Urban Issues

Description
With international tests showing that the United States no longer leads in school achievement, a bipartisan coalition of reformers is advocating the creation of more charter schools and a system of basing pay and firing decisions for teachers on students standardized test scores.

Urban Issues
Urban Issues
SELECTI ONS FROM CQ RESEARCHER
S I X T H E D I T I O N
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v
ANNOTATED CONTENTS i x
PREFACE x i i i
CONTRI BUTORS x v i i
EDUCATION
1. School Reform 1
Are the public schools failing? 4
Are teachers’ unions a major barrier
to improving schools? 7
Is business-style competition a good
model for improving schools? 8
Background 10
Engine of Opportunity 10
Public and Private 13
The New Reformers 15
Education Entrepreneurs 16
Current Situation 17
Budget Battles 17
Racing to the Top? 19
Outlook: Common Standards 20
Notes 21
Bibliography 23
2. Fixing Urban Schools 27
Has the No Child Left Behind law
helped urban students? 30
Should governments make schools more
racially and economically diverse? 32
Are teachers prepared to teach
successfully in urban classrooms? 34
Background 35
Educating the Poor 35
Two Tracks 41
Minority Schools 42
Poor in School 43
Current Situation 45
Congress Divided 45
Retooling NCLB? 46
Outlook: Agreeing to Disagree 47
2010 Update 47
Lagging in Math 48
Paying for Success 49
A Call for Flexibility 49
2012 Update 50
Funding Cuts 50
Alternatives Sought 51
Cheating Scandals 52
Adding Values 53
Test Results 53
Notes 54
Bibliography 58
LAND USE AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT
3. Blighted Cities 61
Do property laws unfairly favor
owners? 66
Contents
vi CONTENTS
Is shrinkage a sound strategy for the
most troubled cities? 68
Should people living in blighted and
depopulated neighborhoods be
forced to move? 69
Background 70
Decline of Roman Empire 70
Political Dilemma 70
Urban Renewal’s Shadow 73
Budget Squeeze 74
Current Situation 76
Action in Congress 76
State Land Banks 78
Philanthropic Aid 78
Outlook: Coordinated Action 79
Notes 80
Bibliography 82
4. Downtown Renaissance 85
Are downtowns making a sustainable
comeback? 89
Does gentrification hurt longtime
residents? 91
Should greater restrictions be placed on
government use of eminent domain
to acquire land? 94
Background 97
Industrial Age 97
Moving on Out 99
Urban “Jungles” 99
Hitting Bottom 100
Current Situation 102
Success Stories 102
Outlook: Multicentered Regions 104
2010 Update 105
Classic Tools 105
Bright Spot 105
Stabilizing Neighborhoods 106
Diversified Downtowns 106
Fate of the Suburbs? 107
Obama Administration 107
2012 Update 108
Immigration Nation 108
An End to the Segregated City? 108
Detroit’s Cautionary Tale 109
Contentious “Consent” 109
Pittsburgh Revival 110
Notes 111
Bibliography 113
5. Attracting Jobs 117
Do state and local tax incentives for
businesses create jobs? 122
Are location-based business incentives
good for communities? 123
Should states and localities compete
for business locations? 125
Background 126
Early Competition 126
Economics vs. Politics 126
Regional Cooperation and
Accountability 129
Current Situation 132
Tight Times 132
Right to Work 132
Outlook: Beyond Incentives 134
Notes 135
Bibliography 139
6. Rapid Urbanization 141
Does urbanization make people
better off? 145
Should governments limit migration
to cities? 147
Can we make large cities greener? 148
Background 150
From Farm to Factory 150
End of Empires 153
Population Boom 156
New Solutions 156
Current Situation 158
Economic Shadow 158
Slum Solutions 159
Outlook: Going Global 161
Update 163
Reducing Slums 163
Building Infrastructure 164
Protecting the Environment 164
Notes 165
Bibliography 170
7. Aging Infrastructure 175
Does aging infrastructure endanger
Americans? 178
CONTENTS vii
Should taxes be increased to overhaul
the infrastructure? 179
Should private companies run more of
America’s infrastructure? 182
Background 183
Meeting Needs 183
Rust Never Sleeps 188
Paying It Forward 189
Current Situation 190
Bridge Tax? 190
Other Proposals 190
Outlook: Threats Increase 193
Update 194
Notes 196
Bibliography 199
8. High-Speed Trains 201
Do high-speed trains make economic
sense? 204
Would high-speed trains relieve
highway and airport congestion? 207
Is high-speed rail good for the
environment? 208
Background 213
The Golden Spike 213
High-Speed Rail 214
Creation of Amtrak 215
In Search of Supertrains 215
Current Situation 217
Obama’s Efforts 217
GOP Response 217
On the Drawing Board 219
Outlook: California Dreaming 220
Update 220
Risk vs. Benefits 221
Litany of Arguments 221
Politics and Mindset 222
European, Asian Service 222
Notes 223
Bibliography 226
LAW ENFORCEMENT
9. Police Misconduct 229
Should police do more to control
excessive force? 233
Should police do more to prevent racial
and ethnic profiling? 235
Should police adopt stronger disciplinary
measures for misconduct? 236
Background 237
Police Problems 237
Police Accountability 240
Changing Priorities 241
Current Situation 244
Investigations Urged 244
Reforms Outlined 246
Outlook: Police under Pressure 247
Notes 248
Bibliography 251
RACE, CLASS AND ETHNICITY
10. Domestic Poverty 253
Is extreme poverty growing? 258
Has welfare reform reduced entrenched
poverty? 260
Would more government spending on
poverty help? 261
Background 263
Warring on Poverty 263
Under Attack 266
Welfare Reform 267
“Elusive Dream” 268
Current Situation 268
Presidential Race 268
Anti-Poverty Proposals 270
Tax Policy 271
States and Localities 271
Outlook: Ominous Signs 272
Update 272
Anti-Poverty Programs 273
Notes 274
Bibliography 278
11. Immigration Conflict 281
Is illegal immigration an urgent
national problem? 285
Should state and local police enforce
immigration laws? 287
Should Congress make it easier for illegal
immigrants to become citizens? 288
Background 290
Constant Ambivalence 290
viii CONTENTS
Cracking Down? 293
Getting Tough 294
Current Situation 295
Obama’s Approach 295
Supreme Court Action 298
Outlook: A Broken System 299
Notes 300
Bibliography 303
12. Child Poverty 305
Should Congress expand welfare
funding? 308
Are poor children now in elementary
school a lost generation? 310
Is single motherhood a bigger cause of child
poverty than the low-wage economy? 311
Background 313
Focus on Children 313
War on Poverty 315
Families in Crisis 318
Requiring Work 319
Current Situation 322
Budget Worries 322
Child Support 324
Cartoon Debate 325
Outlook: Needed: Poverty Target 326
Notes 326
Bibliography 330
ix
Annotated Contents
EDUCATION
School Reform
With international tests showing that the United States no longer
leads in school achievement, a bipartisan coalition of reformers is
advocating the creation of more charter schools and a system of bas-
ing pay and firing decisions for teachers on students’ standardized test
scores. Conservatives have long recommended such businesslike
approaches for schools, and Republican lawmakers and politicians are
pushing for laws to weaken unions’ ability to defend teachers against
charges of incompetency. Teachers’ unions remain opposed to
market-oriented reforms, but the philosophy has new adherents
among education-reform groups and centrist Democrats such as
President Obama, whose administration is providing funding to states
to develop data-driven teacher assessments. Meanwhile, some educa-
tion scholars point out that poorly performing students are concen-
trated in low-income districts, where funding shortfalls, bad teaching
conditions and poverty make educating students more difficult.
Fixing Urban Schools
African-American and Hispanic students — largely in urban schools
— lag far behind white students, who mostly attend middle-class
suburban schools. Critics argue that when Congress reauthorizes
the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it must retarget the
legislation to help urban schools tackle tough problems, such as
encouraging the best teachers to enter and remain in high-poverty
schools, rather than focusing on tests and sanctions. Some advocates
x ANNOTATED CONTENTS
propose busing students across district lines to create
more socioeconomically diverse student bodies. But con-
servative analysts argue that busing wastes students’ time
and that permitting charter schools to compete with
public schools will drive improvement. Meanwhile, lib-
eral analysts point out that successful charter programs
are too costly for most schools to emulate, and that no
one has yet figured out how to spread success beyond a
handful of schools, public or private.
LAND USE AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT
Blighted Cities
Dozens of cities, including Detroit, Flint, Mich., and
Youngstown, Ohio, have been ravaged by staggering
declines in population and vast neighborhood blight.
Some planners are advocating controversial “shrinking-
cities” strategies aimed at demolishing thousands of der-
elict structures, converting blighted blocks to open space
or other uses and providing incentives for residents of
decrepit neighborhoods to move to healthier ones, in
part to save on municipal-service costs. But critics say
demolishing parts of cities is the wrong way to save
them, and they point to failed urban-renewal efforts of
the 1960s as evidence. Meanwhile, progress is slow in
cities that are trying to remake themselves. Funds for
demolition and cleanup are tight, and residents fear
being forced to relocate — a practice city officials deny
advocating. Moreover, intractable urban problems such
as poverty and unemployment make the prospect of
reducing blight especially daunting.
Downtown Renaissance
After World War II, suburban job and population
growth in the United States far outstripped that of cities,
leading many to worry that downtowns were doomed. In
recent years, however, many cities have revived their for-
tunes by fashioning downtowns that are attractive and
— for the first time in decades — drawing in new resi-
dents. Once-forlorn urban centers from San Diego to
Philadelphia are now busy construction zones that are
filling up with trendy shops and restaurants. But despite
the good news, downtowns are still grabbing only a tiny
fraction of metropolitan growth. Some skeptics worry
that the downtown renaissance is fragile, largely built on
upscale shopping and entertainment — relatively new
trends that could easily change. But others believe
downtowns, having once again become the most vital
parts of many cities, will provide a model for future
development — even in the suburbs.
Attracting Jobs
Tax-supported subsidies aimed at luring companies to
relocate or retain offices and factories in specific loca-
tions have proliferated. Local and state governments,
engaged in fierce competition for jobs, are giving busi-
nesses up to $70 billion annually in tax breaks, new
roads and training facilities and other incentives.
Economic-development officials and companies that
have relocated for subsidies say the incentives have
spurred employment growth and helped some businesses
stay profitable. But critics, who include many econo-
mists, argue that the incentives generate relatively few
new jobs and instead lead many companies merely to
shift operations from one place to another, depending on
where they can broker the best deal. Among the most
controversial subsidies are those supporting professional-
sports stadiums. Supporters say new sports facilities help
cities raise their profile and attract growth, while critics
charge the subsidies fail to pay for themselves.
Rapid Urbanization
About 3.3 billion people — half of Earth’s inhabitants
— live in cities, and the number is expected to hit 5 bil-
lion within 20 years. Most urban growth today is occur-
ring in developing countries, where about a billion
people live in city slums. Delivering services to crowded
cities has become increasingly difficult, especially in the
world’s 19 “megacities” — those with more than 10 mil-
lion residents. Moreover, most of the largest cities are in
coastal areas, where they are vulnerable to flooding
caused by climate change. Many governments are striv-
ing to improve city life by expanding services, reducing
environmental damage and providing more jobs for the
poor, but some still use heavy-handed clean-up policies
like slum clearance. Researchers say urbanization helps
reduce global poverty because new urbanites earn more
than they could in their villages. The global recession
could reverse that trend, however, as many unemployed
city dwellers return to rural areas. But most experts
expect rapid urbanization to resume once the economic
storm has passed.
ANNOTATED CONTENTS xi
Aging Infrastructure
The deadly collapse in August 2007 of Minneapolis’
Interstate I-35 West bridge over the Mississippi River
tragically underscored the condition of the nation’s high-
ways, dams, wastewater treatment systems, electrical
transmission networks and other infrastructure. Many
facilities and systems are 50-100 years old, and engineers
say they have been woefully neglected. Decades ago tax-
payers, lawmakers and private companies found it rela-
tively easy to ante up the huge sums needed to build vital
infrastructure, but money for repairs and maintenance
has been far tougher to come by in recent years. Federal
and state lawmakers today often prefer to spend public
dollars on high-profile convention centers and sports are-
nas, and anti-tax groups often fight tax hikes or utility-
rate increases to pay for maintenance. But now lawmakers
are debating whether aging infrastructure merits higher
taxes or other measures, such as turning more highways
into privately run toll roads.
High-Speed Trains
The Obama administration has designated $8 billion in
stimulus funds for high-speed passenger rail, buoying
hopes that supertrains will operate throughout the
American landscape as they do in Europe and Asia. The
money, most likely to be divided among multiple corri-
dors, won’t buy a single fast-rail system. But supporters
say it will help traditional trains run faster and pay for
planning to make true high-speed rail networks a reality.
Washington’s support signals a transformation in federal
policy that has long favored highway and air travel,
experts say. Some argue that money should be focused
first on building true high-speed service in the busy
Northeast Corridor. But supporters in the Midwest,
Florida, California and elsewhere are expected to vie for
a portion of the rail funds. So far, California appears fur-
thest ahead in planning for fast rail, aided by a $9.95
billion bond issue. But critics say the plan’s benefits are
exaggerated.
LAW ENFORCEMENT
Police Misconduct
The U.S. Department of Justice is stepping up its over-
sight of local police departments, pressuring them to
limit the use of force in civilian encounters and eliminate
racial profiling during traffic stops and other enforce-
ment. The Justice Department’s civil rights division has
criticized long-troubled police agencies in such places as
New Orleans, Seattle and Maricopa County, Ariz.,
which includes Phoenix. The department’s power stems
from a 1994 law allowing the federal government to
identify a “pattern or practice” of constitutional viola-
tions and threaten court action to force police agencies
to adopt changes. Seattle officials have proposed a
detailed plan to answer the government’s criticisms, but
negotiations are stalled in New Orleans and Maricopa
County, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio is balking at the gov-
ernment’s demand for court supervision of policy
changes. Meanwhile, the racially charged shooting death
of a Florida teenager by a neighborhood watch volunteer
focused attention on police handling of the case.
