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Learning-Free Zones

By Chester E. Finn Jr.

Five reasons America’s schools won’t improve

Nearly two decades have passed since the United States discovered that its primary and secondary public schools are mediocre. So why are the prospects for real improvement so dim?

To be sure, the agenda for education reform brims with good, "conservative"--I would call them "radical"--ideas. More than 700 "charter" public schools are operating in the 28 states that permit them; upwards of three dozen communities have liberated poor youngsters from bad schools with privately funded low-income scholarships; other communities are experimenting with unlimited public-school choice, publicly funded vouchers, and privatized management of public schools.

Yet the vast majority of U.S. schoolchildren still attend schools untouched by these ideas. President Clinton has set a target of 3,000 charter schools by century's end, but their benefits would be swamped by the remaining 80,000 noncharter public schools. Two dozen more communities may have adopted vouchers or scholarships by then, yet 99 percent of American youngsters won't have access to them.

At the same time, however, American education is awash in faddish innovations that regularly sweep through the profession like tropical storms: "whole-language reading," "constructivist math," "mixed-ability grouping," "multi-age grouping," "multiculturalism," and so on. This faddishness gives the education system the appearance of ceaseless change. Yet few of these innovations improve academic performance. And nearly all of them are being undertaken within the organizational framework of a rigid, governmentalist monopoly centered on an archaic concept of schooling, a concept developed for a 19th-century agrarian society with little technology and scant awareness of how children learn.

Advocates for the bold reforms America needs must confront an unpleasant truth: We have a pretty clear understanding of what would work better, yet old-fashioned bureaucratic monopolies continue to insulate most U.S. public schools from change. Of all the structural and political obstacles embedded in today's system, five are particularly deadly:

1. The education system does not reward risk-taking

If we want educators to display the high-wire, high-intensity, round-the-clock dedication of securities traders, perhaps we should expect to pay Wall Street salaries. But compensation isn't the whole story. Security, predictability, and congenial relations with peers are more important to most educators than rigor, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Education colleges carefully nurture a "progressive" pedagogical philosophy that values self-esteem and respect for differences over intellectual distinction and competitiveness.

Indeed, the surest way for an educator to get in trouble is to propose change. Teachers too easily run afoul of their principals, their school boards, their students' parents, even their own peers. Teachers who receive prizes for classroom excellence, or who go to the considerable trouble of earning "board certification," often find themselves scorned as "rate-busters" by their colleagues. The founders of a charter school in Massachusetts faced intimidation and harassment by public-school employees so severe that several of them left town. And the higher one's rank, the greater the risks of risk-taking. Public-school teachers typically earn job tenure after three years, but urban school superintendents, especially reformers, are lucky to last that long. One- and two-year contracts are becoming increasingly common.

Although schools eagerly embrace new fads in classroom technique and curricula, authentic reforms are subject to far more stringent criteria than is the status quo. Would-be reformers are immediately challenged to prove that their proposal has been fully tested and evaluated, that it will have no undesirable side effects--and that it will not deflect any resources from the "regular" system. In other words, nothing can be tried until it has been proven to work, but nothing can be proven until it has been tried. When a few charter schools fail in California and Arizona, for example, or private management firms lose their contracts for public schools in Baltimore and Hartford, boosters of the status quo assert that these innovations have now been demonstrated to be worthless and must never be tried again.

2. The system resists oversight from elected officials and the public

America's elected officials exert far greater leverage over their welfare, sanitation, and transportation services than over their public schools. This curious situation stems from the late 19th-century conviction that public-spirited lay boards and expert professionals were more trustworthy than common politicians with their corrupt machines, partisan bickering, and grubby patronage. The result was an independent system of governance, consisting of state and local boards of education that employ licensed educators to run the schools.

Over time, the public-education system has constructed its own separate political arena that is exceedingly hard for outsiders to penetrate or influence. Although the inhabitants of this arena depend for their funding upon the local town council or the state legislature, and must obey elaborate state education codes, they usually shape even these rules through intensive lobbying and campaigning. School-board candidates, for example, are less likely nowadays to be able, disinterested laymen and more likely to be people beholden to education unions and other producer interests.

Consumers and reformers alike are crippled by the
lack of clear standards and measures of performance.

Political decisionmaking has passed into the hands of so-called "stakeholders" in the system, who negotiate their respective interests behind closed doors. These stakeholder groups--teachers, coaches, librarians, curriculum directors, guidance counselors, textbook and test publishers, and hundreds of others--have worked out their own modus vivendi: In order to divide up the resource pie (and to demand that it be enlarged), they band together to accommodate each other's vital interests and to repel intruders. Each faction gets its own "categorical" programs, its own budget, its own administrators. Educators hamper reform efforts by nurturing the belief that every stakeholder group must assent to any change in advance. This, of course, is a perfect prescription for maintaining the status quo.

