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ОглавлениеTHE KEYSTONE OF A SMART SOCIETY
Building a smart, high-human-capital society begins with making sure that all children get a good education. A century and a half ago, within decades of its independence, America became the world’s most human-capital-rich—i.e., smartest—country by establishing the world’s best education system and having the world’s most-educated people. That is no longer true. While most young Americans today—across all ethnic and socioeconomic categories—are better educated than their parents or grandparents, they are not necessarily educated well enough for the contemporary, globalized knowledge economy. In contrast to only a few decades ago, they are no longer better educated than their peers in other advanced—and some not-so-advanced—countries. Some of this international comparative deficiency is due to “the rise of the rest,” but, whatever the reason, it is a condition that should rightly concern all Americans. Also, the quality of education across the United States varies far too widely—among Americans of different backgrounds and among the fifty states. How America’s educational shortcomings can be remedied is the subject of this and the following three chapters.
Americans can once again become the best-educated people in the world through a few strategic interventions at key points in the schooling trajectory. One set of reforms should be aimed at closing two key academic performance gaps plaguing the country’s K–12 public schools: the vast gulf separating the achievement of disadvantaged American youngsters of all ethnic groups from that of the vast majority of non-disadvantaged mainstream children (which I discuss as the “Megagap” in chapter 3), and the smaller but much more pervasive one separating the achievement of mainstream students from that of the most privileged American youngsters and their mainstream foreign peers (the “Mainstream” gap discussed in chapter 4). Reforms of higher education should be aimed at enabling all qualified American high school graduates to go to (and complete) college or other relevant post-secondary training, and making sure that this experience is academically or professionally rigorous.
AMERICA’S HISTORIC LEAD
What is considered to be the right number of years to spend in school and what should be taught there obviously changes over time. Two hundred years ago, when Americans first laid the groundwork for a system of universal education—universal in that it was not limited to the children of the rich—being an educated person required about six years of school, what we today would call an elementary education. One hundred years ago, to be well educated meant completing high school. After World War II, the educational gold standard became a college education. Now, increasingly, to be at the educational frontier requires a graduate or professional degree.
Whatever the contemporary educational threshold, Americans always got there first: building the institutional infrastructure, providing for public funding in whole or in part, and establishing the ancillary quality-control processes (like testing and accreditation). As noted in the previous chapter, even before the Colonies won independence from England, American schools were always accessible to all children in their catchment area, at a time when England and continental European countries restricted schooling to children of the aristocracy or the more affluent members of the merchant and professional classes. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the Land Ordinance of 1785 through the G.I. Bill of 1944, American education for students of all ages expanded in leaps and bounds, always staying far ahead of even the most enlightened European countries and somewhat ahead of America’s neighbor to the north, Canada (table 2.1).
From the time of the revolution through the early decades of the nineteenth century, most American schoolchildren were taught in what educational historians label “district schools” because they were organized and paid for by local school districts, and generally territorially compact enough so that all pupils could walk to the nearest school. Characterized now as “one-room schoolhouses,” these district schools were unquestionably quite primitive by later educational standards, having fairly rudimentary 3-R (reading, writing, arithmetic) curricula, mixing children of all ages and abilities in the same classrooms, and employing teachers whose own education was quite limited. Nevertheless, even these basic educational facilities were revolutionary for the time. They were open and usually free to all local children and they brought together children not only of all ages but of all social classes as well, because all but the very richest families sent their children to them.1
Table 2.1
Public Elementary School Attendance in the United States and Selected Countries, 1870–1900 (percent of all ages 5–19)
Sources: For U.S.: Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (National Center for Education Statistics, January 1993). For Canada: B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: The Americas, 1750–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For Europe: B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
In one of the most striking educational developments of the young United States, district schools throughout the new states were determined to stifle at an early age the kind of speech-related class distinctions that then and now have plagued the people of England. Strongly influenced by Noah Webster, they consciously and universally propagated a uniform way of writing (including spelling) and speaking that we today recognize as Standard American English.2
Beginning in the 1830s, spurred on by the enormously influential educational reformer from Massachusetts, Horace Mann, and responsive to the growing educational requirements of a rapidly industrializing country, a powerful national education reform movement strove to substantially upgrade the curricular content, teaching effectiveness, and time span of America’s public schools.3 In Mann’s own words,
After the State shall have secured to all its children, that basis of knowledge and morality, which is indispensable to its own security; after it shall have supplied them with the instruments of that individual prosperity, whose aggregate will constitute its own social prosperity; then they may be emancipated from its tutelage, each one to go whithersoever his well-instructed mind shall determine.4
This effort, referred to by education scholars as “the common school movement,” took on great momentum and spread like wildfire across the new nation. Illinois imposed universal schooling along these lines in 1825, followed by New York in 1830, Massachusetts in 1837, and by the 1860s, so had all northern, Midwest, and frontier states. Only in the South was the movement thwarted before the Civil War, where affluent whites sent their children to private schools, and poor whites and blacks (then enslaved) received a meager district school education at best. In the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, unsegregated common schools open to both white and black schoolchildren were established in all southern states, but with the collapse of Reconstruction after 1875 and the adoption of Jim Crow laws throughout the South, these became segregated and remained so until the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Many of the characteristic aspects of American schools today, most particularly elementary schools, were set in stone by the common schools of the nineteenth century. Among the most distinctive at the time—and the most enduring—was the belief that teachers should receive specialized training, which resulted in the establishment of “normal schools” to prepare them with supposedly scientific methods of teaching (i.e., “pedagogy”). America’s first normal school was launched in Boston in 1838, and by the end of the century the lion’s share of the national teaching force was trained in such places.5 The professionalization of teacher training got a huge boost in prestige and public acceptance with the founding in 1887 of the national citadel of teacher training, Columbia University Teachers College. By the early twentieth century, most normal schools had mutated into state teachers colleges, and, after World War II, into comprehensive public liberal arts colleges dominated by their teacher education programs. To this day, a majority of American elementary schoolteachers as well as a large share of high school teachers are graduates of such teacher education programs, the descendants of the normal schools of the common school era.