RACE, CLASS, AND ETHNICITY
Domestic Poverty
Despite sweeping welfare reforms in the 1990s and gen-
erally healthy economic growth in recent years, domestic
poverty remains intractable. Moreover, signs are emerg-
ing that so-called deep poverty is growing sharply —
most significantly among children. U.S. poverty is fueled
by a long list of problems, including Katrina’s devasta-
tion, immigration, the growing income gap between rich
and poor, the subprime mortgage fallout and education
disparities. Conservatives say solutions must emphasize
personal responsibility, higher marriage rates and fewer
out-of-wedlock births. Liberals focus on the negative
effects of government budget cuts for anti-poverty pro-
grams, tax cuts benefiting the wealthy and the need for
more early-childhood-development programs.
Immigration Conflict
Americans are very concerned about illegal immigration
but ambivalent about what to do about it — especially
the 11 million aliens currently in the United States ille-
gally. Frustrated with the federal government’s failure to
secure the borders, several states passed laws allowing
state and local police to check the immigration status of
suspected unlawful aliens. Civil rights organizations
warn the laws will result in ethnic profiling of Latinos.
The Obama administration has sued to block several of
the laws for infringing on federal prerogatives. Advocates
xii ANNOTATED CONTENTS
of tougher enforcement say undocumented workers are
taking jobs from U.S. citizens, but many business and
agricultural groups say migrant workers are needed to fill
jobs unattractive to U.S. workers. In 2010, the U.S.
Supreme Court upheld an Arizona law providing stiff
penalties for employers that knowingly hire illegal aliens.
In 2012, the justices heard arguments on the controver-
sial, new Arizona law that inspired other states to crack
down on illegal immigration.
Child Poverty
One in five American children lives in a household with
income below the poverty line — $22,050 for a family
of four. Not only are the daily lives of poor children
difficult, but experts worry that many will suffer lifelong
effects from early deprivation. Concern about child pov-
erty has grown especially strong amid a push in Congress
for sweeping budget cuts, including reductions in spend-
ing on food stamps and other anti-poverty programs. As
child poverty continues to rise amid the nation’s persis-
tent economic woes and high unemployment, a long-
simmering debate over the problem’s root causes is
heating up. Liberals argue that fewer children would fall
into poverty if the government safety net were stronger
and more jobs were available for struggling parents.
Conservatives, on the other hand, say child poverty
largely stems from parental behavior — particularly a
growing tendency to have children out of wedlock.
Preface
A
s the daily news constantly reminds us, coming to terms
with the full complexity and variety of issues that confront
America’s urban areas is no small feat. Is a new approach
needed to help the poorest Americans? Is demolishing parts of
cities the way to save them? Does the United States need supertrains?
In order to promote change and hopefully reach viable resolution,
scholars, students and policymakers must strive to understand the
context and content of each of these urban issues. It is such under-
standing that eventually enables students to define their roles as
active participants in urban policy.
With the view that only an objective examination that synthe-
sizes all competing viewpoints can lead to sound analysis, this sixth
edition of Urban Issues provides comprehensive and unbiased cover-
age of today’s most pressing policy problems. This book is a compi-
lation of 12 recent reports from CQ Researcher, a weekly policy
backgrounder that brings into focus key issues on the public agenda.
It enables instructors to fairly and comprehensively uncover oppos-
ing sides of each issue, and illustrate just how significantly they
impact citizens and the government they elect. CQ Researcher fully
explains difficult concepts in plain English. Each article chronicles
and analyzes past legislative and judicial action as well as current
and possible future maneuvering. Each report addresses how issues
affect all levels of government, whether at the local, state or federal
level, and also the lives and futures of all citizens. Urban Issues is
designed to promote in-depth discussion, facilitate further research
and help readers think critically and formulate their own positions
on these crucial issues.
xiii
xiv PREFACE
This collection is organized into four subject areas
that span a range of important urban policy concerns:
Education; Land Use and Urban Development; Law
Enforcement; and Race, Class and Ethnicity. These
pieces were chosen to expose students to a wide range of
issues, from the current state of U.S. infrastructure to the
efficacy of cities’ eminent domain powers. We are grati-
fied to know that Urban Issues has found a following in a
wide range of departments of political science, sociology,
public administration and urban planning, and hope
that this new edition continues to meet readers’ needs.
CQ RESEARCHER
CQ Researcher was founded in 1923 as Editorial Research
Reports and was sold primarily to newspapers as a
research tool. The magazine was renamed and redesigned
in 1991 as CQ Researcher. Today, students are its primary
audience. While still used by hundreds of journalists and
newspapers, many of which reprint portions of the
reports, the Researcher’s main subscribers are now high
school, college and public libraries. In 2002, Researcher
won the American Bar Association’s coveted Silver Gavel
award for magazine excellence for a series of nine reports
on civil liberties and other legal issues.
Researcher staff writers — all highly experienced
journalists — sometimes compare the experience of writ-
ing a Researcher report to drafting a college term paper.
Indeed, there are many similarities. Each report is as long
as many term papers — about 11,000 words — and is
written by one person without any significant outside
help. One of the key differences is that writers interview
leading experts, scholars and government officials for
each issue.
Like students, staff writers begin the creative process
by choosing a topic. Working with the Researcher’s edi-
tors, the writer identi?es a controversial subject that has
important public policy implications. After a topic is
selected, the writer embarks on one to two weeks of
intense research. Newspaper and magazine articles are
clipped or downloaded, books are ordered and informa-
tion is gathered from a wide variety of sources, including
interest groups, universities and the government. Once
the writers are well informed, they develop a detailed
outline, and begin the interview process. Each report
requires a minimum of ten to ?fteen interviews with aca-
demics, officials, lobbyists and people working in the
field. Only after all interviews are completed does the
writing begin.
CHAPTER FORMAT
Each issue of CQ Researcher, and therefore each selection
in this book, is structured in the same way. Each begins
with an overview, which briefly summarizes the areas
that will be explored in greater detail in the rest of the
chapter. The next section chronicles important and cur-
rent debates on the topic under discussion and is struc-
tured around a number of key questions, such as “Has
No Child Left Behind helped minority students? and
“Do tax breaks for business spur employment?” These
questions are usually the subject of much debate among
practitioners and scholars in the field. Hence, the
answers presented are never conclusive but detail the
range of opinion on the topic.
Next, the “Background” section provides a history of
the issue being examined. This retrospective covers
important legislative measures, executive actions and
court decisions that illustrate how current policy has
evolved. Then the “Current Situation” section examines
contemporary policy issues, legislation under consider-
ation and legal action being taken. Each selection con-
cludes with an “Outlook” section, which addresses
possible regulation, court rulings, and initiatives from
Capitol Hill and the White House over the next ?ve to
ten years.
Each report contains features that augment the main
text: two to three sidebars that examine issues related to
the topic at hand, a pro versus con debate between two
experts, a chronology of key dates and events and an
annotated bibliography detailing major sources used by
the writer.
CUSTOM OPTIONS
Interested in building your ideal CQ Press Issues book,
customized to your personal teaching needs and interests?
Browse by course or date, or search for specific topics or
issues from our online catalog of over 500 CQ Researcher
issues athttp://custom.cqpress.com.
PREFACE xv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to thank many people for helping to make this
collection a reality. Thomas J. Billitteri, managing editor
of CQ Researcher, gave us his enthusiastic support and
cooperation as we developed this sixth edition. He and
his talented staff of editors and writers have amassed a
first-class library of Researcher reports, and we are fortu-
nate to have access to that rich cache. We also thankfully
acknowledge the advice and feedback from current read-
ers and are gratified by their satisfaction with the book.
Some readers may be learning about CQ Researcher
for the first time. We expect that many readers will want
regular access to this excellent weekly research tool. For
subscription information or a no-obligation free trial of
CQ Researcher, please contact CQ Press at www.cqpress
.com or toll-free at 1-866-4CQ-PRESS (1-866-427-
7737).
We hope that you will be pleased by the sixth edition
of Urban Issues. We welcome your feedback and sugges-
tions for future editions. Please direct comments to Cha-
risse Kiino, Publisher, College Division CQ Press, 2300
N Street, N.W., Suite 800, Washington, DC 20037, or
[email protected].
—The Editors of CQ Press
xvii
Contributors
Thomas J. Billitteri is managing editor of the CQ Researcher. He
has more than 30 years’ experience covering business, nonprofit
institutions and public policy for newspapers and other publica-
tions. He holds a BA in English and an MA in journalism from
Indiana University.
Charles S. Clark is a veteran Washington freelancer who writes for
The Washington Post, National Journal and other publications. He
previously served as a staff writer at the CQ Researcher and writer-
researcher at Time-Life Books. He graduated in political science
from McGill University.
Staff writer Marcia Clemmitt is a veteran social-policy reporter
who previously served as editor in chief of Medicine & Health and
staff writer for The Scientist. She has also been a high school math
and physics teacher. She holds a liberal arts and sciences degree from
St. John’s College, Annapolis, and a master’s degree in English from
Georgetown University. Her recent reports include “Genes and
Health” and “Animal Intelligence.”
Roland Flamini is a Washington-based correspondent who special-
izes in foreign affairs. Fluent in six languages, he was Time bureau
chief in Rome, Bonn, Beirut, Jerusalem and the European Common
Market and later served as international editor at United Press
International. While covering the 1979 Iranian Revolution for
Time, Flamini wrote the magazine’s cover story — in which
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was named Man of the Year — and
was promptly expelled because authorities didn’t like what they
read. His books include a study of Vatican politics in the 1960s,
xviii CONTRI BUTORS
Pope, Premier, President. His most recent report for CQ
Global Researcher was “Rising Tension Over Iran.”
Alan Greenblatt covers foreign affairs for National
Public Radio. He was previously a staff writer at
Governing magazine and CQ Weekly, where he won the
National Press Club’s Sandy Hume Award for political
journalism. He graduated from San Francisco State
University in 1986 and received a master’s degree in
English literature from the University of Virginia in
1988. For the CQ Researcher, his reports include
“Confronting Warming,” “Future of the GOP” and
“Immigration Debate.” His most recent CQ Global
Researcher reports were “Attacking Piracy” and “Rewriting
History.”
Associate Editor Kenneth Jost graduated from Harvard
College and Georgetown University Law Center. He is
the author of the Supreme Court Yearbook and editor of
The Supreme Court from A to Z (both CQ Press). He was
a member of the CQ Researcher team that won the
American Bar Association’s 2002 Silver Gavel Award.
His previous reports include “States and Federalism”
and “Bilingual Education vs. English Immersion.” He is
also author of the blog Jost on Justice (http://jostonjus
tice.blogspot.com).
Reed Karaim, a freelance writer living in Tucson,
Arizona, has written for The Washington Post, U.S. News
& World Report, Smithsonian, American Scholar, USA
Weekend and other publications. He is the author of the
novel, If Men Were Angels, which was selected for the
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series. He
is also the winner of the Robin Goldstein Award for
Outstanding Regional Reporting and other journalism
honors. Karaim is a graduate of North Dakota State
University in Fargo.
Peter Katel is a CQ Researcher staff writer who previ-
ously reported on Haiti and Latin America for Time and
Newsweek and covered the Southwest for newspapers in
New Mexico. He has received several journalism awards,
including the Bartolomé Mitre Award for coverage of
drug trafficking, from the Inter-American Press
Association. He holds an A.B. in university studies from
the University of New Mexico. His recent reports include
“Prisoner Reentry” and “Downsizing Prisons.”
Bill Wanlund is a freelance writer in the Washington,
D.C., area. He is a former foreign service officer, with
service in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.
Previously, he was a Washington-based editor and
reporter. He holds a degree in journalism from The
George Washington University.
Jennifer Weeks is a Massachusetts freelance writer who
specializes in energy, the environment and science. She
has written for The Washington Post, Audubon, Popular
Mechanics and other magazines and previously was a
policy analyst, congressional staffer and lobbyist. She has
an A.B. degree from Williams College and master’s
degrees from the University of North Carolina and
Harvard. Her recent CQ Researcher reports include “Gulf
Coast Restoration” and “Energy Policy.”
1
K
aren Caruso, a third-grade teacher in Los Angeles, read the
embarrassing news last August in the Los Angeles Times:
She was in the bottom 10 percent of city elementary teach-
ers, according to the paper’s analysis of seven years of students’
performance on standardized math and English tests.
Yet, that poor showing didn’t fit Caruso’s profile. A 26-year
classroom veteran, she was among the district’s first teachers certi-
fied by the prestigious National Board for Professional Teaching
Standards, and her principal had named her one of the best teach-
ers at Hancock Park Elementary School, which serves a mainly
upper-middle-class neighborhood.
Caruso was taken aback by the Times’ findings but told the
newspaper she was determined to do better. “If my student test
scores show I’m an ineffective teacher,” she said, “I’d like to know
what contributes to it. What do I need to do to bring my average
up?”
1
It’s a question teachers nationwide may soon be asking. With
international tests showing that the United States no longer leads
in K-12 learning, an emerging coalition of reformers is aiming to
use market-based ideas to improve the nation’s 99,000 public
schools.
2
The ideas include paying teachers based on student per-
formance and creating more publicly funded, privately run, char-
ter schools to compete with public institutions.
Conservative analysts have long recommended such measures.
But now they are joined by Democratic politicians, including
President Barack Obama, and “venture philanthropists,” led by
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, who are bringing the ideas they
School Reform
Marcia Clemmitt
Thousands of young college graduates teach in urban
schools through Teach for America, a nonprofit group
that receives support from venture philanthropy
groups such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Above, Erin Gavin conducts a discussion with her
seventh-graders in Brooklyn Center, Minn., on Feb. 4.
From CQ Researcher,
April 29, 2011.