This arrangement defies both the public interest and the priorities of students and parents. That explains why, for example, immigrant parents who want their children to quickly learn English have such trouble extricating them from the clutches of "bilingual" educators, who set the rules so as to expand and solidify their fief. It explains why superintendents and school boards fight the introduction of charter schools, which would eat into their enrollments and budgets and loosen their control. It explains why U.S. public schools employ a higher percentage of nonteaching personnel than those in any other Western industrialized country. Most important, it explains why so many failing youngsters can attend school for years while the adults around them neglect even to learn their names, let alone shoulder responsibility for their education.

This alliance of stakeholders protects its intricate balance of power from outsiders. Consider Jersey City, New Jersey, where a reform-minded mayor named Bret Schundler vowed a few years ago to create a school-voucher program. For a time he seemed to enjoy the backing of Christine Todd Whitman, the state's popular GOP governor, while PepsiCo agreed to help underwrite development of the city's voucher plan. But the governor has since retreated from the voucher front, and the company backed off after some of its vending machines were broken and the teachers union threatened to boycott the firm's restaurants and products.

Teachers unions dominate school-board elections by recruiting and financing their own candidates. Union members chair the education committees of more and more state legislatures. Candidates for mayor, governor, and even president strike deals that accommodate the interests of influential education stakeholders. Many of those interests (such as teacher certification, tenure, and mandatory collective bargaining) have been codified into laws that are now difficult to repeal.

Education stakeholders exert a firm grip upon elected policymakers. For the most part, they do this by courting allies in the Democratic party. A huge percentage of the delegates to recent state and national Democratic conventions have been members of teachers unions. School-employee unions are often the biggest contributors to political campaigns and the shrewdest and most dogged lobbyists in the anterooms of power. Union political action committees (PACs) raise and donate millions of dollars to political campaigns and can muster platoons of teachers to operate phone banks and distribute leaflets.

If vouchsafing their interests means manipulating Republicans instead of Democrats, however, they will adjust quickly. This recently happened in New York City and New Jersey, and it is happening more and more often in states (such as those in the Southwest and the Rocky Mountain region) with Republican legislative majorities. The recent defeat of voucher bills in the Arizona legislature, for example, can be blamed on a handful of Republicans whose re-election depends on avoiding vigorous opposition. Such people are easily influenced by union leaders and local school-board members.

More minefields await the intrepid education reformer who tries to circumvent the legislative process and appeal directly to voters. In states where initiatives and referenda are frequently employed to make policy changes, the education establishment will throw immense sums of money and countless hours of "volunteer" time into campaigns to defeat unwanted reforms. This power is evident everywhere from local votes on taxes and education budgets to recent school-voucher and charter-school initiatives in California, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon.

The removal of education policy from the tug of conventional politics has also widened the chasm between the educational priorities of the American public (safety, discipline, and the learning of basic skills) and those of the education establishment. This is beginning to change as more political candidates campaign on education issues, but newly elected mayors or governors--or presidents--with education reform agendas will have difficulty fulfilling their promises to change a system over which they have so little control.

3. The system is unaccountable for failure

Consumers and reformers alike are crippled by the absence of clear standards, goals, and measures of performance. At almost every level, American education lacks specific objectives and standards that describe what children are expected to learn. Without reliable measures of performance in relation to precise objectives, it is impossible to hold anyone accountable for success or failure.

Nearly all reports on the performance of the education system are issued by the people who run it. There is no education counterpart to the independent corporate audit. Most educators are averse to tests, comparisons, and competition, because they want the public to believe that the system is succeeding. Hence they shun clear, timely, reliable information about how schools and students are performing. California did revamp its "whole language" approach to reading instruction after the state's reading scores dropped. But such events are rare.

Here's how former New Jersey governor Tom Kean described his experience: "As part of my blueprint for reform, I proposed a much tougher test [than the minimum competency exam then in use in New Jersey], this time to include writing skills that would be mandatory for high school graduation. The test measures basic ninth-grade-level skills. . . . The initial reaction of educators to the next test was extremely negative. . . . Educators lobbied me strenuously to delay the test, or better, to cancel it. A close look at the argument shows an insidious tendency to put the image of schools above the welfare of the students."

The education system still measures its performance primarily by inputs, not by results. Its bureaucratic management structure insists that schools comply with uniform rules and policies and track resources with precision. But it has no capacity to encourage and reward good teaching, to weed out incompetent principals, or to ensure that children actually learn.

The system shuns performance standards so that no one can be held accountable for failure. If no one is ultimately responsible, everybody can blame someone else for whatever isn't working well. The teacher says she is required to use this textbook, isn't allowed to discipline that disruptive youngster, and doesn't have time to provide individual tutoring for the exceptional child. The principal claims that the teacher was foisted upon him, that textbooks are chosen by the state or local textbook committee, that the school board will not allot extra funds for tutors, and that the courts have tied his hands with respect to discipline. The superintendent explains that the principal has tenure (and his wife's cousin is an alderman). The school board is adamant that disabled and disadvantaged children receive all the tutorial help even if that leaves none for gifted youngsters. The board chairman says he is following the superintendent's recommendation in this matter and, in any case, is bound by federal and state laws.

