school choice. As Ivins and Dubose ( 2000 , 76–81) detail, Bush gave little more than rhetorical support to a school voucher initiative backed by one of his major fundraisers. In contrast, as Ivins and Dubose (136–139) admit and as Bush boasts ( 1999 , 119–120, 123–130), the governor expended tremendous time, energy, and political capital improving Texas public schools through standards-based accountability and efforts at financial equalization.


Bush pursued three distinct strategies in school reform, with varying degrees of vigor and success. Most important, in his first big education ini-tiative during his first legislative session, Bush shepherded through the leg-islature the first complete overhaul of the Texas education code in almost 50 years. The new code delegated decisions about how to run schools to local education authorities (LEAs), but also required district- and school-level reporting of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), the standard-ized test devised by previous gubernatorial administrations. Ivins and Dubose (2000) report that Bush had been expected to end the experimental TAAS; instead, he embraced it. Widespread reporting of TAAS results led both the state legislature and school districts to devote more resources to after school and summer school programs to improve the achievement of low-performing students, most of them minorities. Similarly, in the 1999 state legislative ses-sion, Bush pushed through a measure requiring students to pass TAAS before advancing to the next grade, pushing LEAs to enforce existing state policies banning social promotion. Still, as Gorman (2002, 40) writes, Bush’s reforms were less novel than his supporters suggest:

Building on the work of one’s predecessors can produce success stories. That’s just what Bush did as governor of Texas. His reforms expanded those of former governor Ann Richards, whose reforms built on those in places like Dallas and previous statewide efforts led by, of all people, Ross Perot. Dallas, as it happens, is where then-school board president Sandy Kress initiated accountability—using standardized test scores to reward and sanction schools. “This is our theme,” Kress said. “We may not know a lot of music in Texas, but we can sing the song we know well.”

One education analyst suggested that TAAS’s longevity made it part of the culture of Texas public schooling. Bush’s main contribution was to reempha-size TAAS rather than end it, as governors typically dispatch their predeces-sors’ innovations. As another policy analyst put it in a 2002 interview:

TAAS is really helpful. TAAS has been around since the late 80s. It was on a glidepath that minimum pass rates would go up each year, and Bush just stuck to it. The state doesn’t do a lot, but the districts drop the hammer on indi-vidual schools. It became part of the culture. It became the metric that [school] boards use to look at district leadership and district leadership used to look at principals. [Bush] treated TAAS much more seriously. There were really not that many cases of state intervention in districts, but on the school level the districts chose to act on this information expeditiously. The state was serious and the state’s implicit threat was serious: it was deterrence, mutually assured destruction, when you have a credible threat on the table people are much more willing to self-police, obviously the fact that Texas unions are so weak creates a different environment. You could fire principals.


Rudalevige ( 2002 , 16) notes that Texas “teachers and administrators saw their own careers tied to student performance.” On the 2000 campaign trail, presi-dential candidate Bush often attacked “the soft bigotry of low expectations”—the tendency of traditional public schools to expect little of African American and Hispanic students. In fact, standards-based reforms may prove particu-larly helpful for minorities, who are often warehoused by traditional public schools (Jencks and Phillips 1998 ; Ravitch 2000; Howell and Peterson 2002 ). As the analyst quoted above states:

It’s actually really funny that standards based reform is a great equity device. You specifically figure out where kids are being poorly served and you put the pressure there on people to get things done, whereas curricula reform focuses more on the middle class community and less on the poor community, so you actually might weaken performance in poor areas. Standards is like replacing a national network of diners of uneven quality—some great and some awful—with McDonalds, and you get an experience truncated on the top end but more consistence on the low end.

Bush’s Texas reforms combining state standards and accountability with local control accord with ideas from the Progressive Policy Institute, the New Democratic think tank, and with some Clinton administration proposals (Rotherham 1999 ). As Beinart ( 1998 ) writes, Bush policies “stem from the neoliberal premise that government should give localities enough authority so they can fairly be held accountable for educating their students to a uni-form standard . . . localism as a means to a common end.”

Bush’s Texas education reforms show elements of his leadership style. In particular, as the Bush psychological profiles developed by Immelman ( 2002 , 81–104), Greenstein ( 2001 , 273–282), and Renshon (2003) suggest, Bush combined principle-driven leadership and risk-acceptance with a pragmatic willingness to compromise for results. As Barnes ( 1998 , 21) notes, while his father “regarded public service as a civic duty . . . George W. views it as a way to accomplish things.” President Obama seemingly shares this relatively mor-alistic view of public service. As a highly active extrovert, Bush, like Obama, enjoyed charming would-be opponents onto his team. More than most exec-utives, however, he seemed willing to delegate the details of policy to trusted subordinates, a tendency that cost his administration (and the nation) in war-time (Maranto and Redding 2009 ).

With the possible exception of charter schooling, Bush’s education policies seemingly worked. As RAND Education reports (Grissmer et al. 2000 , 70–73), controlling for socioeconomic status, Texas students scored first in the nation on the highly respected National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests by the late 1990s, with African American and Hispanic students doing particularly well. While some fear that TAAS encouraged teaching to the test (Ivins and Dubose 2000, 125; McNeil and Valenzuala 2002), NAEP results are


less subject to manipulation. Moreover, even critics of standardized testing admit that TAAS pass rates and graduation rates increased more for minority than for white students in the Bush years (Natriello and Pallas 2001 , 25). As an analyst from a left-leaning think tank pondered:

Texas implemented a very low level of standards, not a high one, and they helped move large numbers of low achieving students to that low level and that is a good thing, but it was not helping the others . . . now that may be a good strategy for Texas, but for another state which already has most kids achieving at a high level, it might not make sense.

In short, the Texas reforms fostered educational equity by helping low- performing students. They did not, however, bring more thoroughgoing change.

From TAAS to NCLB

Whatever the educational impacts, Bush’s policies paid off politically. As Keen ( 2000 ) reported during the 2000 presidential primaries, “Bush’s empha-sis on compassionate conservatism and education are designed to appeal to women . . . Bush won more of their votes than McCain did in the primary elec-tions.” Among those who ranked education their most important concern in the 2000 presidential election, Gore won a modest 52–44 percent major-ity, compared to Clinton’s 82–12 percent margin over Bob Dole; thus Bush neutralized a traditionally democratic issue. Bush also did better than Dole among female and Hispanic voters (Ceaser and Busch 2001 , 36). As an occa-sional Bush adviser speculated, President Bush’s first announced initiative was the NCLB since

first of all I think he really does feel comfortable talking about education as a former governor. It’s one of the areas he can talk about inside and out. He’s more comfortable with education than foreign policy, at least before 9/11, so first of all is a comfort level, and then entering the presidency in a time of very small issues, this gave him one, and third it took away an issue that the Democrats considered belonged to them, so it fit with his theme of being a compassionate conservative. In this era of the soccer moms being the big-gest thing in American politics, education enabled him to take a chunk of the Democrats’ constituents away.

Similarly, an analyst from a right-leaning think tank noted that NCLB “clearly got the GOP on the side of educational improvement.”

In some ways this was a bold move. After all, education is a traditional state and local function, and is highly controversial (Arons 1997 ; Maranto 2001). Only about 10 percent of total public K–12 education expenditures


come from the federal government, mainly through dozens of highly spe-cific ESEA categorical programs aimed at social equity, each with their own champions on Capitol Hill, as we describe in Chapters 1 and 2 . Presidents Clinton and G.H.W. Bush had tried to make the programs more flexible, and each failed. Indeed, Clinton tried to replace a number of ESEA pro-grams with block grants to increase state and local flexibility, but congres-sional Democrats opposed “Edflex” moves that empowered state and local officials. So, the 1994 Clinton reauthorization of ESEA required only that states develop standards and assessments (detailed in Chapter 6 ), with unde-fined “adequate yearly progress” (AYP). In the 1997 and 1998 State of the Union addresses, President Clinton urged national tests to benchmark state standards. While the business community supported national standards, Congress did not (Wong 1999 , 19–30, 45–46). As education analyst Chester Finn joked at the time, “Republicans don’t like ‘national’; Democrats don’t like ‘test.’ ” (Rudalevige 2002 , 9). When ESEA reauthorization came due in 2000, Congress left it for the next administration. Given these failures, President Bush showed boldness in sending his NCLB blueprint to Congress days after taking office.

Along with modest increases in funding, Rudalevige ( 2002 , 17–18) reports that the original Bush plan included

1. annual student testing (developed by states but approved by the U.S. Department of Education) in math and reading in grades 3–8, with reporting broken down by school, and with schools by ethnicity, income (free and reduced lunch), special education status, and LEP status;

2. requirements that Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) be made by “disad-vantaged” students in for schools to keep Title I funds;

3. consolidation of 60 ESEA grant programs to five, to allow states flex-ibility to achieve educational goals (Edflex);

4. funding bonuses for schools closing the gap between mainstream and disadvantaged students, with failing schools eventually losing funding;

5. “exit vouchers” allowing Title I students in failing schools to exit to other public or private schools by taking Title I money with them; and

6. state progress benchmarked by NAEP tests, as a check on state standards.

As both Rudalevige ( 2002 ) and one of our sources noted, Bush seemingly learned from the failure of Clinton’s health care plan, and thus sent Congress a broad blueprint early in his administration rather than a more detailed plan later. Further, as Rudalevige (18–19) notes, much of Bush’s plan was cribbed from earlier New Democratic proposals, especially Rotherham ( 1999 ). Bush’s key White House education aid, former Dallas school board president Sandy Kress, was in fact a New Democrat who backed school standards but showed some skepticism toward school choice.


In late December, President-elect Bush met with key congressional edu-cation leaders, including Republican Representative Boehner (R-OH), and Senators Jeffords (I-VT) and Gregg (R-NH), and reform-minded Democrats including Senator Bayh (D-IN) and Representatives Roemer (D-IN) and Miller (D-CA). In these meetings and later, Bush signaled a willingness to drop the school voucher provisions of NCLB to reach an agreement for stan-dards and testing. As one of our sources put it, Bush “pre-compromised” on school choice. As insider Hickok (2010) recounts, the administration itself was divided on the issue. All sources agreed that dropping vouchers reflected both policy goals and political realities. Three with connections to the admin-istration recalled:

“The Bush administration sent very clear signals early on to Miller and Kennedy that they wanted this to be a bipartisan bill, in effect giving liberal Democrats the power to veto school choice and super edflex. It was a pre-compromise. They did that for two reasons. First, in terms of macro political strategy, the tax cut was aimed more at the Republican base while the education bill was aimed at the moldable middle, suburban soccer moms, swing voters, those sorts of folks. The other reason is that the people advising Bush are only moderately in favor of school vouchers, charter schools, and other forms of choice. They favor more traditional top-down reform. They really believe that a standardized test-based reform plan can be made to work nationally the way it worked in Texas. They’re not against vouchers, they just think that choice is an interesting sideshow, not the center ring. The center ring for them is testing.”

“Even in the Republican House caucus you probably can’t get 70 people who really believe in school choice per se. Mostly they want to show that they are doing something on education and outside of that 70 they are pretty agnostic about how they go about it. I think most of the GOP are conservatives who wanted to focus on tax issues and budget issues and law and order and national security and they really didn’t feel like getting up to their elbows in this controversial education debate. Plus Bush is taking great pride in his ability to get the AFT (teachers’ union) on board on some of these things and they really didn’t need that kind of grief, and among mainstream Republicans there is minimal support for school choice.”

“Early on [Bush] told me that there’s no chance for vouchers because the politics are all against them. People who live in rural areas don’t have many choices. People in inner cities are minorities who don’t vote for Republicans, and Democrats are not willing to budge on this issue, and the people who live in the suburbs are happy with their schools. So he started off with the view that it’s a lost cause because the politics were against it. He didn’t do too much for [school] choice in Texas. I think his reasoning in Texas was the same as his reasoning was in Washington. There’s no political constituency for it. He didn’t consider it a touchstone issue. He consid-ered the touchstone issue to be testing from grades 3–8 and disaggregating into the various groups, so he got what he wanted.”

As Table 4.1 shows, voucher provisions were stripped from NCLB by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee in March, and by the House Education and the Workforce Committee in May, with no

Tabl

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ayh

and

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complaint by the White House. Similarly, Edflex provisions were watered down in the House Education and Workforce Committee in April and later, further weakened in the Senate. At the same time, Kress worked with moder-ate democratic senators and, with President Bush’s help, wooed Senator Ted Kennedy, who became a key ally. Breaking with liberals, Kennedy agreed to testing and some funding flexibility in exchange for dropping vouchers to private schools (Rudalevige 2002 , Lizza 2002 ). Why would liberal icon Ted Kennedy, long allied with teachers’ unions and other elements of the EIC play a key role in education reform? We suspect this reflects the role of changing ideas and social learning, as Chapters 1 and 2 detail. By 2000, political elites had concluded that more money without accountability would not improve schools.

With support from moderate Democrats and from Kennedy, the likelihood of passage increased, though challenging issues remained. In particular, until the end of the conference committee, Democrats held serious debates about the meaning of AYP on standardized tests, with republican governors also arguing for relatively lax standards. Supporters of traditional public schools feared that demanding, European-style standards would in fact find most American schools wanting. In the end, a complex formula was agreed to, with actual implementation by the US Department of Education uncertain. Indeed, one administration veteran admits that implementation was highly uneven, in part due to administration divisions, but more so because of the complexity and novelty of the law and the determination of local school dis-tricts and some states to evade it (Hickok 2010).

The president’s pre-compromise on school choice and extreme flexibil-ity on Edflex angered conservative supporters of school reform. As one carped:

NCLB lost two of its three engines of change as it traversed Capitol Hill. The original Bush formulation had three reform engines pulling: testing, choice, and state flexibility. But the latter two pretty much fell off the rails early in the process, with only testing remaining as force for significant change.

President Bush could have fought for a stronger bill, but unlike tax cuts and Homeland Security legislation, many Republicans had serious qualms about a larger federal role in education reform, not to mention additional federal dollars promised by the legislation (Kafer 2002 ); thus a partisan bill may have failed. Further, regarding tax cuts and homeland security, Bush’s goals were relatively partisan , and thus not easy to compromise. In sharp contrast, Bush’s true goals in education reform more resembled those of standards-seeking New Democrats than market-seeking Republicans. Seemingly, the president got what we wanted: tests and standards (Maranto and Redding 2009 ). And as Rudalevige notes, key to the legislative process was the role of President


Bush himself, who brought the key congressional leaders together in part by “embracing Democratic positions and leaders” (2002, 31).

The Theory of Action of NCLB

As noted by several authors (Ladd 2007; Dee and Jacob 2009 ), the ills of the education system can be clearly classified as a principal/agent problem. The principals (parents and taxpayers) desire to hold the agents (teachers and school leaders) accountable for their treatment of children; however, the agent has both perverse incentives and an asymmetric information advantage. Parents have a hard enough time trying to elicit “what happened at school today” from children, and it is almost impossible for taxpayers to know exactly what is going on in the classrooms they are paying for.

As Ladd (2007) points out, principal/agent issues are especially tough in organizations with multiple goals. We want a lot out of schools. Reading and math are important, but we also want schools to develop citizens, teach social behavior, and instill in students a love of learning (for an extended discussion of the various expectations of schools, see Chapter 6 ). Standardized tests, in general, test only one dimension of what we want from schools. If schools are evaluated by only one dimension, it follows that they will spend the bulk of their time attempting to master that dimension. We can see this in the empirical analyses of state (and large district) accountability regimes. By and large, researchers (Carnoy and Loeb 2002 ; Hanushek and Raymond 2005; Jacob 2005; Dee and Jacob 2009 ) found positive effects in mathematics for students in states that had more thorough accountability regimes. However, only one study (Jacob’s study of Chicago) found increases in reading. This can be explained by the “reading is content knowledge” hypothesis popular-ized by education scholars such as E. D. Hirsch. If in order for students to learn to read, they have to learn facts from social studies and science, then the decreased emphasis on those subjects is reflected in the reading scores of students in these states. It shows that students’ time is being monopolized by “reading is a discrete skill” pedagogues who are missing this point and thus failing to teach students how to read well. And what’s worse, the only study that stands in opposition to this argument (Jacob) found that while students did do better in reading on the standardized tests on which the stakes were determined, this did not translate to lower-stakes tests (like NAEP). Jacob himself admits that the positive finding could be explained by test-specific skills and student motivation to succeed on that particular test and not gen-eral learning.

Even without trust in the series of low- n state-level analyses, “sunshine and shame” alone cannot increase student achievement. Implicit in princi-pal/agent solutions is the belief that the principals can act on the increased


information that corrects the asymmetry. For argument’s sake, let’s just say that these grades that are given to parents and taxpayers convey all of the information that they need in order to accurately evaluate the schools in their community. If they can neither choose where to send their children nor empower the building-level leaders to fix the problems, it does no good. Bill Ouchi ( 2009 ) and his colleagues have argued over and over that principals, especially in large urban districts, control so little of their hiring and fir-ing, calendar, schedule, textbooks, and budget that they lack the power to respond to such a judgment (Ouchi 2009 ). We firmly believe that the major-ity of people running schools have children’s best interest at heart, but if they can’t hire better teachers (or fire the bad ones), make the school day or year longer to spend more time achieving all of the goals that we have for schools, buy textbooks that would work better for their students, or move money around to fund any of the myriad supplementary services that could address school performance, they can’t solve the problem. Likewise, if parents are not empowered to choose where their children go to school, evaluating their schools means nothing.

This all comes down to consequences. As Hanushek and Raymond (2005) say directly, “States that simply provide information through report cards without attaching consequences to performance do not get significantly larger impacts than those with no accountability” (321). Despite the best wishes of community organizers, shame is not enough, and consequences, including new (empowered) management or escape hatches for families in failing schools, are the only steps that will change the behavior of the agents responsible for our nation’s children, the EIC.

As Manna ( 2011 ) describes, NCLB’s theory of action can be divided into its theory of accountability and its theory of administration. The theory of accountability is plain: have measurement and transparency of results paired with consequences for performance. The Bush administration set this goal so as to correct the information asymmetry that had developed over time between those involved in the day-to-day classroom experiences of students and those in charge of overseeing them. Quite simply, without measurement, the school, district, state, and federal education supervisors have no idea what is going on in classrooms around the country. The the-ory of administration is slightly more complicated. As Clotfelter and Ladd argue (as cited in Manna 2011 ), the government has two primary avenues by which to regulate policy. It can use market forces “in which consumer preferences and choices decided which organizations will succeed” or it can construct “governmental administrative systems for monitoring and over-sight” (35–36). In theory, the most effective policy management is derived from some combination of these two forces, allowing for individual liberty within reasonable constraints. NCLB, in contrast, is an administrative solu-tion with very little space for market accountability. In fact, NCLB offers a very specific form of accountability (see Table 4.2 ), with the majority of


systems (content standards, cut scores for proficiency, and exams) designed and implemented at the state level (Manna 2011 ).

The Impacts of NCLB: Overhyped Consequences, Bubble Kids, and the Race to the Bottom

Although initially a popular, bipartisan bill, No Child Left Behind became decidedly less so. As Bush education appointee Eugene Hickok (2010, xvi) laments, “Teachers’ unions, school board associations, school administrators, parent-teacher groups—had challenged [NCLB’s] passage and implementa-tion . . . before the ink on the president’s signature was dry.” In the past, the Department of Education had communicated with these education “stake-holders,” but not with the broader public. Now that its traditional EIC back-ers opposed administration aims, the department needed to conduct a major public relations campaign. Unlike certain other bureaucracies such as the military, the Department of Education was ill-equipped to do so. Indeed a minor scandal erupted when the department hired conservative commenta-tor Armstrong Williams to do commercials promoting NCLB. Hickok (2010, 86) laments that among both members of the administration and congres-sional staff

. . . given the fact that most of those who worked on the legislation knew next to nothing about schools work and instead relied upon earlier renditions of the Elementary and Secondary Education, it should come as no surprise that they did not understand the wrath that they might encounter from the education establishment.

From the EIC have come many charges. One of the most popular criti-cisms leveled against it was the charge that it was an “unfunded mandate.” What this implies is that while NCLB increased requirements on schools and school districts (more testing, more interventions for low performing stu-dents, the offers of school choice), it did not make specific appropriations for these services. While it is true that there were not specific appropriations for these programs, to say that NCLB and the reforms that it included were unfunded is simply false (see Figure 4.1 ).

A more legitimate critique of the program is the focus that it put on so-called “bubble kids.” Bubble kids are students immediately surrounding the proficiency cutoff on a high-stakes test, those that with a little more effort on the part of teachers and schools would move from a score that would hurt the school in terms of accountability to a score that would help the school in terms of accountability. There is a great deal of research, both anecdotal/qualitative and quantitative that demonstrates how this has played out as a result of NCLB. Qualitatively, while doing fieldwork


in individual schools, Booher-Jennings (2005) found evidence that schools had increased their focus on these students. In more large-scale, quanti-tative analyses, Chakrabarti (2007) found evidence of increased focus on bubble students in Florida when schools were threatened with having to give students vouchers; Krieg (2008) found evidence in Washington of such additional focus and that it increased as the years that the schools failed to make AYP increased; and Neal and Schanzenbach (2007) found evidence of bubble student focus both in 2002 with NCLB and in 1996 when a sim-ilar district-level high-stakes test reform was implemented. In an Urban Institute Working paper, Ballou and Springer (2008) looked at results from the low-stakes NWEA test, paired with placement on high-stakes tests and found that “there has been a tendency for scores to rise across the board, accompanied by a ‘redistribution’ of achievement gains from high-perform-ing to low-performing students.” They did not, however, find evidence of a focus on bubble students.