A
P

P
h
o
t
o
/
A
n
d
y

K
i
n
g
1
2 EDUCATI ON
used to achieve business success to the domain of public
education. Gates, Los Angeles insurance magnate Eli
Broad and other wealthy donors have poured billions of
dollars into market-oriented reform efforts, arguing that
failing schools jeopardize the nation’s economic competi-
tiveness in the global market.
International data comparing K-12 student achieve-
ment across many nations clearly show that U.S. schools
are failing, according to Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow
at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank
based at Stanford University in California. “While many
people want to be reassured that things are going just
fine, ignoring the real message” of these comparisons
“actually imperils our economic future,” he wrote.
3
Key to gaining elusive public support for large-scale
educational changes is persuading families, who gener-
ally support their local schools, that past strategies have
been costly failures. Reformers have not been shy about
making that case.
“Over the past four decades, the per-student cost of
running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while
our student achievement has remained virtually flat,”
Gates wrote recently. “To build a dynamic 21st-century
economy . . . we need to flip the
curve.”
4
But teachers and many education
scholars argue that reformers seek a
simple fix for a complex problem.
Low-performing students are concen-
trated in the lowest-income districts,
where inadequate funding, teacher
turnover and the ravages of poverty
make it difficult for students to excel,
critics of market-based reforms say.
“Achievement differences between
students are overwhelmingly attribut-
able to factors outside of schools,”
wrote Matthew Di Carlo, a senior fel-
low at the Albert Shanker Institute, a
research and advocacy group affili-
ated with the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-
largest teachers’ union. Research
shows that about 60 percent of varia-
tion in students’ school achievement
is “explained by student and family
background characteristics,” many related to income, Di
Carlo wrote. Only 10 or 15 percent of achievement dif-
ferences can be laid to teachers, he argued.
5
Reform critics also argue that the emphasis on rising
educational costs is misplaced.
For one thing, said Richard Rothstein, a research asso-
ciate at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, a large
chunk of the cost increase Gates mentions has been used
to educate children with disabilities. That segment of
K-12 school spending has swelled from 4 percent to 21
percent over the past four decades, he said. Previously,
schools largely ignored the special needs of children with
disabilities, he said.
6
Henry Levin, a professor of economics and education
at Columbia University in New York, says, too, that “no
other country has to include [teachers’] health-care costs
and pensions” in school-cost calculations. (Health insur-
ance and retiree benefits add at least 20 percent in costs
beyond salary for a public-sector worker, such as a
teacher, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
7
“Our per-pupil expenditures are the highest in the
world,” Levin acknowledges. But he argues that it isn’t
fair to criticize schools for this because of the vast
U.S. Lags Behind Asia in Math Scores
U.S. eighth-graders rank ahead of those in several European countries
but behind students in England, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
* Scores are based on an 800-point scale. Top-scoring countries average
about 600.
Source: Patrick Gonzales, et al., “Highlights From Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study 2007: Mathematics and Science Achieve-
ment of U.S. Fourth- and Eighth-Grade Students in an International Context,”
National Center for Education Statistics, September 2009,
nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf.
Average Math Scores of 8th-Grade Students by
Selected Countries, 2007*
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
Bulgaria Italy Sweden Aus-
tralia
Czech
Republic
United
States
England Japan South
Korea
Taiwan
598 597
570
513
508 504 496 491
480
464
Test score
SCHOOL REFORM 3
difference in employee costs between
countries.
None of these arguments, how-
ever, are persuasive to reform propo-
nents, who say ample evidence exists
to show that parental choice, school
compet i t i on and dat a- bas ed
decision-making are needed to drive
improvement.
New York Federal Reserve Bank
economist Rajashri Chakrabarti
found “unambiguous improvement
in public school performance” in
Florida and Wisconsin as a result of
offering parents a choice of schools,
according to the Center for Education
Reform, in Washington, D.C. The
center also cites research by the
Manhattan Institute, a conservative
think tank in New York, concluding
that all students in a Florida program
that offered wide school choice to
students with disabilities “made
greater academic improvements” as
their school options expanded — and
that included students who stuck
with their neighborhood schools.
8
In recent school-reform battles,
such as last winter’s hot dispute in Wisconsin over newly
elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to drastically
limit teachers’ collective-bargaining rights, unions have
been heavily criticized for running up costs while allow-
ing poor teaching to flourish.
9
“The unions have been pushing the case that there is
a war against teachers, but I don’t think that’s true,” says
the Hoover Institution’s Hanushek. “There is a war
against teachers’ unions” that unions have brought on
themselves by opposing reform proposals such as basing
firing decisions on student achievement, he says.
Linking teacher evaluations and student performance
on standardized tests is indeed among the most conten-
tious topics in public education.
Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Unified School
District announced that it will privately inform individ-
ual teachers of their ratings on a so-called “value-added”
success scale that it uses to link teacher performance and
test scores. The approach is a favorite of many reform
advocates, and it was the L.A. district’s data that the Los
Angeles Times plumbed to create its rankings of Caruso
and other teachers in the city.
The district is negotiating with the local teachers’
union, the United Teachers Los Angeles, which is affili-
ated with both the AFT and the nation’s largest teachers’
union, the National Education Association, to include
the measurements in formal performance reviews, a
move the union strongly opposes.
10
Times reporters argue that opposition is unwarranted
because a “value-added” analysis compares teachers by
evaluating the progress of each individual student in
their classrooms against that student’s own progress in
earlier school years. By comparing a student’s achieve-
ment only to his or her own record, the “value-added”
approach takes into account such factors as poverty and
learning disabilities, over which an individual teacher has
Reading Proficiency Highest in Northeast
Connecticut ranks first in eighth-grade reading ability followed
closely by other Northeastern states, including Massachusetts and
New Jersey. The District of Columbia ranks below all 50 states.
Source: “8th Grade Reading 2009 National Assessment of Education
Progress,” Federal Education Budget Project, New America Foundation,
febp.newamerica.net/k12/rankings/naep8read09.
1. Connecticut
2. Massachusetts
3. New Jersey
4. Vermont
5. Pennsylvania
6. New Hampshire
7. Minnesota
8. Montana
9. Ohio
10. South Dakota
11. Maryland
12. Washington
13. Maine
14. Nebraska
15. Missouri
16. North Dakota
17. Wisconsin
18. Wyoming
19. Idaho
20. Illinois
21. Kansas
22. Kentucky
23. New York
24. Oregon
25. Utah
26. Colorado
27. Florida
28. Indiana
29. Iowa
30. Virginia
31. Delaware
32. Michigan
33. North Carolina
34. Rhode Island
35. Tennessee
36. Alaska
37. Arizona
38. Arkansas
39. Georgia
40. Texas
41. Oklahoma
42. Alabama
43. South Carolina
44. California
45. Hawaii
46. Nevada
47. New Mexico
48. West Virginia
49. Louisiana
50. Mississippi
51. District of Columbia
State Rankings by 8th-Grade Reading Level, 2009
4 EDUCATI ON
Putting Teachers to the Effectiveness Test
“Whether someone is capable or not is way more complex than it may seem.”
E
arlier this year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
— one of the nation’s biggest funders of school-
reform projects — announced it would use the
Memphis and Pittsburgh school districts, among others, as
laboratories for developing “teacher effectiveness” programs
using data on student achievement and teachers’ classroom
behaviors.
The idea is to figure out the connection between stu-
dent achievement and actions of individual teachers and
use the linkage to make “high-stakes” educational decisions
— decisions, for example, on which teachers to fire, which
to reward with merit pay or other recognition and which
teaching practices to replicate.
1
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates told The Wall Street
Journal that he will deem the project a success if “10 years
from now . . . we have a very different personnel system
that’s encouraging effectiveness [in teaching] and our
spending has contributed to that.”
He went on to say that education-improvement efforts
have suffered because data on teacher and school perfor-
mance haven’t been available. Contrast that situation, he
said, to “professions like long-jump or tackling people on a
football field or hitting a baseball,” where “the average abil-
ity is so much higher today because there’s this great feed-
back system, measurement system.”
2
Many education analysts agree that traditional teacher-
evaluation practices haven’t been of much use. “A principal
sitting in the back of the room checking off things on a list”
of recommended teacher behaviors “made almost no sense,”
partly because “it’s bound to involve many very subjective
judgments,” says Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and
education at Columbia University in New York. “Almost
everybody does well” on such evaluations, proving that the
approach isn’t very accurate or useful, he says.
Nevertheless, Pallas maintains, while old-style evalua-
tions “provide almost no guidance about what to do” to
improve one’s teaching, new data-oriented evaluation sys-
tems don’t either — at least so far.
Yet, rejecting the data approach means “sticking our
heads in the sand,” says Valerie E. Lee, an education profes-
sor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “These
things can be good so long as they’re done right,” she says.
no control. Thus, it is a fair way to judge teachers’ suc-
cess, the Times argued.
11
Opponents maintain, however, that inciting teachers
to compete with one another for pay is the wrong way to
go about improving education.
Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at
New York University who recently disavowed her long-
time support for market-based reforms, noted that leg-
endary business-improvement consultant W. Edwards
Deming believed that merit pay for workers was even
“bad for corporations.”
“It gets everyone thinking about what is good for
himself,” Ravitch wrote, “and leads to forgetting about
the goals of the organization.”
12
Columbia’s Levin argues that teaching requires col-
laboration more than competition. For example, he says,
teachers who want their students to improve “need to
talk to the teachers at lower grades about whether they’re
teaching” skills on which higher grades’ lessons are based
and seek their cooperation to do so, he says. “It’s hard to
say that the future really is in competition.”
As policymakers, schools and families debate how to
improve schools, here are some questions they are asking:
Are the public schools failing?
Behind the push to reform K-12 education lies the prop-
osition that wide-scale failure of American schools bears
significant responsibility for a lagging economy. But crit-
ics of that view argue that reform enthusiasts ignore data
showing progress alongside problems. What’s more, they
argue, it makes no sense to hold schools responsible for
the nation’s economic woes.
“American education is in a state of crisis,” according
to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in
Washington. “Millions of children pass through
America’s schools without receiving a quality education
that prepares them . . . to compete in the increasingly
competitive global economy.”
13
SCHOOL REFORM 5
Reform critics cite international PISA (Programme
for International Student Assessment) tests, which com-
pare student performance in dozens of countries, in
arguing that U.S. teachers are, by and large, doing a
good job. But the Hoover Institution’s Hanushek dis-
misses that claim as “largely wrong.”
It’s true, Hanushek wrote, that recent PISA tests
find U.S. 15-year-olds “above the developed-country
average in reading, at the average in science, and below
average in math,” results that make it seem that “per-
haps we are not doing so badly.” But that’s a faulty
conclusion, he argued, because “reading is very diffi-
cult to assess accurately in the international tests. And
reading scores have proven less important than math
and sci ence for both i ndi vi dual and nati onal
success.”
14
Furthermore, “international performance on these
tests is very closely related to . . . economic growth,” so
that small score differences among countries may add up
to big differences in economic well-being over time,
Hanushek wrote.
15
In an article co-authored with two other scholars,
one of them German, Hanushek argued that economic
productivity depends on “developing a highly qualified
cadre of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and other
professionals.” International tests show, for example,
that the United States produces fewer top scorers in
math than countries it competes with, the scholars
said.
16
Furthermore, school failure is not confined to low-
income neighborhoods, Hanushek says in an interview.
“Some suburban schools seem to be great,” he says, “but
it’s because of things parents are providing” for their chil-
dren, which may mask the fact that the schools them-
selves do a poor job.
But many education scholars say that while some
individual schools are in trouble, claims of widespread
failure in American education are false.
That means including other measures besides standardized-
test scores and being careful not to jump at untested
teacher-evaluation approaches, she says. If developed and
used judiciously, Lee says, a good system could control for
individual differences in students, such as attendance and
home life, over which a teacher has no influence. And that,
she says, would make for fairer teacher-to-teacher compari-
sons than those that simply look at student test scores.
Donald B. Gratz, an education professor at Curry
College in Milton, Mass., cited a bit of history in arguing
that programs linking teacher merit pay and student test
scores are ill-conceived. “In the mid-1800s, British schools
and teachers were paid on the basis of the results of stu-
dent examinations, for reasons much like” those cited by
today’s reformers, Gratz wrote. After about 30 years, how-
ever, “the testing bureaucracy had burgeoned, cheating
and cramming flourished” and, with public opposition
swelling “dramatically,” the practice “was abandoned as a
failure.”
3
Basing pay on test scores poses another problem, too,
Gratz says: Fewer than half of teachers teach subjects whose
material is contained in standardized tests.
Furthermore, Gratz notes, at grades six and up, students
typically have six or seven different teachers during a given
year. “Who gets the credit or the blame” for a student’s success
or failure?” he asks. “It looks like a field day for labor lawyers.”
Offering merit pay for good teaching hasn’t been shown
to improve instruction either, Gratz argues. Instituting
merit-pay programs “assumes that teachers know what to
do and just aren’t doing it,” but that’s likely not the case, he
says. “We do know a lot about how to teach,” but teaching
is an extremely complex task, and it’s not as easy as it may
seem for teachers to change their behavior to incorporate
research findings about student learning, for example,
he says.
Complicating matters is the fact that educators’ and
education administrators’ ability to succeed relates to the
situation in which they’re working, says Jeffrey Henig, a
professor of education at Columbia. “We have superinten-
dents and principals, for example, who succeed in one
school, then go somewhere else and fail,” he notes. “So the
question of whether someone is capable or not is way more
complex than it may seem on the surface.”
— Marcia Clemmitt
1
Stephanie Banchero, “Bill Gates Seeks Formula for Better Teachers,”
The Wall Street Journal online, March 22, 2011,http://online.wsj.com/
article/SB10001424052748703858404576214593545938506.html.
2
Quoted in ibid.
3
Donald B. Gratz, “The Problem with Performance Pay,” Educational
Leadership, November 2009, pp. 76-79.
6 EDUCATI ON
The Economic Policy Institute’s Rothstein wrote that
the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP),
which tracks math and reading skills by following groups
of students from fourth through 12th grades, shows that
“American students have improved substantially, in some
cases phenomenally,” over the past two decades.