The governor observes that the schools of this state are locally controlled and that the teachers union and the school board association helped elect him. The legislator is terrified that, if he presses hard to change the law, he will antagonize either the black caucus or the religious fundamentalists. Besides, the state faces a budget crisis and the extra money to do anything new must come from Washington. The congressman sends back a polite form letter indicating that your views will be carefully considered the next time pertinent legislation comes before Congress. From the federal Department of Education, there is no reply at all for six months; then you receive a pamphlet entitled "How To Help Your Child Improve in Math."

4. The system spends too little of its resources in the classroom

The percentage of the public-school budget devoted to "regular instruction" declined from 61 percent in 1960 to 46 percent in 1990. The system channels almost all of its money into salaries, treats every change as an added cost, and has little freedom to substitute one use of funds for another.

A simple calculation makes the point more vividly. A classroom of 24 children accounted for an average total public expenditure of about $150,000 in the 1995-96 school year. Yet the average public-school teacher costs not quite $50,000, including benefits. That suggests that some two-thirds of the public funds spent on behalf of those youngsters are not going to their primary teacher. Where, then, is it going? Nearly all is locked up in salaries to specialists, administrators, and nonteaching personnel and kept there by collective bargaining and bureaucratic inertia. Hence very little of it is available to replace the coal furnace, fix the leaky roof, extend the school year, or equip the building with networked computer systems.

Anyone who proposes a new idea is challenged to find extra money for it, since cutting elsewhere is unimaginable. When money is tight, class sizes may grow. But perish the thought that an unnecessary administrator, unwanted bilingual program, or inept library aide would be let go or replaced by a bit of modern technology.

Once a radical structural change is introduced, the budget and its many dependents continue to fight back. When Educational Alternatives Inc. contracted to manage the Hartford school system, where enrollment had been shrinking for years, it stumbled over its proposal to dismiss unneeded employees and use the money saved to upgrade the system's technological resources. Local unions and politicians cried foul, and E.A.I. lost its contract.

5. The consumers of education are no match for the system

Education reformers come and go, but the permanent beneficiaries of the status quo work at their ownership every day, year in and year out. Let's say an uncommonly zealous governor may succeed in enacting an unusually bold reform over the objections of unions and school boards. But in time he turns his attention to prisons, nursing homes, or economic development. His term ends. A few key allies in the legislature lose or retire. His successor arrives, perhaps with the help of voters aggrieved by the inconvenience of the change in its early stages of implementation. Early evaluations, probably made by education professors, show that the reform did not work perfectly as originally conceived. Proposals are mooted to revise it, in order to save money, to make it work better, to foster equity--whatever. Establishment interests wait for the opportunity to slow down, weaken, or repeal key portions of the change they do not like. They have elephantine memories and the fiscal and political clout to reward friends, punish foes, and sway public attitudes. All this happened, for example, to the "career ladder" (i.e. merit pay) plan for teachers that was the centerpiece of Lamar Alexander's education reform plan when he was governor of Tennessee, which has been steadily eroded and diluted ever since.

The consumers of public education are far more numerous than its producers, but they have no viable means of influencing the decisionmaking process. They have no organization to rival the teachers unions or textbook publishers. They rely upon their elected representatives, who are more apt to owe debts to the unions than to the diffuse population of families with children attending public schools. They are further handicapped by the difficulty most people have visualizing any schools or school systems that differ fundamentally from the ones they attended as children. Consumers, too, are rarely eager to change their own long-established routines, at least without compelling reasons. (This explains, for example, the staunch resistance in many communities to a year-round school calendar, despite evidence that it raises achievement and saves money.)

The Honeymoon's Over

The education establishment cleverly manipulates Americans' strong affection for the idea of public education while setting an impossible standard for reform proposals. Recent surveys by the Public Agenda Foundation, however, indicate that this affection is fading. More and more Americans believe that public schools are doing a poor job of providing safety, discipline, basic academic skills, and character development. These findings prompted one perceptive teacher union chief, the late Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers, to warn his members that "a majority of Americans believe that the public schools cannot be counted on to provide the things they consider most important in an education. . . . [T]he schools have a window of opportunity to regain public support. If that is ignored we will see the collapse of the system."

The education established cleverly manipulates
Americans’ affection for public education
while setting an impossible standard for reforms.

A journey of a thousand miles must, of course, begin with a single step. There's no doubt in my mind that the nation's education system has taken that step--and that we're headed in the right direction. But are our shoes sturdy enough to carry us the distance? And how many tens of millions of youngsters will be lost as we slowly make our way to a far-off destination?