The common school movement introduced many other familiar features of public schools. While originally dedicated only to making access to elementary school universally mandatory and free, by the end of the nineteenth century the movement had extended its reach to encompass universal secondary education. The common school template fostered the strict assignment of students to classrooms by age (something quite novel in the nineteenth century) and by academic ability. In the wake of the movement’s influence, many other American public school characteristics also came to be nationally consistent. Despite being under the jurisdiction of state education departments, with almost no federal government input until recently, the curricular content of schools, subject for subject, became relatively uniform across the country. This was most likely due to the influence of national (but nongovernmental) accreditation organizations that first arose at the end of the nineteenth century; the standardized doctrines of the teachers colleges; and the sales policies of textbook publishers that profit from nationwide adoption of their offerings. Even the physical specifications of American schools quickly became homogenized, with consistent class and classroom sizes, and a familiar repertoire of ancillary facilities: gymnasiums, auditoriums, cafeterias, and so on.
By the early twentieth century, the common school movement had succeeded in making its vision of access to a professionally delivered, practical education for all Americans a reality in every state. But it took a while for the education establishment to agree on the precise format and academic content of a typical school system’s elementary (and later, secondary) schools. In the case of elementary education, there was always general agreement (even internationally) on the educational foundations to be taught. However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, John Dewey and other “progressive” educators challenged the rigidly structured rote learning and focus on academic content practiced in most American elementary schools at the time—and still pervasive in the rest of the world—charging that it was pedagogically ineffective and, worse, stifled child development and creativity.6 By the middle of the twentieth century, the progressives had won this argument, first in the training of teachers in state colleges, and then in the classrooms of most districts. In a strong backlash, there arose a powerful countermovement in the 1950s against progressivism led by such national figures as Harvard President James Bryant Conant, University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Admiral Hyman Rickover, all of them calling for higher academic standards and more rigorous instruction.7 This debate continues to the present day, with the teacher training establishment and the National Education Association still promoting progressivism, and a host of prominent critics opposing it, including luminaries such as the late Boston University President John Silber, former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn, and several notable public school chancellors in Chicago, New York, and Washington.
The spread of American secondary schools at the turn of the last century raised other questions. First, at what age should elementary education end? The study of early adolescent psychological development that surfaced at the time, and the high dropout rates of children who went to four-year high schools right after eight years of elementary school, persuaded educators that there had to be a transitional, intermediate institution. Thus, beginning in 1909 in Columbus, Ohio, and 1910 in Berkeley, California, secondary education came to be articulated into two segments: a transitional school for early adolescents (called junior high or middle school) and high school for older teens. But the precise age at which to set cutoffs to begin the transition (ten, eleven, or twelve) or to end it (fourteen or fifteen) has yet to be settled. Given the uncertainty of the subjects to be taught—and how they are to be taught—in the transition years, and the painfulness of teaching anything to early adolescents, few districts have been happy with any of the many variations they have tried out over the years.
More seriously, educators needed to agree on what should be taught—and to whom—in high school. From their widespread introduction in the early twentieth century until the 1960s, the national consensus was that high schools should sort students by academic ability, as measured by standardized aptitude or IQ tests (administered in elementary or middle school), and tailor each student’s coursework to reflect his or her intellectual and occupational capacities. This sorting led inexorably to channeling students of different abilities—and, to a lesser extent, boys and girls—into different academic and, ultimately, career paths. The cognitively gifted were to be prepared for college; the less gifted taught enough to function competently in lower- and mid-level white-collar jobs (such as girls being groomed for secretarial work); and the least academically oriented (mainly boys) trained for vocational or technical trades, either in comprehensive high school vocational tracks or in specialized vocational schools.8
There were certain undeniable benefits to having academically stratified high schools. They could require rigorous courses for college preparatory students, assuring a very high degree of academic readiness for the college-bound, and they supplied the middle and lower tiers of the labor market with an army of competent secretaries, clerks, and skilled tradesmen. They were also reasonably effective in matching the abilities of young people to career paths in which they were likely to succeed. And though American high schools were internally stratified academically, in other respects they were consistent with the country’s democratic, egalitarian values. Unlike stratified secondary school systems in Europe, all local children attended the same high school, and the American high school experience always included a wide range of social and athletic pursuits open to all students—ones in which the non-cognitively or non-socially advantaged could excel. On the negative side, scholastic stratification was bound to reinforce prevailing patterns of class and racial differentiation, especially for African Americans and poor children generally.