17
Both black and white fourth- and eighth-graders have
improved in math, the Economic Policy Institute’s
Rothstein wrote. What’s more, he said, African-American
students have, at the fourth-, eighth- and 12th-grade lev-
els, improved their math and reading skills the most,
achieving “a rate of progress that would be considered
extraordinary in any area of social policy.”
18
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), an international intergovern-
mental group that manages the PISA tests, also cites U.S.
educational improvement. Since 2006, “the United
States has seen significant performance gains” on inter-
national science assessments, mainly because America’s
lowest-scoring students have been closing the gap that
separates them from the top scorers, the OECD said.
19
“Overall, the American public school system is pretty
decent,” says Katrina Bulkley, an associate professor of
education at New Jersey’s Montclair State University.
“It’s just that in pockets, it’s served badly.”
Those pockets are mainly in urban and rural districts
with the greatest poverty.
20
In low-poverty schools — where fewer than 10 per-
cent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches
— 15-year-old American students score above the inter-
national average in reading on the PISA assessment,
according to Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus of
education at the University of Southern California. By
contrast, in schools where low-income students make up
more than 75 percent of enrollment, 15-year-old students
scored second to last among the 34 OECD nations.
21
The U.S. education system doesn’t provide enough
classroom resources to overcome the disadvantages
wrought by poverty, analysts from the OECD argue.
“The United States is one of only three OECD coun-
tries” in which class sizes in high-poverty schools are rou-
tinely much larger than in schools in higher-income
districts, said a recent report. As a result, disadvantaged
American students are at risk of receiving fewer educa-
tional resources, including teacher time, than richer stu-
dents, the analysts said.
22
Poverty imposes often-overlooked handicaps. “I can
guarantee you right now that at least 20 percent of our
kids need glasses,” said Ramón González, principal of a
public middle school in New York City’s South Bronx
who struggles to get private funding for vision tests and
glasses. “They’re in their classrooms right now, staring at
blackboards with no idea what they’re looking at,” said
González. “You can have the best teachers, the best cur-
riculum and the greatest after-school programs in the
world, but if your kids can’t see, what does it matter?”
23
Educational reformers such as former New York City
school Chancellor Joel Klein “have said that to fix pov-
erty you have to fix education,” says Aaron Pallas, a pro-
fessor of sociology and education at Columbia University.
“Schools can partner with others to help do this,” Pallas
says. “But the idea that schools are going to transform
poverty on their own is just giving schools too much
credit.”
Many school reformers argue that Americans are los-
ing jobs to oversees competition because the United
States isn’t adequately educating its students, says Donald
B. Gratz, an education professor at Curry College in
Milton, Mass. But the real reason is that “American
workers are expensive,” he says. American workers’ pro-
ductivity has soared in the past 20 years, demonstrating
that graduating good employees is not the problem, he
says.
At the same time, universities — not the public
schools — are the real culprits in failing to prepare stu-
dents to compete in the emerging globalized economy,
some critics contend.
“The quality of teaching in higher education is worse
than at the lower levels, terrible,” but “that’s going unno-
ticed,” says Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education
and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Professors lead the ranks of those who want to impose
[standardized-test-based] evaluations on K-12 teachers,
but nobody’s asking for similar tests to be used on them.
The double standard is striking.”
But the higher-education scene is changing. In a
study of 2,300 students at 24 U.S. universities, Richard
Arum, a New York University professor of sociology and
education, found that more than a third showed no
improvement in critical thinking and writing skills after
four years of college.
24
Their professors may soon find
themselves on the test-score hot seat, Arum said.
SCHOOL REFORM 7
Beginning in 2016, the OECD will
use the same test he used to compare
college achievement internationally.
Said Arum, “The U.S. higher-
education system has been living off
its . . . reputation,” but professors “will
increasingly be held accountable.”
25
Are teachers’ unions a major
barrier to improving schools?
Many reform advocates say teachers’
unions are blocking change by being
obsessed with job protection. They
point to sensational cases, such as the
infamous “rubber rooms” in which
hundreds of New York City teachers
deemed unfit for the classroom by
school administrators sat for months,
or even years, drawing their salaries,
while their cases awaited due-process
hearings.
26
But teacher advocates argue that,
despite their flaws, such due-process
protections are needed to shield
teachers from politically motivated
firings or firings based on prejudice.
They also say that reform proposals are drastic enough to
warrant caution. What’s more, they point out that
unions are not uniformly opposed to reforms.
Because of union contracts, “it takes two years,
$200,000 and 15 percent of the principal’s total time to
get one bad teacher out of the classroom,” said Terry M.
Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. “If we fig-
ure that maybe 5 percent of the teachers . . . are bad
teachers nationwide, that means that 2.5 million kids are
stuck . . . with teachers who aren’t teaching them any-
thing,” said Moe. “The unions are largely responsible.”
27
School systems in cities such as Chicago that have
tried to pioneer substantial reforms have not been able to
produce evidence confirming their value because unions
and others “have nipped them in the bud,” said
Hanushek.
28
In districts with strong unions, policy change takes
longer, according to Katharine O. Strunk, an assistant
professor of education and policy at the University of
Southern California, and Jason A. Grissom, an assistant
professor of public affairs at the University of Missouri.
“Stronger unions are better able . . . to negotiate con-
tracts that constrain districts’ flexibility in policy set-
ting,” they wrote.
29
Yet, unions aren’t the only ones who make it hard to
implement change in schools, some analysts argue. They
point to resistance by school boards to expanding charter
schools, which compete with regular public schools but
are exempt from many regulations public schools must
follow. “Local school boards have been as great a road-
block, and in some cases even fiercer opponents” of
reforms, than unions, wrote PBS education reporter John
Merrow. “They go to court to keep charter schools from
opening or expanding. Why? It’s about money and
control.”
30
Blasting unions as driven solely by self-interest ignores
facts, union supporters say.
For one thing, “there is no research . . . that correlates
student achievement to collective bargaining rights,”
despite many reformers’ claims that ending bargaining
Lower Math Scores Tied to Poverty
Students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches tend to score
lower in mathematics than those whose family income is high enough
to make them ineligible for subsidized lunches. The correlation
suggests poverty contributes to lower achievement.
* Scores are based on an 800-point scale. Top-scoring countries average
about 600.
Source: Patrick Gonzales, et al., “Highlights From Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study 2007: Mathematics and Science Achieve-
ment of U.S. Fourth- and Eighth-Grade Students in an International Context,”
National Center for Education Statistics, September 2009,
nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf.
Average Mathematics Scores of 8th-Grade Students Eligible for
Free or Reduced-price Lunches, 2007*
(Score)
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
U.S. average 75% or more 50-74.9% 25-49.9% 10-24.9% Less than 10%
557
543
514
482
465
508
(Percentage of Students Eligible for Subsidized Lunches)
8 EDUCATI ON
rights will improve schools, said Kate McLaughlin, exec-
utive vice president of the United Teachers of Lowell, the
AFT local in Lowell, Mass. Massachusetts students, for
example, “perform higher than anybody else in this
country academically. Yet we have the strongest collec-
tive bargaining rights,” she said.
31
Massachusetts teachers
bargained for and won the right of every teacher to have
“a qualified and trained mentor” during the first three
years on the job to help them improve, a clear instance of
unions working for students, McLaughlin said.
32
Even many teachers agree that the most commonly
used method of teacher evaluation — classroom evalua-
tion by a school administration — usually doesn’t work
well, and some unions are trying to lead development of
new methods, says Gratz of Curry College.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) pro-
poses basing evaluations on multiple measures that can
be “validated against one another.” Under the plan, the
MTA says, “no high-stakes decisions” such as firing or
raising pay would be based solely on test scores or any
other single factor, such as expert evaluation of teachers’
classroom and planning practices. Instead, if apparently
good practices aren’t matched by good scores or vice
versa, evaluators would be “required to find out why”
before acting.
33
Union-management partnerships have “fostered
reform” in places such as Toledo, Ohio, and Norfolk,
Va., according to researchers led by David Lewin, a
management professor at the University of California,
Los Angeles. In those cities, administrators and unions
emphasize professional development, teacher evalua-
tion and mentoring to improve teacher quality. As an
apparent result, school districts experience “very low
levels of voluntary teacher turnover,” the group wrote.
Unions and administrators collaboratively make “diffi-
cult decisions to not retain ineffective teachers,” they
reported.
34
Countries whose students regularly surpass U.S. stu-
dents on international tests “without exception have
strong unions,” observed Dennis Van Roekel, president
of the National Education Association (NEA). Teachers
must implement administrators’ policies, so a collabora-
tive environment matters, he said.
35
Green Dot, a nonprofit organization founded in
1999, operates 17 charter high schools and one middle
school in high-poverty areas of Los Angeles and one high
school in New York City, all unionized. “I’ve seen what
happens to working people when they don’t have . . .
somebody fighting for them,” said founder Steve Barr, a
Democratic political activist and fundraiser who in 1990
cofounded the nonprofit, nonpartisan Rock the Vote
group that aims to increase young people’s political par-
ticipation. When disagreements surface, Barr recom-
mends that administrators and unions ask, “Is there 75
percent of this issue we all agree on?”
36
The University of Pennsylvania’s Ingersoll says that
while the current reform movement “has a punitive cast
toward teachers” that unions understandably resent, he
doesn’t absolve unions altogether. “Many unions aren’t
helping much,” he says. “It would be good for them to
get out in front on defining what a good, medium and
bad teacher” is, but unions have done little of that.
“Sometimes I think the unions are their own worst
enemies.”
Whatever the case, school management plays a huge
role — negative or positive — in improving schools, says
David Menefee-Libey, a professor of politics at Pomona
College, in Claremont, Calif. There is “very strong
research support” for five specific factors that underlie
school improvement, “and, surprise! Those five factors
frequently aren’t present in schools where low-income
students are,” he says.
The five factors — which were validated in research by
Anthony S. Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching — are, according to
Menefee-Libey:
• Support systems to guide teachers in what and
how to teach;
• Good working conditions;
• Strong ties between the school and community;
• Safe, orderly environments, and
• Principals who prioritize learning.
37
Is business-style competition a good model for
improving schools?
Evidence shows that market-style competition and per-
formance-measurement statistics can improve education,
reform advocates say. But skeptics argue that reshaping
education to operate like a business is, at best, an
unproven strategy that may in fact be contrary to the
goals of schooling.
SCHOOL REFORM 9
Using data to figure out who is
best at vital tasks — such as edu-
cating teachers — is crucial, says
Gregory McGinity, managing
director for education policy at
the Los Angeles-based Broad
Foundation, one of a small group
of philanthropies making grants
aimed at spurring education
reforms and measuring their
results.
Rather than propping up all
teacher-training programs, he
says, “governors and school super-
intendents must be more aggres-
sive in using data to determine
which schools of education are
doing a good job” and then “put
the dollars into the schools that
provide the best teachers.”
Critics focus too much on pro-
posals for firing unsuccessful
teachers while ignoring plans to
use merit pay and public recogni-
tion to reward teachers whose stu-
dents improve, McGinity says.
Some researchers have found
data that links improved educa-
tion to market-oriented changes,
such as providing families with a
wider choice of schools.
For example, a school-choice
program in Chicago produced
modest improvement in on-time
high-school graduation rates for
students who exercised the option
to switch from their assigned
neighborhood schools, reported Douglas Lee Lauen, an
assistant professor of public policy at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Students who were high
achievers and those from neighborhoods with low poverty
rates benefited most, Lauen found.
38
In a school system overhauled along market lines,
schools would be closed and replaced rather than tink-
ered with in hopes of improvement, wrote Andy Smarick,
a visiting fellow at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham
Institute, an education-policy
think tank. In other words,
schools would be treated like
businesses — those that fail or
consistently produce losses are
shuttered, and competition fills
the gap.
“Once persistently low per-
forming, the majority of schools
will remain low performing
despite being acted upon in innu-
merable ways,” Smarick said. In
what he calls an “alarming” record,
only 14 percent of California
schools restructured under the
2002 No Child Left Behind Act
(NCLB), a major education-
reform measure signed into law by
President George W. Bush,
achieved “adequate yearly pro-
gress” in the first year after the
changes. The proportions for
schools in Maryland (12 percent)
and Ohio (9 percent) were even
worse, Smarick wrote.
39
(Under NCLB, “restructur-
ing” means firing and replacing a
school’s principal and most of its
teachers and/or reopening the
school as a charter school or
under the management of a pri-
vate school-management com-
pany or the state government.)
40
Frederick M. Hess, director of
education policy at the conservative
American Enterprise Institute,
argues that the public-school sys-
tem is too stodgy, rule-burdened and old-fashioned to
improve. Furthermore, efforts to “scale up” and apply small
improvements to many schools routinely fail, he says.
Thus, he argues, “instead of taking this 19th-century
box called school and making it better, we ought to”
scrap the traditional school system altogether and “think
about how to help people get what they need.” The way
to do that, Hess says, is by harnessing entrepreneurs’
energy to provide students and teachers with education
How U.S. Teacher Salaries
Compare
Compared with salaries of other
college-educated workers, U.S.
teacher salaries are further behind
than teacher salaries in many other
countries.
Source: “Building a High-Quality
Teaching Profession: Lessons From
Around the World,” Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Devel-
opment, 2011,
www2.ed.gov/about/inits/
Ranking of Selected
Countries in Teacher Pay
Compared with Other
College-educated Workers
Spain
Germany
Australia
Finland
Sweden
France
England
South Korea
United States
Italy
10 EDUCATI ON
products and services geared to their individual needs,
such as instructional computer programs based on
new brain research, and creating “virtual schools” that
students can attend online.
But New York University’s Ravitch said she saw “no
reason to believe that closing a school and opening a
new one would necessarily produce superior results.” In
fact, she wrote, half of New York City’s 10 worst-
performing schools on 2009 state math tests “were new
schools that had been opened to replace failing
schools.”
