The return of the dinosaurs - the fallacy that an infusion of money will solve public school problems

National Review, Sept 20, 1993 by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Old ideas don't always fade away. The idea that there is nothing wrong with our schools that money wouldn't cure is proving the next thing to indestructible.

After the political meteors that smashed into the nation over the past quarter-century and altered its education-policy climate, I dared to suppose that two hoary beliefs were following the dinosaurs into oblivion. First, the conviction that U.S. schools are doing a satisfactory job for most youngsters, which was shaken by A Nation at Risk and sundry other studies in the early 1980s. Second, the assumption that education quality is best gauged by the level of resources expended and services delivered, which was jolted by research showing a tenuous relationship between money and pupil achievement. (See Rich Lowry's and Barbara Lemer's perceptive discussions of "opportunity" standards in NR's July 19 issue.)

Endangered beliefs, to be sure, don't vanish immediately. In remote locales and salubrious micro-climates, they may linger on for decades. But these two once-dominant education ideas had at least retreated from view. And their absence enabled some important new understandings to catch on: that we have an acute education-quality problem; that it will be solved (if at all) not by appropriating added funds but by rewriting the system's ground rules; that "civilian" rather than "expert" control of education is essential; and that results, not inputs, are the only true indices of performance.

Nourished by these insights, some new and quite different species of education reform emerged during the past decade. They included "choice" policies under which families could select any public school in their community, even their state; the advent of privately funded (and, in Milwaukee, publicly supported) voucher" projects enabling poor children to choose non-government schools; widening acceptance of "charter" schools, now enacted by seven states; "break the mold" designs for novel schools, including those supported by the New American Schools Development Corporation and conceived by Christopher Whittle's Edison Project; alternative certification so that teachers could get public-school posts without passing through colleges of education; devolution of decision-making from downtown bureaucracies to school-site councils; standards, assessment, and accountability programs with teeth; even the management of some public schools (notably in Miami and Baltimore) by private firms.

Such measures differ markedly from the typical reforms of the Eighties. They jettison traditional assumptions, sloughing off the conventional constraints and shifting familiar power relationships. Compared to what had passed for educational change in the Sixties and Seventies, the evolution was mind-boggling.

They're Back

But Education's dinosaurs are now returning; indeed, they had never truly become extinct. Even as new reform ideas came into being, the older genetic code continued to shape the writings of more than a few "experts." Living specimens survived in colleges of education, the marble-clad headquarters of the National Education Association, and influential parts of the Democratic Party, notably the Education and Labor Committee of the House of Representatives.

The present comeback of saurian ideas can probably be traced to the publication of Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol's much-quoted volume holding that the only serious shortcoming of U.S. education is that it spends more in some communities than in others. But his was not the only voice. Similar messages came from Gerald Bracey, an itinerant researcher last employed by the NEA; the RAND Corporation's Iris Rotberg; the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico; and others.

A coherent statement of their reasoning, such as it is, can be found in the spring 1993 issue of The American Prospect, a self-styled "journal for the liberal imagination." Entitled "The Myth of Public School Failure," the essay was written by Richard Rothstein, research associate at the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute. His argument is similar to the others. It goes like this:

Today's schools may not be perfect, but they're producing the skills that employers actually demand. By various gauges, they're doing a better job today than formerly, despite meager growth in their disposable resources. (Most added school spending of the past quarter-century, according to Rothstein's calculations, has gone for "special" social and education programs, not for improvements in regular classrooms.) Though school bureaucracy may inhibit creativity, it costs little - and its controls prevent discrimination and maintain minimum academic standards." So it's wrong to think that sweeping reforms like choice or decentralization will strengthen American education; they are solutions to non-existent problems, would probably weaken the enterprise, and, in any case, deflect attention from the one truly vital need: more money. The argument that "public-education advocates" should repeat like a mantra is that "even greater gains are likely with additional resources."