Whether or not education lives up to its early billing as the premier issue in this year’s presidential election may not be known until after November 7, if then. But if the polls are reliable, it should at least rank near the top. With the economy booming, crime down, and the cold war over, the parlous condition of our schools heads the list of concerns of American voters.
And little wonder. Since 1983, when a blue-ribbon commission issued A Nation at Risk, report after report has documented the weak performance of U.S. primary and secondary education. Low academic achievement is the most salient problem, but it is not the only one. It is accompanied—and exacerbated—by mediocre teachers, inept administrators, dysfunctional school boards, heedless parents, superficial or eccentric curricula, violence, drugs, and even a recent spate of high-profile shootings.
The impulse to right this mess has given rise to a veritable “school-reform” industry, with variegated solutions being proffered by government officials (recall the ambitious national goals set by President George Bush and the nation’s governors in 1989), education experts, and business leaders alike. Much has been tried and billions spent, most of it without discernible impact. Behind today’s veil of prosperity, the nation’s schools are as much “at risk” as ever.
Of late, however, things have begun to change. Having learned from the costly fecklessness of earlier reform efforts, which naively trusted the public-education system to fix itself if only enough money and expertise were thrown at it, a number of states and communities have grown tougher-minded and less credulous. For the first time in a long time, there are grounds for hope.
Two strategies are particularly promising. One, known as “standards-based” reform, relies on externally set academic norms that spell out what children are supposed to learn; tests that determine how well they have learned it; and test-based rewards and sanctions up and down the system, from individual children to teachers, principals, and superintendents, aimed at providing tangible incentives to teach better, study harder, and learn more.
The second strategy also relies on pressure from outside the system, this time from market forces. Reform based on introducing competition, whether through vouchers, charter schools, open-enrollment schemes, or the outsourcing of public-school management to private firms, seeks both to move some children into better situations right away and to trigger improvements for all children over the long haul.
Supporters of both approaches can point to encouraging interim results, and are understandably exhilarated. Neither strategy, however, has yet swept the country. Not only is each of them opposed by the public-school establishment, but there are already signs of a backlash developing as conventional schools, public and sometimes private, have begun to feel crowded by the competition, as sizable numbers of children have begun to fail state proficiency tests and been “held back” or denied diplomas, and as teachers and other employees of the system have begun to come up against the tangible consequences—sometimes pleasant, sometimes not—that have become newly tied to the results they achieve.
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Least of all has the spirit of reform made inroads in Washington, D.C. There, in the seat of federal government, education policy remains frozen in time, the antiquated product of Lyndon B.Johnson’s presidency and 35 years of legislative acquiescence. The programs enacted under this decades-old mindset reflect a continuing obeisance to education-school experts and the near-stranglehold of establishment lobbyists. Just as bad, they also reflect the abiding belief that the system yearns to boost its own productivity and can be trusted to do right by children so long as enough money flows and enough regulations guide its benign intentions toward the proper priorities.
These programs waste tens of billions of dollars every year: not surprisingly, some educators have stopped even thinking of them as engines of improvement and have come to regard them as predictable, if bureaucratically cumbersome, cash streams. Whatever their stated goals—closing the learning gap between rich and poor pupils, preparing children from troubled neighborhoods to succeed in elementary school, assisting the disabled to learn, or ensuring that teachers themselves possess the requisite knowledge and skills—they have failed to achieve them. The biggest among them—notably Title I and special education—are textbook cases of good intentions gone awry.
Their greatest drawback, however, is the ideas they propagate—ideas that fly in the face of today’s most promising strategies of reform. Almost all federal programs emphasize inputs and services rather than standards and results. They rely on theories of change (top-down, uniform, rule-based, bureaucratic) long since abandoned by the private sector and even by some in government. And so, besides failing in their own terms, many of these programs now actively interfere with efforts by governors and mayors to repair their own schools.
In short, the federal role in public schooling has come to resemble the federal role in welfare before it was reformed: a virtual museum of failed policies, antique programs, ingrained habits, and dubious ideas. Perhaps even more fierce than in welfare, however, is the resistance to change. After decades of carving channels through the bureaucratic bedrock, federal programs have become deeply entrenched not only in Washington but in state and local systems and budget assumptions. A myriad of interest groups battens on their subsidies and depends on their regulations, and the programs have developed cultures of their own that mire them ever more deeply in the habits of denial and self-protection. Head Start, for example, is so wedded to its self-definition as a “child-development” program addressing social, nutritional, and medical needs that its partisans fight efforts to impose a curriculum that might finally succeed in preparing low-income toddlers to read when they reach school. The net result is that even as a growing pile of evaluations shows that the federal government’s efforts in primary and secondary school are ineffectual or much worse, our national addiction to them deepens.
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For this last development, we can largely thank Bill Clinton. Before his day, Washington’s impact on elementary and secondary education, however baleful, was also still fairly limited—and so were expectations of its potential significance. Despite hundreds of programs and billions of dollars, the federal government was unmistakably the junior partner, providing just 7 percent of the K-12 budget, running essentially no schools, conferring no diplomas, employing no teachers. National political figures might stir the country in one direction or another, but nobody in the White House or on Capitol Hill exercised much direct leverage on what actually happened in U.S. schools.