41
Firing teachers is also a dicey strategy, says Columbia’s
Pallas. “We know that new teachers, no matter where
they come from, often are foundering” for at least a few
years, he says. A more realistic approach would be to
focus on improving “how we prepare teachers, both in
school and once they get on the job,” he contends.
Do reformers “think there’s a huge army of new
teachers to jump in to replace” those who are pushed
out? asks Menefee-Libey, of Pomona College. “We
haven’t seen them.”
Kenneth J. Saltman an associate professor of educa-
tion at DePaul University in Chicago, worries that in
the race to require schools to produce measurable out-
comes, “the value of intellectual curiosity,” among
other things, will be lost. “What happens to the coun-
try when the curriculum gets narrowed” to exclude
skills like deep reading and detailed debate of issues
“because these skills aren’t easily testable?” he asks.
“All of these reforms have been advanced as accom-
plishing really big stuff — bringing low-income kids
fully into the mainstream,” where they’ll achieve on a par
with higher-income students, says Columbia’s Levin. But
even studies that show positive effects of market-oriented
strategies “show quite small effects,” he says.
In Washington, D.C., schools recorded gains in test
scores under the direction of Chancellor Michelle Rhee, a
hard-nosed reformer best known for firing hundreds of low-
performing teachers before resigning — possibly under
pressure from a newly elected mayor — a mere three years
into her tenure. But as Levin says, reading scores that appar-
ently soared in the second year of Rhee’s tenure “disap-
peared in the third year.”
He adds, “If you’re only looking for tiny gains, then
you’ve evaded the original argument” for market-based
reform.
BACKGROUND
Engine of Opportunity
Today’s school-reform debates are the latest in a long line
of disputes over public education dating back to the 19th
century.
For two centuries, many have hoped that the public
schools could help the United States break the historical
mold of nations stratified by class. America’s excellent
universal education promises that “the rail-splitter . . . at
20 years of age may become the chief magistrate of 50
millions of free people before he is 50,” declared William
A. Mowry (1829-1917), a school administrator in Rhode
Island and Massachusetts.
42
Expectations for what schools should accomplish have
continuously risen.
In 1870, only 2 percent of Americans graduated from
high school, and 30 years later the rate was only 6.4
percent.
43
By 1940, however, fully half of American stu-
dents graduated from high school, and in 1969 the
graduation rate peaked at 77 percent.
44
Despite the seemingly much greater progress made by
American schools than in the past, however, the 20th century
also saw virtually constant calls for improvement and reform,
according New York University’s Ravitch. Notwithstanding
the remarkable gains in American students’ educational
attainment, “it is impossible to find a period in the 20th
century in which education reformers, parents and the citi-
zenry were satisfied with the schools,” although few agreed
about what should be done to improve them, she wrote.
45
Beginning in the 1970s, oil shocks, recessions and a
globalizing economy shook Americans’ confidence in what
had seemed an endlessly bright economic future. The
schools came under new criticism as the United States
found its world-beating school-completion rates surpassed
by other nations. By the late 1980s, high-school gradua-
tion rates declined to just under 70 percent and leveled
off. In 2007, the rate stood at 68.8 percent.
46
Current reform projects aimed at retooling schools as
an engine of economic prosperity trace their history at
least as far back as 1957, when the Soviet Union launched
Sputnik, the first spacecraft to orbit the earth, says Curry
College’s Gratz. Sputnik, he says, sparked worries that the
United States might be losing its global technological
superiority, and schools came under sharp criticism for
not doing enough to prepare students in math and
SCHOOL REFORM 11
C H R O N O L O G Y
1990s Interest in school-reform grows, with limited
results. Republicans push for expanded school choice;
Democrats support developing compatible curriculum and
nationwide learning standards.
1990 Wisconsin legislature establishes nation’s first
school-voucher pilot program, to help 1,100 low-income
Milwaukee students attend nonreligious private schools.
. . . Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp turns her 1989
senior-thesis idea on eliminating education inequities into
Teach for America, which recruits elite-college graduates
to teach for two years in low-income districts.
1991 Minnesota enacts first charter-school law.
1992 First charter school opens in St. Paul, Minn. . . .
California enacts second charter law.
1993 Tennessee adopts “value-added assessment system” to
measure how much individual teachers increase or
decrease students’ test scores.
1994 President Bill Clinton signs Goals 2000: Educate
America Act, creating the National Education
Standards and Improvement Council with authority to
approve states’ academic standards; short-lived effort
effectively ends when Republicans win control of the
House in November. . . . Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates
and his wife establish Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, soon to become a major funder of school-
reform projects.
1995 Teach for America alumni Michael Feinberg and
David Levin launch Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)
charter schools. . . . Ohio state legislators pilot a voucher
program for low-income Cleveland students to use at
either religious or nonreligious schools. . . . Illinois
legislature hands control of Chicago public schools to
Democratic Mayor Richard Daley.
1999 Florida establishes first statewide school voucher
program.
2000s No Child Left Behind law focuses attention on
“failing” schools. Reformers seek to weed out teachers who don’t
raise students’ achievement scores and reward those who do.
2002 U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of Ohio’s
voucher program. . . . Broad Foundation’s first annual
Broad Prize of $1 million, for an urban district that
reduces achievement gaps for low-income students, goes
to Houston.
2003 Gates Foundation awards millions to Boston and
other cities to break large high schools into smaller units,
based on the theory that a more personal environment
aids learning.
2007 Newly elected Democratic Mayor Adrian
Fenty of Washington is the latest official to wrest control
of schools from the local school board; he appoints high-
profile reformer Michelle Rhee as school chancellor. . . .
New York City school Chancellor Joel Klein says he
will fire principals of schools with lagging test scores. . . .
Teach for America, which placed 500 teachers its
first year, receives 18,000 applications for 2,900
positions.
2009 Citing disappointing results, Gates Foundation
ends small-school program after awarding $2 billion in
grants. . . . President Barack Obama announces Race to
the Top grants for states to develop student-achievement
databases, expand charter schools and improve teacher
retention and recruitment.
2010 Using previously confidential school data, Los
Angeles Times names L.A. elementary-school teachers
who score high and low on “value-added” teacher
assessments. . . . Fenty loses re-election after many
residents protest Chancellor Rhee’s teacher and principal
firings; Rhee resigns. . . . Gates Foundation will fund
development of databases to assess teachers’
achievement.
2011 Newly elected Republican governors and legislators
in states including Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Idaho, New
Jersey and Florida propose bills to lower costs and
improve education by ending tenure, limiting teachers’
union collective bargaining rights, instituting merit pay
and firing teachers based on student-achievement
assessments. . . . USA Today reports possible evidence of
cheating on standardized tests at D.C. schools that former
Chancellor Rhee praised as successful examples of school
reform.
12 EDUCATI ON
science. But he says efforts to blame the schools for the
nation’s large economic and technological challenges have
an air of “unreality” because schools can’t possibly be held
responsible for globalization, growing income inequality
and other such factors that shape the economy.
Even as Americans have had high hopes for schools,
they’ve been skeptical about teachers.
Over the 20th century, national magazines regularly
“fretted about teacher hygiene, perversion, patriotism and
competence,” wrote Hess of the American Enterprise
Institute.
47
The first U.S. teachers’ union, the Chicago Teachers
Foundation, was established in 1897.
48
At the time, many
teachers faced unfair treatment, wrote Ravitch. The New
York City Board of Education fired female teachers if
they married and, after teachers successfully fought for
the right to wed, it fired those who became pregnant.
As late as the mid-20th century, in Texas, a “right to
Charter Schools Draw Mixed Reviews
Education experts say only a few have merit.
T
he nation’s 5,000 charter schools — taxpayer-funded
institutions freed of some rules that public schools
must follow — figure big in school reformers’ plans
to improve American education. But education experts say
that while some individual charter schools have merit, the
charter movement as a whole is not a panacea for what ails the
nation’s public-school system.
That assessment has not discouraged education-reform
advocates from embracing charter schools. So-called venture
philanthropies such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
generously fund charter school-management organizations,
such as San Francisco-based Knowledge Is Power Program
(KIPP). Moreover, the Obama administration’s school-
reform funding program, Race to the Top, encourages states
to make their school laws friendlier to charter development.
But information on how well charter schools perform is
only gradually emerging. So far, the results are mixed, with
some charter schools producing impressive learning results
compared with demographically similar public schools,
some lagging at the bottom on many measures and most
ensconced somewhere in the middle of the pack on student
achievement.
Valerie E. Lee, a professor of education at the University
of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that only “a few charter
schools are really good” at improving student achievement,
while “a few are absolutely awful, and the rest are no differ-
ent” from traditional public schools. “Is this research solid
enough to use as a basis for a large expansion of many of
these schools?” she asks. “I’d probably say, ‘No.’ ”
Charter schools are not covered by laws in some states
that require a unionized teaching staff. What’s more, they
do not have to follow state and school-district requirements
on curriculum and mode of instruction. While most char-
ter schools operate similarly to traditional public schools,
others use longer school days or avant-garde teaching meth-
ods, such as curricula built around music education or
experiential learning.
While reformers’ interest in charter schools has grown
sharply in recent years, the charter-school movement isn’t
new. Minnesota’s charter-school law, the first in the nation, is
20 years old this year. And with charter-school laws in effect
in 40 states and the District of Columbia, the number of
students enrolled in such schools tripled to 1.3 million
between 2000 and 2008.
1
Some of the newest research shows that while few char-
ter schools seem to substantially improve students’ test
scores, “they do produce much higher graduation rates”
— in other words, they instill students with motivation,
says John Witte, a professor of public affairs and political
science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “This
parallels the old research on Catholic schools,” showing
that their students also were more likely than comparable
public-school students to persist through graduation,
Witte says.
In a 2010 analysis of 22 of the 99 schools managed by
the San Francisco-based KIPP charter school-management
organization, most of the schools had “positive, statisti-
cally significant and educationally substantial” effects on
students’ scores on state mathematics and reading tests.
Furthermore, while KIPP schools serve smaller numbers
ofstudents for whom English is a second language and
fewer special-education students, they also enroll “a
SCHOOL REFORM 13
work” state where teachers’ unions have had little success
in organizing and thus enjoy little clout, “an ultracon-
servative group called the Minute Women . . . would
drop in unannounced to observe classes . . . to find out
whether teachers expressed any unacceptable political
opinions,” such as support for desegregation, Ravitch
wrote.
49
Organized teachers won passage of the first tenure law
in 1909, in New Jersey, to protect against firings based
on race, gender or unpopular political opinions or to make
way for cronies of school management.
50
Public and Private
As early as the mid-19th century, charities used private
money to try to reshape the nation’s public schools.
After the Civil War, abolitionist charity groups who feared
that Southern states would not provide education to freed
slaves took on the job themselves, notes Janelle Scott, an
disproportionate share of low-income students” compared
to other local schools, analysts wrote.
2
A 2009 Stanford University study, meanwhile, found
that charter-school students outperformed their public-
school counterparts in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri,
Denver and Chicago. But charter students significantly
lagged in achievement in Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New
Mexico, Ohio and Texas and performed on a par with
public-school students in California, Georgia, North
Carolina and the District of Columbia. Nationwide,
17 percent of charter schools improved students’ math
achievement significantly, compared with public schools,
but 37 percent lagged behind public schools on math
achievement, according to the analysis.
3
Furthermore, while reformers push to close low-achiev-
ing public schools, researchers have also found that, like
public schools, low-achieving charter schools are extremely
difficult to shut down. “Are bad schools immortal?”
lamented researchers at the conservative Fordham Institute
in a 2010 analysis. In follow-up research on both public and
charter schools found to be low achievers in 2003-2004,
a foundation analyst found that 72 percent of the low-
achieving charters were still operating — and still “bad” —
five years later. (Eighty percent of low-achieving public
schools in the study also remained in operation.)
4
The bottom line, say many scholars: Don’t count on
charter schools to drastically improve education.
Originally, many hoped that the freedom granted to char-
ter schools would allow them to develop new modes of
instruction that other schools could adopt. But so far, “there’s
not much evidence of charters serving as incubators for inno-
vation,” says Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and educa-
tion at Columbia University in New York. “I can’t say there’s
one reform that’s come out that can be widely adopted,” he
says. Some charter-management organizations such as KIPP
have significantly raised student achievement after lengthening
the school day and school year, he says. “But when it comes to
the curriculum and ways of teaching, they’re not looking
much, if any, different from the public schools.”
The number of charter schools “is always going to be
limited because they require entrepreneurial people at the
center,” says Wisconsin’s Witte.
That means that the existence of even the best charter
schools in low-income districts does not let the community
off the hook for making its public schools as good as they
can be, says Lee. She says many families lack the time or
knowledge to compete for the limited number of slots typi-
cally available in local charter schools. Parents usually must
participate in a lottery for available seats.
Concern also exists among civil rights groups about the
very large numbers of minority children enrolled in charter
schools, which often don’t have the same ties to the com-
munity or public accountability as do public schools, says
Janelle Scott, an assistant professor of education at the
University of California, Berkeley. Civil rights organiza-
tions and charter-management organizations “haven’t been
terribly involved with each other,” she says. “So there’s some
concern about who’s shaping education for people of color.”
— Marcia Clemmitt
1
“Fast Facts,” National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department
of Education,http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=30.
2
Christina Clark Tuttle, et al., “Student Characteristics an Achievement
in 22 KIPP Middle Schools,” Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., June
2010, www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/education/kipp_
fnlrpt.pdf.
3
“Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States,” CREDO,
Stanford University, 2009,http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/
MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf.
4
David A. Stuit, “Are Bad Schools Immortal?” Fordham Institute,
December 2010, www.edexcellence.net/publications-issues/publica
tions/are-bad-schools-immortal.html.
14 EDUCATI ON
assistant professor of education at the University of California,
Berkeley. For example, the American Missionary Association,
a nondenominational Protestant group, opened more than
500 schools for freed slaves.
51
Many private fortunes have helped shape U.S. educa-
tion. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, established in 1905 by industrialist Andrew
Carnegie, helped found the Educational Testing Service
(ETS), for example. The ETS developed and to this day
manages standardized tests that include the SAT. In addi-
tion, the Carnegie Foundation led the fight for federal Pell
grants for low-income college students.