0

5,000,000,000

10,000,000,000

15,000,000,000

20,000,000,000

25,000,000,000

30,000,000,000

35,000,000,000

40,000,000,000

45,000,000,000

50,000,000,000

1987

–88

1988

–89

1989

–90

1990

–91

1991

–92

1992

–93

1993

–94

1994

–95

1995

–96

1996

–97

1997

–98

1998

–99

1999

–00

2000

–01

2001

–02

2002

–03

2003

–04

2004

–05

2005

–06

2006

–07

NCLB Implemented

Figure 4.1 Federal Education Spending. Source: Common Core of Data (CCD), “ School District Finance Survey (Form F-33) ” , 1994 – 95 (FY 1995) v.1d, 1995 – 96 (FY 1996) v.1b, 1996 – 97 (FY 1997) v.1a, 1997 – 98 (FY 1998) v.1e, 1998 – 99 (FY 1999) v.1c, 1999 – 2000 (FY 2000) v.1d, 2000 – 01 (FY 2001) v.1d, 2001 – 02 (FY 2002) v.1c, 2002 – 03 (FY 2003) v.1b, 2003 – 04 (FY 2004) v.1b, 2004 – 05 (FY 2005) v.1b, 2005 – 06 (FY 2006) v.1a, 2006 – 07 (FY 2007) v.1a, 2007 – 08 (FY 2008) v.1a; Common Core of Data (CCD), “ National Public Education Financial Survey (State Fiscal) ” , 1987 – 88 (FY 1988) v.1b, 1988 – 89 (FY 1989) v.1b, 1989 – 90 (FY 1990) v.1b, 1990 – 91 (FY 1991) v.1b, 1991 – 92 (FY 1992) v.1b, 1992 – 93 (FY 1993) v.1b, 1993 – 94 (FY 1994) v.1b, 1994 – 95 (FY 1995) v.1b, 1995 – 96 (FY 1996) v.1b, 1996 – 97 (FY 1997) v.1b, 1997 – 98 (FY 1998) v.1b, 1998 – 99 (FY 1999) v.1b, 1999 – 2000 (FY 2000) v.1b, 2000 – 01 (FY 2001) v.1b, 2001 – 02 (FY 2002) v.1c, 2002 – 03 (FY 2003) v.1b, 2003 – 04 (FY 2004) v.1b, 2004 – 05 (FY 2005) v.1b, 2005 – 06 (FY 2006) v.1b, 2006 – 07 (FY 2007) v.1b, 2007 – 08 (FY 2008) v.1b.


This type of gaming behavior is interesting, considering that the sanctions imposed by NCLB were not particularly onerous (see Table 4.2 ). As popular education journalist and policy entrepreneur Joe Williams wrote:

To date, NCLB has been relatively toothless in terms of holding districts accountable through the use of strong-arm sanctions. From federal guidelines offering tremendous amounts of wiggle room to states and districts in imple-menting sanctions to the reality that districts themselves often get the first chance to determine their improvement plans, underperforming districts have encountered little pain under NCLB other than the stigma that comes from being branded failing systems ( 2007 ).

Under the directives of No Child Left Behind, it is only after five years of school failure that anyone at the school runs the risk of losing his or her job. In fact, for the previous years, failing to make AYP would actually cause an influx of dollars in the forms of grants for supplementary services. Other than the stigma of being labeled a failing school, there were very few conse-quences, except in the most extreme conditions (see Table 4.2 ).

As time went on and more schools fell into the purview of the more extreme sanctions of NCLB, states and districts were able to get around any type of punitive punishment. Education commentator Sarah Mead, in an article in Education Next in 2007, described the “easy way out” districts across the country were taking when it came to the fundamental school reforms man-dated after six years of failure. Schools are required to develop a restructuring plan after five year of failing to make AYP that is put into place after their sixth year of failure. Schools have the option to

1. close and reopen as a charter school; 2. replace relevant school staff; 3. turn the school’s governance over to the state;

Table 4.2 AYP Consequences. Years in a Row Missing AYP Consequences for the School

1 put on watch 2 school enters Improvement Status and must offer school choice 3 must offer school choice and supplemental education services 4 must offer school choice, supplemental education services, and

implement “corrective action” 5 must offer school choice, supplemental education services,

implement “corrective action,” and create plan for restructuring 6 must offer school choice, supplemental education services,

implement “corrective action,” and implement restructuring plan

Source: Adapted from Table 2.1 in Manna ( 2011 ).


4. contract with a private management company to operate the school; or 5. [employ] any other major restructuring of the school’s governance

designed to produce major reform (quoted from Mead 2007).

Not surprisingly, a large number of districts decided to pick “any other major restructuring.” Mead cites a Center for Education Policy study that found that 76 percent of schools in Michigan and 93 percent of schools in California chose “any other major restructuring,” deciding to reorganize students into “schools within schools,” reconfigure grades, or utilize other policies that did not change the schools nearly as much as designers of the law intended. Quite simply, schools with savvy leaders felt little pressure to change, even with the most extreme evidence of their continued failure. Of course, there are excep-tions. In the previous chapter, we discussed the case of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island where all teachers were threatened with termination if they failed to show some flexibility to improve student performance. What is notable is not that this occurred but that a thousand other failing school districts did not follow suit. Seemingly, superintendents and school boards did not see this as a career-enhancing action. This may show the continued strength of the EIC (Moe 2011 ; Brill 2011 ) in the ability to circumvent and co-opt accountability laws.

Other scholars have documented even more egregious cases of the EIC circumventing the sanctions of NCLB. In a 2007 Education Next article, edu-cation researcher William Howell wrote in great detail of the manipulation of parents in the Worcester, Massachusetts, public school district. That district had several chronically underperforming schools in which families qualified for the school choice provisions of NCLB. However, in order to take advan-tage of those services, they had to jump through an absurd number of hoops that the district set up. Parents had to first set up a meeting with the principal of the school their child currently attended; then they had to schedule a meet-ing at the “Parent Information Center” (which at the time only two families had ever done) wherein they were informed that the district’s only obliga-tion was to offer parents a choice of two schools that did make AYP. Howell quotes a district official, Joan Fitton, as saying, “The feds told us we had to offer a choice, not the parents’ choice, but a choice.” Clearly the “wiggle room” granted to schools and districts had the effect of decreasing the teeth of the accountability elements of NCLB (Howell 2004).

This type of gaming behavior has happened at the state level as well. In what has been referred to as the “race to the bottom,” states have used their flexibil-ity in designing tests and setting proficiency cut scores to lower standards so as to increase their number of proficient students. In a 2009 study published by the Institute for Education Sciences, Bandeira de Mello, Blakenship, and McLauglin compared longitudinal NAEP test scores and proficiency levels to state assessments to determine the relative rigor of state tests over time. They found that in fourth-grade reading, of the states that changed their standards from 2005–2007, half increased their standards and half decreased them. In


eighth-grade reading, of the seven states that changed their standards over time, all seven lowered them. In math, it was a similar story: 6 of the 11 states that changed their fourth-grade standards lowered them, and 9 of the 12 states that changed their eighth-grade standards lowered them. “The Proficiency Illusion,” a paper published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (Adkins et al. 2007), softened the language, referring to state behavior not as a race to the bottom but rather a “walk to the middle,” as those states that previously had high standards watered them down.

Even with all of these concerns, careful analysis has found a net positive effect of NCLB. Economists Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob ( 2009 ) compared student achievement on NAEP in states that had similar accountability pro-grams before and after the implementation of NCLB. They found that NCLB had a statistically significant positive effect (an effect size of .22, which is unusually large for education studies) on fourth-grade math performance, and smaller positive effects—concentrated amongst students at lower achieve-ment levels and for students in the free- and reduced-price lunch program—on eighth-grade math. They did not find any effect on reading achievement.

Conclusion: More Good than Harm

Was No Child Left Behind a good policy? For its time, we would give it a qualified yes. Even though measurement was imperfect and regulation left too much wiggle room, it was still light years ahead of the status quo of 2001. The government had allowed schools to fail their students for far too long and intervention had become necessary. But do not forget that NCLB was a 2002 policy to solve the problems that existed in its time. As we stated in our fourth maxim ( government policies are always oversold ), too often we try to hold policies to an unrealistically high standard. No policies are perfect, and every policy will inevitably have some unintended consequences. It is frankly unrealistic to think that NCLB would still be able to solve education problems eight to ten years later without serious revisions. Again, the key question of any policy is whether it has done more good than harm. On this measure, NCLB clearly succeeded. Though we share several horror stories of school districts circumventing the requirements of the law, it is important to note that most likely those districts would still have shortchanged students without the law, so the net effect is at worst zero. NCLB at least created data systems and interest apt to publicize school- and district-level chicanery and failure.

Barack Obama inherited this policy context. NCLB helped the nation dis-cover exactly how poorly many of its schools were performing. It gave the Obama administration mountains of data upon which to base its future deci-sions. Responding to this mountain of data and developing a coherent set of policies to address the myriad issues exposed therein has become the mission of the Obama administration. How it will choose to use such data and the les-sons learned from NCLB are the topics of the next several chapters.

5

Race to the Top: Introducing Competition for

Federal Dollars(with Daniel H. Bowen)

It looks like the only strategies they have are charter schools and measure-ment. That’s Bush Three.

—AFT president Randi Weingarten (quoted in Brill 2011 , 264)

Race to the Top is the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation. For less than 1 percent of what we spend on education each year, it has led over 40 states to raise their standards for teaching and learning.

—Barack Obama, State of the Union address January 25, 2011

Creating a competitive fund of money for people who want to do the right thing has already proven to be effective. People have changed their laws and changed their mindsets. While we were working on passing a value-added law prior to RTT, the competitive grant incentivized us to accelerate our push.

—Paul Pastorek, Louisiana state education chief

In July 2009, President Obama and Secretary Duncan announced the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) program—a nation-wide, state-level

competition aimed at overhauling the infrastructure of education through-out the United States. The primary objectives of RTT included toughening state standards, improving the tracking of students’ performances, turn-ing around failing schools, and improving the recruitment and retaining of effective educators ( The Guardian 2009). President Obama accentuated the importance of RTT, deeming it “the single most important thing we’ve done [in education]” (Klein 2010 ). With the conclusions of two rounds of competi-tion (and the ongoing discussions of the possibility of a third round), RTT received its share of praise and criticism. Praise has stemmed from RTT’s


successes in fostering meaningful policy discussions regarding the educa-tion reform environment at a relatively low cost to taxpayers (Brooks 2009 ), while critics have questioned the application process along with its ability to bring about substantial outcomes ( The Wall Street Journal 2009).

Organizing and funding Race to the Top did not come without controversy. First, although stated as costing “only” $4.35 billion, 1 it was coupled with an unprecedented increase in federal spending for education. Ostensibly to stave off massive public sector job losses, the Obama administration earmarked $79 billion in K–12 education spending in the stimulus package. Most of this money went either to expand funding to existing programs (such as Title I) or to states to fill budget shortfalls. In addition, the administration also out-lined the other federal grants that it would use to drive its reform agenda. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (2009), in “$100 Billion and No Change Back,” highlighted the opportunity of this spending: “After all, with-out all the extra cash, the likelihood is that teachers across the country will be laid off. That gives the president some leverage: Take my money, take my reforms.” Indeed, in 2009 the US government provided an unprecedented 15 percent of public K–12 spending, eclipsing the previous record of 10 percent and thus increasing the power of the federal government (Guthrie and Peng 2010 ).

Twenty-three states changed their education laws in response to the competi-tion. Thirteen (see Table 5.1 ) altered their laws to allow for more charter schools, either lifting or expanding state-mandated caps on the number of charter schools. States also significantly altered their data systems so as to make teacher evaluation more transparent. Before Race to the Top, six states (California, Indiana, Maine, Nevada, New York, and Wisconsin) had data “firewalls” pre-venting student information from being linked to teachers for evaluative pur-poses; these were statutes typically imposed with little fanfare by supporters of teachers’ unions. Five of those six states (all but New York) removed the firewalls by act of legislature, and New York allowed its statute to expire. Eleven more states (see Table 5.1 ) passed laws requiring that schools and districts use student achievement data to evaluate teachers and determine tenure.

This bundle of policies represents a wide spectrum of ideas on reforming education systems, from increased autonomy to increased accountability. Charter schools are independent public schools that strike a deal with a state board of education to trade increased autonomy for increased accountabil-ity. They are licensed to operate either by the state board or an approved agency in the state (laws vary from state to state, but such organizations could be universities, community colleges, independent charter boards, or local school districts). In this license, called a charter, schools are given clear performance expectations and a timeframe within which they are expected to achieve them. When charters come up for renewal, they are evaluated as to how well they met the goals laid out for them and are either reautho-rized to continue or are denied their charter and shut down—that is, held

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accountable through democratic processes. In addition, charters earn fund-ing based on the number of parents who choose them; if few or no parents choose a charter, it closes. Hence, charters face both democratic and market accountability mechanisms. In many states, there are restrictive caps as to the number of charters that can operate, or onerous regulations that prevent charter schools from operating with the autonomy they long for. The Obama administration made the removal of these restrictions a high priority in Race to the Top, and rewarded states that allowed charters to operate freely. There is considerable research on charters, and for some years the body of work has shown that charter schools spend substantially less and have substan-tially higher student, parent, and teacher satisfaction than traditional public schools. Charters have somewhat lower test scores than traditional public

Table 5.1 Response to Race to the Top

Charter Schools Allowed for or Increased Cap

Data “Firewall” Removed or Allowed to

Expire

Student Achievement Data

Required to be Used in Teacher

Assessment

Won Race to the Top

Arizona Yes California Yes Colorado Yes Connecticut Yes Yes Delaware Yes Yes Yes Florida Yes Georgia Yes Hawaii Yes Illinois Yes Yes Indiana Yes Yes Iowa Yes Louisiana Yes Yes Maine Yes Maryland Yes Yes Massachusetts Yes Yes Michigan Yes Mississippi Yes Nevada Yes New York Yes Yes Yes Yes North Carolina Yes Ohio Yes Yes Oklahoma Yes Rhode Island Yes Yes Tennessee Yes Tennessee Yes Yes Utah Yes Washington, DC Yes Wisconsin Yes

Source: Democrats for Education Reform policy brief “Race to the Top: By the Numbers August 24, 2010 ,” http://www.dfer.org/list/issues/policy

http://www.dfer.org/list/issues/policy


schools, chiefly because in most locales they appeal to the parents of low-performing children, and because new charters often have serious growing pains. Most studies of value added—that is, how much students learn in a year in school—find that charters that are more than two years old do some-what better than traditional public schools. Within the broad aggregations, however, are certain distinct patters. In particular, charter schools that are set up to appeal to upper-class demands for child-centered education may do somewhat less well on valued added examinations (tests that measure stu-dent growth over time), though they seem to offer other services parents find appealing (Kayes and Maranto 2006). On the other hand, certain networks of charters such as the KIPP schools focus on academics and safety and are located in cities where traditional public schools have failed to educate dis-advantaged students. For the most comprehensive treatment of the effects of charter school, see Betts and Tang (2011). These schools have outstanding value added, and typically good test scores; indeed, they are proving that most disadvantaged students can be prepared for college (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Matthews 2009 ). Further, quantitative and qualitative studies indicate that these schools do not succeed through selective admis-sion or expulsion of certain students, but rather by good teaching and lots of it; most have longer schools days and years and thus more instructional time (Maranto and Shuls 2011 ).

The second thrust of Race to the Top focused on accountability mecha-nisms. RTT built upon the data collected by schools, districts, and states under No Child Left Behind to enhance its usefulness in tracking the per-formance of children, schools, and, ultimately, school systems. No Child Left Behind (as detailed in Chapter 4 ) required schools to test all students and to collect and report that data to the general public. However, under pressure from the EIC, certain states passed laws to prevent that data from being used to evaluate teachers, often through so-called “data firewalls,” preventing the linking of student-level achievement data to any particular teacher. If all of the tests scores in a given school were, for example, aggregated simply at the grade level (as the law requires), as long as there were multiple teachers in that grade, no one could be held directly accountable for any particular test scores. Race to the Top rewarded states that did not have such barri-ers in place. The Obama administration took student achievement data a step further, going so far as to reward states that used it directly in teacher assessment.

In a lesser-known provision of the stimulus, states receiving funds were required to report per-pupil expenditures by school. Previously, states were only required to aggregate expenditures at the district level, and there had been concern (Roza 2010 ) for years that Title I dollars earmarked for poor children were not following students into the classroom. This new wealth of data allowed the Institute for Education Sciences (Heuer and Stullich 2011 )

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to analyze school finance and student demographics and found several trou-bling trends:

1. Within districts that had both Title I and non-Title I schools, more than 40 percent of Title I schools had lower personnel expenditures per pupil than did non-Title I schools at the same school grade level.

2. More than one-third of higher-poverty schools had lower per-pupil per-sonnel expenditures than lower-poverty schools in their districts at the same school grade level.

3. Other expenditure categories . . . resulted in an increase in the percent-ages of Title I schools that had expenditures below their district’s aver-age for non-Title I schools at the same school grade level (xi–xii).

This is driven mostly by policies advanced by the EIC. Because union con-tracts require pay to be based on seniority and also allow more senior teach-ers to pick where they work, more expensive teachers migrate to schools with fewer students in poverty. So although (as discussed in Chapter 1 ) the EIC moans about the low levels of funding in high-poverty schools, it is as respon-sible as any other party in creating those conditions.

Throughout the drafting process, EIC members worked to limit the impact of Race to the Top. Initially, the White House wanted $15 billion to promote school reform of the $100 billion earmarked for education in the stimulus. In somewhat of a black eye to the administration, Congressional Democrats pushed by teachers’ unions and led by David Obey of Wisconsin first decreased that allocation to $5 billion (Brill 2011 ) and then attempted to take $800 mil-lion ($500 million of unspent Race to the Top funds, $200 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund, and $100 million from the Federal Charter Schools Program) from Obama’s education reform initiatives to top off $10 billion for education jobs in a $26 billion state employee jobs bill. Obama threatened to veto that jobs bill until the money was found though other means, namely $12 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, quite literally taking food out of the mouths of extremely poor citizens to give to by-and-large middle-class teachers.

Precursors to Race to the Top

Race to the Top stands on the foundation laid by numerous efforts to reform education. Three are most notable. Most recently, in 2008 the Gates Foundation promoted its particular set of reforms through a competitive grant competi-tion between school districts. It awarded $100 million to Hillsborough County, Florida, $90 million to Memphis, Tennessee, $40 million to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and $60 million to a coalition of five Los Angeles charter school


networks to develop student and teacher level-data systems that would play a role in teacher evaluation (Brill 2011 , 233). Similarly, when Barack Obama was a junior senator, he proposed to “dangle aid to the states that promised to undertake real reform” (Brill 2011 , 227). For his part, democratic House member George Miller, who would later become instrumental in the passage of NCLB (as detailed in Chapter 4 ), proposed amendments to ESEA in 1994 and 2005 that would promote merit pay. In 1994, Miller initially thought he had considerable support in Congress. However at the eleventh hour, as a result of heavy union lobbying, his colleagues deserted him. The final vote was 434–1 against (Brill 2011 , 64–65). In 2005, he proposed a similar amend-ment to NCLB; this time he thought he had the support (or at least neutrality) of the NEA and AFT. Then, at the last minute, the NEA persuaded members of Congress to block a vote on the measure. Miller lamented,

Either they were playing along and opposing this so it wouldn’t look bad, because they never thought the bill would pass, or they got a revolt from their locals, who were angry that their people in Washington were caving in on this. They never explained why they flipped. The NEA never explains anything to anyone. They don’t think they have to bother (quoted in Brill 2011 , 176–177).

Such tactics won a short-term victory for the EIC but set into motion a realignment of traditional allies into the reform camp. “New” Democrats such as Whitney Tilson, Boykin Curry, John Petry, and Charles Ledley (later prominent members of Democrats for Education Reform) came into educa-tion policy from the data-driven business community and saw a system that trapped people Democrats traditionally care about: disadvantaged children in terrible schools. Superstar Democrat Cory Booker (mayor of Newark) went so far as to say, “It’s time to face the fact that the Democrats have been wrong on education” (as quoted in Brill 2011 , 207). As Arne Duncan put it:

We didn’t create all of this movement, we simply unleashed it. There was all this pent-up demand. People in their hearts knew that what was going on in our schools was bad. Wrong. Immoral. We ended up with almost as much change in the states that didn’t win the money—sometimes even more—than states that did win the money. It wasn’t about the money. It was about creating a climate that gave states and districts and politicians permission to do what was right (quoted in Brill 2011 , 418).

As we note in prior chapters, the parallels with the civil rights struggles of the 1960s seem obvious.

Breaking Down Race to the Top

While conditional fiscal federalism practices are nothing new in education policy (e.g., IDEA, NCLB, etc.), RTT represented a fairly unique approach

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which incorporated a highly competitive element to the process. Competition can prove beneficial for at least two reasons. First, the competitive nature of the process prevents the mentality of seeking the bare minimum to receive funds (Hess 2010 c). The process also may facilitate states into an irrational escalation of commitment (e.g., Shubik’s dollar auction experiment) creating a greater benefit-cost ratio than a traditional grant program (Shubik 1971 ). However, to work, competitors need to view the assessment procedure as one that maintains fairness and integrity.

Race to the Top also leveraged what Manna ( 2006 ) described as the opti-mum policy environment for meaningful change. In School’s In , he argued that “policy entrepreneurs are most likely to promote a government’s inter-est and involvement in an area when the government possesses high license and high capacity to act” (15, emphasis added). In order to enact meaningful change, entrepreneurs need strong arguments to justify government action (license) and both financial and bureaucratic resources (capacity). State and local governments have more license when it comes to making education pol-icy, though they do not always have the necessary political or technical capac-ity to enact the types of plans they want to. The federal government, on the other hand, has plenty of resources, but not nearly the amount of license to make education policy decisions. Therefore, by giving the capacity of the fed-eral government to the license-possessing state and local agencies, the odds of meaningful change occurring greatly increased. Additionally, the com-petitive nature of the program lent more license to the federal government, giving policy entrepreneurs within the bureaucracy (such as Arne Duncan) the political cover with conservatives traditionally against a federal role in education.

Prior research has attempted to demonstrate that RTT lacked the objectiv-ity required of a fair, impartial evaluation process (Peterson and Rothstein 2010 ). However, while these more qualitative case studies have dissected the shortcomings of the RTT application process, the extent of RTT’s sub-jectivity remains questionable (Smarick 2010 a). With the use of indepen-dent assessments that have evaluated states’ education reform efforts, we can quantitatively examine disparities between projected and actual scores for the first two rounds of RTT. The magnitude of these differences should assist in determining the extent to which the evaluation has been fair and objective.

Examining Sources of Subjectivity

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the growth of federal service grants increased the extent to which program administrators’ discretion dictated the implementations and outcomes of public policy grants (Derthick 1975 ). This increase in administrative power granted to professional specialists, in


many cases, would ultimately lead to spending inefficiencies and a lack of transparency when evaluating states’ applications for federal service grants (Seidman 1970 ). But, it is not entirely fair to lump RTT in with the federal service grants of the 1960s and 1970s. RTT is certainly an upgrade. The Department of Education has granted public access and transparency to states’ applications, the RTT rubric, and all of the states’ scores and graders’ comments.

