Failure at the Top in Public Education

The Myth of Public School Failure

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Kids are taken to museums and enrolled in private classes that teach art, music, and even cooking. These children have many models of educated professional and business people around them and the probability if getting a good job after completing school is a visible reality. The contrast with kids from inner-city communities is stark. These children are often surrounded by drug dealers, they worry about getting shot while walking to school, and face continuing pressures to join a gang. As a matter of course, they experience teen girls on the block who are unwed mothers and have siblings who are incarcerated.

Their streets reek of blight and the buildings are adorned with graffiti. Their families struggle to survive economically each day -- rationing their food stamps, working long hours at two menial jobs, or traveling to work at a long distance on public transportation. Unemployment is a constant specter. The inner city is where the injuries of class and race disadvantage intertwine and the greatest educational challenges lie.

Of course, strong families and indigenous institutions exist here and some kids come through with flying colors. But at the risk of caricaturing, the consequences of persistent racism ought not be downplayed Fine teaching does little good when children are hungry, sick, scared, lacking preparation, or worn down by atrocious life circumstances. Giving disadvantaged kids iPads, attempting to boost their self-esteem, or letting their parents choose a charter school doesn't overcome the cumulative detriments dished out from living at the poverty level.

To add insult to injury, in wealthier districts, parents and residents boost the budgets and augment the programs of schools through taxes, fund-raising, and political influence. Liberal educational reforms that focus on correcting in-school problems -- but avoiding confronting the broader, deeply-rooted reasons for our education failures -- are a flimsy effort. Ravitch, at one point in her book says, "We know what works It comes over as a fantasy. Reform notions fall short because of an inability to acknowledge that our market-driven economic system generates the inequality that is crippling our children and dampening our schools.

Conventional wisdom has an all-purpose explanation for supposedly deteriorating education: The claim, however, does not withstand scrutiny. In Los Angeles, typical of other California districts, schools spend 65 percent of their own resources excluding state and federal programs on "instruction," including salaries, benefits, and training of teachers and paraprofessional aides, textbooks, classroom equipment, and supplies. Counselors, psychologists, and nurses take 4 percent. Security and maintenance consume 11 percent.

School administrators principals, deans, attendance officers, and school clerical personnel take 7 percent. Busing gets 6 percent. Miscellaneous expenses such as library staff, library books, and educational television take another 3 percent. This leaves central administration the "bureaucracy" , including superintendents, accounting, payroll and purchasing, property and liability insurance, with only 5 percent of the annual budget. Its peak in the last decade was 6.

Although category definitions may vary, national data also show schools spending 61 percent of their budgets on instruction and 5 percent on administration. Yet even these relatively modest bureaucratic expenditures are often characterized as wasteful, lending support to calls for decentralization, "school-site autonomy," or "school-based management. In , New York gave parent- and teacher-dominated community boards finance and hiring power. The relaxation of controls spawned scandals like loans of school funds to employees; theft of school property; hiring politicians' relatives as teacher aides; solicitation of bribes; ethnic-based hiring; and extorting political contributions from teachers.

Despite his commitment to school-site decision making, New York School Superintendent Joseph Fernandez expanded the central bureaucracy's role in monitoring finances and appointments. Schools' bureaucratic rules such as centralized textbook selection, detailed curriculum requirements including the number of minutes spent on specified subjects, demands for attendance accounting and ethnic surveys, and restricted telephone or copying machine use inhibit teacher creativity and should be reformed. But behind classroom doors, teachers are still the most autonomous and unsupervised of all professionals.

Rarely acknowledged in school debates is that bureaucracy results from compromises made between spontaneity and creativity on the one hand, and eliminating discrimination, corruption, and incompetence on the other. Decentralization can't stimulate creativity without also risking corruption.

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Schools with flexibility to buy classroom computers without cumbersome bidding also have opportunities to solicit bribes. A principal who can select unconventionally qualified candidates, ignoring credentials and test scores, can also discriminate in hiring teachers or custodians. Centralized school systems restrict flexibility, yet districts have mostly been freed of corruption. Bureaucratic mazes have roots in earlier reforms to curb graft.

After employees are caught in a kickback scheme, multiple signatures for purchases become required. Years ago, hiring relatives was routine in school employment. To avoid this abuse, school hiring is now governed by cumbersome civil service rules. Perhaps the most egregious exception is New York City's system of school building custodians who function more like entrepreneurs than employees.

Reform will require more bureaucracy, not less. If decentralization of school bureaucracies proceeds, there will be calls for recentralization when scandals inevitably follow. T he trade-off between autonomy and accountability is most stark when academic standards at issue. Bilingual teaching for non-English speaking students is now national policy. School administrators train faculty and inspect schools to ensure that students get native language instruction while gaining English fluency.

Data clerks track student progress to assure that appropriate tests for transition to English are administered. Without central monitoring, some schools might ignore language minority students. Indeed, many did, prior to when courts ordered bilingual teaching. Special education requires tests to identify handicapped children and specialists who investigate whether special education is provided. Without watchful bureaucrats, some schools might ignore these expensive requirements. Before courts mandated these programs in , many schools did so. Demands for less bureaucracy imply willingness to risk their doing so again.