PARADIGM SHIFTS
The rapid diffusion across the United States of a standardized national template for universal education, beginning 150 years ago, can be seen for most of American history as a great triumph, and is largely responsible for the United States being, until the day before yesterday, so far ahead of the rest of the world in giving all of its citizens a sound education. But this historical paradigm is no longer adequate. If the United States wants to remain the world’s best-educated country, it must revamp the entire set of institutions and policies, from preschool through college, that constitutes the American educational system.
Over the last five decades, with accelerating force, America’s long-settled educational paradigm has been transformed by four major developments. The first was a new self-consciousness regarding the nation’s international standing in indicators of educational achievement. Until the Cold War, without giving the matter much thought, Americans were supremely complacent about the superiority of their educational system relative to that of any other country. For much of the last century, most of the world was barely literate and even the richer countries of Europe clearly lagged behind the United States in how well their people were educated (as indicated in the data cited earlier). However, the launch of the world’s first space satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union in 1957 was a wake-up call that suddenly cast into doubt America’s vaunted global technological superiority and, by extension, the quality of its schooling in science and mathematics. The immediate result of this new sense of vulnerability was to increase significantly public school funding and efforts in these subjects. The long-term effect was to instill in Americans a gnawing anxiety and inferiority complex about the quality of their schools in any international matchup.
The second, and perhaps most important, paradigm shift affected the way professional educators (and the public) looked at—and took responsibility for—the academic success or failure of public school students. Before the 1960s, everyone unquestioningly believed not only that every American child’s academic (and, therefore, career) prospects were shaped by some combination of their genetic endowment and family status, but also there was not much that could—or should—be done about it. This kind of cognitive and socioeconomic fatalism is no longer acceptable (except, maybe, among teachers). Out of the social upheaval of the 1960s and the civil rights movement, a new national consensus took hold that insists that no youngsters, including those from underprivileged minority groups, should be doomed to a bad education or an inferior career merely because of their genes or familial disadvantage.
Third, the increased reliance on testing to gauge American educational progress has buttressed these paradigm shifts. A number of tests developed by two international education agencies working with the U.S. Department of Education measure how well American schoolchildren are doing compared to their international peers. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) conducts two periodic assessments. The older one, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), has measured, at four-year intervals beginning in 1995, the mathematical and science proficiency of fourth- and eighth-grade schoolchildren in sixty or so countries. The other, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), has been given at five-year intervals since 2001 to fourth graders in forty-two countries to assess reading comprehension. Starting in 1997, and at three-year intervals, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been assessing the mathematical and science proficiency of fifteen-year-olds in more than seventy countries in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. The United States participates fully in all of these international assessments and, to date, American schoolchildren have not done especially well in any of them (I will review the findings later in this chapter), a widely cited fact that accounts for much of the current American educational angst.
Testing has become even more important in gauging academic achievement within the United States, primarily to address—and remedy—disparities among schoolchildren of different ethnic and socioeconomic groups. While common for decades, public school testing took a quantum leap forward with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001 (No Child Left Behind, or NCLB). NCLB requires all states, as a condition of receiving federal school aid, to test all third- to eighth-grade students annually to determine their achievement levels in reading and math. For certain student cohorts (especially black and Hispanic schoolchildren) that test below benchmark proficiency levels, states and school districts must show “adequate yearly progress” in test results or risk losing some portion of their federal aid. Testing is also a key element of local school accountability to parents and other “stakeholders,” as most states now issue district-level and individual school student achievement “report cards.”
One of the unfortunate political compromises made by the George W. Bush administration to secure passage of NCLB was to permit each state to develop and use its own tests. This almost guaranteed a kind of testing “race to the bottom,” because if a state implemented really rigorous tests it faced a greater risk of falling short of its own (and national) achievement benchmarks and triggering federal sanctions. Therefore, for anyone wanting to know how well students are doing in any American state, the only reliable set of academic achievement tests is that administered by the U.S. Department of Education: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), dubbed “the nation’s report card.”
Fourth, and finally, the most recent and urgent reason for comprehensively revising American educational practice is the growing recognition that, for the United States to remain a global economic power, Americans must excel in the global “knowledge economy.” The knowledge economy, both in the United States and abroad, puts a labor market premium on brains over brawn and, even among brains, on keen analytical abilities (requiring stronger mathematical and scientific proficiency) and communication skills (requiring greater literacy).