In Goodbye to Good-Time Charlie , political scientist Larry Sabato ( 1983 ) made a strong argument for increased trust in state-level leaders. Outlining the history of the governor and state bureaucracy, he described the ebb and flow of state-level agencies’ power throughout the course of American his-tory. From the outset, the founders desired to limit the authority of gover-nors, most likely as a reaction to the near limitless power colonial governors possessed. A North Carolina delegate to the Constitutional Convention said that a governor was given “just enough power to sign the receipt of his sal-ary” (Sabato 1983 , 4). Progressives gave governors more power early in the twentieth century in order to fight corrupt and city-based political bosses, but the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment and the increased ability of the federal government to raise revenues served to limit their power once again. It did not help that during this time a series of distinctly national problems (the Great Depression, two world wars) gripped the nation, greatly increasing the power of the federal government. Sabato argues that this led to a period (from the 1930s to the 1970s) in which governors were “Good-Time Charlies”: inept, corrupt, attention-seeking charlatans that had no business running state bureaucracies. However, with the increased transparency of the civil rights movement and the New Federalism of the 1970s, states began electing more educated, more skilled, and less corrupt leaders. Taxpayers should place more trust in these leaders, Sabato argues, as well as their increasingly capable and professional state-level bureaucracies, as they have greater capacity to imple-ment policies.

Similarly, political scientist Alice Rivlin ( 1992 ) outlined several reasons citizens should give states more power in the decision-making that directly affects their constituents. Broadly, she outlines six major reasons:

1. Global interdependence requires the federal government to pay more attention to international affairs, so states must play a stronger role in domestic policy.

2. The policies needed to revitalize the economy, which include eliminat-ing the federal deficit and increasing public investment in skills and infrastructure, cannot all be undertaken by Washington without a fed-eral tax increase too big to be either likely or desirable.

3. Top-down management by the federal government is unlikely to bring about needed change in education, skilled training, and other areas where reform is essential.

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4. Some objectives, though, such as reform of health financing and control of medical costs, cannot be attained by states on their own.

5. Increased competence and responsiveness of state government have weakened the rationale for many federal programs.

6. Citizens’ lack of trust in government, especially at the federal level, is exacerbated by confusion over which level of government is in charge of what and how tax money is being spent (110–111).

RTT by and large appears to embody the spirit of Rivlin’s arguments, entrust-ing increasingly competent state bureaucracies with developmental programs whose reforms the federal government simply cannot manage.

However, despite these deserved kudos, a serious concern with RTT stems from the copious amounts of administrative discretion permitted to the RTT evaluators (Peterson and Rothstein 2010 ). The RTT evaluation’s chief source of this discretion emerges from its poorly designed rubric. Great rubrics explic-itly state the criteria of the evaluation, provide the weights given to these cri-teria, and establish methods for measuring the extent to which the evaluated party meets expectations (Cooper and Gargan 2009 ). For the most part, the RTT application rubric fails to provide objective methods for measuring the extent to which states meet criteria, leaving significant ambiguity in the eval-uation process. These more subjective components of the evaluation pose the danger of restricting the precision needed for a fair and impartial evaluation of a state’s application. Furthermore, some of the rubric’s components solely depend on a state’s promises rather than evaluating actual data (Center for Education Reform 2010 ). For example, even a well-designed rubric would fail to precisely evaluate how well a state “articulat[es] comprehensive, coherent reform agenda” (Criteria A1i) or “build[s] strong statewide capacity to imple-ment, scale up, and sustain proposed plans” (A2) (Department of Education 2009 ).

There are two prominent criticisms of possible inconsistency in the scor-ing of states in Race to the Top. One is an issue as old as politics itself: the tainting of evaluations based on partisan political machinations. Did states with upcoming elections see an undue uptick in their grading in the hopes of scoring some political points for the Obama administration? The second is a bit more nuanced: the vetting procedure was highjacked by “rogue vetters” who were chosen poorly and given too much latitude, and simply did not back administration goals, as we suggest below.

Why Examine Political Influences?

It would stand to reason that a state with a tightly contested US Senate race or gubernatorial race, or that had a tightly contested 2008 presidential race (i.e., bellwethers), could receive preferential grading. The logic behind this


rationale is similar to politicians seeking federal grants (i.e., earmarks/pork) for constituents when foreseeing a difficult election (Sellers 1997 ). Furthermore, the acquisition of pork tends to increase in the presence of electoral vulnerability, especially when the election is of great concern to the political majority (Lazarus 2009 ). Even though states acquire RTT funds via a federal grant competition, as opposed to a standard legislative ear-mark project, the same principles apply, impacting the decisions behind the distribution of funds. Indeed, as far back as the 1970s, political scientists have found that presidential and congressional politics had considerable impact on grants. For example, the Nixon administration loosened grant eligibility requirements, seemingly to buy off potential republican rivals in the 1972 presidential race (Derthick 1975 ). With the 2010 elections on the horizon during the first two rounds of RTT, the Obama administration and the Democratic Party had serious concerns (Preston 2010 ). Even though the president had another two years before his own reelection, a midterm defeat could (and arguably did) set back his agenda for the next two years (Cook 2010 ). Hypothetically, a state’s political climate could induce favoritism, especially on the more subjective aspects of the grading process.

Modeling Political Influence

In order to determine the potential impacts of the subjective components of the process, an objective evaluation of states’ applications was conducted in order to control (i.e., handicap) for the likelihood of a given state obtaining high marks. Fortunately, outside sources (e.g., Leaders and Laggards, Data Quality Campaign, Education Week’s Quality Counts, etc.) have indepen-dently conducted evaluations on the RTT criteria that account for 82 percent of the total points on the RTT rubric. These independent evaluations provide a means for creating a projected score, serving as a control variable, for each state for each of the two rounds of scoring.

After controlling for the states’ projected scores, it is possible, through regression analysis, to determine the extent to which a state’s political climate affects its actual RTT score. Formulaically, the final model looks like this:

RTT it � β 0 � β 1 PROJRTT it � β 2 PRES i � β 3 SEN it � β 4 GOV it � ε it. (1)

The dependent variable, RTT it , is the actual RTT final score for state i at time/round t . 2 PROJRTT it is a state’s projected first-round score (i.e., previ-ously demonstrated reform track record based on the independent evaluations described earlier in this report). PRES i is a measure of the competitiveness of the state for the 2008 presidential election. 3 SEN it is whether or not a state has a US Senate seat that is in play for the 2010 election. 4 GOV it is whether or not a state has a governor seat that is in play for the 2010 election. 5 And ε it is the error term. 6

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Overview of Round 1 Results

Examining the coefficients of each component ( Table 5.2 ) shows that for each point a state acquired on its projected Round 1 score (i.e., PROJRTT it ) there was a .62-point increase for its actual first-round score (i.e., scoring 100 points on the projected score translated into 62 points on a state’s actual RTT score). A state having a close senatorial race adds 35 points. Finally, a close guberna-torial race adds 42 points

Overview of Round 2 Results

Examining the coefficients of each component shows that for each point a state acquired on its projected Round 2 score there was between a .55- to .57-point increase for its actual first round score (i.e., scoring 100 points on the projected score translates into 55–57 points on a state’s actual RTT score, with a Round 2 score mean of 389.5 and a standard deviation of 68.45). A state having a close senatorial race adds 12 points (though statistically insig-nificant). A close gubernatorial race adds 32 points. Table 5.3 incorporates a more precise method for calculating the contentiousness of a senatorial or a gubernatorial race. Since polling data was available during the announce-ment of the second round of RTT, these data provided the opportunity to use a continuous measure for contentiousness rather than relying on a dummy variable. The coefficients for these variables indicate how a single percentage point increase in competitiveness (e.g., the poll leader dropping from �5 to �4) affects the state’s RTT score. When measured in this manner, a percent-age-point increase in the competitiveness of a state’s Senate race improved a state’s score by .15 (though not statistically significant), and its gubernatorial race improved a state’s score by .44 per percentage point.

Table 5.2 Estimates of Effects for RTT Round 1 Score

Actual RTT Score (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)

Projected RTT Score 0.56 0.62(0.14)*** (0.13)***

Presidential Contention

– 0.56 –0.55(0.73) (0.89)

Senate Contention 37.87 34.87(24.29) (19.63)*

Gubernatorial Contention

34.76 42.08(21.06) (17.21)**

Constant 205.42 405.81 348.93 342.75 203.91(40.75)*** (60.61)*** (12.14)*** (14.13)*** (84.27)**

Observations 41 41 40 40 40 R 2 0.278 0.015 0.060 0.067 0.468

Note: *p-value ≤ 0.10 (two-tailed); **p-value ≤ 0.05 (two-tailed); ***p-value ≤ 0.01 (two-tailed)

Table 5.4 Estimates of Effects for RTT Round 2 Score (with Senate and Gubernatorial Contention as Continuous Variables)




–1.09 –1.06(0.75) (0.98)

Senate Contention 0.49 0.15(0.29) (0.25)


0.62 0.44(0.30)** (0.26)*

Constant 238.58 478.74 357.38 346.60 283.24(40.37)*** (62.51)*** (21.55)*** (22.59)*** (94.20)***

Observations 36 36 35 35 35 R 2 0.304 0.058 0.077 0.117 0.470


Table 5.5 Estimates of Effects for RTT Round 1 and Round 2 Scores




-0.83 -1.02(0.53) (0.66)



36.26 27.17(15.80)** (12.71)**

Constant 213.52 441.47 366.10 357.14 277.07(27.05)*** (44.09)*** (9.22)*** (10.16)*** (60.13)***

Observations 77 77 75 75 75 R 2 0.331 0.032 0.023 0.067 0.446

Note: *p-value ≤ 0.10 (two-tailed); **p-value ≤ 0.05 (two-tailed); ***p-value ≤ 0.01 (two-tailed).

Table 5.3 Estimates of Effects for RTT Round 2 Score (with Senate and Gubernatorial Contention as Dummy Variables)




–1.09 –1.29(0.75) (0.98)



46.97 32.42(22.61)** (18.95)*

Constant 238.58 478.74 385.92 369.03 319.79(40.37)*** (62.51)*** (13.65)*** (14.30)*** (89.34)***

Observations 36 36 35 35 35 R 2 0.304 0.058 0.002 0.116 0.466


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In both rounds, the competitiveness of the 2008 presidential election did not prove to have a statistically significant impact on a state’s RTT final score. For full results, see Tables 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5.

Findings

These analyses provide two central findings. First, states having highly contested seats for the 2010 election gained points. Second, the inclusion of a state’s political circumstances, along with its education reform record, improves the model’s capacity to explain and predict RTT Round 1 scores. As for the lack of statistical significance for the variable measuring 2008 election contentiousness, quite possibly the 2012 election is simply too far down the road to have measurable influence.

Despite these findings, determining causation remains problematic. Do states with contested 2010 elections receive preferential treatment? Or, are politicians in politically contentious states working harder to find ways that improve the chances of securing grant money (and possibly gaining the approval of constituents)? These questions reflect just some of the plausible scenarios with regard to determining causation. Regardless of the true nature of causation, these findings could still serve as evidence for the assertion that the RTT competitive grant process falls subject to influences outside of sim-ply rewarding states with the best education reform records.

However, despite the indication that political climate (i.e., contentiousness) may positively bias states’ scores, this analysis fails to determine the nature of the bias. For example, if point boosts were given to states with conten-tious elections regardless of the political affiliation of the incumbents, then this would seem to justify the notion that it just so happens to be the case that there is something about contentious states that caused them to put in better applications. In other words, it probably would not do much good for a democratic president to boost the scores of a state with a close gubernato-rial race where there was a republican incumbent. A point boost in this case could allow the incumbent to show that he or she has what it takes to “bring home the bacon,” likely proving detrimental to his or her democratic chal-lenger. Therefore, in order to further explore the nature of these point boosts, it is vital to factor in the political party circumstances of a given election (e.g., democratic hold/incumbent, republican hold/incumbent, or no race in 2010 for the seat).

What Role, If Any, Does Political Affiliation Play?

A series of simple, multivariate regressions can be used to test the hypothesis that the nature of an incumbency could factor into a state’s score:

RTT it � α 0 � α 1 PROJRTT it � α 2 SEN_DEM i � ε it; (2) RTT it � γ 0 � γ 1 PROJRTT it � γ 2 GOV_DEM i � ε it; (3)


RTT it � ω 0 � ω 1 PROJRTT it � ω 2 SEN_REP i � ε it; (4) RTT it � θ 0 � θ 1 PROJRTT it � θ 2 GOV_REP i � ε it; (5) RTT it � λ 0 � λ 1 PROJRTT it � λ 2 NO_SEN i � ε it; (6) RTT it � ϕ 0 � ϕ 1 PROJRTT it � ϕ 2 NO_GOV i � ε it. (7)

Once again, the dependent variable, RTT it , is the actual RTT final score for state i at time (i.e., round) t . PROJRTT it is a state’s projected first-round score (i.e., previously demonstrated reform track record based on the inde-pendent evaluations described earlier in this report). SEN_DEM is a dummy variable indicating whether the state’s contested US Senate seat was a poten-tial hold for the Democrats going into the election. GOV_DEM is a dummy variable indicating whether a Democrat was an incumbent for the state’s gubernatorial race. SEN_REP is a dummy variable indicating whether the state’s contested US Senate seat was a potential hold for the Republicans going into the election. GOV_REP is a dummy variable indicating whether a Republican was an incumbent for the state’s gubernatorial race. NO_SEN and NO_GOV are dummy variables for whether a state lacked a US Senate or gubernatorial election, respectively. ε it is the error term in each of the equations.

In aggregate, the general trend was for states with democratic incumbents or a seat to hold for the Democratic Party to receive increases in its RTT scor-ing (though not always statistically significant). When examining the results of Rounds 1 and 2 together, states with a US Senate election where the seat was a potential Democratic hold going into the 2010 election received about a 27-point increase. States that had a democratic incumbent running for gover-nor received approximately a 36-point increase.

In contrast, states with republican incumbents or a seat to hold for the Republican Party experienced decreases in their RTT scoring (though not always statistically significant). When examining the results of Rounds 1 and 2 together, states with a US Senate election where Republicans held the seat going into the 2010 election received about a 26-point decrease. States that had a republican incumbent running for governor received a 24-point decrease on average (not quite statistically significant).

Lacking a US Senate or gubernatorial race had no effect on a state’s RTT scoring. The lone exception was a state in the second round that lacked a gubernatorial election experienced a decrease in its score. For full results, see Table 5.6 .

Integrating political affiliations into the analysis may shed some light on the issue of causation. Had affiliation proven entirely insignificant, then it could probably be argued that contentious elections and the quality of the applicant were simply somehow intertwined. Whether a state experienced an increase or decrease in its score corresponds with the intuition that the Obama administration would give greater preference to Democrats over Republicans. This raises concerns over the subjectivity of the scoring.

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However, as is the case with the contentiousness of elections, causality with political affiliation also remains questionable. While it may be the case that RTT scorers gave preferential treatment to states with democratic incumbents and/or seats that the Democrats are trying to hold, it may also be the case that states with Democrats at the helm put forth greater efforts in the application process. RTT is strictly a President Obama and Secretary Duncan initiative. Therefore, states with Democrats in charge could have had greater buy-in while states with Republicans either opted to not apply or necessarily give it their all. The state of Texas serves as case that could support this argument. Despite the fact that Texas likely would have had a very strong application, Governor Perry (R) refused to apply due to the fact that he strongly disagreed with some of the reforms that President Obama and Secretary Duncan have been in urging in RTT (Office of the Governor, Rick Perry 2010).

The “Rogue Vetters” Hypothesis

Journalist Steven Brill interviewed many of the prominent players in the cre-ation and implementation of Race to the Top for Class Warfare (2011). He discovered several serious issues, both with the selection of vetters and the Race to the Top scoring process in general. First, federal statutes regulating the role of advisors to the executive branch limited greatly both the privacy and subjectivity of the vetters. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (1972), for example, required any outside experts exercising subjective authority to do so in public meetings. Similarly, guidelines set forth by the government Accounting Office for “conflicts of interest” essentially removed from the

Table 5.6 Estimates of the Effects from the Nature of the Election on RTT Scores

Variable of Interest† Round 1 Round 2 Rounds 1 and 2

SEN_DEM 23.07 30.48 26.98(17.82) (19.10) (13.08)**

GOV_DEM 26.87 40.52 36.04(23.93) (22.87)* (16.52)**

SEN_REP –33.49 –15.13 –26.16(16.85)* (20.17) (13.01)**

GOV_REP –42.13 -8.63 –24.00(28.61) (30.06) (20.86)

NO_SEN 16.65 –25.84 –0.70(21.00) (24.73) (16.15)

NO_GOV 3.48 –38.88 –16.41(21.10) (21.72)* (15.32)

Notes: † In all estimates, PROJRTT turns up statistically significant (p ≤ 0.01, two-tailed) with coefficients ranging from 0.58 to 0.66; *p-value ≤ 0.10 (two-tailed); **p-value ≤ 0.05 (two-tailed); ***p-value ≤ 0.01 (two-tailed)


vetting process anyone related to the provision, funding, or study of educa-tion currently, leaving, as Brill ( 2011 ) enumerated, only:

education foundation staff members, but not at places that finance • reform projects; think tank staffers, but not ones who had ever taken positions on the • issues involved or were associated with think tanks that had taken such positions; education professors, but not professors who had studied the reform ini-• tiatives being evaluated in the states’ proposals; and long retired educators (258). •

Clearly, these individuals were not the best to judge such an important con-test. Additionally, vetters could only rely on the proposals as written and were not allowed to bring in any outside knowledge that they might know about that state or its climate for reform. In other words, even if the vetter knew that a state had no intention of implementing a particular promised reform, he or she was forbidden to make use of that knowledge. Strange as this sounds, this is actually typical of government regulations designed to assure a fair process by closely constricting the discretion of decision makers in grant making, and until recently, government procurement (Kelman 2005 ; Anechiarico and Jacobs 1996 ).

Vetters also did not know how to catch some of the sneaky language placed into various parts of the applications and their appendices. Each state, in the appendix to their application, included “Memoranda of Understanding” (MOU), statements from EIC members that the EIC members would play ball with the reforms and actually implement them if the states won the money. However, many teachers’ unions snuck phrases into their MOU’s to com-pletely undercut reform. For example, as Brill (2011) points out, in New York the teachers’ union included the line “nothing in the MOU shall be construed to override any applicable state or local collective-bargaining requirements” (274). That collective bargaining agreement specifically prevented almost all of the teacher-quality-related reforms in Race to the Top from being imple-mented, making New York’s Race to the Top application a Potemkin pro-posal. But because vetters were both out of touch and explicitly instructed not to bring in additional information, they could not take account of such damaging provisions.

Further, Brill suggests that some vetters may not have wanted to know if the EIC had sabotaged the reforms. For several “rogue” vetters, scores varied widely. A key flashpoint for disagreement was the importance of union buy-in. Brill describes certain individuals that put greater weight on this section as “veteran academics who expressed skepticism that any reform could happen, or in one case should happen, without the wholehearted cooperation of the teachers’ unions” (374). Such judgments directly contradicted Arne Duncan’s

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statement that Race to the Top would put reform before cooperation. This led to terrible applications, like those from New York and California, scor-ing higher than clearly stronger ones, like those from Louisiana and eventual Round 1 winners Tennessee and Delaware, on certain scorecards.

Conclusion

So is the Race to the Top glass half-full or half-empty? The answer would depend on who you ask. Race to the Top was a reform of policy moderates, supported by the likes of Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and David Brooks. These individuals desired to give support to states, but not just cash. Race to the Top was opposed, however, from opposite flanks. Conservatives (such as the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee John Kline) and libertarians (such as Senator Rand Paul and Cato Institute analyst Neal McCluskey) generally oppose the expansion of the federal role in education; thus anything that national policymakers do to expand their influence or role will meet the ire of conservatives and libertarians. On the opposing side, the more liberal members of Congress, the media, and the academe both dislike the competitive nature of the program (believing that dollars should just be given to states to support programs) and did not like the content of the reforms. Few could argue, though, with its ability to enact a reform agenda.

This returns to a maxim with which we began this book: ideas matter . Race to the Top was an idea, an idea that well publicized competition for large federal grants in a time of austerity could drive change, and that idea, as imperfectly implemented as it was, held true. As Brill ( 2011 , 377) concluded:

Looking across the Round Two score sheets, it is easy to conclude that if, as Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that we have tried,” competitive grant programs, in which the money is dispensed by objective and disinterested (and therefore not fully knowledge-able) judges, may be the worst way to dole out taxpayer money except for all the others.

We agree. Unquestionably, RTT facilitated and continues to facilitate the discussion

of education reform at the state and local levels. If nothing else, RTT forced policymakers, educators, and interest groups to discuss pertinent education reforms. Second, RTT stimulated meaningful reforms at the state levels at relatively low costs to taxpayers. Tennessee, for instance, received the biggest prize from Round 1, $500 million. Relatively speaking, this amount represents a truly minute amount of federal spending. In fact, the $4.35 billion dedicated to RTT only accounts for 9.3 percent of the Department of Education’s 2010 discretionary appropriations. 7


Finally, RTT may actually have an advantage over President Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in that it allows greater flexibility for ad hoc adjustments. Since RTT has not been a major financial investment, to this point, fine-tunings and reevaluations of the system remain viable options. The mistakes of the first round of RTT are forgivable if they lead to the desir-able changes. With luck, public criticism and the call for objectivity will ultimately facilitate changes toward more effective and meaningful reforms for states’ education systems. Otherwise, not only will the integrity of RTT evaluation remain questionable, its capacity to spur meaningful changes will become less probable.

Weighting more of the grading on outside, independent data, rather than the statements made in an application would also be an upgrade. An assess-ment of proposals and promises does not have the same impact as doing more to reward results. This approach would do more to promote meaning-ful reform than merely taking states at their word. In fact, this concern has already made itself apparent with the numerous fictitious claims already unraveled in the first round of applications (Center for Education Reform 2010 ).

Rather than being rewarded simply for aspiration, states with stronger his-tories of education reform should gain preference. Eight of the 12 governors or mayors leading states or districts that won Race to the Top were replaced in the 2010 election, entrusting the key reforms to people who did not make the promises in the first place, so rewarding states with proven track records would do more to promote action. This sends the message that states will have to reform. Also, providing grants to states that have already shown greater initiative in finding ways to improve their education systems would likely spark more innovative approaches.

In short, despite its flaws, we are convinced that Race to the Top did far more good than harm, which as we state in Chapter 1 , is the test of all public policy.

6

Common Core Standards: Developmental, Redistributional,

and Contentious

As the nation seeks to maintain our international competitiveness, ensure all students regardless of background have access to a high quality educa-tion, and prepare all students for college, work and citizenship, these stand-ards are an important foundation for our collective work.

—US secretary of education Arne Duncan

It is critically important that the voice of the education practitioners is included in the development of all core standards. NEA remains an advo-cate of including other essential areas of schooling, such as civic responsi-bility, in education transformation efforts. NEA believes it is critical that standards and assessments associated with them promote access for all stu-dents to a complete education.

