CORRESPONDENCE: Education Next poll; Moving to Opportunity; Murray's challenge; measuring NCLB Americans and Their Schools 
At a televised presidential debate in Iowa on August 19, the Democratic candidates were asked their views on performance pay for teachers. It turns out they’re split—two for it, one on the fence, two against it, and a few who’d prefer to dodge the question. Your poll (“What Americans Think about Their Schools,” features, Fall 2007) found the same kind of split among Americans generally. But Americans are nearly 50 percent more likely to support performance pay than oppose it. Do you hear that, candidates? To me, the most important finding was the massive public support for some kind of national standards and assessments—14 percentage points higher than what a recent Educational Testing Service (ETS) poll showed. This raises an interesting question: Why aren’t more presidential candidates coming out for national standards? It’s clearly a popular idea. Part of the problem is the early primary season. Iowa and New Hampshire are strong local-control states, and candidates who need those primary votes are hesitant to talk about anything that might challenge local values. There are ways for candidates to provide the kind of strong leadership America so desperately needs on this issue without “mandating” national standards. The goal should be a vigorous national effort to raise American standards, one that is sensitive to political realities but bold enough to ensure results. What if a candidate pledged to work with governors and other state leaders to raise standards from the ground up? The federal government could provide financial support for a consortium of states and nonprofit groups to create “model” standards and then reward those states that set comparable standards with extra federal funding or flexibility under No Child Left Behind. I hope that by the time this issue is published, every presidential candidate will have proposed a solution. Based on your poll, Americans are way out ahead of most candidates on this issue. It’s time for the candidates to catch up.
Roy Romer Too little is known about the public’s attitudes toward education policy. As chairman of the Florida State Board of Education, I was struck by the difficulty of creating public policy from public opinion. The Education Next poll shows that public policy does not mirror public opinion. While the latter reflects a positive view toward reform (choice, accountability), the individuals, groups and institutions that are actively engaged (as opposed to the public at large) are more likely to protect the status quo. As noted in your article, Florida is the only state to use state tests to determine students’ promotion from the 3rd grade. The public would generally support this policy, so why is such a policy so difficult to implement? The active minority trumps the inactive majority. The goal for education policy is to enhance all students’ achievement each school year, to provide a year’s education every school year. In order to achieve this objective, we must have transparency about student proficiency and teacher competence and achievement as well. It is interesting that your survey portrays the public’s desire to have accountability for student performance, but not for teacher performance. Changing education policy to reflect public opinion will require harnessing the participation of more people who hold the majority view. They must become involved at the school board level and advocate for more transparency, accountability, and choice.
Phil Handy Moving to Opportunity 
In addition to the clear presentation of empirical findings, both articles on the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program (“New Kids on the Block,” research, and “All Over the Map,” features, Fall 2007) do a good job of summarizing problems associated with the MTO experiment’s design and implementation. These weaknesses are often overlooked when media commentators use the results of the MTO experiment to discredit housing voucher programs for the poor, such as those proposed by Senator John Edwards. See, for example, David Brooks in the New York Times (July 31, 2007) and Alec MacGillis in the Washington Post (May 7, 2007). It is important to emphasize that many MTO movers relocated to neighborhoods that were not significantly better than the ones they left. For example, three-fifths of these families entered highly racially segregated neighborhoods. Such neighborhoods tend to be considerably less advantaged than integrated areas. Also, at the time of the interim evaluation, as many as 41 percent of those who entered low-poverty neighborhoods had moved back to more-disadvantaged neighborhoods. As Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Douglas Massey point out in a forthcoming American Journal of Sociology article, because of such extensive outmigration, these families accumulated relatively little time in areas of low poverty, not to mention in those low-poverty neighborhoods that are racially integrated. Finally, nearly three-quarters of the children in the MTO experiment remained in the same school district and were often in the same schools at the time of the interim evaluation. In accounting for these findings, DeLuca’s research insightfully reveals that many of the MTO parents in Baltimore lack adequate information for decisions on school choice. “It is quite striking,” she states, “how little some parents thought that school mattered for learning, relative to what the child contributed though hard work and a ‘good attitude’.” Sanbonmatsu and her colleagues state, “Research has in fact found surprisingly little convincing evidence that neighborhoods play a key role in children’s educational success.” It would have been more prudent to simply state that research raises questions about the extent to which neighborhoods affect children’s educational success. Unfortunately, the evaluations of the MTO experiment have not resolved these questions.