All of these concerns have coalesced in a new educational paradigm that obligates America’s schools and colleges to:
1. Instill higher academic expectations backed by more rigorous curricula to meet the demands of the knowledge economy and to restore American global educational preeminence.
2. No longer allow the scholastic achievement of their students to depend on good genes and good fortune, with the corollary that all students—including the most disadvantaged poor and minority children—must be brought to some satisfactory level of academic proficiency.
3. Keep track of their educational progress through frequent and reliable testing, and be prepared to continuously revise their educational policies accordingly, implementing proven “evidence-based” strategies.
Some features of the new paradigm have not gone unchallenged. The abandonment of cognitive and socioeconomic educational determinism and its companion, holding schools and teachers accountable for student performance based on testing, while pretty much “the law of the land,” face resistance from two quarters. Schoolteachers, standing as they do at the front lines of accountability for satisfactory levels of student achievement, not only are understandably anxious about what this means for their job security and pay, but also not so secretly question the basic premise. They say, not without reason, that it is naive and unfair to put the entire burden of student achievement—especially for the poorest or most handicapped children—on their shoulders. As one commentator observes, regarding the New Orleans school system:
The criminal justice and health care systems may be broken, living-wage jobs in short supply, and families forced to live in unstable or unsafe conditions. But the buck supposedly stops in the classroom. Thus teachers can find themselves charged with remedying an impossibly broad set of challenges that go far beyond reading at grade level.9
They have a point. In chapters 3 and 4 I address ways in which we can significantly boost student achievement and, while not letting teachers off the hook, also not impose on them the entire burden of eliminating performance disparities.
The other opposition comes from a segment of contrarian opinion that believes that education reform efforts aimed at closing achievement gaps are largely futile because schoolchildren’s cognitive and cultural disadvantages are too deep-seated to overcome. Instead, they argue that not all Americans need to be educated to the level of college readiness, and that this goal is not achievable in any case. The policy prescription we are to infer from this bleak assessment is that we should go back to the old paradigm of cognitive and social stratification: stop wasting money or energy on school reform and focus education efforts on those most likely to succeed academically with the goal of preparing them—and only them—for college, and, as in the old days, steer the educational losers into industries and occupations that may require specialized training (e.g., hair stylists, telephone installers) but not a thorough general education.
Are the contrarians correct? First, their position is not new; it is merely a rationale for reestablishing the status quo that prevailed in the first two-thirds of the last century. Taken to its extreme, it echoes the educational elitists of every era to justify the kind of educational rationing and stratification that used to be endemic throughout the world—something repugnant to the egalitarian American ethos. But the best empirical refutation is found in the academic fortunes of upper-middle-class American children. Central to the contrarian’s view is the argument that half of all children must be—in terms of statistical logic—below average and therefore should be automatically disqualified from aspiring to or getting a college education. Yet this same logic should also apply to children from the upper middle class. Countless studies refute the notion that just because upper-middle-class adults engage in “assortative” (i.e., class-based) mating, their children have any genetic advantage in intelligence.10 Yet, despite not being necessarily “smarter” than the general population—or even than the majority of disadvantaged children—nearly all upper-middle-class children graduate from high school and most go on to and graduate from college—mainly because their well-educated parents see to it. Bottom line: if upper-middle-class kids of middling (or even inferior) ability can get—and benefit from—a good education, then all other kids should be able to as well. So, despite the doubters, we need not abandon the idealistic new American public education paradigm; we just have to make it work.
MILESTONES ON THE ROAD TO THE NEW PARADIGM
Widespread acceptance of America’s new educational paradigm did not occur overnight; it is the product of a half century of study and reconsideration. Perhaps the first crack in the old paradigm was the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended de jure school segregation in the South. Clearly, the court’s ruling was primarily grounded in the flagrant unconstitutionality of state-mandated segregation. But a key element in the court’s motivation was the desire to raise the academic achievement of black schoolchildren. The court’s thinking was influenced by the research of sociologist Kenneth Clark and others that for the first time challenged the prevailing socioeconomic determinism that took the poor school performance of blacks—segregated or not—for granted.11 Thus Brown might be considered the country’s first step on the path to holding schools, not children, responsible for educational outcomes.
As noted earlier, the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik space satellite in 1957 suddenly made Americans aware that the United States was in danger of losing the global race for technological superiority, the one domain in which Americans had long displayed unchallenged leadership. The fact that the country might be overtaken not by a friendly Western competitor but by its dangerous Cold War adversary heightened Americans’ anxiety and sense of inferiority. The response of the Eisenhower administration was to launch a host of committees and studies and, ultimately, to sharply increase federal aid for public school instruction in science and mathematics.