The two political parties dealt with these limitations in their stereotypical ways. With damn-the-torpedoes bravado and an appetite for greater influence on actual practices, Democrats would regularly urge still more programs, more money, heavier regulation, and ever-greater federal involvement. Republicans, by contrast, held to the notion that the less impact, the better; many believed that Washington should withdraw from K-12 education altogether, or at least convert the government’s innumerable “categorical” programs into “block grants” or vouchers. The debate, in other words, was about federalism, with one side asserting that the national government had a large and properly proactive place and the other insisting that Washington should get out of the way and leave parents and local school boards in charge.
The U.S. Department of Education, created in 1979 to fulfill Jimmy Carter’s political deal with the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union, became a high-profile symbol of this clash. For years, Republicans kept threatening to abolish it, but got nowhere; indeed, they never really tried very hard. (Ronald Reagan could not find even a single member of Congress willing to sponsor his bill to scrap the department, and instead ended up appointing the feisty William J. Bennett to head it.) Nor did the GOP fare very well in advancing any sort of coherent agenda. Never in the majority when critical legislation was on the docket, Republicans only occasionally put forward proposals of their own, and these were likely to involve, at most, an incremental shift in established practices or a tepid recycling of timeworn schemes that never went anywhere. When the annual appropriations crunch arrived, the GOP, as if to make amends with the public, customarily joined in approving even more money for existing programs.
This awkward position, with Republicans regularly made to look like both deadbeats and hypocrites, only worsened after the 1994 midterm election, when the new GOP majority in Congress briefly espoused a slash-and-burn strategy that Clinton easily turned against it. But the Republicans’ real punishment came with Clinton’s success in obliterating the federalism question altogether, a feat he accomplished by means of his ever-adroit ability to shift discussion from principle to quantity, from “should I?” to “how much?,” from “is this a good idea?” to “how do I sell this?”
Sensing that the public was tired of abstract arguments about who should do what in education and was yearning for someone simply to say he would take care of it, and undeterred by Washington’s miserable track record, Clinton set in motion a whirlwind of activity, much of it unrelated even to his own major education themes (such as “standards-based reform”). The point was simply to hurl a new scheme or more money at any and every education malady or enthusiasm that tested well in surveys and focus groups, ranging from school uniforms to smaller class size, from Internet access to teacher training, from after-school programs to a doubling of the Head Start program, from national testing to school construction. Despite a statutory ban on direct federal involvement with curriculum, Clinton’s Education Department even published its own list of recommended math-instruction programs and prepared to do the same in science, technology, and women’s studies.
Such activism, not to say promiscuousness, has been hugely expensive. The department’s “discretionary” budget has risen by about 50 percent during the Clinton-Gore years, and so has the number of programs that it runs. But whether these programs do any good is another question—and easily answered. Perhaps the most conspicuous example is Clinton’s tireless effort to reduce class size (and hire more teachers) across the board. The unions love him for it, and the idea sounds wonderful to many parents. And yet, besides being perhaps the costliest education “reform” of all, it seldom leads to stronger student achievement, and experience (notably in California) shows that it brings untoward consequences, like a shortage of classroom space and the entry of more ill-educated teachers into the ranks. Still, it has been a useful campaign tool, and one that Clinton has been able to wield against resistant Republicans (whom he has recently taunted for harboring “philosophical” doubts about an ever-expanding federal role). Above all, it has helped habituate the public to the idea that, for every imaginable educational woe, there can and most likely will be a new, Washington-style remedy.
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This, then, is the backdrop against which the present election drama is being played out. But this year has also witnessed an interesting reversal of roles. For the first time, it is the Republican candidate who has an imaginative program, a high degree of articulateness about education, and a track record of accomplishment, while the Democratic standard-bearer is, by contrast, something of a newcomer to the field.
George W. Bush’s Texas offers, indeed, one of the brightest spots on the national education horizon. The most populous state after California, it has been making measurable educational progress, progress that has been undeniably good for its own sons and daughters and that carries a large measure of national significance as well. Although Bush cannot claim sole credit for the improvement—many of the Texas reforms hark back to a mid-1980’s commission headed by, of all people, Ross Perot—nearly everyone agrees that he deserves a lot of it.
On display in the Lone Star state are both of today’s most promising new strategies. Pursuing standards-based reform, the Bush team has strengthened Texas’s all-encompassing system of rigorous tests and accountability for schools and students alike, rebuffing attacks on it from Left and Right. Pursuing competitive-style reform, Bush and his associates have added hundreds of charter schools, welcomed privately funded voucher projects, encouraged experiments with private management of public schools, loosened rigid certification rules for teachers and boosted their pay. Moreover, he has accomplished most of this with bipartisan backing, the intense involvement of the business community, and the support of many educators—and, sometimes, even with the assent of the teachers’ unions.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished in this state,” says president John Cole of the Texas Federation of Teachers; and there is reason to be proud. In terms of pupil performance, Texas emerges from objective studies as the first or second “most improved” state over the past decade. More remarkably, the state’s least privileged youngsters are at or near the head of the line. In 1996, black fourth graders from Texas led black youngsters across the nation in math. Hispanic eighth graders ranked second in writing. And despite a vast minority population, a flood of recent Mexican immigrants, and a comparatively low rate of spending per pupil, Texas eighth graders overall ranked fourth in the country in writing.