52
In 1955, Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago
libertarian economist and 1976 Nobel Prize winner,
introduced a new twist to the idea of linking the public
and private sectors on schooling. As part of his overarching
theory that all public-sector enterprises overspend and
underperform because they are not disciplined by market
supply and demand, Friedman proposed that public funds
should be directed to private schools.
The government should fund education but should
not, in general, run schools, because government, by nature
inefficient, should run as few institutions as possible,
Friedman theorized. His plan would offer parents vouchers
Teaching Is a Prestige Profession in Some
Countries
“There are few occupations with higher status” in Finland.
T
oday’s U.S. school reformers, alarmed at what
they see as widespread failure in the classroom,
tend to focus on removing bad teachers, reducing
the collective bargaining power of teacher unions and
reducing the authority of teachers to stray from standard-
ized curricula.
But in some other countries where students outpace
American pupils on international tests, the focus is on giv-
ing teachers greater autonomy and elevating them to a pro-
fessional status often reserved for lawyers and doctors.
“Finland has raised the social status of its teachers to a
level where there are few occupations with higher status,”
states a report prepared for an international education sum-
mit organized by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in
March.
1
Test scores in Finland were below the international aver-
age 25 years ago but have recently risen to the top of the
global rankings.
Finland focuses on bringing the best students into
teaching and ensuring that the job confers respect in soci-
ety, according to the report, prepared by the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In
contrast to the United States, where elementary-school
teachers, especially, come from the lower half of college
classes, top students in Finland battle for primary-school
teaching spots. In 2010, for example, “over 6,600 appli-
cants competed for 660 available slots in primary-school
preparation programs . . ., making teaching one of the most
sought-after professions,” the OECD said.
2
Finnish teachers’ unions play a key role in shaping edu-
cation policy, too. “It’s a totally different situation in
Finland” than in the United States when it comes to the
relationship between unions and school administrators, said
Henna Virkunnen, the country’s minister of education.
“Our teachers’ union has been one of the main partners —
We are working very much together with the union,” she
said. “Nearly all of the teachers are members. I think we
don’t have big differences in our thinking.”
3
Virkunnen acknowledged that comparing education
policies is not easy. Schooling is “very much tied to a
country’s own history and society, so we can’t take one
system from another country and put it somewhere else,”
she said. Still, national differences aside, paying close
attention to teachers’ pre-service and in-service training,
developing teachers who “are experts of their own work,”
respecting their professional autonomy and knowledge
and providing good workplace conditions are key,
Virkunnen said.
4
SCHOOL REFORM 15
“equal to the estimated cost of . . . a government school”
to send children to private schools. Such a scheme would
“permit competition to develop” and “not least . . . , make
the salaries of school teachers responsive to market forces,”
Friedman wrote.
53
Little noticed at first, the idea was promoted in the 1980s
by a burgeoning network of conservative think tanks such
as the American Enterprise Institute.
54
The New Reformers
A wealth boom in the 1990s built fortunes for entrepre-
neurs in such fields as electronics and finance and gave
rise to a new breed of school reformers, typified by Gates,
the Microsoft cofounder, and Broad, who made his first
fortune in Detroit real estate development before turning
to insurance. This group has been dubbed “venture phi-
lanthropists” for their efforts to fuse business methods
with their social activism.
Venture philanthropists’ “critique of traditional phi-
lanthropy is that it’s been far too incremental” in achieving
goals, says the University of California’s Scott. As a result,
while old-style foundations generally announced broad
funding areas, then solicited grant applications from experts
in those fields, “venture philanthropists often don’t ask
Singapore also assigns high status to the teaching profes-
sion. It “carefully selects young people from the top one-third
of the secondary-school graduating class whom the govern-
ment is especially interested in attracting to teaching and offers
them a monthly stipend, while still in school,” the OECD said.
The stipend, it said, is competitive with salaries for new gradu-
ates in other professional fields. In exchange, recipients must
make a three-year commitment to teaching. They get a choice
of career paths: becoming master instructors who train others,
curriculum and research specialists or future administrators.
5
Some have noted an irony in the fact that Education
Secretary Duncan not only organized the international
summit but co-authored a newspaper column with the top
official of the event’s host: Fred van Leeuwen, general secre-
tary of 30-million-member Education International, the
largest international teachers’ union.
The Obama administration has vocally supported many
of the principles of the U.S. school-reform movement,
including the championing of charter schools, most of
which employ nonunionized teachers and are intended to
compete with traditional public schools.
Yet Duncan and his co-authors wrote that “increasing
teacher autonomy” is “vital” for improving the schools.
Contrary to arguments of many current U.S. school
reformers, “many of the world’s top-performing nations
have strong teacher unions that work in tandem with local
and national authorities to boost student achievement,”
they said. “These high-performing nations illustrate how
tough-minded collaboration more often leads to educa-
tional progress than tough-minded confrontation.”
6
— Marcia Clemmitt
1
“Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from Around
the Worl d, ” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, 2011, p. 11, www.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746
,en_21571361_44315115_47386549_1_1_1_1,00.html.
2
Ibid.
3
Quoted in Justin Snider, “An Interview With Henna Virkunnen,
Finland’s Minister of Education,” The Hechinger Report, March 16,
2011,http://hechingerreport.org/content/an-interview-with-henna-
virkkunen-finlands-minister-of-education_5458.
4
Quoted in ibid.
5
“Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession,” op. cit., p. 9.
6
Arne Duncan, Angel Gurría and Fred van Leeuwen, “Uncommon
Wisdom on Teaching,” Dept. of Education website, March 16, 2011,
www.ed.gov/blog/2011/03/uncommon-wisdom-on-teaching.
Finland focuses on bringing the best students into teaching.
Above, a second-grade class in Vaasa.
A
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P
/
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e
t
t
y

I
m
a
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e
s
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i
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16 EDUCATI ON
you to apply.” Instead, they “seek you out, if you’re doing
specific work that they support, because they tend to
believe they already know” what works in a given field,
Scott says.
But the venture philanthropists’ ideas don’t always pan
out in practice.
For example, one of the Gates Foundation’s early
initiatives — running from 2001 to 2009 — funded the
breakup of large high schools into small ones of a few
hundred pupils each, on the theory that better education
occurred in a more personal environment, Scott says. At
the time, research showed that medium-sized high schools
of 500 to 1,200 students got the best results. But Gates
poured money into tiny schools anyway. Then, after several
years, when the small schools didn’t produce improvement,
the foundation quietly dropped the program, says Scott.
One person involved with the initiative told Scott that
“researchers had told us” that medium-sized, rather than
very small, high schools showed the best results, “but we
didn’t listen,” she says.
On the positive side, the episode demonstrates that
the Gates Foundation, at least, is willing to learn from
poor results, says Scott. But it also illustrates the potential
danger of privately funding a crucial public resource, she
says. What happens to schools created with private dollars
when that money is withdrawn? Should taxpayers support
them? Scott asks.
Still, venture philanthropists are gaining power as
they support mainly market-oriented school reforms in
concert with like-minded politicians, such as New York
City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley. Also working with the philanthropists
are “education entrepreneurs” such as Wendy Kopp, the
Princeton graduate who founded Teach for America, a
nonprofit group that has placed thousands of young
graduates of elite colleges into temporary teaching slots
in urban schools.
Scott says venture philanthropists have “followed the
lead of conservative funders” who in the 1970s began
to build a network of professors, academic research cent-
ers and think tanks that today buttresses the powerful
conservative movement. By funding multiple groups and
individuals and providing multiyear funding to cover
operating costs, rather than making single-project grants,
the venture philanthropists have formed a coherent
philosophical network with lasting power, she says.
“There’s power because people aren’t working at
cross-purposes.”
In recent years, “joint grant making” by education
funders has increased, says Sarah Reckhow, an assistant
professor of education at Michigan State University in
East Lansing. While many cities and organizations get no
venture-philanthropy cash, those that do — including the
New York City and Los Angeles school districts and groups
such as Teach for America —“get a lot,” from multiple
sources, which helps them make large-scale, high-profile
changes, Reckhow says.
“Historically, education politics has been local,” with
reformers focusing on change in a single district, says Jeffrey
Henig, a professor of political science and education at
Columbia University. Today’s “coalition is focused on chang-
ing the national system,” such as by persuading the federal
government to add public dollars for programs that echo
foundation initiatives. “I don’t think this would have been
possible without the growing role” that states and the federal
government have played in education policy, Henig says.
(Beginning in the 1970s, most states began creating
statewide school-funding formulas to replace purely local
ones. The 2002 No Child Left Behind law helped increase
federal involvement in assessing student achievement.)
Compared to a school system’s annual budget, philan-
thropy dollars are “a drop in the bucket,” says Reckhow.
However, since most school-district money is tied up in
salaries, “the funding actually provides powerful leverage”
because it’s “nearly the only money available for new
initiatives.”
Wealthy investment-fund managers who pump money
into school-reform efforts such as charter schools “honestly
think they’re doing good. Plus, it’s a very strong goodwill
builder” for an industry whose reputation has suffered
from the financial crash and recession, says Columbia’s
Levin. A few million dollars “is a rounding error for a
wealthy investor.” But it “is huge for a school.” Such
funding, Levin says, can make a school highly influential
by providing extra resources that may help achieve better
results and allow adoption of interesting programs that
gain public and media attention.
Education Entrepreneurs
Conservative reformers and venture philanthropists tend
to stress different aspects of and reasons for school reform,
says Montclair State’s Bulkley.
SCHOOL REFORM 17
Conservatives, who tend to be skeptical of public
systems of any kind, often argue that reform’s greatest
value is to offer families free choice and to create a market
where none existed, she says. By contrast, she continues,
venture philanthropists “tend to believe in public purposes”
for schools and often stress the importance of building a
public system better equipped to produce a skilled
workforce.
The Broad Foundation, for example, awards an annual
prize to districts that improve disadvantaged students’
achievement, citing as a key motivation the need to restore
“the public’s confidence in . . . public schools by high-
lighting” success.
55
With their focus on freedom and individual choice,
many conservative reformers are as supportive of small
one-of-a-kind charter schools as they are of multischool
charter-school groups, says Bulkley. But venture philan-
thropists “have their DNA in entrepreneurship” — having
launched small companies that grew into giants — and
this background translates into a strong interest among
venture philanthropists in so-called “charter-management
organizations” that seek to run many individual schools
based on a single school-management philosophy, Bulkley
says.
Venture philanthropy dollars have spurred develop-
ment of numerous entrepreneurial groups. New Leaders
for New Schools is a New York City-based private
training program for aspiring urban-school principals.
The Brooklyn-based New Teacher Project — founded
in 1997 by Rhee before she became D.C. school
chancellor — aims to change school practices to allow more
hiring of teachers without traditional certifications.
56
Venture philanthropists favor working with cities where
mayors, not school boards, are in control. Both Chicago
and New York, where schools have been under mayor
control since 1995 and 2002, respectively, receive sub-
stantial private funding.
57
“Old-style industrial-based foundations tended to work
within institutional constraints,” taking local politics into
account, for example, Henig says. But “Silicon Valley-
influenced” philanthropists inhabit a fast-moving world.
“I do understand the frustration” that leads them to pre-
fer the one-stop shop of mayoral control, Henig says. “Why
would you want to wait two generations to implement
change incrementally, in part because it’s hard to get top-
heavy bureaucracies to move?” Nevertheless, incremental
change that seeks widespread buy-in is probably the best
path to lasting improvement, he suggests.
CURRENT SITUATION
Budget Battles
Several newly elected conservative governors are bringing
school reform to the front pages this spring. Recession-
triggered budget problems in such states as Wisconsin,
Ohio, Idaho, Florida and New Jersey have opened the
way for battles over teachers’ benefits and unions’ cherished
right to bargain collectively.
Conservative reformers, especially, have welcomed the
reform efforts. “Except for one year during the Great
Depression,” public-school funding “has gone up every
year for 100 years,” says the Hoover Institution’s Hanushek.
Much of the money “went into salaries and retirement”
plans for teachers and for “reducing class sizes,” neither
of which improves education, he argues.
The budget battles provide an entry point for ensuring
“accountability for every dollar and every child,” wrote
former Washington school chancellor Rhee, who contin-
ues to enjoy heavy venture-philanthropy backing. To save
money, wrote Rhee, “districts must shift new employees
from defined-benefit pension programs” — traditional
pensions that promise retired workers a specific benefit
level for the rest of their lives —“to portable, defined-
contribution plans” whose payout depends on investment
returns. And because “the budget crisis inevitably requires
layoffs,” she said, states can take the opportunity to begin
basing firing decisions “on teachers’ effectiveness, not on
their seniority,” as most districts do today.
58
In March, Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who
has hired Rhee as a consultant, signed legislation to
gradually eliminate tenure and base firings and pay raises
on teachers’ performance in raising student test scores.
59

In April, Republican Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter of Idaho
signed a measure ending tenure for new teachers, institut-
ing merit pay and banning unions from bargaining over
workload and class size.
60
“There have also been lots of state-law proposals for
school choice” this year, says John Witte, a professor of
public affairs and political science at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison. In the past, Republican lawmakers
have pushed bills to bolster charter schools but haven’t often
18 EDUCATI ON
A T I S S U E
Has spending on public schools risen too high?
Adam B. Schaeffer
Policy Analyst, Cato Institute
Written for CQ Researcher, April 2011
Richard Rothstein
Research Associate, Economic Policy Institute
Written for CQ Researcher, April 2011
Real, per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than
doubled over 40 years, while test scores have remained flat at
the end of high school. That’s around $12,000 or $13,000 per
student every year.
We’ve spent more every decade with no return in student
performance. That’s not investment — defined as getting a
positive return on your money. It’s just spending.
This poses a particularly difficult problem for state and local
governments who bear most of the burden. State and local edu-
cation spending consumes 46 percent of all tax revenue, or two-
and-a-half times what’s spent on Medicaid/CHIP.