In 1965, as part of the Lyndon Johnson administration’s “Great Society” reforms, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which, for the first time, specifically directed federal school aid to raise the academic achievement levels of underperforming schoolchildren, most of them poor, urban, and minorities. In terms of policy, this was the first concrete attempt to decouple student achievement from socioeconomic or cognitive determinants. This legislation also established Head Start, the first (and still the largest) federal foray into promoting preschool education for disadvantaged youngsters. (The importance and design of an effective preschool experience is the subject of chapter 3.)
A singular aspect of the new paradigm story is the expanding role of the federal government in education policy. In fact, to a large extent it is the “federalization” of education that has defined the new paradigm. The old paradigm, although strongly impacted by national intellectual and advocacy currents like the common school movement, nevertheless was implemented entirely by the individual states and localities. In contrast, every element in the new paradigm depends on national perceptions and national action. The U.S. Supreme Court ended school segregation. National Cold War anxieties and national civil rights advocacy prompted federal aid to address their concerns. One key advance in this march toward the federalization of education policy—along new paradigm lines—was the creation of a cabinet-level federal education agency. A modest movement in this direction had already been taken during the Eisenhower administration in the establishment of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in 1953. The definitive step, however, was the transfer of national education policy and oversight from HEW to an independent Department of Education under President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
A cascade of influential reports and popular books has both shaped and responded to federal education policy. Two books in particular that highlighted the failings of American public schools caught the public imagination: Death at an Early Age by Jonathan Kozol and Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch.12 These works drove yet more nails into the coffin of the old paradigm of socioeconomic and cognitive educational determinism. But the most influential of all the postwar education reports by far was A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, authored by a blue-ribbon commission of prominent educators under the auspices of the Reagan administration in 1983.13 The report charged that “the educational foundations of our society” were being “eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people” and “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Beyond its hyperbolic rhetoric, the report was one of the earliest to note the poor performance of American students on international tests in mathematics, science, and language arts. Among its many other indictments, it asserted that 23 million Americans (about 14 percent of all adults) were “functionally illiterate” and a majority of the rest lacked “ ‘higher order’ intellectual skills”; that Scholastic Aptitude Test scores for college-bound seniors had fallen over the previous twenty years; and that colleges had to offer remedial courses to a high proportion of their underprepared entering students.
Federal spending on education has grown dramatically as Congress has continually tweaked the various provisions of the ESEA under its successive reauthorizations. Federal aid to state and local public schools has grown from $2 billion in 1965 to more than $56 billion in 2008.14 But the reauthorization of ESEA in 2001—optimistically titled No Child Left Behind—exponentially increased the intensity of federal intervention in state and local school policy. This legislation, more than any of its predecessors, has already impelled states and their local school districts to introduce reforms that only a few years ago were unthinkable: the widespread establishment of charter schools; more rigorous evaluation of teachers, including assessing their effectiveness through pupil test scores; recasting of curricula; lengthening of school days and years; and a host of locally idiosyncratic experimental interventions. Chapter 3 will review in detail the value and costs of implementing the most pervasive of these reform initiatives.
The Obama administration has tried to speed up the pace of educational reform by dangling before states and localities the prospect of winning competitively awarded federal grants. Originally part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, and now funded through annual appropriations, the Race to the Top initiative has distributed, in three competitive cycles, more than $4 billion—with another half billion in the pipeline—to states that agree to implement more aggressive school reform measures. Success in winning a Race to the Top grant (or its size) has depended primarily on the willingness to implement a rigorous, student test–driven teacher evaluation system and substantially increasing the number of charter schools, while gaining the acquiescence of local teacher unions.
In parallel with the steady stream of publications that view American education with alarm and pieces of federal legislation, there have been substantial developments of the reforms themselves. The first truly new idea was the “charter school,” a tuition-free, publicly funded school available to parents dissatisfied with the zoned local district school, and operated free of the constraints imposed by unionized teachers and district administration. The idea of permitting independently operated schools to receive public funding is said to have originated with University of Massachusetts, Amherst, professor Ray Budde in 1988, and was embraced soon after by Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1991 Minnesota became the first state to authorize charter schools, followed by California in 1992. Today charter schools exist in forty-one states and the District of Columbia. The success to date of charter schools nationally will be considered in chapters 3 and 4.
Another independently developed but highly significant educational reform initiative is Teach for America (TFA), which was founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp and based on her 1989 Princeton University senior thesis. Its idea is to break the prevailing monopoly on teacher training of state teacher colleges—and their mediocre private collegiate brethren—by recruiting “the best and the brightest” graduates of U.S. Ivy League and other prestigious universities to become teachers, especially in the country’s most troubled neighborhoods. The TFA program involves, first, going to America’s best colleges and universities to attract teaching candidates—none of whom has ever taken any “education” courses—and then giving them a crash course in pedagogy so they can qualify to teach in public school classrooms in most U.S. states. TFA has by now become hugely successful in carrying out its mission; each year it currently attracts more than 46,000 candidates and trains and places about 4,500.15
It is indeed curious that, given the stress our national dialogue about public school reform has placed on the importance of recruiting and retaining highly effective teachers, there has been so little interest in where teachers are being trained. Kopp’s brainstorm was to recognize that the overwhelming majority of U.S. teachers today are being educated in second-rate institutions, and consequently America’s public schools are losing out in the competition for first-rate talent. We don’t know yet how well teachers’ effectiveness is correlated with their intellect, or the quality of their undergraduate education, but there is good reason to believe that brighter, better-educated individuals might also be better teachers. Beyond this yet-to-be-proven hypothesis, there is the important issue of teachers’ prestige. Among the countries that outrank the United States in educational outcomes there is one common factor: their teachers are better educated and, consequently, better respected.