Bush, then, loves to talk about school reform and knows a great deal about the subject, showcased it at the GOP convention in Philadelphia, and is full of ambitious plans for what he would do as President to cure the nation’s ailing schools. As for Al Gore, his Democratic opponent, he has never held any of the state or local offices that bring hands-on experience with education, largely ignored the subject during his career in the House and Senate, and, even though the Clinton-Gore administration’s record of activism in this field is unmatched, Gore’s own fingerprints are visible only on the effort to link schools to the Internet. In general, one could fairly say that education remains an issue he is not particularly at home with. (To make matters worse, there is the awkward fact that his four children attended elite private schools, even as Gore now staunchly opposes vouchers for the poor.)
There is, admittedly, a wrinkle that spoils this perfect contrast, and it is once again attributable to Bill Clinton’s success in erasing the issue of federalism. For the first time in U.S. history, this year’s contest simply ignores the question of whether Washington should be involved in transforming K-12 education. Rather, it is a contest between two different conceptions of education policy, both of which depend on a proactive, big-spending, muscular federal role.
If George W. Bush were to convince the American people to elect him as a dynamic “education President,” he would perforce need powerful tools and levers with which to press for changes in the system. Besides, he has seen for himself that, when it comes to reforming bad schools, “local control” is not always everything it is cracked up to be: school boards and superintendents do not always do right by children, and sometimes it is necessary to take power away from them in order to effect improvement. Translated to the national scene, this would inevitably mean using the federal government and thus—again inevitably—adding to its clout.
In this narrow but important respect, therefore, Bush does not differ all that much from Al Gore, who comes bearing his own, Clintonesque basket of beguiling new programs and costly new initiatives. Basically, the difference between the two men comes down to something else, namely, their dissimilar answers to two key questions: does the energy for change in American K-12 education come mostly from the bottom up (parents, schools, communities, states) or from the top down, i.e., from Washington? And when choices must be made, does one favor education’s consumers or its producers? At the end of the day, Bush seems to believe in an upward flow, whereas Gore, even more so than Clinton, seems to regard the nation’s capital as the sun in the education solar system, the place from which light and energy emanate. Similarly, Bush is clear—most days—that children’s welfare is the main consideration, while Gore’s loving embrace of, and by, the national teachers’ unions signals that he will work within the system, a system as resistant to change as it is zealous for the interests of its employees.
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One of these two candidates will become President. What then? Much will depend, of course, on whether he has the cooperation of Congress, and on how much is controlled by interest groups. History and common sense alike suggest that Gore would have the easier time of it: his proposals are mostly incremental, add-ons rather than transformations, less disruptive of established interests—and they come accompanied by promises of a great deal more money. Bush, by contrast, has threatened to overturn more inherited dogmas and power relationships, to press harder on such sensitive political nerves as testing, teacher competence, and school choice—and to offer fewer new billions (although he is hardly a skinflint).
On the other hand, and particularly if Republicans keep control of Congress, Bush, assuming he stuck to his guns, might enjoy an advantage of his own. For, over the past year and a half, congressional Republicans have begun to overcome their own tradition of half-hearted support for half-baked schemes, and have rallied behind some reasonably bold changes in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as well as in the domain of federally sponsored research. Despite intense Democratic opposition—and the threat of a Clinton veto—the House under GOP leadership passed a bill that would let ten states experiment with dramatically different ways of using their federal education money while boosting their accountability for student achievement. (Participating states would thus function much like giant charter schools, winning freedom from regulation in return for sharply improved performance.) The Senate education committee boosted the number of states to fifteen and added a modest provision that would give students the right to take their Title I dollars to (a limited array of) other educational institutions.
These were just baby steps, and anyway they have temporarily halted: election-year politics will keep the Senate from completing action in 2000. But even baby steps are a start. In a better world, one where the nature and extent of a federal role in K-12 education were still open to serious deliberation, one might dream of attempting once again to persuade Washington simply to fold its tent and allow reform-minded governors and mayors to proceed as they have been proceeding. But thanks to Bill Clinton’s insatiability and the clumsiness of GOP lawmakers, that possibility is gone, perhaps forever. And so, if the federal role is with us to stay, anyone who cares about the state of American education is well advised to try to make it, however incrementally, as constructive as possible.
As it happens, most of the LBJ-era programs are due for their periodic congressional reauthorization, creating a unique opportunity for a top-to-bottom overhaul of the role bequeathed by the 1960’s. There is no detailed formula for this, but for general direction one should surely be looking to the hopeful developments around the land that have themselves been powered by the dual engines of standards-based and marketplace-style reform. That, indeed, is where a President could come in, lending a hand and a well-amplified voice, and above all helping to minimize harm. If Bush—or, for that matter, Gore—actually caught this wave, something significant might yet happen to alter Washington’s long and sorry record of involvement with the nation’s schools.
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