It’s also taking a bigger share of tax revenue. State educa-
tion spending as a share of tax revenue has increased 90 percent
in two decades. It’s increased over 70 percent as a share of local
revenue.
It’s time to replace the “spending” model of education policy
with an “investment” model.
We can make public education a lot more efficient. The num-
ber of public school staff per student increased 70 percent since
1970; cutting back on unnecessary personnel will bring signifi-
cant savings.
But school choice, particularly through education tax credits,
is the best way to invest in education. It’s a proven way to
improve public school performance, save money and increase
choice. It’s an effective, efficient investment in education.
Choice is the most intensively studied education reform
there is, and the verdict is clear: It works. Decades of evidence
and dozens of studies provide proof. It works in Chile and
Sweden, and it works in Florida and Wisconsin and a dozen
other states.
The vast majority of studies analyzing private choice policies
demonstrate positive impacts on participants and children who
remain in public schools. None have shown negative impacts.
And choice programs are far less costly to taxpayers.
According to a 2008 fiscal analysis by the state Office of
Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability in
Florida, the state gained $1.49 in savings for every $1 it lost in
tax revenue to its education tax credit program. David Figlio, a
Northwestern University researcher and official analyst of the
program, found it significantly boosted performance in Florida’s
public schools.
Citizens and businesses want to invest directly in our educa-
tion system. We should encourage them to do so.
Let’s stop just spending money on education. Let’s really
start investing in it.
States’ education spending varies widely, even after adjustment
for purchasing-power differences. Real costs also vary, because
disadvantaged students need more support than those whose
early-childhood, after-school, home-literacy and cultural experi-
ences supplement their schooling.
For decades, spending nationwide increased, largely for chil-
dren with disabilities. Their individualized attention accounts for
much of the staff increases. Nonetheless, achievement for regu-
lar students also improved, substantially so for the disadvan-
taged: On the “gold standard” National Assessment of
Educational Progress, black 12th-graders gained nearly two-
thirds of a standard deviation in math and reading since 1980.
Some states clearly spend too little. Others may spend more
than needed for graduates’ workplace success, because wealthier
taxpayers choose to provide more fulfilling (and expensive) expe-
riences for their children. Mississippi spends less per pupil —
about $8,500 — than almost any state. Its percentage of
low-income children is higher, test scores are lower and capacity
to fund education (per-capita personal income) is less.
Massachusetts spends more — about $14,500 — with propor-
tionally fewer low-income children than elsewhere. Its test scores
are highest of all. Its fiscal capacity is greater than most states’.
Then there is California, spending less — about $10,000 —
than most, with many low-income children, low scores and high
income. It chooses not to tax itself to educate disadvantaged youth
well, spending instead on prisons for those who fail.
More money should not be spent unwisely, but Mississippi
cannot spend what’s needed without greater federal aid.
California should spend more, but with greater state effort. Both
should invest in early childhood. Children from less literate
homes have worse verbal skills than middle-class children — by
age 3. This early gap cannot be overcome by more spending
later, but better schools can sustain benefits from early invest-
ments. Well-qualified (and better-paid) teachers in smaller
primary-grade classes for low-income children would be wise.
Massachusetts should also invest more in early childhood
for disadvantaged students, but it need not boost average
spending. Wealthy taxpayers should contribute more, choosing
whether to do so by reducing suburban expenditures.
Today, federal aid exacerbates inequality. Subsidies for low-
income students are proportional to existing state spending, so
Massachusetts inexcusably gets more federal dollars per child
than Mississippi. The question is not whether we overspend but
whether we spend on the right programs for children most in
need. The answer is “no”.
YES NO
SCHOOL REFORM 19
sought voucher expansions, partly because their mostly
suburban constituents like their local schools and wouldn’t
seek vouchers. “But now something on the right has changed,”
and voucher-expansion proposals are on the table “all around
the country,” Witte says.
Wisconsin’s Gov. Walker has proposed repealing enroll-
ment caps both for vouchers and for the number of students
who can attend so-called “virtual” — or online — schools.
He also wants to phase out income limits for voucher eligi-
bility.
61
“That’s a huge change” because voucher programs
have previously assisted only the poor, says Witte.
Walker also proposes ending a requirement that students
who use vouchers at private and online schools take state
achievement tests. But that would be contrary to the
stated principles of some venture-philanthropy reformers.
“If you’re going to have a system of choice,” then a com-
mon set of learning and achievement standards — preferably
nationwide — is crucial for all schools, not just public ones,
says Broad Foundation policy director McGinity. Otherwise,
“you’re not going to have a transparent market in which
people can make comparisons.” Ultimately, the standards
would include both test scores and comparative information
to help parents choose a school “with the best arts program,”
for example, he says.
Such developments cast doubt on just how much
reforms backed by conservatives and venture philanthro-
pists actually coincide, says Columbia’s Henig. “There’s
also cleavage on how much money should be spent,” he
says. Venture philanthropists “have learned from charters
and cities with mayoral control that it’s expensive to do
this,” while conservatives stress cutting education spending.
Racing to the Top?
The Obama administration has worked in concert with
reformers since taking office in 2009. Obama’s Secretary
of Education, Arne Duncan, was CEO of Chicago’s
public schools and gained reformers’ favor through his
strategy of closing down chronically low-performing
schools and reopening them with new staff.
62
Under Obama’s Race to the Top program, states have
pledged to:
• Adopt statewide learning standards and assessments;
• Build data systems to measure achievement;
• Recruit, retain and reward effective teachers and
principals through measures such as merit pay and
retention bonuses;
• Foster education innovation through such means as
laws encouraging charter-school development; and
• Focus on turning around the lowest-performing
schools.
Last year, 11 states and the District of Columbia won
$4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants, including $350
million to support joint work among states on student
assessment.
63
This year, states are pushing forward with these pro-
jects. For example, Rhode Island is field-testing a teacher-
evaluation program in two districts and a charter school.
Delaware will pilot in-school expert coaches to help staff
members analyze achievement data and adjust instruction
to individual needs. Massachusetts will establish career
ladders to encourage teachers to remain in the profession.
64
Yet, some reformers have hit bumps in the road in
recent months, at least partly because of public skepticism.
Last October, Rhee resigned from her post in
Washington after then- mayor Adrian Fenty, who
appointed her in 2007, lost his reelection bid, in large
part because many city residents were fed up with
Rhee. Some teachers and parents complained, for
example, that teacher firings Rhee claimed she based
on merit actually occurred before her new teacher-
assessment plan had even gone into operation.
65
Much of Rhee’s “impatience was merited,” says
Columbia’s Levin. “The idea that the school system is
an employment agency for my friends” is a bad feature
of many districts, including Washington, and needs
changing, he says. “But I would try to build community
support before doing that,” he says. Rhee “has a big ego,
and she instead took pride in her tactics.”
Levin and others also say that Rhee’s so-called
“IMPACT” teacher-evaluation plan has merit. The plan
is a useful, multifaceted attempt to produce an overall
picture of teachers, including not just test scores “but
evaluations by master teachers,” who would seek “to
recognize good teacher practices both in the classroom
and in planning” lessons, says Columbia’s Pallas.
Ultimately, external funders helped cause the “mischief ”
in Washington, says Levin. Through their venture-philan-
thropy ties, Rhee and Fenty “were getting national
attention, funding and chances to air their views, so
they took their eye off the local population” and viewed
funders “as their constituency,” Levin says. They failed
to “strike the needed balance between getting external
20 EDUCATI ON
funding and then using it to build capacity” for improve-
ment from within, he says.
Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s
hand-picked chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, resigned under
pressure after less than four months on the job. Black had
been a top publishing executive, heading both Hearst
Magazines (publisher of Cosmopolitan and Popular Mechan-
ics, among others) and USA Today. But she had no
education-management or teaching experience.
66
Black
quickly ran afoul of teachers and parents by making what
many considered insensitive jokes about school problems.
“Could we just have some birth control for a while? It
could really help us all out a lot,” Black quipped at a
parents’ meeting to discuss school overcrowding.
67
“Those kinds of comments show a lack of understand-
ing of what parents are going through,” said one parent.
68
But McGinity, of the Broad Foundation, argues that
Black’s ouster actually makes “a great case” for one
school-management principle reformers consider key —
mayoral control. Unlike in districts where school-board
politics dominate, Black and Bloomberg “could see that
the situation wasn’t working and made a change quickly”
before problems worsened, he points out.
OUTLOOK
Common Standards
American education will change in the coming decades,
but the shape of what’s to come is hard to discern.
Some reform critics fear that private interests could
dismantle the public schools Americans once prized.
The United States has long had a two-tier system, with
schools in higher-income areas having many more
resources, observes DePaul’s Saltman. “But what you’re
seeing now is a new kind of two-tier system being created,
in which schools in the bottom tier will be privately
managed,” he predicts.
“In poor city and rural areas,” reform advocates are
“quickly turning public distrust into short-term profit-
making industries” that will seek some quick bucks from
taxpayer-supported schools and get out, he warns. “Most
Americans don’t realize how far along this privatization
agenda has gone.” But with many Democratic politicians
now agreeing “that public schools need to compete with
the private sector, privatization has largely won,” he says.
There’s little doubt that databases tracking student
performance will be established everywhere fairly soon.
But while unions fear that teachers will lose their job
security to overly simplified interpretation of standardized
test scores, even some reform critics see possible long-term
upsides to data tracking.
Databases now under construction will include school
data only, but down the line databases from multiple
social-service agencies might link information about health,
poverty, homelessness and more to school records, muses
Columbia’s Henig. Such data could be “revolutionary” in
revealing all factors that contribute to students’ achieve-
ment, or lack thereof, and help propel holistic solutions,
he says.
With Republicans and many Democrats now backing
school choice, the national learning standards some have
recommended for decades will appear at last, some ana-
lysts say.
69
Prior to 2002’s No Child Left Behind law, “everybody
said they met standards because they could make up their
own rules,” says Kenneth K. Wong, an education profes-
sor at Brown University. But as assessments increasingly
become comparable across state lines, this convenient
mode of hiding failure is evaporating, he says. In addition,
while accountability requirements so far apply only to
public schools, with nearly 5,000 charter schools now in
operation, “we must think about how we know they are
meeting standards, too,” Wong says. “If we are going to
move toward school choice,” the nation must confront
the highly contentious question of “whether we’re going
to have something like a national examination,” he says.
“My hope is that there will soon be a strong set of
core [learning] standards with a common assessment” for
all schools nationwide, says the Broad Foundation’s
McGinity.
Expansion of school choice to allow out-of-district
enrollments and virtual schools will accelerate a “revolu-
tionary” trend — delinking schooling from one’s neigh-
borhood, says Wisconsin’s Witte. “For a hundred years
people went to their neighborhood schools, and 90
percent still do. But until 20 years ago, everybody did,”
he says. Ultimately, “this change will affect everything”
in schools, he says. For example, “We govern public
schools through an elected school board, so should open-
enrollment people [from out-of-district] also have seats
on the board?”
SCHOOL REFORM 21
Before the nation simply lets such large changes hap-
pen, however, “I think people need to ask themselves,
‘What are our goals for our children?’” says Curry
College’s Gratz.
NOTES
1. Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith, “Who’s
Teaching L.A.’s Kids?” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 14,
2010, www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-
value-20100815,0,258862,full.story, p. A1.
2. “Public elementary and secondary schools by type of
school,” Digest of Education Statistics, National
Center for Education Statistics,http://nces.ed.gov/
programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_093.asp.
3. Eric A. Hanushek, “Feeling Too Good About Our
Schools,” Education Next website, Jan. 18, 2011,http://educationnext.org.
4. Bill Gates, “How Teachers Development Could
Revolutionize Our Schools,” The Washington Post,
Feb. 28, 2011, www.washingtonpost.com.
5. Matthew Di Carlo, “Teachers Matter, But So Do
Words,” Shanker blog, July 14, 2010,http://shanker-
blog.org/?p=74.
6. Richard Rothstein, “Fact-Challenged Policy,” Eco-
nomic Policy Institute website, March 8, 2011, www
.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/fact-challenged
_policy.
7. “Employer Costs for Employee Compensation,”
press release, Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 9,
2011, www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm.
8. “Fact-Checking School Choice Research,” The
Center for Education Reform, October 2010, www
.edreform.com/_upload/No_More_Waiting_
School_Choice.pdf.
9. For background, see Kenneth Jost, “Public-Employee
Unions,” CQ Researcher, April 8, 2011, pp.
313-336.
10. Jason Song and Jason Felch, “L.A. Unified Releases
School Ratings Using ‘Value-Added’ Method,” Los
Angeles Times, April 12, 2011, www.latimes.com,
p. A1.
11. Ibid.
12. Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier, “Bridging
Differences,” Education Week blogs, March 29, 2011,http://blogs.edweek.org.
13. “Education, Leadership for America,” Heritage Foun-
dation website, www.heritage.org/Initiatives/Education.
14. Hanushek, op. cit.
15. Ibid.
16. Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger
Woessmann, “Teaching Math to the Talented,”
Education Next, Winter 2011,http://educationnext
.org. Peterson is a government professor at Harvard
University; Woessmann is an economics professor at
the University of Munich.
17. Rothstein, op. cit.
18. Ibid.
19. “Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in
Education: Lessons from PISA for the United
States,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, 2011, p. 26, www.oecd.org/dataoecd/
32/50/46623978.pdf.
20. For background, see Marcia Clemmitt, “Fixing
Urban Schools,” CQ Researcher, April 27, 2007
(update, Aug. 5, 2010), pp. 361-384.
21. Cited in Richard Kahlenberg, “Debating Michelle
Rhee,” Taking Note blog, Century Foundation, Feb. 25,
2011,http://takingnote.tcf.org/2011/02/debating-
michelle-rhee.html.
22. “Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in
Education,” op. cit., p. 28.
23. Quoted in Jonathan Mahler, “The Fragile Success of
School Reform in the Bronx,” The New York Times
Magazine, April 6, 2011, p. 34. See also Joe Nocera,
“The Limits Of School Reform,” The New York
Times, April 26, 2011, p. A23.