The last significant educational milestone is the effort to institute across the country a more rigorous—and more nationally uniform—public school curriculum. Launched by two nonfederal organizations—the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers—and based on studies going back to 1996, the Common Core State Standards Initiative encourages every state to adopt its highly subject- and grade-specific recommended curriculum. As of 2012, all but five states are on board.16 While very promising conceptually, it remains to be seen whether the common standards are academically sound and whether they will actually be implemented as envisioned and prove to be educational game changers.
All of the milestones noted so far have been national. One important addition to the list, however, is state initiated. The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 imposed a rigorous, statewide K–12 core curriculum and a somewhat longer school day and school year; in 2005, the state began piloting an even longer school day in certain districts. Perhaps because of these measures, Massachusetts now leads the nation in K–12 education gains. A recent Harvard study, examining results from international math and reading tests, found that Massachusetts eighth graders not only scored highest among American states on the tests but also outscored test takers in all but a few countries (see table 2.9).17 Other encouraging statistics: 61 percent of Massachusetts high school freshmen proceed to college, and 53 percent of its young adults have college degrees; both are the highest proportions of any American state.
MINDING THE (ACHIEVEMENT) GAPS—AND CLOSING THEM
For America to regain its status as the world’s smartest society, it must have the world’s best educational system. Yet, as noted earlier, looking at metrics of educational achievement internationally, we see that the United States is rapidly falling behind, being overtaken by an increasing number of other countries with each passing decade. Most of this can be ascribed to the rapid educational progress being made by other places. The advanced rich countries of Europe have largely abandoned their educational elitism and are making good on their own version of “not leaving any children behind.” Other countries with the will to become smart societies needed only the means. The former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe no longer have their educational potential held back by the yoke of Soviet communism, and the “Asian tigers” no longer suffer from the scarce resources of early-stage economic development. Although we are losing the educational race mainly because others have learned to run faster, that is no excuse; we must learn to run even faster ourselves.
The inferior standing of the United States is evident in all three of the international tests, in all three subjects (reading, math, and science), and at all ages (fourth grade, eighth grade, and age fifteen) as shown in tables 2.2 and 2.3.
A detailed analysis of the data behind these dismal statistics reveals that the deficiencies in American school achievement are present not just in the bottom cohort of schoolchildren (the “left behind”), but also in those at higher levels of ability. As shown in table 2.4, even America’s brighter youngsters, those in the 75th and 95th percentile of test takers, do poorly relative to their peers in other advanced countries. This suggests that the fastest way for American political and educational leaders to restore the country’s historic international educational supremacy is to direct much more attention to increasing the academic performance of mainstream schoolchildren, a subject elaborated on later and addressed in chapter 4.
Table 2.2
PIRLS Test Scores for Reading (fourth grade)
Source: OECD, Programme for International Student Assessment, 2009.
Table 2.3
TIMSS Test Scores for Mathematics (fourth and eighth grades)
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.
Table 2.4
PIRLS Percentiles for Reading (fourth grade), 2006
Source: OECD, Programme for International Student Assessment, 2009.
The country’s greatest contemporary educational failure is the shockingly uneven level of academic achievement among Americans in different circumstances and in different places. The most familiar comparison is that white children are doing much better than blacks and Hispanics, and Asians are doing a little better than whites. Less frequently noted, white children whose parents have a college education are doing much better than those who don’t. Overall, suburban children are doing better than those who live in cities, and much of this disparity remains even when we hold race and parent education levels constant (table 2.5)! Among city children with the same profile, those going to school in smaller cities (or poor suburbs) do better than those in the biggest. But the most startling finding, and actually the most hopeful in terms of effective educational policy reform, is the enormous difference in academic performance from state to state—even after one adjusts for each of the socioeconomic and locational distinctions mentioned above. In fact, as table 2.6 shows, achievement-lagging demographic cohorts in some states do better than leading ones in others. This is hopeful because, if such academic achievement disparities cannot be attributed to socioeconomic disadvantage, and the statistical distribution of cognitive ability should be the same everywhere, then the only explanation for such differences lies in the schools themselves.
