Making school reform work

Public Interest, Summer, 2002 by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The approach with the longest history--traditional bureaucratic control by the public education system-is so discredited that it does not even deserve consideration. We have plentiful evidence showing that, while that system sometimes runs good schools, it cannot fix the bad ones. It just keeps them going.

Professionalism has had the second longest run, but public schools almost never cede full authority to their paid professionals. The professional educators don't wield complete control nor are they held to account for the system's performance. As for "guru-led" school designs, there have been many over the past two decades--consider the influence of Gardner, Sizer, Christopher Whittle, E. D. Hirsch, and Robert Slavin--but their teachings rarely are implemented in pure form, never in properly controlled experiments, and they hardly ever yield clear data as to their effectiveness.

Standards-based reform has been the favorite of policy makers since at least 1989, when President George H. W. Bush and the state governors set national education goals. But only a few states have successfully implemented these reforms, and there is much dispute about the effectiveness, unintended consequences, and long-term costs of this approach. The new federal education law rests on the dubious assumption that Washington can make every state follow the Texas example. In Texas, attention from state authorities usually has prompted local leaders to make improvements in faltering schools. But the political culture in the Lone Star State may be unique. In Ohio, Maryland, and New York, for example, schools linger for years on state-generated lists of poor performers, yet nobody lifts a finger to change them. In Massachusetts, when it began to look as if test-based sanctions were imminent, an anti-testing backlash set in, fanned by the teachers union. (Massachusetts authorities have persevered, however, and mo re students are passing the state high school graduation test in successive administrations.) Nor does the federal government have any record of success in imposing this kind of change in resistant states and communities. It provides too little of the public school budget to influence curriculum or standards, and federal officials have not had the stomach to withhold even their paltry grants from poorly performing locales.

As for market-style education reform, it's not a new idea-- Milton Friedman first proposed it in 1962--but it has been so controversial that experiments have been small and short-lived. The average charter school is less than three years old, and we have little national data on these schools' effectiveness. Only three publicly financed voucher programs have been put into place, and their constitutionality remains in doubt. Privately funded "scholarships" are more numerous, thanks to generous donors like John Walton and Theodore Forstmann, but their per-pupil amounts are too small to trigger a "supply-side" response from potential school builders. Such scholarships have served primarily to fill empty seats in existing private schools, hardly a fair test of the education marketplace.