Hire Ed: the secret to making Bush's school reform law work? More bureaucrats

Washington Monthly, March, 2004 by Marc S. Tucker, Thomas Toch

Attitudes began to change in the mid-1980s after the federal government's "A Nation at Risk" report warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" in America's schools. In 1989, at a summit meeting in Charlottesville, Va., then-President George H.W. Bush and the nation's governors, led by Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, broke with the tradition of local control, establishing national education goals, in 1994, then-President Clinton bolstered the nascent national movement for school accountability by signing legislation that mandated that states set achievement standards, measure student performance against them, and reform schools with students that didn't make the grade.

But the 1994 law didn't require states to move quickly to crack down on schools that didn't measure up. That happened only in 2001, with the passage of NCLB. Today, state education agencies, not local school boards, are responsible for reshaping their education systems to produce higher student performance. Overnight, state regulators were to become reformers. "It's a complete shift" in the departments' roles, says Abigail Ports of the Council of Chief State School Officers, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that represents the 50 state departments of education.

But while the expectations and responsibilities of state education bureaucracies have suddenly and utterly changed, their actual structure has not. Consider the California State Department of Education, which occupies a modern, six-story office building on N Street in Sacramento, around the block from the state capitol. With a payroll of 1,452, it's a sizable agency. But it is hardly a leviathan, considering it manages 41 percent of California's core budget and is responsible for overseeing a system that educates one out of seven American school children. Moreover, the vast majority of those 1,452 employees spend their days in activities that have little or nothing to do with school reform. One hundred and fifty-five finance experts, for example, share the second floor with 144 special-education regulators; there is a whole division of lawyers, a team to draft safety standards for school buses, and many technologists. Sequestered in a section of the fourth floor are the 100 or so statisticians, experts in school leadership and others--about 7 percent of the department's staff--in charge of the department's most important work under NCLB: identifying and turning around California public schools that are failing to educate their students effectively. And California has a far bigger school reform staff than almost any other state.

Simple arithmetic

Some state education agencies have proven effective at intervening to improve failing schools, at least when the number of such schools has been kept at a manageable level. Two states in particular, Kentucky and North Carolina, produced among the nation's best achievement gains during the 1990s using a strategy similar to NCLB's: comprehensive testing to identify failing schools against clear student achievement standards, followed by state intervention for those that performed the worst. Since 1997, North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction has sent "assistance teams" into 56 of the state's most dysfunctional schools. All but four have been lifted from the bottom category of the state's school performance rankings, and more than half have gone to the top. In Kentucky, schools deemed failing are assigned a school-improvement expert for two years. Over 90 percent of the 356 failing schools that have participated in the turnaround program since its inception a decade ago have met Kentucky's student achievement standards within two years.