— Dennis Van Roekel, NEA president

Education standards codify the goals and expectations a community has for its students. In her authoritative tome on the issue, education histo-

rian Diane Ravitch ( 1995 ) outlined the three types of education standards. Content standards list and describe what is supposed to be taught and what students are expected to know. Performance standards are degrees of mastery or attainment of the information or skills laid out in the content standards. Finally, opportunity to learn standards are expectations of the availability of services for students. As Ravitch points out, all of these are interrelated. “Content standards without performance standards are meaningless” she argues (13), because, as we have stated earlier, what doesn’t get measured doesn’t count . Similarly, without the framework of the content standards or the information gleaned from the application of the performance standards, policymakers have no idea what services students need in order to have the opportunity to succeed. As Ravitch points out, relatively clear, objective


standards play a role in virtually every facet of industrial and postindustrial life, from the quality of McDonald’s hamburgers to orthopedic standards for setting broken limbs to NASA standards for inspecting space vehicles. Without standards, we can neither know if what we do works as intended, nor can we figure out how to do it better. Without standards, we must rely on traditional authority, trusting educators because of their titles, rather than rational legal authority, trusting them because of their effectiveness. It is nearly impossible to imagine a complex industrial or postindustrial society functioning without relatively transparent, relatively objective standards. After all, how can an employer say that two prospective employees have earned a comparable education when one reads at a level several years in advance of the other yet both have the “same” credential. As the data pour-ing in from NCLB-mandated testing shows, the United States lacks such national standards, meaning that formally equal educational attainment is highly unequal (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Hirsch 2009 ; Childress et al. 2009 ). As we stated in Chapter 3 , this longstanding condition has been defined as a serious problem worthy of national action by the egalitarian Barack Obama; we think properly so.

Traditionally, as education has been of state and local purview, state and district boards of education have been charged with developing and imple-menting these standards. However, in recent years, federal officials, private philanthropies, think tanks, and professional organizations have pushed to develop a national set of academic standards. Due to the legal restrictions placed on the Department of Education, the department cannot, as education professor and blogger Jay P. Greene pointed out:

exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum , program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law (as quoted in Greene 2011 ).

To circumvent this problem, the Obama administration tacitly gave its approval to a set of Common Core Standards developed by a consortium of state school officers and tied Race to the Top dollars to implementing these standards. Whether or not this is a good idea is up for debate.

What is not up for debate is the fact that standards setting is a contentious process. There is a finite amount of time during children’s education in which they can learn and therefore a finite amount of information that can be cov-ered. This requires leaders to prioritize and rank content and skills students need, and inevitably leave some concepts on the cutting-room floor. Each topic has an opportunity cost: every class period spent teaching photosyn-thesis is one less class period that can be spent teaching genetics. Therefore,

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states and districts have to develop some means to draft standards and make these difficult editorial decisions. 1

Standards are almost inextricably paired with assessments. If a community or state takes the time to develop standards, it will almost certainly want to assess whether or not students actually learned the content contained therein. This process is contentious, arduous, and fraught with conflict as there is only a finite number of questions (and therefore a finite amount of testable mate-rial) that students can be expected to learn. Every question on Malcolm X is one less question that can be asked about Patrick Henry, and therefore leaders must strike a balance, making decisions on the relative importance of content matter and cognitive processes. Stemming from our previous maxim that it only counts when you measure , what shows up on state tests will become, de facto, the most important things taught in schools.

The History of Standards

American content standards originally developed organically. As Ravitch ( 1995 ) retells, at the time of the Revolutionary War, Webster’s “Blue-Backed” speller was a de facto set of national standards, as it was the only resource that most schools had to educate students. More and more textbooks were devel-oped at the turn of the nineteenth century, but by the mid-nineteenth century the McGuffey Readers had developed a near monopoly over the curriculum of schools across the country. Even at the time when the Committee of Ten met in 1892, no one believed that the federal government would possibly get involved in the setting of standards; the committee believed that such cur-ricular decisions lay more in the hands of professional organizations (like the burgeoning NEA) and in schools of education.

Serious talk about national standards started with the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP). As early as the latter part of the 1960s, social scientists and politicians alike were thirsty for hard data on the per-formance of the American school system. In order to quench this thirst, in 1969 a group of state-level education leaders and leaders of public education interest groups developed the NAEP, a test designed to be given to a sample of students nationwide to track performance. In 1970, President Nixon worked to develop the National Institute of Education, a research organization within the executive branch that developed measures of educational output. Whether they knew it or not, this data collecting effort started the nation down the path of national education standards (Finn 2008 ).

By developing national tests, creators were setting the stage for national standards, and predictably, state-level actors were none too pleased. During the 1970s, the assessment of students focused more on minimum competency exams; however, with the addition of cross-state comparisons in the NAEP in the 1980s, a call for more unified standards, at the state or national level, grew


louder. By 1984, 30 states were working on creating standards. It should be noted that longtime AFT leader Albert Shanker, while often backing higher educational standards, cautioned against the creation of national standards. Rather than the states rights’ arguments of his conservative contemporaries or the antitesting tack of many of his liberal compatriots, Shanker argued that any standards that could be agreed upon at that high a level of aggregation would most likely be so watered down as to be next to useless (cited in Finn 2008 ).

In 1989, self-described “education president” George H. W. Bush con-vened the Charlottesville education summit, placing the creation of national academic standards explicitly on the agenda. In the same year, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics released its standards. In 1991/92, the Department of Education gave grants to various organizations in an attempt to develop a set of national education standards. Finn ( 2008 ) outlined many of the issues that prevented anything from ever coming from these grants, from the self-interest of the “experts” entrusted with developing the stan-dards, to the demands for political correctness, to the complete inability of standard setters to narrow down the list to a manageable form. When the relatively “politically correct” standards for history were released, the Senate voted 99–1 to condemn them.

President Clinton similarly waded into the creation of national standards. Through the creation of the National Education Standards and Improvement Council, he sought to develop stronger standards that could gain broader support. As in the past, the creation of such standards grew to be too politi-cally contentious, and his nominations to the council were blocked. Congress eventually killed funding for the program. However, in his State of the Union address on February 4, 1997, he called for “voluntary national tests” in grades four and eight. As Checker Finn argued at the time and chronicled later ( 2008 , 207), “If this falls apart it will be because of liberals who hate ‘testing’ and conservatives who hate ‘national.’” And that is precisely what happened.

George W. Bush explicitly avoided the creation of national standards in the construction of No Child Left Behind. In the legislation, Bush was explicit in allowing states to set their own standards, develop their own assessments, and set the definition for proficiency. As we chronicle in Chapter 4 , this led to as many unintended as intended consequences, both good and bad. The largely accurate race to the bottom was almost as popular of a critique of NCLB as the largely inaccurate “unfunded mandate” charge.

Here entered Barack Obama, inheriting a broken system of state stan-dards and a history of failure in the creation of national standards. President Obama made an explicit case for uniformity in standards in a speech to the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March 2009:

Today’s system of 50 different sets of benchmarks for academic success means 4th grade readers in Mississippi are scoring nearly 70 points lower than


students in Wyoming—and they’re getting the same grade. Eight of our states are setting their standards so low that their students may end up on par with roughly the bottom 40 percent of the world. That’s inexcusable. That’s why I’m calling on states that are setting their standards far below where they ought to be to stop low-balling expectations for our kids. 2

However, being more politically savvy than his predecessors in this depart-ment, he found a more indirect and thus less contentious means by which to advocate for such standards. Here, Obama’s experience as a community organizer shined through.

First, the Obama administration partnered with the Gates Foundation, an organization with enough money to not only develop but market the standards that they created. By not playing an explicit role in their cre-ation and instead capitalizing on a nascent effort on the part of the Gates Foundation, in connection with the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the administration was able to avoid the contentious political process that beleaguered the prior efforts at standard setting. These standards were developed with little publicity and little fanfare and only made available for comment after reaching essen-tially their final form.

Second, again learning from prior efforts to create national standards, the Obama administration (and its Gates partners) started with the least contro-versial subjects. Rather than attempting the highly contentious areas of his-tory or science, the Common Core initiative (as this process became known) focused simply on math and reading standards.

Finally, the Obama administration played the “voluntary” card bet-ter than any of its predecessors through the Race to the Top competition. Seventy of the five hundred points in that well-publicized state grant com-petition came from “Standards and Assessments,” with 40 points coming from “developing and adopting standards” and the other 30 coming from developing and utilizing the common assessments necessary to test student progress on those national standards. The Obama administration made it clear that the standards needed to be rigorous and “college and career ready.” Because no state standards, even those from states like Massachusetts, which were widely lauded (Carmichael et al. 2010), were explicitly rated as “college and career ready,” it appeared that any state wanting those points would have to go back to the drawing board in drafting new standards. Any state educa-tion leader would be loathe to fight through the political morass of creating a new set of standards from scratch, so the administration made it clear that they had an out: the premade, prepublicized, and pre-endorsed Common Core Standards. It was a no-brainer for state leaders, most of whom had con-cluded even by 2004 that curricular standards were an idea whose time had come (Maranto and Maranto 2004 ), but feared the political battles of stan-dard setting.


What are the Common Core Standards?

Starting in 2008, a consortium of state-level education officials began to con-struct a series of standards in math and language arts to present to the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. After their approval, the standards were sent around the country for public com-ment, first in September 2009 and again in March 2010. According to the Common Core Standards Initiative (CCSI), 3 over ten thousand comments were returned. The CCSI released the final version of the Standards in June of 2010 . According to the CCSI, the standards:

are aligned with college and work expectations; • are clear, understandable and consistent; • include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-• order skills; build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards; • are informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are • prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and are evidence based. •

Not all parties agreed with the CCSI’s assessment. In testimony before the Texas House of Representatives, our colleague, standards guru Sandra Stosky (a member of CCSI’s validation committee), leveled two serious critiques. First, she argued that the standards were not as rigorous as previously thought, stating, “Common Core’s ‘college readiness’ standards for English language arts and reading do not aim for a level of achievement that signifies readiness for authentic college level work.” Furthermore, she stated, “States adopting Common Core’s standards will damage the academic integrity of both their postsecondary institutions and their high schools precisely because Common Core’s standards do not strengthen the high school curriculum.” Second, she decried the lack of transparency regarding the drafting of the standards, arguing, “The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers never explained to the public what the qualifications were for membership on the standards-writing committees or how it would justify the specific standards they created.” When the names of the standards drafters were finally released, according to Stotsky, most were employees of testing companies. Stotsky also testified that she was on the validation committee, a 25-member group of “national and international experts” that was enlisted into service to review the work of the drafters, but, along with four other members of the committee, she had refused to sign off on the final version of the standards (Stotsky 2011). While Stotsky is generally thought of as conser-vative, many on the left also criticized the relatively closed and “corporate” composition of the standards drafters (see works within Kovacs 2011).


So What Makes Good Standards?

Fundamentally, America has a problem clearly stating what it means to be educated. From the days of the Old Deluder Satan Law and its call for bibli-cal literacy to ensure eternal salvation to the Cardinal Principles of 1918 to Common Core Standards, the definition of what it means to be educated has changed. Therefore, evaluating standards are an inherently subjective enter-prise. Traditionally, when evaluating standards, competing organizations brought together groups of “experts” to apply various criteria to the different sets of standards. What makes these people experts is less than clear. And for better or worse, standard setting is typically nontransparent, elitist policy-making in its pure form.

Some Pollyannaish thinkers believe that there is general consensus on what should be taught in American classrooms. While most involved in edu-cation would agree, in principle, to what Hochschild and Scovronick (2004, 14–15) outlined as the three broad goals of education—“the ability to deal with diverse others in the public arena”; “a common core of knowledge”; “a common set of democratic values and practices,”—when the rubber meets the road, there is less convergence. Some thinkers, traditionally those from the business community, have a stronger desire to instill in students the skills necessary to work in business, such as strong communication skills, profi-ciency with technology, and basic mathematics, with less emphasis on the traditional liberal and fine arts. As stated directly by Craig Barrett, former CEO of Intel, “Common education standards are essential for producing the educated work force America needs to remain globally competitive.” 4 Others value a more arts-centered education (Davis 2007). Still others emphasize the social aspect of schooling (e.g., Dewey and Vygotsky). Still others (Jefferson, 5 Freire 2000) emphasize the political aspect of education.

E. D. Hirsch, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Virginia, has been a longtime advocate of the role of common education standards in cultivating citizenship in American youth. In his landmark works Cultural Literacy (1988) and The Making of Americans (2009), he outlined his central argument: that all Americans should share a common set of knowledge so as to be able to communicate with, relate to, and get along with each other. As he states in The Making of Americans :

All children need to be taught the general knowledge that is silently assumed in that language community. Our schools need to assimilate into the public sphere not just new immigrants but all of our children, regardless of family background. That is a fundamental aim of school in a democracy and one that we are not serving very effectively today (18).

Hirsch argues that American schools have gotten away from the “commonal-ity” of the common schools that Horace Mann envisioned. For a time, schools


were designed to assimilate and integrate students into American society by teaching them a common language, instilling them with common values, and offering them a common set of experiences. 6 This practice, eroded by well-intentioned but misguided “neighborhood schooling” and multiculturalism has divided students and communities, threatening national disunity. Hirsch argues for a “core knowledge” curriculum, a set of facts, works of literature and art, and skills that all students across the country should learn so as to bring them closer together.

Another curricular movement emphasizing the political dimension of education (though from a polar opposite viewpoint) is critical pedagogy. As outlined in the foreword to The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education (Carr and Porfilio 2011) a collection of essays from prominent critical theorists evaluating the Obama presidency, a school or school system utilizing a critical pedagogy would be distinct,

rather than treating students as objects who are valuable if they only perform well on examinations, educators could be given the power to open spaces in their classrooms to help students examine problems confronting the education system and the wider society. Similarly, educators could generate pedagogical projects where students work with community members inside and outside of schools to examine why neoliberal policies, for the past 30 years, have ensured that students who are marginalized by race and class attend dropout factories, while their affluent counterparts attend schools that prepare them for power in the business and social world; why corporate and government officials are unwilling to provide adequate resources in schools and social programs in communities that could place minoritized students in a better place to engage in the schooling process; and why teachers need to be accountable for pre-paring students to succeed on mindless, standardized examinations that do not foster students’ understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power, their openness to diverse intellectual ideas and peoples, or their thirst to join others in the collective struggle to build egalitarian schools and a just society (Sleeter, in Carr and Porfilio xxxv).

Critical pedagogy

encourages resistance to the “discourses of privatization, consumerism, the methodologies or standardization and accountability, and the new disciplin-ary techniques of surveillance . . . Critical pedagogy provides the tools for understanding how cultural and educational practices contribute to the con-struction of neoliberal conceptions of identify, citizenship and agency” (Sleeter in Carr and Porfilio 2011 xxxvi, quoting Denzin 2009).

Whether or not critical pedagogy or traditional citizenship education is the appropriate means to educate our next generation of students is outside the scope of our treatment here. Rather, we quote these thinkers to illustrate


the vast chasm between the ideological positions of thinkers who train teach-ers and principals and who shape opinion on how schools should be orga-nized. It is difficult for one ideological position that views schools as the primary means to lift students out of poverty to discuss how schools should operate to square the circle with a group that believes that existing schools are the primary means to keep students in poverty. And it is not surprising that they haven’t.

In short, what makes good standards is entirely in the eye of the beholder, making the process of standards setting exceeding difficult.

Standards Setting: The Story of Texas

In March of 2010 , national attention focused on the Texas Board of Education’s vote for new textbooks. A conservative faction had grown to dominance on the board and decided that it was time to “add balance” as one member put it, to the state social studies curriculum (McKinley 2010 ). The more liberal mem-bers referred to it as “rewriting history.” One conservative member, for exam-ple, was quoted as saying, “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state.” Similarly, the board wanted to increase the prominence of “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, includ-ing Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association,” to change references of “capitalism” to “the free-enterprise system,” and to minimize the teaching of history critical of conservatism. For example, board members wanted to highlight Republicans who supported the civil rights movement, and include the publication of the Venona papers, “confirming suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government” (quoted in McKinley 2010).

This tension highlights the inherent issues in setting standards, either at the state or federal level. Because there is only one set of standards for all students in the state, their creation is always a political battle. As Andrew Coulson ( 2002 , 124) writes:

We are all losers when our differing views become declarations of war: when, instead of allowing many distinct communities of ideas to coexist harmoni-ously, our schools force us to battle one another in a needless and destructive fight for ideological supremacy.

This destructive fight for ideological supremacy uncovers a not often talked about aspect of the EIC. Whereas we have previously decried job patronage as a characteristic of the EIC, this conflict represents a form of ideological patronage. Fundamentally, there are authoritarian factions, both on the left (see previous comments on critical pedagogy) and on the right (our friends in Texas) with an evangelical fervor to foist their beliefs on the children of


others—reinforced by their even greater desire to prevent their ideological opponents from doing the same. As in so much of politics, standards-setting becomes a matter of “us against them” (Kinder and Kam 2009 ). The absur-dity of forcing their worldview on children so as to avoid someone forcing their worldview on children is apparently lost on them, but then, as our col-league Jay P. Greene is fond of pointing out, authoritarianism can be fun if you get to be the authoritarian. Unfortunately, in the name of not objecti-fying students, both sides objectify students, who are pawns in a broader ideological battle.

Who Should Set Standards?

The debate over Common Core Standards focuses on a simple question: who should set standards? Perhaps to put a finer point on the question, what the Common Core debates fundamentally asks is, what level of government should set educational standards? There are strong arguments on both sides of this issue, and over the next several pages, we will endeavor to give a fair hearing to both sides.

The location of the setting of state standards offers a test of Peterson’s the-ory of Federalism, as outlined in Chapter 1 . Are standards best described as a developmental policy with their position most appropriately placed at the level of the state? Or, are standards a redistributive policy, best controlled by the federal government? In the “standards as developmental policy” camp, one could argue that variation in policies should encourage the types of resi-dential sorting that Tiebout (1956) postulated would facilitate community growth. Both localities and states have strong incentives to develop quality standards in an attempt to attract the highest performing students possible. If communities set their standards too low, they would attract less desirable stu-dents (and grown-ups) and possibly suffer a reputation as a bad community in which to do business. However, there are a number of perverse incentives that could affect the motivation of elected officials to keep standards high. It could be just as easily argued that standards are in fact a redistributive policy. It is important to realize that standards are not set to be at the highest ability of all students. Standards are a threshold to be cleared, above the achievement of some students, and well below that of others. As such, standards inherently take from the highest performing students (ones who would conceivably per-form higher if the standards were higher) and give to lower-performing stu-dents. Low-performing students are simply encouraged to clear the bar of what is expected of a student at their age and grade, while higher performing students, who are already above the threshold, have no incentive to improve. Research has demonstrated the effects of standards-based accountability on so-called “bubble” students (as we detail in Chapter 4 ), those located around the proficiency cutoff on the achievement spectrum. Clearly, more time and


energy are being devoted to these students at the expense of other students, as time and energy are finite resources.

So which is it? Should standards be set at a state level or nationally? It’s complicated.

Arguments for a Federal Role

In a 2006 article in Education Next , Chester E. “Checker” Finn and Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation laid out the case for national education standards. They playfully titled their article “A New New Federalism,” and argued for a system in which “feds play a much smaller role in the day-to-day affairs of local schools, but are much more specific about achievement expectations” (Finn and Petrilli 2006 ). The federal government, they argue, has played an increasingly negative role, most clearly embodied in No Child Left Behind. In a sentiment echoed by McClusky and Coulson (2007), Finn and Petrilli describe the race to the bottom caused by patchwork state-level standards. All four authors argue that because the federal government mandated that states test students for a level of proficiency, but allowed each state to set their particular definition of proficiency, states have had an incentive to decrease standards to increase passage rates. McClusky and Coulson list several examples of such behavior, from Texas education officials decreasing the number of questions needed for passing the third grade reading test to Michigan education officials low-ering the standard of school-level Adequate Yearly Progress in English from 75 percent to 42 percent (6). Maranto and Maranto ( 2004 ) find some evi-dence that standards are systematically lowered in the year before a guber-natorial election.

From the other end of the political spectrum, the liberal Albert Shanker Institute made a slightly different argument for national standards. In a manifesto entitled “A Call for Common Content” (2011) and signed origi-nally by over 75 education leaders, the authors argue that national standards are essentially an equity issue. Expecting students to learn different things in different states creates some states that do well, and some that do not. Why should a student in Alabama be held to a different standard than a student in Wisconsin? Minimizing performance gaps is a goal of the American educa-tion system, so knowingly allowing for discrepancy in expectations will only serve to exacerbate inequities. Additionally, a national curriculum could, they argue, lead to “the creation of all kinds of matching resources-technology offerings, texts, and teacher-made materials, as well as field trips and other outside-of-school resources” (2). This would serve to supply all students with the necessary resources to meet the common standards the nation would set for them. This is why, they argue, the highest performing countries in the world have national education standards. Additionally, students in the


United States are highly mobile, especially those from low-income families. A common national curriculum would allow students to transfer from school to school, from district to district, and from state to state without missing a beat. For similar arguments, see Hirsh (2009).

The subtext of the race to the bottom is the problem of faction. Founding father James Madison defined faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actu-ated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interest of the commu-nity” (1787). Faction, like a flame fed by the air of liberty is “sown in the nature of man” and cannot be controlled, even by “enlightened statesmen.” What Madison argues is the best check on faction is a large federal republic, whereby,

as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candi-dates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.

Madison concludes several paragraphs later:

Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic,—is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it.

The education debate is one plagued by faction. Self-interested actors from the EIC form an iron triangle (as we describe in Chapter 2 ) in state legisla-tures that can only be broken in the most extreme of circumstances. That iron triangle is more difficult to maintain at the national level, and gives the advantage to national actors when making accountability decisions. Decisions made at the national level are more transparent because a broader range of interests are involved and policy makers face even greater media scrutiny. As Berry and Howell ( 2008 ) and Moe ( 2001 ) demonstrate, local and state school board elections do not represent non-EIC actors. Because these elections occur “off cycle” (on days not typically reserved for elections) and because they are statutorily required to be “nonpartisan,” voters have little informa-tion to base their vote on, and hence cannot hold officials accountable. This allows motivated interest groups (like the EIC) to control these elections. This is reinforced by funding patterns as EIC members in general and teachers’ unions in particular typically supply most of the campaign contributions and people-power in these low-turnout races. Further, the state and local news media are often ill-equipped to report information about school performance


and education policy, and so rely primarily on EIC sources for information. Thus moving standards setting to a higher level of aggregation could avoid these flawed democratic controls.

Finally, there is an argument to be made that standards are a redistribu-tional policy, one that Peterson would put under the purview of the federal government. Standards are not what “each student should achieve to the best of his or her ability.” Rather, they are a level deemed age appropriate that a large number of students will easily clear. The accountability schemes orga-nized around standards privilege students whose ability level exists below the standard as schools are incentivized to focus on getting these students to clear the bar. Therefore, resources need to be diverted from higher-performing students to lower-performing students, something that would motivate the parents of high-performing students to move to districts or states with more people like them. As Peterson argues, any such redistribution is done best at the national level, as individuals are not able to “game” the system through residential sorting.