Table 2.5
NAEP Eighth-Grade Reading Scores for Whites by Location and Parent Education, 2011
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Table 2.6
NAEP Eighth-Grade Reading Scores by Race and State (top and bottom five), 2011
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The project of fixing America’s educational system should begin with a strategic analysis of where, in the interaction of children and schools, we find our most serious academic problems; and where, in the educational pipeline, those problems can be most effectively addressed. While the achievement of major educational gains for all categories of youngsters remains challenging, the gaps to be closed can be parsed into just two broad categories, and these can be addressed at just a few promising intervention points, all replicable at a national scale, and all affordable—measuring affordability in terms of their long-term, rather than short-term, cost-benefit ratios.
The largest academic achievement gap, one that has long consumed the energies of U.S. national, state, and local education agencies, remains the one separating poor minority children from mainstream whites (see table 2.7). Closing that gap has so far proven to be beyond the reach of the most prevalent education reform policies. To date, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars and the implementation of countless experimental reforms—affecting teachers, class sizes, school organization, high-stakes testing, and so on—progress has been very limited and geographically sporadic. Not far behind poor minority children in school performance is a growing cohort of lower-income white children—most often those raised in single-parent families, a phenomenon largely ignored by reformers obsessed with ethnically correlated performance differences.
Table 2.7
NAEP Test Scores by Race and Location, 2011
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Increasingly noticeable is the academic achievement gap between girls (higher) and boys (lower) among schoolchildren of all class and ethnic backgrounds, as indicated in table 2.8. Some recent reports on male/female school performance disparities ascribe them to likely differences in brain wiring, and therefore conclude they might be lessened by using gender-differentiated teaching strategies, and perhaps hiring more male teachers. This is most certainly wrong; effective schooling can be—and should be—gender-blind. When Lawrence Summers, as president of Harvard, suggested something similar, that women’s underrepresentation in mathematics and the sciences was due to gender-based cognitive differences, he was booed off the stage and ultimately lost his job. Cognitive determinism is no more defensible when it is used to justify why so many boys are lagging academically. For children growing up in poor families—white or black—a better explanation is that being raised in fatherless households disproportionately undermines the school performance of boys. Girls often have a positive role model—and achievement motivator—in their mothers, while boys in the absence of fathers are apt to look to delinquent older males (who most likely show contempt for any evidence of academic striving) for guidance.18
Table 2.8
NAEP Eighth-Grade Reading Scores by Gender and Race
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The one American school cohort that is not being left behind academically is made up of upper-middle-class white children. Even here, girls do better than boys, but the boys easily do well enough to succeed in college and later in their working careers. Obviously, it is no surprise that socioeconomically advantaged kids do well in school, and disadvantaged ones do badly; we have always known this intuitively and statistically have confirmed it repeatedly since the publication of the Coleman Report in 1966,19 but we have had a hard time translating this knowledge into a plan of educational action. Until the 1960s, we simply shrugged and accepted differential school outcomes as the unavoidable byproduct of social stratification. After the Supreme Court ended de jure racial segregation in 1954, we naively assumed that racial mixing—and, by extension, socioeconomic class mixing—would trump the disparities in home environments. When that didn’t work, we decided that compensatory resources would do the trick—for example, giving school districts with large numbers of disadvantaged children more money to pay teachers more, run smaller classes, hire paraprofessionals, and engage educational “experts.” When that didn’t work either, we launched the current generation of reforms that will be reviewed in detail in chapter 3.
Although the strongest predictor of academic performance for all schoolchildren is family social and economic status, and this explains not only the inferior academic performance of lower-income minority schoolchildren but also that of lower-income whites, with the greatest impact falling on boys in both groups, there is not much we can do about that. Decades of failed experiments have conclusively shown that it is nearly impossible for government to level the socioeconomic playing field through interventions in the home. The inevitable policy conclusion to be drawn from this fact is that if we are to raise the academic performance of disadvantaged children, we must do so in school.
But which kind of school? It is becoming increasingly obvious that all of these apparently discrete school performance gaps—affecting African American and Hispanic children, lower-income white children, and lower-income boys of all ethnic backgrounds—have their origins in the same underlying condition: cultural deprivation at an early age. If that is so—and the work of E. D. Hirsch and other scholars of cognitive development persuasively documents the validity of this hypothesis—it is a problem that can only be successfully remedied at an early age. All efforts to date that have attempted to close the academic gap in high school and college have yielded only marginal gains. Even elementary school may be too late. There is a growing body of evidence that the best place to address this issue is in preschool. But not any old preschool, as the country’s disappointing experience with Head Start, the nation’s largest preschool program for disadvantaged youth, has demonstrated. However, with the right kind of preschool curriculum, and the right kind of preschool teachers, and with sufficient time—in school-day hours and school-year days—a very large share of these heretofore intractable gaps can be closed. Why and how this is to be done is discussed in detail in chapter 3.