24. “A Lack of Rigor Leaves Students ‘Adrift’ in College,”
NPR website, Feb. 9, 2011, www.npr.org.
25. Quoted in Timothy J. Farrell, “Arum Research Calls
Out ‘Limited Learning’ on College Campuses,” New
York University blogs, March 25, 2010,http://blogs
.nyu.edu/blogs/dbw1/ataglance/2010/03/arum_
research_calls_out_limite.html.
26. For background, see Jennifer Medina, “Teachers Set
Deal with City on Discipline Process,” The New
22 EDUCATI ON
York Times, April 15, 2010, www.nytimes.com/
2010/04/16/nyregion/16rubber.html.
27. “Don’t Blame Teachers Unions for our Failing
Schools,” debate transcript, Intelligence Squared
U.S., March 16, 2010,http://intelligencesquaredus
.org/wp-content/uploads/Teachers-Unions-031610
.pdf.
28. Quoted in Carlo Rotella, “Class Warrior,” The New
Yorker, Feb. 1, 2010, p. 28.
29. Katharine O. Strunk and Jason A. Grissom, “Do
Strong Unions Shape District Policies?: Collective
Bargaining, Teacher Contract Restrictiveness, and
the Political Power of Teachers’ Unions,” Educational
Evaluation and Policy Analysis, December 2010,
p. 389.
30. John Merrow, “The Road Not Traveled: Tracking
Charter Schools Movement,” Taking Note blog,
Dec.1, 2009,http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv.
31. “Don’t Blame Teachers Unions for our Failing
Schools,” op. cit.
32. Ibid.
33. “A Stronger Evaluation System,” Massachusetts
Teachers Association, March 22, 2011,http://mass
teacher.org/news/archive/2011/03-22.aspx; “MTA’s
Reinventing Educator Evaluation: Answers to
Frequently Asked Questions,” www.seateachers
.com/HTMLobj-1742/MTAReinventing_Educator
Eval12011.pdf.
34. David Lewin, et al., “Getting It Right: Empirical
Evidence and Policy Implications from Research on
Public-Sector Unionism and Collective Bargaining,”
Employment Policy Research Network, March 16,
2011, www.employmentpolicy.org/sites/www
.employmentpolicy.org/files/EPRN%20PS%20
draft%203%2016%2011%20PM%20FINAL
tk-ml4%20edits.pdf.
35. Quoted in Liana Heitin, “16 Nations Meet to
Discuss Improving Teaching,” Education Week blogs,
March 17, 2011,http://blogs.eduweek.org.
36. Quoted in Bill Turque, “Green Dot’s Barr: Unions
Part of Solution,” The Washington Post, Sept. 8,
2009,http://voices.washingtonpost.com.
37. For background, see Anthony S. Bryk, “Organizing
Schools for Improvement,” Phi Delta Kappan, April
2010, pp. 23-30.
38. Douglas Lee Lauen, “To Choose or Not to Choose:
High School Choice and Graduation in Chicago,”
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis,
September 2009, p. 179.
39. Andy Smarick, “The Turnaround Fallacy,” Education
Next, Winter 2010,http://educationnext.org/
the-turnaround-fallacy; For background, see
Kenneth Jost, “Revising No Child Left Behind,” CQ
Researcher, April 16, 2010, pp. 337-360.
40. “School Restructuring Options Under No Child
Left Behind,” Education.com, www.education.com/
reference/article/Ref_School_Restructuring.
41. Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great
American School System (2010), pp. 86-87.
42. Quoted in Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of
Battles Over School Reform (2000), p. 19.
43. Christopher B. Swanson, “U.S. Graduation Rate
Continues Decline,” Education Week online, June 2,
2010, www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/10/34
swanson.h29.html?qs=historical+graduation+rates.
44. Ibid.
45. Ravitch, The Death and Life, op. cit., p. 13.
46. Swanson, op. cit.
47. Frederick M. Hess, “A Policy Debate, Not an
Attack,” Room for Debate blogs, The New York Times
online, March 6, 2011, www.nytimes.com.
48. “Chicago Teachers Federation,” Encyclopedia of
Chicago, www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/
pages/271.html.
49. Ravitch, The Death and Life, op. cit., p. 174.
50. Trip Gabriel and Sam Dillon, “Teacher Tenure
Targeted by GOP Governors,” The New York Times,
Jan. 31, 2011, p. 1, www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/
us/01tenure.html.
51. “American Missionary Association,” Encyclopedia
Britannica online, 2011, www.britannica.com/
EBchecked/topic/19996/American-Missionary-
Association.
52. “About Carnegie,” Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching website, www.carnegie
foundation.org/about-us/about-carnegie.
53. Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in
Education,” School Choices website, www.school
choices.org/roo/fried1.htm.
SCHOOL REFORM 23
54. For background, see Kenneth Jost, “School Voucher
Showdown,” CQ Researcher, Feb. 15, 2002, pp. 121-
144, and Charles S. Clark, “Charter Schools,” CQ
Researcher, Dec. 20, 2002, pp. 1033-1056.
55. For background, see “Frequently Asked Questions,”
The Broad Prize for Urban Education website, www
.broadprize.org/about/FAQ.html#2.
56. “Overview,” The New Teacher Project website,http://tntp.org/about-us.
57. For background, see Ruth Moscovitch, Alan R.
Sadovnik, et al., “Governance and Urban School
Improvement: Lessons for New Jersey from Nine
Cities,” Institute on Education Law and Policy,
Rutgers University at Newark, 2010,http://ielp
.rutgers.edu/docs/MC%20Final.pdf.
58. Michelle Rhee, “In Budget Crises, an Opening for
School Reform,” The Wall Street Journal Online, Jan.
11, 2011,http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142
4052748704739504576068142896954626.html.
59. Isabel Mascarenas, “Student Teachers Speak Out on SB
736 on Teacher Merit Pay,” WTSP News website,
March 25, 2011, www.wtsp.com/news/article/183421/
250/Student-teachers-speak-out-on-teacher-merit-
pay; Michael C. Bender, “Rick Scott Names Michelle
Rhee, Patricia Levesque to Education Transition
Team,” Miami Herald blogs, Dec. 2, 2010, http://
miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2010/12/
rick-scott-names-michelle-rhee-patricia-levesque-to-
education-transition-team.html.
60. Laura Zuckerman, “Idaho Governor Signs Educa-
tion Overhaul Into Law,” Reuters, April 8, 2011, www
.reuters.com/article/2011/04/09/us-idaho-education-
idUSTRE7380GA20110409.
61. Amy Hetzner and Erin Richards, “Budget Cuts
$834 Million from Schools,” [Milwaukee] Journal
Sentinel online, March 1, 2011, www.jsonline.com/
news/statepolitics/117192683.html.
62. Rotella, op. cit.
63. “Nine States and the District of Columbia Win
Second Round Race to the Top Grants,” press release,
U.S. Dept. of Education, Aug. 24, 2010, www.ed
.gov/news/press-releases/nine-states-and-district-
columbia-win-second-round-race-top-grants.
64. For background, see Michele McNeill, “Race to Top
Winners Work to Balance Promises, Capacity,”
Education Week, March 30, 2011, www.edweek.org/
ew/articles/2011/03/30/26rtt-states_ep-2.h30.html?
tkn=RMOFJADRisIf48BKX1kxGbHNaOeVRca2
6WD1&print=1.
65. Andrew J. Rotheram, “Fenty’s Loss in DC: A Blow
to Education Reform?” Time, Sept. 16, 2010, www
.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2019395,00
.html.
66. “Cathie Black,” Executive Profiles, Bloomberg/
Business Week,http://investing.businessweek.com/
businessweek/research/stocks/private/person.asp?per
sonId=79286149&privcapId=23675200&previous
CapId=4160895&previousTitle=Bill%20&%20
Melinda%20Gates%20Foundation.
67. Yoav Gonen, “Parents Fume Over Black’s ‘Birth
Control’ Quip About Overcrowding,” New York Post
online, Jan. 15, 2011, www.nypost.com/p/news/local/
black_wisecrack_on_birth_control_a0EUsHTDjV-
vWAMvA5qf6KI.
68. Ibid.
69. For background, see Kathy Koch, “National
Education Standards,” CQ Researcher, May 14,
1999, pp. 401-424.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Hess, Frederick M., Education Unbound: The Promise
and Practice of Greenfield Schooling, Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2010.
An analyst at the conservative American Enterprise
Institute argues that today’s schools shouldn’t be reformed
so much as scrapped so education entrepreneurs can
devise specific solutions for different educational needs.
Merrow, John, The Influence of Teachers: Reflections
on Teaching and Leadership, LM Books, 2011.
Based on his reporting throughout the country, a long-
time PBS education reporter explores issues such as
teaching quality, payment and evaluation of teachers.
Ravitch, Diane, The Life and Death of the Great
American School System: How Testing and Choice Are
Undermining Education, Basic Books, 2010.
A longtime education policymaker explains why she
now rejects the market-oriented education-reform
24 EDUCATI ON
theories she helped to develop for President George H. W.
Bush.
Weber, Karl, ed., Waiting for “Superman”: How We
Can Save America’s Failing Public Schools,
PublicAffairs, 2010.
The companion book to the acclaimed 2010 school-
reform documentary “Waiting for Superman” includes
essays on how to improve U.S. education by charter-
school leaders, education journalists and a teachers’
union leader.
Articles
“Grading the Teachers: Value-Added Analysis,” Los
Angeles Times online, www.latimes.com/news/local/
teachers-investigation.
An ongoing series of investigative articles from 2010 and
2011 explores the effectiveness of teacher evaluations
based on students’ standardized test scores. Includes a
database with rankings of individual teachers and
schools.
Banchero, Stephanie, “Bill Gates Seeks Formula for
Better Teachers,” The Wall Street Journal online, March
22, 2011,http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405
2748703858404576214593545938506.html.
Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates
explains how he’s trying to develop better teacher evalu-
ations and argues that cutting education budgets is prob-
ably unwise.
Barkan, Joanne, “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule
Our Schools,” Dissent, winter 2011, www.dissent
magazine.org/article/?article=3781.
A writer for a left-leaning magazine argues that venture
philanthropists like Bill Gates are gaining too much
power.
Bryk, Anthony S., “Organizing Schools for
Improvement,” Phi Delta Kappan, April 2010, www
.kappanmagazine.org/content/91/7/23.abstract,
p. 23.
The president of the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching describes his research on
Chicago’s schools, showing that several critical aspects of
a school’s organization and leadership are major determi-
nants of whether that school can improve.
Pellissier, Hank, “The Finnish Miracle,” Great Schools
website, www.greatschools.org/students/2453-finland-
education.gs.
Finland’s schools, which rose from mediocre to out-
standing over the past quarter-century, have lessons for
schools, teachers and parents. Notably, teaching is
among Finland’s most respected professions.
Rotella, Carlo, “Class Warrior: Arne Duncan’s Bid to
Shake Up Schools,” The New Yorker, Feb. 1, 2010,
p. 24.
President Obama’s Secretary of Education is the former
CEO of Chicago’s public schools, with a reputation for
closing low-achieving schools and reopening them with
new staffs.
Reports and Studies
“Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession:
Lessons from Around the World,” Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development, 2011, www
.oecd.org/dataoecd/62/8/47506177.pdf.
Analysts for the international organization find that
most countries with high-achieving schools recruit the
best students as teachers, provide extensive on-the-job
training and mentoring and involve teachers closely in
efforts to improve schools.
Corcoran, Sean P., “Can Teachers be Evaluated by
their Students’ Test Scores? Should They Be? The Use
of Value-Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness in
Policy and Practice,” Annenberg Institute for School
Reform, 2010, www.annenberginstitute.org/products/
Corcoran.php.
A Columbia University assistant professor of economics
explains how value-added evaluations of teacher quality
work and examines the evidence on their reliability and
implications for schools.
Suffren, Quentin, and Theodore J. Wallace, “Needles in
a Haystack: Lessons from Ohio’s High-performing,
High-need Urban Schools,” Thomas B. Fordham
Institute, May 2010, www.scribd.com/doc/31987794/
Needles-in-a-Haystack-Full-Report.
Analysts for a research organization supportive of school
choice examine a group of public, magnet and charter
schools in low-income urban areas in search of factors
that help the schools improve student achievement.
SCHOOL REFORM 25
For More Information
Albert Shanker Institute, 555 New Jersey Ave., N.W.,
Washington, DC 20001; (202) 879-4401; www.ashankerin
st.org. An arm of the American Federation of Teachers that
brings together experts to discuss education issues.
Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University,
Box 1985, Providence, RI 02912; (401) 863-7990; www
.annenberginstitute.org. Analyzes school-system issues, works
with community partners to improve school districts and
publishes the quarterly journal Voices in Urban Education.
Economic Policy Institute, 1333 H St., N.W., Suite 300,
East Tower, Washington, DC 20005-4707; (202) 775-8810;
www.epi.org/issue/education. Examines school reform from a
liberal viewpoint.
Education Next, Program on Education Policy and
Governance, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 79
JFK St., Cambridge, MA 02138; (877) 476-5354; http://
educationnext.org/sub/about. A reform-oriented online
publication that examines all aspects of K-12 education.
The Hechinger Report,http://hechingerreport.org. A non-
profit online news organization based at the Teachers College
of Columbia University that publishes in-depth reporting
and commentary on education issues.
Hoover Institution, 434 Galvez Mall, Stanford University,
Stanford, CA 94305-6010; (650) 723-1754; www.hoover
.org. Studies and publishes reports on school reform and
other topics from a conservative perspective.
National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department
of Education, 1990 K St., N.W., Washington, DC 20006;
(202) 502-7300;http://nces.ed.gov. Provides statistics on
every aspect of American education.
Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 1016 16th St., N.W., 8th
Floor, Washington, DC 20036; (202) 223-5452; www
.edexcellence.net. A think tank dedicated to improving school
performance through accountability and expanded options
for parents.

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