Arguments for State Control

While McClusky and Coulson agree that a race to the bottom has taken place, they and others (most notably education professor and blogger Jay P. Greene, and education advocate William Evers) argue that states are in a better position to solve the problem. In the aforementioned piece, McClusky and Coulson cite James Madison (this time from Federalist 46) wherein he argues that state governments and their proximity to citizens are in a better position to meet their immediate needs. Madison wrote:

By the superintending care of these (states), all the more domestic and personal interests of the people will be regulated and provided for. With the affairs of these, the people will be more familiarly and minutely conversant. And with the members of these, will a great proportion of the people have the ties of personal acquaintance and friendship, and of family and party attachments (as cited by McClusky and Coulson 2007, 11).

In their argument, state-level leaders are less likely to be manipulated by fac-tion because they are closer to the voters who would refuse to elect them if they knew they were working against the people’s interest.

Greene and Enlow offer a broader critique. In what became known as the “Counter Manifeso” to the Shanker Institute’s pro–Common Core publica-tion (2011), Greene outlined three broad arguments against national stan-dards. First, the counter manifesto argued against the idea that the National Governor’s Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, any of the testing consortia, or any other organizations have any constitutional author-ity to draft national standards. As previously stated, the US Department of


Education is expressly forbidden from developing a national curriculum. Similarly, because of the Tenth Amendment, states have the primary respon-sibility to oversee education. The authors argue that this is due to the balance of power the framers desired, but also fits Peterson’s theory of developmental versus redistributional policy. In theory, localities have the desire to develop the highest quality standards to make them competitive for tax-paying citi-zens. If all states and districts have the same standards, it would one less lever in place to incentivize education systems to do better.

Second, they argued that there is “no consistent evidence that a national curriculum leads to high academic performance.” While the pro–national standards crowd can give examples of high-performing countries that have national standards, there are also several countries, most notably France and Denmark, that have national standards and perform worse on international assessments. They offer the counter examples of Canada and Australia, two countries that have decentralized standards-setting and outperform the United States on international assessments.

Finally, and most broadly, they argue that national standards will stifle innovation. With 50 different systems throughout the country, the variation that inevitably exists can teach standards-setters lessons about what works and what does not. Similarly, the ability of variation to exist should push state-level leaders to develop higher standards to better compete against their neighbors. What Greene and Evers are really arguing is that standards are a developmental policy, and states have strong incentives to increase the quality of their standards in order to compete for tax revenue.

How Do Common Core Standards Affect the EIC

It is most helpful to examine the effect of Common Core Standards on the power base of the EIC through the lens of license and capacity. As Manna ( 2006 ) states, policy entrepreneurs, such as the leaders of the EIC, need both license and capacity to enact policy. As we (in Chapter 2 ) have outlined, the EIC tends to water down standards and assessments in order to make its life easier and maintain its legitimacy. Ideology also plays a role: the Cardinal Principles, after all, cannot be thought of as a document endorsing high academic achievement. Thus any standards-related policy that decreases its power is a better policy and any policy that increases its power is a worse policy. So, do Common Core Standards increase or decrease the power of the EIC? It depends.

Insofar as nationalizing standards increases the transparency of the stan-dards-setting process, the Common Core initiative will decrease the power of the EIC. To test McCluskey and Coulson’s Federalist #46 argument, we would like you to put this book down and go ask the next five people you meet who their state House representative and state senators are. Then, ask who their


U.S. House member and senator are. Ask them what recent major pieces of legislation have been handled by the state House; then do the same for the US Congress. Chances are, they will have a much clearer idea what is going on at the national level. This is because when Madison was writing, there was no television or Internet. Twenty-four-hour cable news networks analyzing the minute details of congressional action did not yet exist, so people could only learn about what they had relatively close proximity to. Now, the information available is a mirror image to the time of Madison. Very little news time and very few print inches are dedicated to the actions of state Houses, and much more are devoted to what the feds are up to. Therefore, if these types of stan-dards decisions would need to be made at the federal level, many Americans would be watching, something highly unlikely to occur in state Houses. This would make co-opting and watering down more difficult.

Conversely, this centralized transparency would also offer a “one stop shop” for the EIC to affect policy. Currently, EIC members must lobby for their preferable (read: weak) standards in all 50 state Houses, something that is much more difficult than lobbying one time in Washington, DC. This has allowed for wide variation in standards, with states with lower levels of EIC power drafting standards less favorable to the EIC and states with high levels of EIC power drafting standards more favorable to the EIC. Interested parties have since been able to compare and contrast standards and evaluate which are stronger and which are weaker. This variation has given license to anti-EIC policy entrepreneurs to fight the power of the EIC, armed with the evi-dence that the EIC has watered down standards. If there is simply one set of standards, it would be more difficult for those factions entrusted with check-ing the EIC’s power to have either the license or capacity to reign it in.

None of this is to say that Common Core Standards have not been over-sold. As we say in Chapter 1 , all public policies are oversold. Nor do we say that the initial iteration of Common Core is all that it should be. As our col-league Sandra Stotsky points out, despite frequent claims to the contrary, the standards were not benchmarked against international ones. Further, with the noted exception of Bill Gates, the business community has not as yet showed much interest in standards development. We believe that under the pressures of transparency, this will change over time, but we must acknowl-edge the possibility that we are wrong. Time will tell. For now, we can say that the Common Core is likely to do more good than harm, though this may depend on whether a range of actors other than Bill Gates and the EIC bring pressures to bear.

Conclusions

Standards cannot be evaluated in a vacuum. With standards come assessments and with assessments comes evaluation. When school systems underperform,


citizens will want reform. So those supposedly “small government” conserva-tives who think that the federal government will be “tight” with expectations but “loose” with allowing schools and school districts flexibility to get there fundamentally misunderstand the subgovernmental environment in which the EIC operates.

However, those on the other side of the standards debates have their issues to deal with as well. Many of the “laboratories of democracy” have a history of doing a poor job educating students. A race to the bottom has occurred. Apparently, states don’t see standards as strong developmental policy, given that many of them have weak ones. It appears, from the evidence that is avail-able, that the perception of good schools, as in strong performance on state evaluations, is powerful enough to bring taxpayers to a state, city, or school district.

In short, if the federal government is going to be involved in the account-ability business, there are no half-measures. If they are going to set account-ability requirements, they need to be explicit about what students need to learn. If they want to back off and allow market-based forces to regulate, they should neither set standards nor develop accountability regimes. Since the federal government will likely play a role in accountability for the foreseeable future, Common Core Standards are a step in the right direction by leveraging what the federal government is in the best position to do, limiting the power of the EIC by increasing transparency. They also fit President Obama’s desire to increase the power of the national government for reasons of equity.

7

Reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:

Challenging the Education Industrial Complex

We must do better. Together, we must achieve a new goal, that by 2020, the United States will once again lead the world in college completion. We must raise the expectations for our students, for our schools, and for ourselves – this must be a national priority. We must ensure that every student gradu-ates from high school well prepared for college and a career.

—Barack Obama, introduction to “ESEA Reauthorization: A Blueprint for Reform” (Department of Education 2010)

From its initial enactment as part of President Johnson’s Great Society, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) has spearheaded

federal involvement in local public schools. Johnson, who began his career as a teacher in a low-income community, believed that education was essen-tial to the war on poverty and that the Great Society would be one in which “no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled” (Johnson 1964 ). However, from 1965 to today, education commentators, politicians, and policy entrepreneurs have argued about the proper federal role in edu-cation. This problem, predictably, was less of an issue when ESEA simply meant the federal government pouring money into struggling school sys-tems. However, as outlined in Chapter 4 , No Child Left Behind (ESEA’s most recent iteration) paired assessment and accountability with those dollars, causing school district officials to recoil.

In President Obama’s push to reauthorize ESEA, he will be, in effect, charting the course for federal involvement in education for the foresee-able future. Will he, in the vein of former presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George H. W. Bush, simply push for increased dollars, or will he, like presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, call for increased accountability


with increased federal dollars? From both his rhetoric and his actions, it appears that President Obama will chart a middle course, increasing both expenditure and accountability while providing some autonomy for public schools.

Context: The Federal Role

In today’s education policy conversation, thinkers can be placed on more or less a continuum of belief regarding the federal role in education. On one end, most populated by conservatives and libertarians, lie individuals favor-ing little to no federal involvement in education. They neither want the fed-eral government to fund education initiatives nor do they want the federal government to administer such programs. Accountability should, in their estimation, lie at the state or local level, with market-based mechanisms ensuring quality. On the opposite end of the spectrum, political liberals call for increased federal dollars for public schools with little to no academic accountability, though with regulatory regimes designed to assure equity in funding and discipline along racial and gender lines. Most liberals distrust measures of academic progress (specifically standardized tests), and usually argue that schools performing poorly need more and more resources until they turn around, if indeed they can ever turn around. This is the Great Society approach, described in Chapter 1 .

Like his immediate predecessors, President Obama occupies a middle ground, desiring a strong federal role in funding education initiatives, but one coupled with politically acceptable accountability provisions. This view-point was most clearly articulated in George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, which simultaneously oversaw the greatest expansion of both federal fund-ing and federal oversight of education. This is not surprising, considering President Obama’s personal experience with the Chicago public schools (see Chapter 3 ) which performed poorly, but did not necessarily “struggle” to improve.

Luckily for President Obama, it appears that most prominent politicians agree. Almost all agree that the federal government should play a role in both funding and overseeing education in the United States. The debate hinges on exactly how extensive that role should be. This debate will play out during the reauthorization of ESEA. Representative Duncan Hunter went so far as to state that there is “90 percent” agreement on the issues at hand, and that the debate over reauthorization would revolve around the other 10 percent (Cox 2011 ).

What are the issues? First, NCLB’s standard of universal proficiency by 2014 was a bit of a pipe dream, and the back loading of performance tar-gets labeling 80 percent of schools in America as failures is clearly inaccurate.

REAUTHORIZING EDUCATION ACT 129

Similarly, setting absolute performance bars as the threshold for proficiency leads to perverse incentives in focusing on the “bubble kids.” More broadly, most elites seem to think that while the federal government has a role in edu-cation, it should focus only on the lowest-performing schools, leaving the vast majority of schools, which are by and large doing an acceptable job educating most students, alone (Brill 2011 ).

This focusing of federal education efforts on the lowest-performing schools fits into Peterson’s (Peterson, Rave, and Wong 1986 ; Peterson 1994) frame-work for federalism, outlined in Chapter 1 . When the federal government gets too involved with developmental policies, layers of incoherent policy and needless programs spring up out of a desire for national political figures to score points with voters who care about education. All this does is bur-den states, districts, and schools with more paperwork in a kind of “ersatz accountability.” However, if the federal government chooses to focus on the lowest-performing schools, it is using its superior position in redistributional policy to enact positive change. If states redirected the necessary dollars from their high-performing schools (which tend to correlate with higher-wealth areas) to their low-performing schools (which tend to correlate with lower-wealth areas), it would incentivize higher-performing and higher-wealth fam-ilies to move to districts that are more homogenously high performing. This would remove the tax base to fund the programs necessary to turn around the lowest-performing schools. Similarly, the more generous the programs for low-performing students, the more low-performing students would be incen-tivized to move into the district, requiring even more resources that districts with wealth-flight would not be able to afford. Therefore, the redistribution necessary to get each student an equitable level of funding needs to take place at a level of aggregation in which Tiebout sorting (or some might call gaming of the system) cannot take place.

By and large, this appears to be what the Obama administration envi-sions the federal role in education to be—a positive development in education policy.

The Blueprint

In March 2010 , the Department of Education released its blueprint for ESEA reauthorization. In it, the department outlined the three major areas for fed-eral action:

1. supporting college- and career-ready standards, preparing college- and career-ready students

2. rewarding progress and success 3. turning around the lowest-performing schools (7)


Under the topic of supporting college- and career-ready standards and stu-dents, the blueprint explained that states need to:

either choose to upgrade their existing standards, working with their 4-year public university system to certify that mastery of the standards ensures that a student will not need to take remedial coursework upon admission to a postsecondary institution in the system; or work with other states to create state-developed common standards that build toward college- and career-readiness (8).

For all intents and purposes, as with Race to the Top, this means that states will be greatly incentivized to participate in the Common Core Standards initiative, described in Chapter 6 . These standards would need to paired with “rigorous and fair accountability and support at every level” (8).

These aforementioned assessments would need to measure growth rather than absolute levels of proficiency. As we have previously discussed, there are serious perverse incentives associated with using a bright-line proficiency cutoff to evaluate schools and school districts, so to correct for that, the blue-print calls for accountability systems based on student academic growth . Like under the directives of NCLB, the blueprint calls for student data to “be dis-aggregated by race, gender, ethnicity, disability states, English Leaner status, and family income” (9). The blueprint does add a call for additional data on attendance (both student and teacher/administrator), discipline, and surveys about school experience.

As was stated by President Obama in the introduction to the blueprint and quoted to introduce this chapter, all standards and assessments will work toward the goal of universal graduation with college- and career-ready skills by 2020. While perhaps slightly more realistic than seeing universal profi-ciency in reading and math by 2014, as was required by No Child Left Behind, seeing all students graduate from high school is a lofty goal. Currently around 70 percent (Greene 2005 ) of students graduate from high school, and that is with standards that almost all non-EIC parties admit are too easy. It may be an uphill battle to paradoxically increase both graduation rates and stan-dards. Yet, there is some evidence from the high-poverty, high-performance schools literature that setting high standards and pushing teachers and stu-dents to meet them can unify a school, actually increasing attendance and graduation rates (Maranto and Shuls 2011 ; Merseth 2009 ). The blueprint calls for performance targets to be developed to measure progress toward the goal of universal graduation with the necessary skills and for the rewarding of districts that succeed and assisting of schools that fail to make that target.

Those states, districts, and schools that succeed will be classified as “reward” states, districts, and schools while those that fail will be labeled as “challenge” states, districts, and schools. President Obama described the pro-posal thusly:


Under these guidelines, schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down (quoted in Dillon 2010 ).

“Rewards” would include increased funds to develop innovative programs, financial rewards for staff and students, or flexibility in the use of ESEA funds. “Challenge” schools would be divided into those that constitute the lowest 5 percent, which would be forced to implement radical turnaround models (discussed below), and those that are failing but do not need such extreme interventions. In the latter case, schools and districts would need to “implement strategies such as expanded learning time, supplemental edu-cational services, public school choice or other strategies to help students succeed,” not unlike the interventions contained in No Child Left Behind. Essentially, schools and districts failing to make adequate progress would see less freedom in how they spend their ESEA dollars.

The lowest 5 percent of schools would receive special attention under the department’s reenvisioning of ESEA. These schools would be assisted by spe-cial grants paid to states to “turn around” their performance. In what appears to be a nod to the issues of excessive flexibility in reconstituting schools in the vague language of NCLB (which we describe in Chapter 4 ), the blueprint prescribes four more strict turnaround models:

1. Transformation model : Replace the principal, strengthen staffing, imp-lement a research-based instructional program, provide extended learn-ing time, and implement new governance and flexibility.

2. Turnaround model : Replace the principal and rehire no more than 50 percent of the school staff, implement a research-based instructional program, provide extended learning time, and implement new gover-nance structure.

3. Restart model : Convert or close and reopen the school under the man-agement of an effective charter operator, charter management organi-zation, or education management organization.

4. School closure model : Close the school and enroll students who attended it in other, higher-performing schools in the district (Department of Education 2010, 12).

So What Exactly Are Growth Models?

Growth models measure student progress rather than the absolute level of stu-dent achievement. As we have previously discussed, almost all tests used for accountability purposes establish some standard for what a child is expected to know and then measure whether or not a student has reached it. The pri-mary problem with using this approach is that it fails to take into account where the student was before he or she walked into the classroom.


Perhaps it would be helpful to explain with an example. Let’s imagine a fourth grade classroom in any one of the thousands of elementary schools across the country. Students would walk into that classroom in August, pen-cils sharpened, backpacks in tow, at various ability levels and various back-grounds. Some students would be high achieving, some low, and most would probably be somewhere in the middle. Throughout the year, Ms. Johnson would do her best to teach the content determined by the state that fourth graders are supposed to know, and at the end of the year, the students would be given an exam to see how well they did in meeting those standards. The problem with using that exam to evaluate Ms. Johnson or her school is that we don’t know where the students were at the beginning of the year, so we don’t know exactly how much Ms. Johnson taught them. Little Jose, for exam-ple, may have come into the classroom as a high-flyer, a student well ahead of his classmates who could have passed the end of the year test the minute he walked in the door. What did Jose learn this year? We can’t tell. Similarly, little Suzy could have walked into the classroom years behind her peers, read-ing and writing at a kindergarten level. Ms. Johnson could very well have worked with Suzy before school, during lunch, and after school to help her catch up, and may very well have gotten her to read and do math at a third-grade level. However, because the test tests whether or not she could do work at a fourth-grade level, the enormous gains that she made (to Ms. Johnson’s credit as much as Suzy’s) would go unnoticed.

Growth models attempt to correct this, incentivizing teachers and schools to push students at all points in the achievement distribution. Right now under NCLB, if we are evaluating Ms. Johnson’s classroom, or the schools in which she teaches, we are really just measuring how well she can help close to average students (the aforementioned bubble students) jump over the hurdle of what they are expected to know in the fourth grade. Therefore, those bub-ble students would “count” more than the students in the tails of the achieve-ment distribution. With growth models, every student would count equally, and, in fact, the students at the low end of the distribution (and therefore with the greatest potential for growth) might even be more valuable to schools and classrooms. This system (at least in theory) is more fair, more equitable, and more transparent.

Thoughts on the Use of Growth Models

Growth models, however, are not all roses and chocolates. There is a broad consensus amongst reasonable education reform advocates (even some in the EIC) that some measures of teacher effectiveness should inform person-nel decisions. While there is agreement by researchers with thoughts such as those expressed by Glazerman et al. ( 2010 ), who write, “there is an obvi-ous need for teacher evaluation systems that include a spread of verifiable


and comparable teacher evaluations that distinguish teacher effectiveness,” there is debate about what these metrics should look like. When it comes to output-based, value-added models, economist Jesse Rothstein frames the debate appropriately. In his 2009 article on the topic, he states, “In order for output-based quality measures to be of use, they must reflect teachers’ causal effects on the student outcomes of interest, not preexisting differences among students for which the teacher cannot be given credit or blame” (2). In plain English, a good model accurately measures what Ms. Johnson contributed to Jose, Suzy, and all of the other students in her class. This is the most impor-tant criterion when it comes to evaluating such models.

Because of nonrandom sorting of teachers and students, large data needs, and tests that are not designed for such purposes, value-added models for accountability purposes produce information that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Teachers and students do not sort randomly into their class-rooms, for their best interest. Classroom placement considerations aim at several goals: to prevent bullying, to foster learning through ability grouping, and to pair students with teachers whose dispositions in teaching and disci-pline styles best suit the students. Perhaps Ms. Johnson runs her classroom particularly effectively and is thus more adept at dealing with students with behavior issues. Perhaps another fourth grade teacher in Ms. Johnson’s school is artistically gifted and therefore works with students who are visual learn-ers much better. A smart principal or lead teacher might move the students around in order to put them into their best learning environment. All of these things are done to help both teachers and students learn and grow better, and any system that disrupts this in the name of teacher accountability would be counterproductive. This disrupts value-added modeling’s ability to be sensi-tive to what Rothstein calls “preexisting differences.”

Some advocates of value-added modeling control for baseline scores; how-ever, as Rothstein points out, “Unless teacher assignments are random con-ditional on the baseline score, estimates will still be biased” (12). Kane and Staiger ( 2008 ) used an experiment wherein teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms, but teachers are not randomly assigned to classrooms in the real world. Rothstein concedes what Koedel and Betts ( 2009 ) argue: that in order to evaluate a teacher, multiple years of data are necessary. Basing our discussion on this major area of agreement, this need immediately removes many of the teachers about whom we are most curious. If the minimum is three years of teacher data, that rules out all new teachers and takes them right up to the time that they receive tenure in most states. Additionally, this presents a problem with high school or other specialized teachers. How do you measure gains in a geometry class or a biology or chemistry class, where students come in with no subject-matter knowledge and thus are assured to have a gain? This limits the model’s ability to provide information to make accountability decisions.


Similarly, as Baker et al. ( 2010 ) argue, if students move (which is highly likely in low-income areas), they would need to be excluded from the cal-culation, making the sample that much smaller, that much less precise, and that much less helpful in making accountability decisions. The tests cur-rently used in accountability systems are not designed for teacher evaluation or value-added modeling. First, in order to yield meaningful results, value-added models need to be based on vertically scaled tests. Vertically scaled tests have a consistent and continuous interval set of scores across grade lev-els. As Baker et al. argue, if the tests are not vertically aligned, the value-added measure is simply a comparison of changes in relative rank, not overall learning. Very few states use vertically scaled tests.

Also, the vast majority of standardized tests are designed with the greatest sensitivity around the mean and any value-added models based off of these tests will be biased toward average students. The bulk of the questions are concentrated around the mean-level student achievement, and the contribu-tions of extremely high-performing students and extremely low-performing students are inaccurately measured. Therefore it is difficult for us to say with confidence exactly what a teacher did for students in the tails, who are the very groups that value-added measurements are so desperately attempting to include.

Glazerman et al. ( 2010 ) ask the very important “compared to what?” ques-tion: is value-added modeling superior to what we have now? We would agree that it is superior, but with an obvious opportunity cost. Getting teachers, policymakers, and other stakeholders on board with value-added modeling-based decision-making would burn a tremendous amount of political capital that will backfire when the first teacher to be fired due to a measurement error sues the district and takes the whole system down. It is important for principals and school leaders to make data-driven decisions, but this infor-mation should only inform them in their decision-making, not make or break the decision. Value-added modeling should not be used as a hard-and-fast NCLB distinction-maker like proficiency levels are now, but should be part of a portfolio of information used to rate the relative effectiveness of teach-ers and schools, as the Obama administration suggests. We should note here that few if any education reformers propose that all or even most of a teach-er’s evaluation depends on value added; rather they make the case that value added must be part of any evaluation system. Without it, evaluations are apt to depend too much on either paper credentials or personal affections, nei-ther of which seems to have much impact on student learning (Greene 2005 ; Winters 2012 ).