But it is not just children from poor minority families who are being “left behind.” Looking at the previous tables, we can see that currently the majority of American schoolchildren are falling short relative to their potential and the education they need to excel in the twenty-first-century knowledge economy. This is the gap separating “normally” performing American middle-class schoolchildren from their more successful European and Asian peers and their affluent—often privately schooled—upper-middle-class American ones. This Mainstream achievement gap affects the largest number of American schoolchildren and also happens to be the easiest to close, yet it has gotten practically no notice at all. This gap can and should be closed later in the educational cycle—that is, in high school and college—and we have good evidence on how to do it. Since this gap is not grounded in hard-to-overcome handicaps of poverty, racism, family structure, or cultural disadvantage, we need only look for guidance to places where mainstream students are doing well—like Massachusetts in the United States, or Japan abroad. Indeed, the most irrefutable evidence that the Mainstream gap can be closed is in the marked variation among American states in the performance of their white, middle-class, suburban schoolchildren. For example, those in Massachusetts taking the NAEP eighth-grade reading test in 2011 outscored their California peers by an entire proficiency level. Indeed, as table 2.9 confirms, the educational performance disparities among American states, even after accounting for demographic variables, are as great as those that differentiate school performance among nations.20
This is actually a piece of very good news because these interstate differences can be tied to differences in state educational practices, and educational practices can be easily changed. Further, by showing what can be done, these data represent an irrefutable counter to the educational determinism of reform skeptics. What educationally successful school districts, states, or countries tell us is that the most important determinants of high academic achievement for non-disadvantaged students is offering them demanding academic content and instilling high academic expectations. This is well understood by those parents who spend enormous sums sending their children to elite private schools (whose success is based on these factors and not on their social cachet) and by the majority of Catholic schools, which serve less affluent children.
Table 2.9
Comparing U.S. States (top and bottom five) and Sixty-six Foreign Countries in Reading and Mathematics Proficiency, 2011
Source: Paul E. Peterson et al., Globally Challenged: Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?, Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, August 2011.
*On reading proficiency test.
THE EDUCATIONAL CAPSTONE: POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION
Probably the best overall qualitative measure today of a society’s educational system is how many of its young adults complete a program of higher education—in other words, college. American international superiority was once dramatically evident in this educational arena, even more so than in elementary and secondary schooling. As noted in chapter 1, Americans established colleges and universities—public and private—at a rapid pace from the seventeenth century through the twentieth and aimed at educating not just the children of the affluent (as was the case in the world until very recently), but all who had the desire and (ideally) the aptitude. As a result, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a higher percentage of Americans had a college education than the citizens of any other country.
Despite this impressive heritage, by many indicators the United States is now lagging increasingly behind its global peers. In 1970, when 19 percent of American young adults (i.e., age thirty to thirty-five) had gotten a college education, the United States was well ahead of all other countries in the world, including Canada (11 percent), Japan (7 percent), France (4 percent), and Germany (3 percent). By 2010, the latest year for which comparative data are available, the proportion of young Americans with college degrees had risen modestly (22 percent), but the United States had been overtaken by Japan, Australia, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, and even Spain. Comparing American college graduation rates (of those entering college) to the average for all the advanced OECD countries, in 1995 the U.S. rate of 33 percent was well above the OECD average of 20 percent. Today, at 37 percent, it is slightly below the OECD level.
Table 2.10
High School Graduation Rates by State (top and bottom ten)
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census.
*Italics indicate that rates have fallen since 1990–91.
Thus, school reforms in elementary and secondary schooling need to be focused single-mindedly on having all schoolchildren graduate from high school and then preparing them for life after high school. Overall, current high school graduation rates fall far short of this goal, but, as in student performance generally, there is wide variation among the states (table 2.10).
Currently, two-thirds of those who do graduate from high school go on to some kind of higher education. The problem is that no more than one-third of these students are actually ready for college, something evident in today’s low college-completion rates (tables 2.11 and 2.12). While U.S. colleges and universities are not blameless in this, they are very much at the mercy of how well American high schools prepare their graduates—meaning that the link between high school and college academic expectations must become considerably tighter, an issue calling for more stringent college admissions policies and greater cooperation between colleges and their feeder high schools.
This problem has been bedeviling American higher education for decades, and mere exhortations to resolve it have proven futile. To reform higher education comprehensively, we need to generate more potent incentives for both students and the collegiate institutions. The most efficient and scalable way to do this is through the funding of college education, most of it directly or indirectly underwritten by the federal government. Changing the basis of that aid should motivate students and colleges to raise their game. Chapter 5 will review the extent to which college attendance and completion (by years of study) adds to individual and national human capital, how much of the population might actually benefit from going to college, how the quality of a typical American college education can be strengthened across the board, and how federal financial aid to students and colleges can be comprehensively restructured to ensure that most American college students are college-ready, that all who are can get a college education, and that they and the colleges are motivated to see that they graduate.
Table 2.11
College Enrollment by Gender and Status, 1970–2021
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics.
Table 2.12
College Graduation Rates of 2004 Entering Cohort (percent by race and gender)
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
