A Lesson for Congress: No School Reform Quick Fix

There are no silver bullets for saving the schools. Improving student performance is a difficult, frustrating, often perplexing challenge. Progress demands persistence. And sometimes even that isn’t enough.

These are lessons Washington ought to remember as it embarks on another crusade in the classroom. After months of negotiation, Congress last week completed the most ambitious federal education reform bill in decades. Under any circumstance, it won’t be easy for the federal government to drive reform in an education system in which authority is as decentralized as ours. But if the legislation is to have any chance of improving results, it’s important to avoid the parallel dangers of unrealistic expectations and premature despair.

Individual states (such as Texas and North Carolina) and cities (such as Chicago) have shown that concentrated reforms can help students gain ground in reading and math. But the trends don’t usually advance in a straight line, and the gains are almost always fragile. (Chicago’s innovative school superintendent, Paul G. Vallas, found himself out of a job earlier this year when a rapid rise in test scores abruptly reached a plateau.) There is no single quick fix that can turn around a struggling school or rescue a struggling student.

That’s apparent in several new studies examining some of the favored educational reforms of the left and right. For years, most conservatives have touted private school vouchers--public money parents can use to send their children to private schools--as the salvation for America’s education system. In recent years, Democrats, especially centrists, have countered with support for charter schools--public schools that operate free from most bureaucratic and union rules.

Earlier this month, the Rand Corp. issued a detailed report analyzing the evidence on both of these reform efforts. Neither took home sterling grades. Reviewing the existing research, Rand found that African American students who left the public schools with vouchers were experiencing at most a “modest achievement benefit”--and even that wasn’t conclusively demonstrated. Voucher students of other races didn’t show any consistent gains at all.

The evidence was similarly equivocal on charter schools, which have proliferated rapidly and are given a further funding boost in the new federal education bill. Students in such schools, Rand found, are not performing “dramatically better or worse . . . than those [in] conventional public schools.”

Vouchers and charters are intended to help not only the students who use them directly but also the vast majority of students who remain behind in the traditional public schools. The theory is that these new competitors will compel the public schools to rethink and revamp their operations, much the way the Japanese auto makers forced change on Detroit--it’s the Toyota model of school reform.

But several important new studies suggest it is unrealistic to expect the hidden hand of the marketplace by itself to reshape public schools.

The most optimistic evidence comes from Harvard economist Caroline Minter Hoxby in the latest issue of the Hoover Institution’s Education Next magazine. Hoxby looked at three states that have exposed public schools to more competition: Wisconsin (which has an extensive voucher program in Milwaukee), Michigan and Arizona (where a large number of charter schools operate). Her conclusion was encouraging: The public schools that faced the most competition in those communities generated the most rapid gains in student reading and math scores.

But Hoxby acknowledges that those gains may only reflect an exodus of the weakest public school students into the alternatives that vouchers and charters provide. More important, other researchers, such as Frederick M. Hess, a University of Virginia education professor, note that Hoxby and other voucher advocates haven’t been able to tie those statistical gains to any specific changes in the public schools facing competition. That suggests the durability of the results remains to be proved.

In fact, in “Revolution at the Margins,” an upcoming book for the Brookings Institution, Hess found that school districts facing competition from vouchers were responding more with public relation gestures than substantive classroom changes. Researchers studying the Arizona and Michigan experience have found similarly modest changes in the operation of public schools competing with charter schools. “In the absence of broader organizational and institutional changes,” Hess sensibly concludes, “choice-driven competition is unlikely to deliver the results that its proponents desire.”

Which brings us back to the new federal education reform legislation. To the disappointment of conservatives, the bill doesn’t fund private school vouchers. But it still bets heavily on a marketplace model. The bill’s centerpiece is a requirement that states test students annually in reading and math from third to eighth grade; the hope is that poor results will generate pressure from parents for public schools to improve, somehow.

If it were only that easy. Hess’ research suggests that such agitation alone is unlikely to turn around big city schools burdened by bloated bureaucracies, stultifying union rules and the great gray weights of poverty and disorder. Remember: There are no shortcuts.

Thankfully, the new education bill also imposes concrete demands on the schools--and provides new tools to meet them. It both increases federal aid for educating low-income students and more precisely targets that money on the poorest districts. Then it requires schools that fail to improve student results to provide new options for parents: the right to transfer to better-performing public schools and funds to purchase after-school tutoring. Eventually, failing schools must accept sweeping reforms that could culminate in the removal of their principal and teachers. “This is a bill that has both standards and teeth which will bite if you don’t meet the standards,” says Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.).

At least that’s what the bill says on paper. But it’s worth noting that only about a third of the states have met the deadlines for implementing the testing and accountability systems mandated in the last major federal education bill, passed in 1994. In education reform, the most dangerous terrain is always the distance between exhortation and result.

*

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: http://arstechnica.netblogpro.com/brownstein.