In short, there is nothing magical about value-added models, yet we are convinced that they will do more good than harm. At the same time, we must acknowledge that imposing such models entails political risks. EIC mem-bers, particularly teachers’ unions and schools of education, have spent years arguing that certified teachers are interchangeable widgets. Since all teachers


perform equally, it is in this view counterproductive and even divisive to attempt to measure teacher performance and encourage low-performing teachers to copy their more effective peers, or even leave the field. As Winters ( 2012 ) demonstrates, this conventional EIC view contradicts both research and common sense. Studies of state-wide data systems show that it is now possible to identify the best and worst performing teachers using value-added measures, and that contrary to the claims of critics, findings show relatively little variance from year to year. Teacher quality has enormous impacts on student learning, but teacher quality has little to do with the formal qualifica-tions such as certification valued by EIC members. For their part, President Obama and Secretary Duncan have demonstrated the fallacy of the teachers-as-widgets notion. During a town hall meeting at the White House, President Obama (quoted in Winters 2012, 13–14) had the following exchange with a Philadelphia teacher:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: How long have you been teaching? TEACHER: Fifteen years. PRESIDENT OBAMA: Fifteen years. OK, so you’ve been teaching for 15 years.

I’ll bet you’ll admit that during those fifteen years there have been a couple of teachers that you’ve met—you don’t have to say their names (laughter)—who you would not put your child in their classroom (laughter). See? Right? You’re not saying anything. (laughter). You’re taking the fifth (laughter). My point is that if we’ve done everything we can to improve teacher pay and teacher performance and training and development, some people just aren’t meant to be teachers, just like some people aren’t meant to be carpenters, some people aren’t meant to be nurses. At some point they’ve got to find a new career.

Similarly, early in his tenure, before an audience of education researchers, Secretary Duncan argued:

In California, they have 300,000 teachers. If you took the top 10%, they have 30,000 of the best teachers in the world. If you took the bottom 10%, they have 30,000 teachers that should probably find another profession, yet no one in California can tell you which teacher is in which category. Something is wrong with that picture (quoted in Winters 2012, 27).

Unfortunately, the EIC is still reluctant to sign on. Teachers’ unions in par-ticular have often extracted collective bargaining concessions designed to make such measurement impossible. In California, New York, and other states, they successfully lobbied the state legislatures to outlaw such use of data though as we note in Chapter 5 , the Race to the Top successfully pushed them and other similar states to remove such provisions (Brill 2011 ; Moe 2011 ).


What We Know about Turnaround Models

It is smart for the federal government to focus mainly on the lowest-perform-ing schools; however, the evidence we have on so-called “turnaround mod-els” is less than compelling. As education researcher Andy Smarick ( 2010 b) summarized in “The Turnaround Fallacy,” published in Education Next , “Overall, school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations.” He added, “Quite simply, turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America’s troubled urban school districts.” Smarick sum-marized the evidence (or lack thereof) on turnaround models as suffering from the very “compared to what?” problem Glazerman et al. asked previ-ously. The vast majority of research on turnaround models is case studies of individual schools, and we don’t know the independent effect the program had on the school. As IES (the research arm of the Department of Education) states, such case studies are “particularly weak in determining causal validity for several reasons, including the fact that there is no way to be confident that the features common to successful turnaround schools are not also common to schools that fail” (quoted in Smarick 2010b). In short, we don’t know what individual characteristics of the school helped it succeed or fail if all were working at the same time. Was it the teachers? Was it a new discipline plan? Was it the curriculum? We can’t disentangle it.

Perhaps the problem has been the particular implementation of turn-around models in the past. With the extended definition of what constitutes a turnaround, including simply closing the school down and starting fresh, there is ample opportunity for innovation in curriculum and discipline, and ample opportunity for new leaders with bold ideas to build new schools from scratch with the clear, expressed mission of helping struggling students. As Smarick quotes from successful school system leaders, most don’t do turn-arounds because they cannot seem to disentangle their school from the dys-functional system that most likely contributed to its failure in the first place. In particular, they seldom achieve full control over staffing. Indeed, the highly successful KIPP charter network has largely gotten out of the turnaround business. However, if ESEA in the future provides more staffing autonomy to turnaround schools, these programs may show greater success.

Waivers and Half-Measures

On September 28, 2011, the Department of Education released its “ESEA Flexibility” guidelines, providing states with the ability to get around cer-tain requirements of No Child Left Behind by agreeing to a number of the reforms promoted by the Obama administration. As previously stated, the holes in NCLB that promoted a race to the bottom amongst the states have particularly vexed Arne Duncan, a strong proponent of standards-based


accountability. He envisions the Common Core Standards ensuring high levels of student expectations around the country, and set one of the main conditions for ESEA waivers (primarily for states to avoid the expectation of universal proficiency by 2014) as adoption of Common Core Standards or their equivalent. The administration did this by executive fiat.

In this document, the Department of Education outlined the primary reforms it wants to see in order to grant NCLB waivers. First and most impor-tantly, it calls on any state wishing to obtain a waiver to “adopt college and career-ready standards in at least reading/language arts and mathematics” (6) through either adopting “college- and career- ready standards in at least read-ing/language arts and mathematics that are common to a significant num-ber of States” (i.e., the Common Core) or adopting “college- and career-ready standards in at least reading/language arts and mathematics that have been approved and certified by a State network of institutions of higher educa-tion” (6). As stated before, the department has essentially offered a choice where one is not feasible. They are telling states that they can either adopt a set of predrafted, pre-endorsed, and prepromoted standards or enter into the contentious and difficult process of setting new standards with a necessary imprimatur from the state’s institutes of higher learning. There is no way that a state would be able to do that in time to avoid the increasing sanc-tion of NCLB, so in a roundabout way, the US Department of Education is forcing states to adopt the Common Core without forcing states to adopt the Common Core (which it legally cannot do). Politics is the art of the possible, and what is politically possible is often legally messy.

As with the creation of all standards, states must also create assess-ments to measure progress toward the goals outlined in the standards. The Department of Education outlined the process as such, calling on State Education Authorities:

to develop, annual, statewide, high-quality assessments, and correspond-ing academic achievement standards, that measure student growth and are aligned with the State’s college- and career-ready standards in reading/language arts and mathematics, in at least grades 3–8 and at least once in high school, that will be piloted no later than the 2013−2014 school year and planned for administration in all LEAs no later than the 2014−2015 school year (8).

These assessments need to have “ambitious but achievable annual measur-able objectives” (11) which are the cornerstone of “a state-based system of dif-ferentiated recognition, accountability, and support” (10) that will create the already discussed “reward” and “priority” schools. In short, this new account-ability system would work to alleviate many of the federal requirements on average and high-achieving schools so as to focus efforts on the schools that are especially struggling.


While reforming the lowest-performing schools is an admirable goal, it is important to note that, as we have discussed, an important part of NCLB was holding schools accountable for every student in the building. Under these revisions, schools that perform well on average could still be doing a poor job educating small pockets of students within their school that could be “left behind” when their scores are aggregated with other higher-performing stu-dents. For example, some suburban schools do well with most children, but fail to educate their disadvantaged minorities.

At the same time the administration made these waivers available, con-gressional leaders advanced a series of bills slated to reform sections of ESEA. Tennessee Republican and former secretary of education Lamar Alexander, along with republican senators Johnny Isakson, Richard Burr, and Mark Kirk proposed four bills: The Elementary and Secondary Education Amendments Act of 2011, The Teacher and Principal Improvement Act of 2011, The Empowering Local Education Decision Making Act of 2011, and the Empowering Parents through Quality Charter Schools Act. All were referred back to committee in the Senate and are not slated to be seriously tackled for several months, but the Empowering Parents through Quality Charter Schools Act was introduced, voted upon, and passed through the house on September 13, 2011. That version of the bill, sponsored by California Republican Duncan Hunter had a relatively easy path, eventually passing the house 365–54 with 12 abstentions. It has (at time of press) stalled in the Senate.

In total, these bills do not differ significantly from the administrations’ blueprint for ESEA reauthorization, which probably does not bode well for their near-term political future. In the run-up to the 2012 election, all evi-dence points to education taking a back seat , so it is unlikely that Republicans will seriously pursue a bill, especially one regarding federal involvement in a traditionally state-level responsibility. If they did so, they would require their presidential candidate to take a position unpopular with the right flank of their party. Yet over the long run, elite consensus on ESEA reauthorization suggests that after the 2012 political season is over, Congress (perhaps even a lame duck Congress) will pass something similar to the Obama blueprint.

Political Realities of ESEA Reauthorization

The election of 2010 and its shake-up of the congressional landscape cast doubt on the future of ESEA reauthorization. Mirroring the party changes in the House of Representatives, 8 of the 12 governors or mayors leading states or districts that won Race to the Top were replaced, entrusting the key reforms to uncommitted successors. Additionally, the republican freshman class of 2010 , with its strong anti-Obama rhetoric and calls to reduce federal power, replaced more moderate and reform-friendly Democrats, leaving the


democratic caucus “more homogenous, liberal, and NEA-friendly” (Kelly and Hess 2010 ). Thus, an expansion of the federal government’s role in education (which the more conservative Republicans will try to stop) to promote educa-tion reform (which the more liberal Democrats will try to stop) may have very few friends in its corner.

Clear political divisions notwithstanding, cooperative rhetoric has marked initial discussion of ESEA reauthorization. Democratic senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee said in April 2011, “My goal is to have a bill ready for the presi-dent’s signature by late summer. Of course we have no control over the House, but I am hopeful that they will move expeditiously.” Senator Harkin’s House counterpart, republican representative Duncan Hunter, who chairs the Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education Subcommittee concurred, stating, “I think it’ll be done this year, not as soon as the Senate or the President would like it to be, but I think it’ll be done this year, barring any unforeseen circumstances.” Representative George Miller, a California Democrat and ranking member on the Education and Workforce Committee, went so far as to say, “Education continues to be an area where bipartisan agreement is possible . . . We can all agree that the status quo is failing our students and put-ting our future, our economic stability, and our global competiveness at risk” (all quotes from Cox 2011 ).

Arne Duncan has been a serious contributor to the bipartisanship of ESEA reauthorization. Any ill will by Senate and House Republicans toward the president appears to sail cleanly past the Secretary of Education. Minnesota Republican John Kline, the chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, went so far as to describe Duncan as “impossible not to like” (Berman 2011 ). It makes sense. Arne Duncan in almost every public appear-ance, written statement, or op-ed makes the case that education is central to both economic growth and American hegemony, something that traditionally resonates with Republicans. Perhaps more clearly than other policy entrepre-neurs, Duncan articulates a case why suburban and rural voters, even those whose children attend supposedly high-quality public schools, should care about struggling urban schools.

There is also a strong argument to be made that President Obama gener-ally has had a hard time getting legislation through Congress, so there is no reason to believe that ESEA reauthorization would be any different. From the struggles passing healthcare reform with a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate to the protracted struggle in July 2011 to raise the debt ceiling, at seemingly every turn President Obama has struggled to pass legislation. Those on the left, such as Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, attributes this to “the strong con-tingency in the House that doesn’t want to give Obama credit for anything” (quoted in Cox 2011 ). There is some truth to that statement. Even in the face of a national default and a spending cut package widely seen as a Republican


“win,” 66 Republicans still did not vote for it, apparently holding out for what was known to be impossible. However, it would not be unreasonable to see President Obama get equally strong pushback from the left flank of his party. Teachers’ unions, for example, came out strongly against the blueprint, with NEA president Dennis Van Roekel saying that he and his union were “disap-pointed.” Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT was equally critical, argu-ing, “From everything that we’ve seen, this blueprint places 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and gives them zero percent of the authority” (both quoted in Dillon 2010 ).

In short, President Obama burned a nontrivial amount of political capi-tal in pushing through several of his more unpopular proposals, so when it comes time to reauthorize ESEA, he could have little support to give. Former Clinton advisor and prominent political scientist William Galston summed it up thus:

The White House and congressional leaders pursued an agenda that the people mostly rejected while overlooking measures that might well have improved the economy more, and almost certainly would have been more popular, than what they did instead. In short, while Obama was dealt a bad hand, he pro-ceeded to misplay it, making the political backlash even worse than it had to be (Galston 2010 ).

By moving education (an area his predecessor used for bipartisanship) to the back burner while pushing decidedly more controversial healthcare reform early in his presidency, President Obama paid a clear opportunity cost. All of the time, effort, good will, and negotiating high ground the strong mandate of his landslide election got him that he spent passing that legislation is time, effort, good will, and negotiating high ground that he no longer possesses, making passing anything more challenging. This was hinted at specifically in a reported conversation between Representative Kline and Secretary Duncan wherein Duncan reportedly said that he wanted ESEA to proceed “differently from other legislation,” which Representative Kline took as meaning health-care (Berman 2011 ). Couple this fact with a contracting federal budget and anyone can plainly see that Obama’s leverage is dwindling.

Policy Recommendations from Across the Political Spectrum

In “A Way Forward; A Progressive Vision for Reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” the center-left-leaning Center for American Progress outlined its “Five E’s” for ESEA reauthorization. Those five Es are equity, enhancing opportunity, effectiveness, efficiency, and encourag-ing innovation. Specifically, the document (released at a CAP event which included panel discussions featuring George Miller, Arne Duncan, Margaret Spellings, AFT president Randi Weingarten, and others) gave numerous


recommendations, from “ensur(ing) assessments accurately, objectively, and fairly measure student learning” (14) to “require(ing) states to develop teacher and principal evaluation systems and ensur(ing) the equitable distribution of strong teachers” (17), to “require(ing) districts to report per-pupil expendi-tures for each school” (20).

Broadly speaking, the CAP recommendations encourage the Obama administration to try and build a better mousetrap, to fix the glaring issues with NCLB, and to tweak other federal programs (like Title I). Many of the recommendations are extremely reasonable. It does not make a great deal of sense, for example, that districts have to disaggregate student achievement at the school level, but not school finance information. This has led intrepid researchers to dig through district spending data and uncover glaring issues with the distributions of funds earmarked for harder-to-educate students (Roza 2010 ). In fact, the administration requires states receiving stimulus money to track it down to the school level. Similarly, the CAP proposal sup-ports expanding funding for charter schools, a palatable form of school choice for its liberal sensibilities, and “empowering schools to play a greater role in staffing” (32). The work of Bill Ouchi ( 2009 ) and others to uncover exactly how little control an individual principal has over his or her school clearly did not fall on deaf ears, and the recommendation from the document includes freedom to “make human capital decisions” from hiring and firing teachers to compensating more effective teachers to work in more difficult schools. In short, this document offered a series of very reasonable recommendations that did not attempt to radically reshape the federal role in education.

CAP’s center-right counterpart, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, also released a series of recommendations for ESEA reauthorization. Their ESEA Briefing Book, authored by foundation president Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli outlined four major areas of necessary reform: academic standards and assessments, accountability, teacher quality, and flexibility and innova-tion. Described in the executive summary as “a radical rethinking of the fed-eral role in education” (4), their brand of “reform realism” attempts to carve a middle ground between the right-wing “keep the feds out of education crowd” and the (in their estimation) Pollyannaish left-leaning Washington, DC, leaders who think that they can simply build a better mousetrap.

The Fordham report outlined a “tight-loose” form of federal management, in which the federal government is “tight” in its expectations but “loose” in allowing states flexibility in reaching those goals, a theme of Fordham reports since the 1990s. They state that the federal government should be “tight” with respect to requiring states to adopt Common Core Standards (or standards deemed equally rigorous), to set rigorous cut scores, to use growth measures to measure student progress, and to test science and history in addition to reading and math. That is where direct federal involvement stops. When it comes to school ratings, interventions for failing schools, or teacher require-ments, Finn and Petrilli argue the states should be in control. Funding, they


similarly argue, should come more in the form of competitive grant competi-tions like Race to the Top and i3 (discussed in Chapter 5 ), and less in the form of traditional block grants so as to foster innovation without being overly prescriptive.

What ESEA Reauthorization Could Mean for the EIC

Thinking back on what Paul Manna ( 2006 ) argued, policy entrepreneurs need both license and capacity to effect change. When it comes to the various plans offered to reauthorize ESEA, it is helpful to discuss how the varying plans would alter either the license or capacity (and in turn the effectiveness) of the EIC.

Evaluating schools and teachers with valued-added measures, imperfect though they may be, would be a blow to both the license and capacity of the EIC. For as long as bad press has come from underperforming schools, a stan-dard response of the EIC has been that they are given students that are simply too difficult to educate, a popular myth we debunk in Chapter 2 . “Their fami-lies don’t care, their neighborhoods are in shambles, how can they possible be expected to learn?” the familiar refrain repeats. When measuring aca-demic achievement based against a proficiency hurdle, these educators have a strong case. If the aforementioned Ms. Johnson gets a class of Suzies where all students are years behind where they should be (which is not uncommon at many schools serving underprivileged populations), getting them from a kindergarten level to a fourth-grade level would be essentially an impossible task. Shaming or sanctioning those teachers, as is current practice, might do more to increase the capacity of the EIC than diminish it, as the general pub-lic is more sympatric to their plight. Ordinary Americans and their spokes-men (most notably celebrities such as Jon Stewart and Matt Damon) get that these teachers have a difficult job, and want to cut them some slack. However, if those teachers are measured on growth, most of these excuses disappear. All they will become expected to do is add value—that is, to make the child better when he or she leaves the classroom than when he or she enters. This is a much more reasonable request of teachers, and cuts the legs out from under some of the arguments that foment the license of teachers in the lowest-performing schools. 1

Similarly, evaluating teachers on merit as opposed to years of experience and degrees will diminish the capacity of the EIC to protect low-performing (but power-base-contributing) members. The EIC is made stronger the more people that are in it, and more obstinate the worse performing those members are. Therefore, practices that increase the size of the EIC and make it more obstinate make reform more difficult, and practices that decrease its size and make it less obstinate make reform easier. If all of the members of the EIC were high-performing game changers, it would have no problems including


elements of performance evaluation, choice, and competition in the national education system, because it would be confident that it would win. It only blocks these elements because it is confident that it will lose. If the group that through its actions tacitly admits that it would lose in a competitive market runs the education of our children, it is the children that lose.

Focusing federal efforts on the lowest 5 percent of schools would be a huge blow to the license of the EIC. The mandatory testing requirements of NCLB brought to light what had been assumed, but explicit: the bottom 5 percent of school are doing a really terrible job and that even average schools fail to teach disadvantaged and special-needs students. That is not to say that they are not fighting an uphill battle and are not attempting to educate an extremely dif-ficult population. However, with increasingly exorbitant funds, these schools are still simply failing to get the job done. By making this public, it hurts any group that wants to maintain a monopoly on educating these students, as it is clear that the schools are not doing their job. With the loose language of NCLB, these schools have been able to weather the sunshine and shame of testing requirements without being forced to make substantial changes to their operations. Increasingly extreme forced restructuring by the federal government would be even worse PR, especially when it is made clear this is happening because of their continued failure.

By putting real teeth into the turnaround provisions and forcing schools to make radical changes, ESEA could go a long way in dislodging the capacity of the EIC.

8

Moving Forward: Four Trends Remaking Public Schooling and how the Obama Administration

Manages the Changes

Working together, with candor, courage, and commitment, I believe the New Normal can be a wake-up call to America—and a time to rethink how we invest in education for our nation’s children.

— Arne Duncan to the American Enterprise Institute, November 17, 2010

For public education, it is either the best of times or the worst of times. For certain, the times are changing. Predictable EIC policy dominance

is gradually giving way to something else, more quickly than most pre-dicted. Even now, in out of the way places such as Exton, Pennsylvania, the unthinkable is happening. The lead author, who lives in Arkansas, serves on the (unpaid) board of Achievement House, a cyber charter school located in Exton that teaches students from more than a hundred school districts all across the Keystone State. The mere fact that someone in Arkansas can serve, and, if state laws were modified, even tutor or teach “in” a school a time zone away shows the potential for technology to change everything. At a recent physical visit to Achievement House, the author attended the 8:00 a.m. daily meeting of the tenth-grade at-risk team. In the meeting room, a screen showed a cyber class in progress, with images of the teacher and students flashing up as each made comments, their points scrolling down the screen for the rest of us to monitor if we wished. The team included the principal, the western site director (who attended via conference call), the special education coordinator, six teacher-advisors for the tenth grade, and the Chief Curriculum Officer (CCO). Each morning, a different grade-level at-risk meeting takes place, with the school attempting to employ behavioral contracts and frequent contact with students and parents before pressuring


anyone to withdraw for tardiness or absence. Work of the committees, and other efforts to personalize cyber education, has reduced student turnover by about a third. The committee went over the records of eight students, sharing information about how to best reach each and assigning students to one or more “call lists.” Below are examples of typical deliberations.

Student 1

TEACHER: I said, “Can you get two assignments done Friday?” and he said, “I don’t think so.” And then his mom came down and started yelling at him. She’s a good mom, although she does yell and scream. She does get him to attend if you tell her he is not, so you can work with her.

PRINCIPAL: So any time you call his home, ask for mom. TEACHER: He had been lying to his mom about attending. She insisted he

had been, so when we showed her the records online, and after some ini-tial resistance—and we showed her how attendance worked—she cracked down. He has now attended for a whole week.

Student 2

TEACHER: She’s the only one in her family who speaks English, broken English, so don’t bother trying to talk with the mom in that house except in Spanish. She [the student] just had a baby in June, right after she joined. She reads at a second-grade level.

PRINCIPAL: So it sounds like an ESL problem, not a reading problem. TEACHER: Yeah, we’ve already gotten her support, but we need to follow up

on it.

Student 3

TEACHER: I think she is a candidate for a home visit. She is not attending. She is not answering her calls. Her attitude is spotty.

CCO: Is she the one from ___ school district? TEACHER: No, from ___.

Student 6

TEACHER: She is a very sweet girl. She attends every day. She is very good with IMing [instant messaging]. She will get back to you every day, but she is not completing assignments.

SECOND TEACHER: I know her. Did you try a “let’s make a deal”? FIRST TEACHER: I have not done that yet. [They agree that the second teacher

will call her and talk with her.]

MOVING FORWARD 147

Student 7

TEACHER 1: I got a let’s make a deal with her. TEACHER 2: I got a let’s make a deal with her, too. I got a deal that I will over-

look it if she completes two assignments by Friday, but if not the deal is off. TEACHER 1: I told her we have to meet at nine o’clock, and she said, “I can’t. I

have a two year old.” I said, “Wait a minute. I have a two year old and I can make it.” [Several teachers laugh.]

SPECIAL EDUCATION COORDINATOR: For those who have young kids, we need to ask them to go to the Parent’s Club, which is not required but is really helpful for a lot of them.

Student 8

TEACHER: Make sure to praise ___. She has a baby, but is taking care of her assignments. We may want to try to get her in the parenting club as an example.

As these discussions suggest, Achievement House is anything but “elite.” As one administrator put it:

Our goal here is to try to get all of our students in grade level for everything, and have them pass the [state tests]—We can’t deviate from the material. On the special education side we have a huge emotionally disturbed population. We do a lot of life skills and autistic support, mainly by Skype since the facial cues and gestures are so important.