Bureaucrats also review applications to determine which students get free lunch, which are eligible for subsidy, and which must pay full cost. It would of course be simpler and more expensive to provide meals to all. But few business or political leaders are prepared, despite anti-bureaucratic rhetoric, to commit additional tax funds to such administrative streamlining.

Simultaneous calls for greater school autonomy and higher national standards put the two basic "reform" drives in direct conflict. One wants higher standards, the other less administration. Yet bureaucracy must enforce mandates unless we allow each school to decide whether to teach math, science, or American history.

Higher standards demand more bureaucracy, not less. Many leaders say they want school-based decision making, but what they really seek is a chimera: Bureaucracy stifles, and school reform should reduce bureaucratic structures performing redundant or useless tasks. But lacking the willingness to abandon common standards and tolerate more corruption, calls for radical dismantling of school administration are mostly demagogic.

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It's no surprise that school-based management experiments have mostly floundered. Good school principals have always involved teachers in school planning. But when, in contemporary reforms, teachers get formal powers to run schools, they often balk at time demands of administrative tasks.

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Good teachers, reformers have been discomfited to find, want to teach. They don't want to spend time in committee meetings, entertain textbook publishers, solicit low bids for supplies, or calculate race and ability distribution for classroom assignments. Belief in schools' failure has also encouraged the notion that competition could force improvement by requiring that schools compete for clients. But the customer-driven management analogy may not work for public education, where the "consumer" of school outcomes is the nation's economic, social, and moral standing, not merely the family whose child is taught.

Choice advocates assume that parental "purchasing power" will include knowledge of competing schools' academic strengths. Choice advocates assert without evidence that parents will not favor schools where academic mediocrity is offset by good athletic programs, a whiter student body, or a recent paint job. Illiterate immigrant and college-educated parents, they assume, will have equal information about alternatives. Unfortunately, however, parents with the least purchasing power knowledge about educational alternatives in a market model are the very parents whose communities most need school improvement.

Parent choice already plays a limited role in public education. Specialized theme "magnet" schools in many urban districts give ambitious minority students a chance for integrated education and entice whites to stay in the city system. These are worthy goals but have little to do with the fantasy that the whip of competition will force schools to improve. In fact, "choice" schools like magnets may make neighborhood schools worse. Despite careful admissions restrictions, magnet programs attract the most highly motivated students, draining neighborhood schools of students and parents who could spur higher achievement levels.

Controls cannot be subtle enough, for example, to prevent counselors from giving greater encouragement to middle-class magnet applicants than to poor students. While magnets have better academic records than neighborhood schools, this is because the motivated students they attract do well in any setting.

Magnets provide no evidence for the free market idea that a need to be selected forces schools to improve. Analysis of student outcomes shows that magnet students generally do no better than neighborhood school students who applied to magnets but, because of space limitations, could not get in.

T he greatest danger of choice, public or private, is that race and class segregation will grow if parents choose schools attended by children like their own. This likely effect of choice is suggested by other nations' experience. Since , for example, Canada's British Columbia has subsidized private schools; wealthier and better educated parents took these subsidies, leaving public school students in a less advantaged milieu. Since , the French government has paid salaries of all teachers, public and private. Though France attempts to limit inequality by requiring comparable public and private class sizes, rich students are disproportionately enrolled in subsidized private schools, leaving immigrant students concentrated in the public system.

Israel recently established alternative schools with differing philosophies and curricula. They are academically superior to neighborhood schools; parents who choose them are wealthier and more educated. Choice schools are islands of excellence for the rich while Israel struggles to assimilate immigrants from North Africa and Russia. Holland's choice system is 85 years old. The government pays for buildings and teacher salaries for any school that parents establish; two-thirds of all schools are privately run. School choice in Holland has enabled "white flight" from Turkish and Moroccan neighborhood schools.

Recent Dutch studies show that Muslim students in segregated classrooms do worse than those who are in integrated classrooms, while most Dutch parents choose schools based on the socioeconomic status of students already enrolled, not on the school's academic performance. Scotland got school choice in ; parents can send children to private or public schools outside their local district. According to a recent study by professors Doug Willms and Frank Echols, 27 percent of children whose parents were professionals chose to escape neighborhood schools, but less than.

Twenty-four percent of college-educated parents' children, but less than 1 percent of children whose parents had no college, escaped. There is little doubt that wealthier parents believe their children gain advantage by attending schools with other privileged children. But the consequence of honoring this choice is diminished opportunity for less advantaged children.

Historically, we have honored such choices.

U.S. Public Schools Are Not Failing. They’re Among The Best In The World

White, middle-class parents once moved to homogeneous suburbs to seek "better" schools. Today this method of exercising school choice is less available. Urban areas and their impoverished minority populations are now too large to permit easy escape within commuting distance of central cities. The incorporation of professionals into upper-income strata has expanded elite private school options previously reserved for the hereditary or corporate elite.