William Julius Wilson
One hardly knows what to make of the two articles on the HUD Moving to Opportunity program. At first blush, the results are disappointing for someone like me, who would like to break up the concentrations of low-income and racially and ethnically isolated families found in many urban neighborhoods and as a result see improvements in their children’s school achievement. The MTO program seems to have accomplished family mobility to some degree with their relocation to somewhat more affluent communities. But there was virtually no effect on the achievement results for children in these families. I find myself mimicking James Carville and crying out, “It’s the schools, stupid!” Sanbonmatsu and her colleagues do a very nice job of speculating on why there was little if any improvement in student test scores—the kids were already enrolled in better, out-of-neighborhood schools; families moved again, back to less affluent neighborhoods; poverty rates increased quickly in the new neighborhoods; the new neighborhoods were also racially isolated and had poor-quality schools. And the data indicate that there probably was not much real income integration but rather movement of students from low-poverty to somewhat lesser-poverty schools but not to middle-income schools. My observations of many high-performing, high-poverty schools tell me that good schools can compensate for home and neighborhood weaknesses. They have strong leadership, talented teachers, a coherent curriculum, and often expand the time of student learning. They are found in low-income and segregated neighborhoods and as magnets or other schools of choice in less isolated neighborhoods. The MTO program makes good sense, but it won’t result in better achievement for low-income kids until there is a much larger supply of high-quality schools for them to attend. Cynthia G. Brown IQ and Education Reform It is a rare treat to read an article (“The Odd Couple,” check the facts, Fall 2007) that calls me a crank but nonetheless gives a fair statement of my position. Two quick points to highlight how Jay Greene and I might pursue our disagreements empirically: Professor Greene cites education reforms that have produced gains of about a third of a standard deviation. I accept that evidence. But in response I would cite the extensive evidence that pretest–post-test changes shrink to a fraction of their initial size within a few years (see chapter 17 of The Bell Curve). Then I would argue that even the initial gains do not challenge my thesis about the limits that cognitive ability places on what education can do. Any gain is welcome, but an increase of a third of a standard deviation does not qualitatively change a student’s life chances. Can we institute an additional intervention that raises the student’s achievement by another third of a standard deviation? Then another, then another? The answer may be yes for high-ability students in terrible schools. But I argue the answer is no for those who are below average in cognitive ability, and here is the second disagreement that can potentially be explored with data. I contend that if I am given IQ scores of children at age 6 in developed nations, I can predict the reading and mathematics competence of those in the bottom half of the IQ distribution when they have reached age 18—for students of every ethnicity, in every education system. My predictions will sometimes be wrong, demarcating the potential of education reform. But, overall, my predictions will be remarkably right, demarcating the limits of education reform. Charles Murray NCLB Forum As the articles on No Child Left Behind (“Will NCLB Hit the Wall?” forum, Fall 2007) make clear, there is reason to wonder about the future of President Bush’s signature education law. Whether or not No Child Left Behind is reauthorized and what any revised law might look like will be a matter of politics more than policy. Well into the implementation of the law, we have learned that those who opposed it initially still do and those who supported it initially are having second thoughts. We have also learned just how talented the education establishment is at getting around some of the more controversial aspects of the law, like school choice and supplemental educational services, and how adept state and local officials are at changing the rules in the middle of the game to enhance the image of their schools. The law itself has changed the terms of the national education debate. Now there is an unrelenting focus on results, even if there is debate over how best to measure them. Now policymakers are forced to confront the achievement gap, even as they seem somewhat bewildered about what to do about it. More information about America’s schools is available today than ever before, although that information is sometimes packaged in less than fully transparent ways. The question remains, has NCLB done much to improve education in this country? Public policy is essentially an exercise in manipulating human nature. It is about trying to get people to do things they normally don’t want to do or to get them to stop doing things they normally want to do. NCLB’s accountability provisions created an “education bottom line.” It was hoped educators would try to improve that bottom line. In far too many instances, they have sought instead to redefine the standards and measures on which the bottom line depends. NCLB was an important and necessary first step in what will be a long, extended campaign to change education in America. But far more fundamental change—revolutionary change—is needed. And revolutions don’t come from the top. They are the product of deep-seated frustration, resentment, and disappointment felt by people who become fed up with the status quo. Until that happens, the status quo in American education will remain what it is. With NCLB in place, we just know more about it. Gene Hickok
Funding Texas Schools Like Marguerite Roza (“Do Districts Fund Schools Fairly?” research, Fall 2007), we at Education Resource Strategies (ERS) are concerned that school districts often give some schools more resources than others, with no clear strategy that relates to school or student needs. Roza and her colleagues suggest that these school-to-school differences are hard to explain using the institutional factors that they include in their study. We agree with this general point. The article highlights the need for additional, deeper research in three areas: school size; how much schools spend of their general-fund dollars to support students with special needs; and the impact of categorical revenues. Our research consistently shows that school size explains much of the funding differences between schools within a district, especially when schools have fewer than 300 students. A revised version of the Weighted Student Index (WSI) might yield the same finding in Texas. Second, school districts spend up to 50 percent more on special education students than they receive for those students. While Roza was careful to exclude noncategorical revenues dedicated for special education students, her data did not allow her to measure this additional spending. Schools with high percentages of high-needs special education students might account for part of her unexplained variation. As Roza and colleagues point out, further research must explore the impact of categorical funds. As a field, we must find better ways to account for how academic, social, and emotional needs vary across different student populations so that we can then study whether schools are getting enough resources, from all sources, to meet these needs. For their part, district-level leaders must be strategic and transparent about how they allocate resources to schools.
Karen Hawley Miles Stephen Frank
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