Achievement House also frequently dispatches social workers and others for assessment and home visits. The school has three tracks: career, military, and college; this is appreciated by some parents, who resent traditional pub-lic schools which only emphasize college preparation and treat noncollege-bound students as failures. Many Achievement House students had failed or were bullied in their prior schools. A fourth have diagnosed special education needs and receive services, 60% above the state mean. Most read below grade level on starting, but because of the success of tutoring (much of it through software packages), constant measurement of results, and frequent hand-holding, the school made compliance with NCLB (through “safe harbor” provisions for good value added) in the 2010 /11 school year for the roughly two-thirds of students who stuck with the program. We conducted a survey finding that students and parents gave Achievement House a mean grade of A-, compared to C- for their previous schools. The disparity was even larger for students with special needs and their parents, many of whom com-mented that the online school suited their child’s learning style, and offered


a safe and caring environment. Ironically, parents and students agree that Achievement House teachers are unusually good at relationship building.

The success of Achievement House would have been simply unthinkable a decade ago. Its innovations include the following elements:

1. Educators and students work together even while separated by hun-dreds of miles.

2. Administrators monitor classes while meeting. 3. Educators in different locations act as part of the same team in real

time. 4. Continuous feedback is used to measure student growth. 5. Teachers employ information technology for tutoring, attendance,

and other routine tasks, freeing them to see the big picture and build relationships.

6. Different organizational subunits of a school work together each day, routinely, to address student needs in something approaching real time.

7. A school provides parents real-time feedback, and works with parents to push student attendance and effort.

8. Software is used to monitor whether students are paying attention in class.

As Moe and Chubb ( 2009 ), Tom Vander Ark ( 2012 ), and others detail, this sort of technological innovation is spreading rapidly. It is also among the four key forces likely to reshape American public schools in the coming decade:

1. An aging population increasingly dependent on government entitle-ments, which means that per-student budgets can no longer expand unimpeded.

2. The rise of the creative class, which has led Americans to expect more out of their schools, and to embrace market-oriented and individualized approaches.

3. Most important, as in the case of Achievement House, advancing tech-nology, which is revolutionizing schools in two key ways: by bringing measurement and transparency to schooling, and, as in Achievement House, by bringing new modes of instruction.

4. Political leaders building new personnel pipelines into education, and these new cohorts bringing in new ideas.

In the coming pages, we will argue that the Obama administration recognizes the inevitability of changes resulting from these forces. Unlike EIC members, the administration seeks not to block the tides, but rather to shape them to help kids and ease the transition for adults.

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1. Demography is Destiny

The most predictable, most predicted, and least prepared for change in American history is the aging of the baby boom generation. As Figures 8.1 and 8.2 show, this is having and will continue to have enormous ramifications for education. While we oppose EIC members such as Gene Glass ( 2008 ) on any number of issues, we do agree that America is aging, and this has significant implications for school funding. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2009 there were 39.6 million Americans over 65, 12.9 percent of the US popula-tion. Americans have added roughly three years of longevity each decade since 1900; thus it is predictable and in fact predicted that we will have 72.1 million citizens 65 or over by 2030, 19 percent of the US popula-tion. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO 2007 ) projects health care costs rising from the 16 percent of GDP in 2007 to 25 percent by 2025, due to an aging population, improved care, and systemic inefficiencies. At this writing, President Obama has resisted calls to reform Social Security, and it is not clear whether the administration’s health care reforms will increase or decrease costs over the long term. It is clear that most US gov-ernment expenses go to entitlements for the elderly and near elderly, as Figure 8.3 shows, as do significant portions (chief ly through Medicare, Medicaid, and public servant pensions) of state and local expenditures. These increasing demands will almost certainly squeeze all other gov-ernment expenditures. As the saying goes, state governors may face the Hobson’s choice of serving grandparents or serving grandchildren. In the

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coming decades, the United States, Europe, Japan, and China may each face fiscal Confucianism, in which policy makers lavish resources on the elderly, who vote, rather than the young, who do not.

Yet crisis may provide opportunity. When times are f lush, bureaucracies have little reason to reform (Downs 1967 ). As we have previously argued,

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Figure 8.3 2010 Federal Budget.

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insofar as austerity drives change, this might not be the worst of times for American public education. As we show in Chapters 1 and 2 , simply increasing expenditures will not improve student performance. For too long, policy makers have simply thrown money at schools. This may have caused more problems than it solved. For example, lowering class size at the cost of dipping deeper into the teacher labor market has wasted billions of dollars with few positive results. This classic example of EIC groupthink has set back reform efforts that, while better for kids, are more politically contentious.

The Race to the Top can serve as a model both for future plans for the Obama administration and for presidents to follow. The “take my money, take my reforms” strategy is more likely to enact changes the president wants than any preaching from the bully pulpit, or any strictures codified in federal education statutes and regulations. As we argued in our analysis of No Child Left Behind, actors in schools have an immeasurable infor-mational advantage in avoiding, stalling, and co-opting federal education initiatives, so the only way to enact real change from the federal level is to promote policies that decrease the power of those with incentive to stall. The provisions of Race to the Top that encouraged evaluation of teachers with student-level data offer examples of aligning incentives and remov-ing the power of within-school actors to wiggle out of policies. If states say that x percentage of teacher evaluations come from an objective measure that is relatively transparent, then teachers and administrators have more incentive to copy successful practices rather than fight uphill battles against measurement.

Conspicuously absent from our analysis here is the role of immigration, particularly in the Southwest. EIC defenders (e.g., Glass 2008 ) argue that the changing demographics of students will make the aging population less likely to support education of students that do not look like them. In Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips , Glass argues, “The wealthier White majority—with fewer children and grandchildren than in the past, and with increasing debt and life expectancy—grows less willing to support financially the institutions that are the stewards of poor minority children” (2008, 234). It should be noted that this claim was made with little to no evidence to back it up. More sophisticated analyses by Berkman and Plutzer ( 2005 ) find that demographic self-interest has very little statistical power in predicting school bond elections. American schools have a proud, almost two hundred–year history of educating immigrants and integrating them into American society. Indeed, the most zealous school reform efforts have focused on disadvantaged children, including immigrant children (Mathews 2009; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003 ; Maranto and Shuls 2011 ). Middle-class Anglo children are doing relatively well in our current system; thus school reform generally has focused more on improving outcomes for the disadvantaged.


The Great Recession, Austerity, and the “New Normal”

In part, economic austerity reflects national aging, with older people less likely to start businesses and invent new products and more likely to need (or at least receive) public assistance. Quite simply, older nations grow less, as politicians increasingly understand. On November 17, 2010, Arne Duncan gave a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute which he titled “The New Normal: Doing More with Less.” That speech outlined the opportunity, rather than the burden, of austerity:

It’s time to stop treating the problem of educational productivity as a grinding, eat-your-broccoli exercise. It’s time to start treating it as an opportunity for innovation and accelerating progress.

When describing unproductive ways to deal with the New Normal of auster-ity, Duncan echoed many of the arguments that we have made:

Rethinking policies around seat-time requirements, class size, compensating teachers based on their educational credentials, the use of technology in the classroom, inequitable school financing, the over placement of students in special education—almost all of these potentially transformative productivity gains are primarily state and local issues that have to be grappled with.

These are important first steps in driving the type of transformational change necessary in American public schools. There is no reason to require a set amount of time in a classroom; rather, progress toward clearly defined goals should be measured, and when a student reaches the necessary goal, he or she should be free to move on to a new one, as is typically the case in the postin-dustrial workplace. Simply requiring seat time rather than achievement does not encourage students to give more than token efforts. Similarly, there is little to no evidence that teachers with more credentials do any better, and therefore compensating teachers based on the number of degrees that they have earned is wildly inefficient (as we note in Chapter 2 ). However, schools of education (those in the credentialing business) and individuals that have taken the time and spent the money to earn those credentials will staunchly defend their mer-its, data be damned. Here, the power of austerity may undermine the EIC.

The Great Recession may handcuff Mr. Duncan (and possible successors) on several fronts, though. It appears through the first round of stimulus funding and any talks on future federal funding that giving money to states to prevent teacher layoffs will be a central characteristic of any federal jobs program. While this might do well to stimulate the economy in the short term or at least stave off massive increases in the unemployment rate, it might not help either the economy or the education system in the long term. At best, the short-term increases in funds will delay or smooth out teacher layoffs, allowing bureaucratized school systems to adjust in ways that safeguard the interests of children and adults. At worst, the continuous offer and receipt of

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federal funds will prevent the tough decisions that need to be made regarding teacher hiring, firing, and compensation. Further, traditional liberals are apt to oppose using federal funds to push reform, while Tea Party Republicans might oppose spending the money at all. These austere times are the perfect excuse to trim the teaching force of low performers, but the last-in-first-out policies perpetuated by the EIC in many instances tie the hands of education leaders. If this “new normal” is one in which Last In First Out (LIFO) policies are as politically untenable as they are inefficient and harmful for students, then austerity will drive positive change. But, if the Obama administration continues to send money to states, it is much less likely that they will find the need to push for such reforms.

2. The Rise of the Creative Class

Education Politics Increased affluence and education have fundamentally changed human (and parent) motivations, as Maslow ( 1954 ) predicted long ago. As Florida ( 2002 ) points out, about a third of the workplace is part of the well-paid, well-edu-cated “creative class,” up from perhaps 10 percent in the early twentieth cen-tury. In most communities, this has changed school politics, and everything else. In low-income communities, politics, including school politics, remain largely materialistic, with schools serving as employment for the middle class and, one hopes, upward mobility for the poor. Yet much of American school politics takes a very different flavor. Increasingly, middle- and upper-income Americans are less likely to defer to teachers, principals, and even superintendents as the education experts. Traditional deference to bureau-cratic authority has weakened, meaning that EIC members can no longer dictate to mere parents and citizens to accept without question “research-based best practices,” which in any event are typically no such thing. For example, Fuller ( 2007 ) documents how California EIC backers such as Rob Reiner systematically overstated the likely benefits of early childhood educa-tion in an effort to gain political and financial support for the extension and bureaucratization of what had been market-provided preschool programs. Fortunately, parent activists contested efforts to impose a one-size-fits-all model of “universal pre-K.” Such examples of democracy pain EIC backers such as Glass ( 2008 ) and Ravitch ( 2010 ), who seek public and elite deference to EIC experts. More open and contested school politics also vexes tradi-tional superintendents used to ruling by fiat rather than having to answer questions and defend their decisions with data. Indeed, many school admin-istrators now consider themselves “victims” of the new school politics (Polka and Litchka 2008).

The rise of the creative class has also broadened the demand for differ-ent educational services for different kids with different needs. Of course, Sasha and Malia Obama themselves attend private schools—not conventional


public schools. As noted in Chapter 3 , the same could be said of their parents, and indeed of much of the national political elite.

Schools As Stevens ( 2001 ) points out in Kingdom of Children , decreased deference to authority among the 1960s generation increasingly led parents to question rather than blindly support their children’s schools. The movement to scru-tinize traditional schooling started largely on the left, which sought more child-centered and less bureaucratic approaches to schooling. Indeed, home-schooling started largely as a countercultural phenomenon. Increasingly, however, those on the Christian right have adopted homeschooling, in part to impart their values to their children but even more because they, too, like their counterculture counterparts, dislike and distrust school bureaucra-cies. Parents on both the left and right see the public education system as too driven by rules and turf and insufficiently child- and family-centered; hence both want what Stevens calls “a kingdom of children” rather than one of and for grownup educators and administrators. In part, this is linked to smaller family size, leading parents to lavish more attention and concern on individual children. Like homeschooling, Stevens links the rise of special education’s Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), and Montessori and other private and charter schools to these broader cultural shifts. Further, there is reason to think that a market-based system of education will provide a better match between schools and individual student needs (Friedman 1962 ; Goldberg 1997 ). Increasingly, even schools of education are acknowledging that broader social changes push schools to work with rather than dictate to parents (Henderson et al. 2007).

Management Efforts to reinvent schooling reflect a broader revolution in public and private management, in part due to cultural changes of the baby boom and post–baby boom generations. A wide range of management gurus, most notably private sector gurus Tom Peters and Bill Ouchi (e.g., Peters and Waterman, 1982 ; Ouchi 1981 ) and public sector guru David Osborne (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Osborne and Plastrik 1997), urge leaders to discard outdated processes, reduce hierarchy, empower lower-level employees, and replace regulation of behavior with measurement of success. In addition, these gurus propose using markets to supply services where possible, so consumers can best satisfy their needs. Maranto (2001) and more notably Ouchi ( 2009 ) have applied the new management ideas to schooling, proposing that schools empower principals to lead, empower parents to choose their schools, and measure success wher-ever possible. It is important to note that survey research finds that teachers feel more empowered and have higher morale in private schools and in char-ter schools than in traditional public schools, suggesting again that a highly

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bureaucratic workplace does not work for knowledge workers (Chubb and Moe 1990 ; Maranto et al. 2001 ).

Notions of empowered management fit with baby boomer and post-boomer culture, which expects autonomy and self-actualization rather than mere security and convenience in work. In short, modern public servants want to make a difference (Aaron and Mann 1993 ), and Teach For America and other new education recruiters make use of this idealism (Hess 2010 a). The new approaches to school management, quite simply, have nothing in common with the more hierarchical Progressive approaches still favored in colleges of education. As Hess ( 2010 a, 95, 104) points out, surveys show that most teachers with more than 20 years of experience report that professional development has made no difference in their teaching. More than 60 percent of the alumni of schools of education report that their college training did not prepare them for classroom realities. Similarly, just one-third to one-half of principals think that their training prepared them for challenges such as serv-ing diverse learners, employing performance assessments, and implementing curricular standards. Ninety-six percent of principals see their colleagues as more useful than their graduate studies, and two-thirds found their graduate schools to be out of touch with school realities.

The new approaches also fit with at least some of what the Obama admin-istration wants to do with or to public education. As Peterson (Peterson, Rave, and Wong 1986; Peterson 1994 ) argued, states and localities have an incentive to have good schools. It behooves the president and the federal government to leverage this incentive structure rather than fight it. By following, generally, Peterson’s framework of redistributing when necessary and facilitating com-petition the rest of the time, the president can take advantage of the system of federalism to leverage the types of change that will make the education system better. In short, the system will function best if the president treats states and school districts more like charter schools.

Charter schools trade accountability for autonomy, but not complete autonomy. Depending on the state, charter schools are governed by regula-tions on a spectrum from onerous to liberating. While most charter school operators will tell you that they have way too many regulations, many of those regulations are worthwhile. Most states, for example, require that teachers in charter schools have background checks to make sure that they are not sex offenders. Similarly, most states require that charter schools demonstrate financial viability, and prove that they are not simply pocketing the money sent to them to educate students. These regulations, and those like them, serve to weed out the charlatans that inevitably show up when public dollars are offered to individuals or groups to perform a service.

Historically, the federal government has needed to play a large role in ensuring the civil rights of students, but it is no longer 1965. When Orval Faubus and George Wallace sent troops to prevent students from integrating


schools, clearly the federal government needed to intervene to allow students equal access to educational services. One must only see the old recordings of a young Ruby Bridges walking past the “concerned citizens” of New Orleans holding up a child’s size casket with a black doll in it to see a clear argument for a federal role in education. However, as researchers such as Sabato ( 1983 ) and Rivlin ( 1992 ) show, the “Good-Time Charlies” that allowed this to hap-pen are thankfully long gone. The increased responsibility of governors and the increased transparency provided by the national media have weeded out the racists, or at least made their decisions to deny the rights of citizens of color politically costly.

Thus, if the federal government advocates for a limited number of reg-ulations—essentially those to keep out the most egregious mishaps of the “laboratories of democracy”—provides funds for hard-to-educate students, and advocates for reforms through competitions for additional money, it can leverage the most positive change.

3. The Technology “Tsunami”

As a result of information technology, events that were unthinkable only a few years ago have actually occurred. As Steven Brill ( 2011 , 364–370) details, in 2010 the Los Angeles Times released the value-added measures of the effectiveness of thousands of Los Angeles public school teachers. Even though superintendent Ramon Cortines assured reporters they could use the data, his own bureaucracy allied with the local teachers’ union to keep the data secret. Eventually the Times sued, and reporters wrote the story, which became one of the most downloaded in the history of the newspa-per. For the first time, members of the public could see what EIC insiders always publicly denied but privately acknowledged: some teachers are far more effective than others, and teacher productivity has little or no impact on teacher pay and job security. This happened at about the same time that the Obama administration, through Race to the Top, was pushing states to change (typically union-developed) laws making it impossible to consider teacher-level student achievement data in school management, as we detail in Chapter 5 . As Brill notes, the story no doubt helped the administration make its case.

As this and the very existence of NCLB makes clear, modern measurement instruments enable schools to join late-twentieth-century management by results rather than management by tradition, seniority, or political intrigue. Over the long term, this will be difficult for the EIC to resist. Perhaps more important, technology can and will revolutionize how schooling is conducted. With an increasingly digital younger generation and increasingly digitized knowledge and service, technology is a “tsunami,” as Stanford political scien-tist and education policy visionary Terry Moe likes to say, an enormous force

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that simply cannot be contained. Try as the status quo might, he and John Chubb argue in Liberating Learning (2009), the innovations presented and the opportunities for specialization and individualization are too incredible for anyone to co-opt, stall, or block. Technology allows people, in all other domains of their lives, to individualize what information they will consume, to communicate instantly and effortlessly, and to be constantly connected to their community. These actions and habits virtually define the creative class. As technology expands across social and economic life, it will likewise expand into education. The possibilities for individualization and customiza-tion are near limitless. Innovators such as Salman Khan at the Khan Academy and charter school networks such as Rocketship in California, Carpe Diem in Arizona (Jacob 2011 ; Vander Ark 2012 ), and Achievement House in Pennsylvania have demonstrated the first steps of the individualization of education, allowing for remediation of struggling students and enrichment of soaring students simultaneously in the same classroom. Organizations such as School of One and the Florida Virtual School are in the early stages of tak-ing these innovations to scale. Notably, Achievement House contracts with Florida Virtual to provide its advanced placement courses, not a traditional focus of Achievement House.

Broadly speaking, we agree with Moe and Chubb’s assessment with one key caveat. As we have explained, a key advantage of the EIC is holding the high ground in an information asymmetry. EIC club members know what goes on in schools and how students are doing, better than either the parents sending the students into the schools or the politicians charged with holding them accountable. Through this, the EIC distorted information and avoided accountability. Technology is a force to be reckoned with, but we must recall other “tsunami”-level forces that one could reasonably believe would take over education and have not. Choice, for example, is a basic tenet of human exis-tence. Walking down the aisle of a grocery store, wandering through a used car lot, or perusing the shelf of a book store is all the evidence you need that humans, and especially Americans, like choices. However, the same diversity of choice is missing from the American educational landscape. Public schools systems are by and large identical to one another, with only slight variations in the particular age groupings of schools (some elementary schools are K–4, others K–5, and the like), and with even less variety in curriculum and instructional methods. The similarity in curriculum and methods can be partly blamed on the limited number of textbook publishers (Ravitch 2003 ), the de facto standardizers of course content, but the similarity of pedagogy and organization is best understood as a product of the EIC as a whole. EIC power over and support for the status quo in teacher training and contracts have blocked even the most fundamental human desires from coming to frui-tion in schools. Moe and Chubb ( 2009 ) believe that the “tsunami” will simply wash away the EIC, but what if through certification and regulation the EIC can limit and constrain technology and customization? After all, a generation


ago Chubb and Moe ( 1990 ) argued that school choice would sweep away tra-ditional public schooling as we know it.

4. New Schools, New Leaders, and New Teachers

Finally, while for the most part eschewing a frontal assault on schools of education, the Obama administration has, in a not so quiet way, sought to broaden the educational personnel pipeline. As the Los Angeles Times story makes clear, teacher quality is key to reforming schools; yet the EIC has stead-fastly refused to admit that the relatively high percentage of new teachers coming from the bottom third of college graduation classes, at relatively low-tiered colleges, might cause concerns (Hess 2010 ; Winters 2012 ).

The EIC’s mixed views toward academically talented new entrants to the field are not new. In the 1970s, the lead author, then a University of Maryland undergraduate, considered studying to become a high school social studies teacher. He decided against this when an education professor told him that he had no need to understand the subjects he taught since “the curriculum people will tell you what to teach.” When he questioned the wisdom of this approach, the professor became defensive and insisted that it did not matter what a mere undergraduate thought: those were the rules and the rules must be followed. Further, the professor argued, a high school teacher who actually liked his or her content area might have trouble relating to students who did not like it. Since apparently a hatred of learning was a prerequisite for teach-ing, the lead author realized it wasn’t for him. Three friends at two different universities had identical experiences with education professors or advisors, with tragic results: they went to law school (though years later one became a high school teacher through alternative certification).

These experiences reflect a long history, and as we state in Chapter 1 , his-tory matters . As David Labaree writes in The Trouble With Ed. Schools (2004), American schools of education were designed in an era of rapid school expan-sion, to swiftly increase the supply of teachers no matter their quality. This was consistent with the notion that teaching was a craft rather than a sci-ence. Further, as “women’s work,” quite unlike law or medicine, teaching and teacher preparation were not deemed worthy of large investments, in part since the women entering the profession often left to marry in a few years. We are still paying for these long-ago policies. Yet for a time the system worked, in part because women were not allowed other career opportunities (Brill 2011 ). As Hess ( 2010 a, 98–99) writes:

Fifty years ago, each teacher would instruct a roomful of students for six hours a day under the savvy management of a principal and would do pretty much this same job for 25 or 30 years. While a lousy way to attract and retain talent, this was a perfectly plausible approach when schools had little competition for

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the services of smart, college-educated women. Today, this model is no longer tenable, yet the overhang of labor agreements, staffing routines, teacher expec-tations, and training programs combine to keep it firmly in place.

Such bureaucratization can no longer attract the best and brightest, as Hess (2010a) details. Today’s talented young people want more power over their jobs, more ability to make a difference, and are less attracted to long-term security.

Further, as numerous reports have argued for years, American schools of education lack sufficient academic rigor and applied acuity . Consequently, those they train, teachers and administrators at traditional public schools, often do not have the knowledge and skill for their very difficult work. In particular, teachers and administrators have insufficient training in class-room management (Wong and Wong 2009 ) and content knowledge (Hirsch 1996 ). Unlike those promoting inchoate “twenty-first-century skills” and the like, Maranto et al. ( 2010 ) have proposed that, like the business schools of the 1950s, contemporary schools of education should be reorganized around highly rigorous academic disciplines with well-established academic quality ; such programs would seem more likely to offer the skills and content teachers and administrators need. Psychology, biology, statistics, and content knowledge in the disciplines taught in K–12 schooling make the most likely candidates for areas of concentrated study. As Hirsch writes, teachers should have sub-stantial knowledge of and enthusiasm for content knowledge. Without this, a teacher is no more likely to be a good teacher than is a football coach who hates football likely to inspire players and win games. Secondly, grounding in psychology and biology has the potential to give future teachers a good understand of how the brain works and thus how students learn. This can inform lesson planning, as Daniel Willingham ( 2009 ) shows in Why Don’t Students Like School? Third, knowledge of statistics and testing would allow teachers and principals to make continuous improvements in instruction, as Teach for America’s Steve Farr ( 2010 ) points out.