As a result, desire for restorating the segregation that this class once knew has been transformed into demand for school choice. Cloaked in a faulty assessment of schools' academic decline, choice is presented as a necessity for broad school reform to benefit all children. If the foregoing is true--that increasing returns to education are deceptive and we have a shortage of demanding jobs rather than of educated workers; that expanded educational resources since have not mostly been dedicated to academic improvement; that, nonetheless, public schools' academic achievement has risen; that bureaucracy is not stifling American education; and that the most popular contemporary reforms, decentralization and choice, address the wrong problems and could do great damage--then it is hard to avoid an iconoclastic conclusion: More resources are not the only improvement needed.

Implementation of the curricular reforms of the last 15 years is essential. Better systems for hiring and evaluating principals and improved teacher training--for undergraduates as well as teachers already on the job--could contribute to better academic achievement. So too could a satisfactory method of removing poor teachers from the profession.

But design of this reform is difficult because results produced by individual teachers are hard to measure statistically, so sustaining the removal of poor teachers through civil service or union procedures is improbable, unless child abuse or other criminal behavior is present. Most teachers are competent, as the performance of our schools indicate. We could not claim improved outcomes without a teaching force that, on the whole, is dedicated, prepared, and increasingly creative.

This is why, while weeding out uninspired teachers would be worthwhile, the most useful reform of public education remains more money. Here is how more resources could most productively be spent: In states which have not equalized funding between rich and poor districts, students continue to attend dilapidated schools without adequately paid teachers or necessary equipment. As Jonathan Kozol has pointed out, if money made no difference in education, wealthy districts would not be so determined to hoard it.

Educational research shows that class-size reduction has little effect if classes remain so large that teaching is mostly to large groups. Reducing class size to 15 or less, on the other hand, can have academic results. This is the most expensive school reform imaginable reducing class size from 24 to 15 doubles the marginal costs of education , and it should perhaps be restricted to schools with the most disadvantaged students.

But if we want to close the gap between minority and white students more quickly, lowering class size could be effective. Full funding of Head Start. Preschool children exposed to books, manipulative toys, and literate adults are better prepared to succeed than those who are not.

Quality school experiences cannot fully compensate for deprivation in preschool years. Yet Head Start funding is sufficient to enroll only 30 percent of eligible low-income children.

While Head Start children's test scores surpass those of nonenrolled children in first to third grades, the advantage seems to be lost by fourth grade. Further investigation is needed to understand this loss, other evidence supports full funding.

Head Start graduates are less frequently retained in grade, have better school attendance, lower dropout rates, higher employment rates, fewer criminal arrests, and less welfare dependency than youth from similar backgrounds but without the benefit of a preschool program. A national prenatal health program. It is a shibboleth of the education establishment, overcompensating for generations of contempt for poor and minority children, that all children can succeed if only their teachers communicate high expectations.

This has an element of truth, but also an element of denial. Low-birthweight babies, or fetal drug-, nicotine-, or alcohol-addicted babies cannot mature into successful students to the extent healthy babies can. Giving all babies a healthy start in life would contribute to improved academic outcomes. Improved apprenticeship and workplace training. Schools presently send students with adequate numeric and literary skills into the work force.

Work habits may not be adequate, and curricular reforms should emphasize team building and cooperative skills. But schools cannot be expected to provide the kind of practical technical training like Ford offers to Mexican dropouts in Chihuahua. The Clinton administration may propose requiring business to fund worker training, with the further mandate that training funds be expended on frontline as well as supervisory workers. They have stayed the same. To some this just demonstrates that our schools have always been mediocre.

The broader the spectrum of children who take a test, the lower the average score will be. In other words, if only your top students take the test, your average score will be very high. If only your top and middle students take the test, your average score will still be quite high. But if ALL of your students take the test, your average score will be lower. Now add in poverty. Living in poverty reduces your access to health care, books, early childhood education and many other factors that increase learning throughout your life.

Children from poor families are already more than a year behind those of rich parents on the first day of kindergarten. If you only test the wealthiest students, the average test score will probably be quite high. The average score will drop dramatically if you test all of your students. The United States has the highest child poverty rate in the Western World. We include them on our tests. That has a major impact on our scores. But talking heads on TV almost always ignore it. But if you fairly compare education systems and factor in the equal access we provide for all children to an education, our system comes out way on top.

We have one of the best systems in the world. Not only does the United States serve all children regardless of academic achievement or poverty. We also serve far more students with disabilities.

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Why are there so many special education children in the USA? Because we have a higher standard of living. A standard pregnancy lasts about days or 40 weeks.

However, some mothers give birth to children after only 28 weeks. Two decades ago, these babies would not have survived. Today, they often do. Five years later that child will enter kindergarten and our school system will be responsible for teaching that student to read, write and learn math. In other countries, premature babies have a much lower chance of survival. So things as diverse as the live-birth rate actually affect average test scores.

Another counterintuitive factor is the suicide rate. In many countries where pressure to perform at the highest levels on standardized tests is extreme, many children are actually driven to suicide. This is especially true in numerous Asian countries with a record of high scores on these international tests. So a higher suicide rate actually increases test scores. Would you say this makes other countries superior to the United States? In fact, just the opposite. Nor would I wish that more premature babies died to improve our international standing.

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