The Obama administration has sought to remake the school personnel pipeline in three key, though indirect, ways. First, at least rhetorically, the administration has encouraged states to measure individual-level teacher effectiveness, and eventually link this to the schools of education that trained those teachers. Over the long run, if this occurs, it seems certain to affect how schools of education will train future teachers and leaders, making the field more transparent and ultimately more effective. Like us, the Obama admin-istration believes that measurement is key to success. Once the measurement genie is out of the bottle and citizens and business interests can see relative rates of effectiveness, change will become an imperative. Likewise, schools of education will have the data to compare themselves with rivals and mar-ket themselves as more effective. Second-tier schools, in particular, will want to show that they produce better teachers than flagship institutions. Second,


the administration has supported merit pay plans to attract and retain more talented teachers, those for whom the traditional stability of collective bar-gaining agreements may be less attractive. Teaching is a very difficult job. Done well, it requires almost constant adjustment. The teachers of tomor-row, especially those integrating new technologies, will need to be risk-takers and self-starters. Compensating them as interchangeable widgets will simply not suffice. This is especially true in high-needs communities, where schools must compensate for the relative disorganization of families. Third, and related to this, the administration has recognized alternative pipelines into teaching and school leadership, most notably Teach for America, which by Obama administration fiat is now a recognized producer of certified teach-ers. Though its training programs are still evolving and are not yet clearly superior to those within schools of education, TFA has brought a wealth of new talent into public education in low-income communities. The 107 school-strong KIPP network of charter schools is just one of the educational innova-tions led by TFA alumni, who increasingly lead large school districts. TFA and other alternative leader and teacher certifiers seem certain to increase their market share, as Figure 8.4 suggests. Given the mixed record of tradi-tional schools of education, this is likely to do more good than harm.

Conclusion: Obama, Romney, and School Reform Sustainability

These four forces—an aging population, a rising creative class, a tsunami of technology, and new entrants into the teaching field—are inextricably bound

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to the power struggle of the Education Industrial Complex. Remember what binds together the members of the EIC: all have a direct financial and ideologi-cal stake in maintaining the status quo in American public schools. As we have argued, the EIC will never concede to the types of change necessary to help students across the country get the education that they deserve. They must be forced. In assessing the Obama administration on how well it has forced the EIC to change, we must give a positive grade. We are not policymakers, so we have no need to oversell our claims. Has President Obama set into motion policies that will completely dismantle the EIC? No. Will the Obama adminis-tration oversee the busting of public sector unions as many on the right would wish? Absolutely not. Do we expect to see President Obama attending the rib-bon cutting of a new school funded by school vouchers? No. But, has the presi-dent advanced policies that will, for the foreseeable future, do more good than harm and limit powers of the EIC? Yes. Barack Obama is a genuine school reformer, and we believe that over the long term children will be better off because of it. The Obama education agenda is good public policy.

Perhaps equally important, we believe that the Obama reforms are politi-cally sustainable. Though nothing in politics is ever certain, as we write this it seems very likely that either Barack Obama or former Massachusetts gover-nor Mitt Romney will be president in 2013 and beyond. On the stump, while attacking President Obama’s foreign policy and economic policies, Romney has been more gentle in his criticism of the president’s education policies. As governor, Romney took education seriously, and on the strength of work by the governor and his predecessors the state boasted the highest NAEP scores in the nation. In his campaign manifesto, the data-loving Romney ( 2010 , 194–223) offers a lengthy and unusually detailed chapter on education, com-plete with two graphs showing the non relationships between achievement and class size, and achievement and per-pupil spending. While unlike President Obama, Romney seems likely to back school vouchers, in essentially every other respect his education axioms and agenda resemble that of the president. Like President Obama, Governor Romney has substantial experience work-ing with (and against) educational administrators. Like President Obama, Governor Romney sees education as key to economic growth generally and as the new civil rights struggle for the disadvantaged. Like President Obama, Governor Romney sees measurement as vital to improvement, and wants to remake the education talent pipeline. Like President Obama, Governor Romney wants to revamp collective bargaining agreements and make mea-surement a part of how we evaluate and compensate teachers. Like President Obama, Governor Romney has experience in private schools, and indeed sent one of his children to private school, though in his case only after a bad expe-rience in a public school. Like President Obama, Governor Romney wants to expand charter schools, and indeed fostered some expansion as gover-nor. Like President Obama, Governor Romney seems to understand that the interests of children sometimes clash with EIC jobs and turf. At such times, Romney sides with the powerless.


In short, in part because of the hard work and political risk-taking of President Obama, president George W. Bush, and myriad reformers of both parties, whoever serves as president in the coming years will be an educa-tion reformer. Though there remain disagreements as to exact timing and exact methods, education reform has become a bipartisan occupation. The reform movement may be where the civil rights movement was in 1960. While enormous work remains, reformers have by and large won the war of ideas. No matter the results of the next few elections, the Educational Industrial Complex faces a challenging future. That’s what happens when you’re on the wrong side of history.

Notes

1 History and Policy

1 . Here and elsewhere we should note that “lead” refers to alphabetical order. Each author made equal contributions.

2 . Even so, some public-private partnerships remained. For example, since the mid 1800s, Maine and Vermont have funded “tuitioning” programs in which school districts without public schools pay student tuition at either public or private schools elsewhere, forerunners of today’s school voucher programs (Maddaus and Mirochnik 1992 ).

3 The Obama Education Agenda: The Personal is Educational

1 . In an amusing example, a recent New York Times photo shows a protesting teacher holding a sign that says, “I want my vote back.”

2 . Similarly, Galston ( 2011 ) ponders the question of why the president ignored polit-ical warning to push ahead with health care reform, a much more controversial matter than any of his education policies.

3 . In the interest of full disclosure, the second author of this book worked as the research assistant of the lead author of that study.

5 Race to the Top: Introducing Competition for Federal Dollars

Sections of Chapter 5 were originally published as Daniel H. Bowen’s 2010 Politics and the Scoring of Race to the Top Applications. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute (AEI). We thank AEI for permission to republish.

1 . In 2009, the total education expenditure (Local, State, and Federal) in the United States was over $600 billion, as noted in Chapter 2.

2 . Due to the fact that Washington, DC, could not have had either a senatorial or governor race, it was excluded from the analysis.

3 . Calculated by taking the absolute value of the percentage point difference between Obama and McCain in the 2008 election (e.g., for Florida, this number is 1 – [.51 – .48] = .97).

164 NOTES

4 . Dummy variable on whether CQ Politics deemed the seat a “potential gain” (for either party) or “tossup” for the 2010 election; note: state status is based on status at the beginning of March, the time during/just prior to announcement of Round 1 winners. The statuses of these races may have changed since this time (“Senate Races in 2010,” CQ Politics , Accessed August 2010)http://innovation.cq.com /senate2010_map).

5 . Dummy variable on whether CQ Politics deemed the seat a “potential gain” (for either party) or “tossup” for the 2010 Election; note: state status is based on status at the beginning of March, the time during/just prior to announcement of Phase 1 winners. The statuses of these races may have changed since this time (“Races for Governor in 2010,” CQ Politics , Accessed August 2010 http://innovation .cqpolitics.com/atlas/gov2010).

6 . For the second round of RTT scoring, it was possible to use polling data to obtain a more precise measure of the closeness of gubernatorial and Senate races. For the second round (only), I ran two separate analyses—one using the CQ Politics dummy variables and another using Rasmussen Polling Data in relatively the same manner as that used to calculate the closeness of the 2008 presidential elec-tion. For these I took the point differential of the polled front-runner and sub-tracted from 100 (e.g., if candidate A was leading at +5, then the closeness of the race was scored a 95: 100–5. However, despite greater precision, there was virtu-ally little to no impact on the final results.

7 . “Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Summary—US Department of Education,” US Department of Education, May 7, 2009 , http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview /budget/budget10/summary/edlite-section1.html.

6 Common Core Standards: Developmental, Redistributional, and Contentious

1 . For a full exposition of the sometimes sordid nature of the standard process, see Ravitch ( 2003 ). Indeed many school districts have decided to leave off such “con-troversial” topics as human evolution when covering biology, mainly to avoid public outcry.

2 . This is not just a problem for low-performing students; our colleagues Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee ( 2011 ) use testing data to illustrate the large gaps between even our high-performing students and their international peers.

3 . See www.corestandards.org. 4 . See http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Quotes-from-Supporters.pdf. 5 . “Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own

government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights” (personal letter, Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, from Paris, January 8, 1789, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits / jefferson/60.html).

6 . There was also, to be sure, a strong anti-Catholic element to the “assimilation” of Horace Mann, as at the time to be “American” meant to read the King James Bible and refuse to swear allegiance to a foreign potentate (such as the Pope).

http://innovation.cq.com

http://innovation.cqpolitics.com/atlas/gov2010

http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget10/summary/edlite-section1.html

http://www.corestandards.org

http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Quotes-from-Supporters.pdf

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits

http://innovation.cq.com

http://innovation.cqpolitics.com/atlas/gov2010

http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget10/summary/edlite-section1.html

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits

NOTES 165

7 Reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Challenging the Education Industrial Complex

1 . As an aside, value-added studies frequently find that schools serving affluent students do not do well on value-added measures. Accordingly, widespread use of such measures might prove controversial in affluent communities, where many parents have paid large sums to buy homes in proximity to public schools that are not as good as their reputations. In fairness, school administrators in those com-munities argue that since most children already have solid achievement on sub-jects tested, it may make sense to focus on extracurricular activities and untested subjects.

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Index

Accountability 6 6 , 67 , 73–78 , 83 , 84–87 , 90 , 91 , 94–96 , 118 , 120 , 122 , 123 , 126–137

Achievement House 2 3 , 145–148 , 157 Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) 8 4 ,

88–90 , 121 Alexander, Lamar 2 1 , 138 Alinsky, Saul 5 6–57 Alternative Certification for Teachers

61 , 160 American Education Research

Association (AERA) 2 0 , 42 American Enterprise Institute 4 , 145 ,

152 , 163 American Federation of Teachers

(AFT) 3 , 81 , 93 , 98 , 114 , 140

Barrett, Craig 1 17 Bayh, Birch 8 1–82 Bell, Terrell 2 0 , 49 Bennet, William 3 0 Better Education for Students and

Teachers Act (BEST) 8 2 Biden, Joe 4 6 Bilingual Education Act of 1 968 18 Boehner, John 6 8 , 69 , 81–83 Booker, Cory 9 8 Bridges, Ruby 1 56 Brill, Steven 5 0 , 107–109 , 156 Broder, David 7 4 Brown vs. Board of Education 1 6 “Bubble” Students 8 8 , 120 , 129 , 132 Buchanan, Pat 7 5 Bush, George H.W. 35 , 46 , 61 , 70 , 127 Bush, George W. 4 , 13 , 14 , 21 , 22 , 35 , 46 ,

55 , 57 , 58 , 61 , 70 , 73 , 74–87 , 93 , 110 , 114 , 128 , 162

Cardinal Principles 9 –12 , 15 Carter, Jimmy 1 9 , 46 Center for American Progress 1 40 Charlottesville Education Summit

46 , 114 Charter Schools 2 , 21 , 26 , 29 , 37 , 46 , 66 ,

70 , 81 , 89 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 , 138 , 141 , 154 , 155 , 160 , 161

Clinton, William (and Administration) 4 , 17 , 21 , 22 , 46 , 55 , 70 , 78–80 , 114 , 127 , 140

Clinton, Hillary 3 , 59 Committee of Ten 9 –10 Common Core 2 2 , 23 , 36 , 70 , 111–120 ,

123–126 , 130 , 137 , 141 , 164 Connor, Bull 1 6 Content Standards 8 7 , 111 , 113 Council of Chief State School Officers 2 2 ,

115 , 116 , 123 “Counter Manifesto” 123 Creative Class 2 3 , 148 , 153 , 157 , 160 Critical Pedagogy 1 18–119 Curry, Boykin 9 8

Darling-Hammond, Linda 6 6 DC Opportunity Scholarship

Program 2 1 , 54 , 67–68 Democrats for Education Reform 2 1 , 50 ,

55 , 66 , 98 Demographic Decline 3 1–33 Demography 1 0 , 26 , 149 Desegregation 1 6–17 Dewey, John 6 1 Dole, Robert 7 9 Dropout Rates 1 , 10 , 71 , 118 Duncan, Arne 4 9 , 66 , 98–99 , 108–109 ,

136 , 139–140 , 152

184 INDEX

Economic opportunity Act of 1 964 Edflex 8 0–84 Edley, Christopher 6 6 Education for All Handicapped Children

Act of 1 975 18 Education Spending 2 6 , 46 , 47 , 88 , 94 Educational Industrial Complex (EIC)

5 , 22–26 , 34 , 36–38 , 40–51 , 54 , 58 , 61 , 66–70 , 84 , 96–97 , 108 , 119 , 122–126 , 130–135 , 142–145 , 148–153 , 156–158 , 161

Eisenhower, Dwight D. 16 Elementary and Secondary Education

Act 6 , 17 , 19 , 74 , 80 , 83 , 127–131 , 138 , 139 , 141–143 , 165

Eliot, Charles 9 Elite 2 , 20–23 , 38–42 , 44 , 46 , 48–50 , 57 ,

70 , 75 , 84 , 129 , 138 Empowering Local Education Decision

Making Act 1 38 Empowering Parents through Quality

Charter Schools Act 1 38 English Language Learners 8 , 32 Evaluation, Teacher 9 4 , 98 , 132–134 ,

141 , 151 Evers, William 1 23–124

Faubus, Orval 1 6 , 155 Federal Charter Schools Program 9 7 Federal Role in Education 8 4 , 121 , 127 ,

129 , 141 , 156 Fenty, Adrian 6 5 Finn, Chester E. “Checker” 20 , 21 , 30 , 38 ,

50 , 80 , 114 , 121 , 141 Fogel, Robert 7 6 Fordham, Thomas B. Institute 2 2 , 91 ,

121 , 141 Funding 1 2 , 14 , 18–20 , 29 , 94 , 95 , 128 ,

129 , 141

Gallo, Frances 6 7–68 Gates, William (Bill) 2 2 , 36 , 97 , 115 , 125 Glass, Gene 3 8 , 43 , 149 Goals 2 000 46 “Good-Time Charlies” 100 , 156 Gore, Al 3 5 , 61 , 79 Great Society, The 1 6 Greene, Jay P. 26 , 38 , 112 , 120 , 123 , 124 Gregg, Judd 8 1–83 Growth Models 1 31–132

Hanusek, Eric 2 9 , 31 , 34 , 86 Harkin, Tom 1 39 Henig, Jeff 4 6 Hess, Frederick 5 0 , 155 , 158 , 159 Hickock, Eugene 8 1 , 87 Hirsch, E.D. 9 , 50 , 85 , 117 , 118 , 159 Howell, William 9 0 , 122 Hunter, Duncan 1 28 , 138–139 Hyperpluralism 4 0

Immigration 7 5 , 115 Indian Self-Determination and Education

Assistance Act of 1 975 18 Individualistic Political Culture 7 –8 Isakson, Johnny 1 38

Jeffords, Jim 8 1–83 Jennings, Jack 1 39 Johnson, Claudia 1 32 , 133 , 142 Johnson, Lyndon B. 17–19 , 127

Kennedy, John F. 16–17 Kennedy, Robert F. 19 Kennedy, Theodore (Ted) 8 2–84 Kerry, John 3 5 , 61 King, Dr. Martin Luther 4 1 , 50 Kirk, Mark 1 38 Klein, Joel 4 6 Kline, John 1 09 , 139 , 140 Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) 3 4 ,

96 , 136 , 160 Kress, Sandy 7 7 , 80 , 82 , 84 Kristof, Nicolas 7 5

Labaree, David 1 0 , 158 Lanham Act 1 4 Last in First Out (LiFO) 1 53 Ledley, Charles 9 8 Lieberman, Joseph 6 8 Little Rock Central High School 1 6 Local Educational Authorities (LEAs) 4 4

Madison, James 1 3 , 15 , 38 , 41 , 122–125 Mann, Horace 7 , 117 , 164 Manna, Paul

License and Capacity 9 9 , 124 , 142 Sanctions of No Child Left Behind 8 9 Theory of Action of No Child Left

Behind 8 6–87 Matthews, Jay 5 0

INDEX 185

McCain, John 3 , 94 , 98 , 132–134 , 141 , 151 Mead, Sara 8 9 , 90 Memoranda of Understanding 1 08 Merit Pay 2 , 21 , 42 , 67 , 70 , 98 , 160 Miller, George 8 1–83 , 98 , 139 , 140 Moe, Terry 3 , 59 , 156 Moralistic Political Culture 7 , 8 , 38 Morality/Moral Objectives 5 4–56 , 65 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 1 9 Myths

Cutback 2 6–28 Decline 3 0–31 Money 2 8–29 Reformers as Elitists 3 6–37 Related Input 3 4–36 Schools Don’t Matter 3 3–34

Nation at Risk 1 4 , 20 , 30 , 45 , 46 National Assessment for Education

Progress (NAEP) 1 , 30 , 31 , 46 , 48 , 66 , 78 , 80 , 85 , 90 , 91 , 113 , 161

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 3 6 , 114

National Defense Education Act 1 5 National Education Association 9 , 14 , 36 ,

43 , 66 National Education Standards and

Improvement Council 1 14 National Governors Association 2 2 , 116 National Institute of Education 1 13 National Standards 2 2 , 23 , 80 , 112–115 ,

121–124 No Child Left Behind 2 1 , 59 , 66 , 67 , 73 ,

74 , 87 , 89 , 91 , 96 , 110 , 114 , 121 , 127–131 , 136 , 151

Noddings, Nell 1 1

Obama, Barack 1 –6 , 13 , 17 , 21–16 , 28–33 , 35 , 36 , 38 , 43 , 45 , 46 , 49–76 , 78 , 91–108 , 112–115 , 118 , 126–130 , 134 , 135 , 136 , 138 , 145 , 148–154 , 156–158 , 160

Obey, David 9 7 Office of Management and Budget 4 0 Olasky, Marvin 7 6 “Old Deluder Satan” Law 9 Open Systems 4 4–45 , 49 Opportunity to learn standards 1 11 Osborne, David 1 54 Ouchi, Bill 8 6 , 141 , 154

Paige, Rod 8 2 Palin, Sarah 6 1 Paul, Rand 2 1 , 109 Payne, Charles 3 3 Performance Standards 1 11 Peters, Tom 1 54 Peterson, Paul

Developmental Policy 1 2 , 120 , 124 , 126 , 155

Redistributive Policy 1 2 , 120 , 123 Theory of Federalism 1 2 , 120–130

Petry, John 9 8 Pluralism 2 5 , 31 , 37–40 , 44 Policy Monopolies 1 4 , 38–42 Private Schools 3 3 , 35 , 37 , 59 , 60 , 62 , 64 ,

68 , 69 Privilege 3 8–40 Professional Development 3 4 , 35 , 67 , 155 Progressive Policy Institute 7 8 Punahou School 6 0–61

“Race to the bottom” 81 , 87 , 90 , 114 , 121–123 , 126 , 136

Race to the Top 3 , 6 , 17 , 22 , 46 , 54 , 57 , 59 , 70 , 93–112 , 115 , 130 , 135 , 138 , 142 , 151 , 156 , 163

“Rouge Vetters” Hypothesis 1 01 , 107–108

Racial Identity 6 2 , 118 Ravitch, Diane 3 2 , 46 , 111 , 113 , 153 Reagan, Ronald 1 4 , 19–21 , 40 , 45 , 47–49 ,

57 , 68 , 70 Reiner, Rob 1 53 Restart Model 1 31 Rhee, Michelle 6 6 , 109 Richard, Burr 1 38 Richards, Ann 7 5 , 77 Rivlin, Alice 1 00–101 , 156 Roemer, Timothy 8 1–83 Romney, Mitt 1 60–161 Rothstein, Jesse 1 33

Sabato, Larry 1 00 , 156 Schnur, Jon 5 7 School Choice 2 , 3 , 16 , 20 , 33 , 36 , 37 , 48 ,

57 , 60 , 65 , 66 , 76 , 80 , 81 , 84 , 87 , 89 , 90 , 131 , 141 , 158

School Closure Model 1 31 Secretary of Education 3 6 , 66–69 ,

138–139

186 INDEX

Segregation 1 6–17 , 50–51 Shanker, Albert 1 14 , 121 , 123 SOAR Act 6 8 Social Efficiency 1 0 Sputnik 1 5 Stotsky, Sandra 1 16 Subgovernments 1 8 , 19 , 38–40 , 74 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance

Program (SNAP) 9 7

Teach for America (TFA) 1 55 , 159–160 Teacher and Principal improvement Act

of 2 011 138 Teacher Certification 4 6 , 61 , 74 Teacher Incentive Fund 9 7 Teachers’ Unions 2 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 34 ,

36 , 42 , 48 , 54 , 58 , 59 , 61 , 64 , 66 , 68 , 69 , 87 , 94 , 97 , 108 , 122 , 134 , 135 , 140

Technology 2 3 , 48 , 117 , 121 , 145 , 148 , 152 , 156 , 157 , 160

Test-Based 2 , 64 , 66 , 81 Testing (school-level, standardized,

proficiency) 1 9 , 48 , 79–84 , 87 , 112–116 , 123 , 143 , 159 , 164

Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) 7 7–79

Texas Reforms 7 8–80 Tilson, Whitney 9 8 Title IX 1 8 Transformation Model 1 31 Transparency 2 1 , 40 , 42 , 47 , 48 , 86 , 100 ,

116 , 124–126 , 148 , 156 Turnaround Model 1 31 , 136

US Department of Education 2 7 , 28 , 30 , 46 , 84 , 87 , 100 , 109 , 112 , 114 , 129 , 136 , 137

Value-Added Models 7 0 , 93 , 96 , 133–135 , 147 , 156 , 165

Van Roekel, Dennis 1 40 Vouchers 1 6 , 21 , 23 , 37 , 48 , 58 , 59 , 68 , 69 ,

80–84 , 88 , 161

Wallace, George 1 6 , 155 Washington, Harold 6 3 Weingarten, Randi 3 , 93 , 140 Wheeler, Joshua 1 1 Whitmore, Richard 4 5 , 50 Williams, Armstrong 8 7 Williams, Joe 4 5 , 50 , 89 Wilson, James Q. 37 Wilson, Pete 7 5

President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political

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Transcript of President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political