Reason Magazine - Contributors

Protect Our Kids from Universal Preschool

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

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Not Hot for Teachers

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

In a Winter 2008 City Journal essay, "School Choice Isn't Enough," the Manhattan Institute's Sol Stern, a well-known critic of progressive education, former editor of the radical left magazine Ramparts, and previously a strong supporter of school choice, says that school vouchers are a failed experiment and competition has not led to public school improvement.

He argues that the school choice movement needs "a realistic Plan B for the millions of urban students who will remain stuck in terrible public schools?" His suggestion is to focus on instructional reform as the best way to improve public schools for the urban poor. This is significant to the school choice fight because Stern is abandoning a central theme of the choice movement: "Competition lifts all boats."

Instead, Stern offers us a vision of centralized top-down content management as the next panacea for education reform. Stern insists that an "instructionist" approach, which focuses on content standards and accountability, is a better route to school reform.

Stern cites Massachusetts as an exemplary example for other states to follow. He credits "instructionists" that "pushed the state's board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam," with much of the student achievement success in Massachusetts.

Stern talks up the "Massachusetts miracle," where the state scored first in the nation in the latest 4th and 8th grade math and reading on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the nation's report card for student achievement and standardized benchmark for every state. The state's average scores on the NAEP have also improved at far higher rates than most other states. However, there is a more nuanced explanation for the uptick in student achievement in Massachusetts. We might ask, "Miracle for which students?"

To be sure, having the highest scores in the nation and highest gains on the NAEP, as Massachusetts does, is an admirable achievement. For a fuller picture of what is happening, however, Education Week's 2008 Quality Counts report for Massachusetts offers more context. Quality Counts notes Massachusetts ranks very low in terms of progress on the student achievement gap between low-income and higher income students. Massachusetts ranks 46th and 50th for the poverty gap—the difference in NAEP scores between students eligible for the free-lunch program and non-eligible students. In 4th grade NAEP reading scores, for example, Massachusetts has a 29.1 point gap compared with the national average of 26.8 points. In fact, the reading gap in Massachusetts has grown by almost 3 points between 2003 and 2007 on the NAEP. For 8th grade NAEP math scores, the state has a 31.4 gap compared to the 26 point national average.

In Massachusetts, middle class and wealthy children have clearly benefited from a focus on content and standards. However, it is less clear how this curricular focus has benefited the most disadvantaged students in the state, who are now being left even further behind.

Other data underscore Massachusetts' ongoing struggle with the most challenging students. According to Standard & Poor's, Boston's 2007 reading proficiency scores on state standardized tests show that white students in Boston scored 67 percent proficient while black students scored 35 percent proficient, Hispanic students scored 35 percent proficient, and economically disadvantaged students scored 37 percent proficient. Every disadvantaged group in Boston has a larger achievement gap in 2007 than in 2004. Across the state the gap is similar. Seventy-six percent of non-disadvantaged students are proficient in reading while 42 percent of economically disadvantaged students are proficient—a 34 point gap, two points larger than in 2004. For low-income and disadvantaged students, then, Massachusetts' instructional reforms have proven far less than miraculous.

A second important point about Stern's advocacy for instructional reform is that other states that have undertaken similar efforts have not seen a Massachusetts-style pay-off in test scores. If content-based curriculum were a panacea, California and Indiana should, like the Bay State, be showing much larger gains on the NAEP. The 2008 Quality Counts report gives Indiana and California an "A" on standards and accountability. Both these states have had a very intensive curriculum and standards-based approach, very similar to Massachusetts, over the last decade.

Yet this focus on strong content and accountability has not translated into large student achievement gains. Indiana has produced a respectable seven-point gain in 4th grade math on the NAEP between 2003 and 2007. However, reading scores have remained flat. And like Massachusetts, Indiana's poverty gap remains large with higher-income students being largely responsible for any gains.

Since Indiana ranks first in the nation in terms of content standards, we should expect to see a stronger effect on student achievement for disadvantaged students as well as advantaged ones. In urban cities in Indiana such as Indianapolis, the achievement gap has widened not narrowed in recent years. Beating the Odds, a May 2007 report by the Council of the Great City Schools, details how urban school districts have closed their achievement gaps in the past six years. In Indianapolis, the most disadvantaged students have lost ground since 2001. The achievement gap in reading on the I-Step for low-income 8th graders was 36 points in 2001; five years later it had grown to 45 points. About 75 percent of white students passed the English portion of the I-Step exam in 2006, compared with 48 percent of black students and 51 percent of Hispanic students.

In California, content standards and standards-based reform have had essentially no effect. California ranks near the bottom, 45th and 48th in 4th grade reading and math on the NAEP. The Quality Counts report ranks California 49th in terms of the "poverty gap" with a 30 point gap in 4th grade reading scores between low and high income students. The fact that California and Massachusetts rank similarly, 49th and 50th respectively, should give everyone pushing an "instructionist approach" pause, considering the demographic differences between the two states. Quality Counts ranks Massachusetts first on their "chance for success" index which includes variables like family income, parental education level, and parental employment. Massachusetts ranks 5th in the nation in terms of family income with 75 percent of parents earning more than 200 percent of the poverty level, while California ranks 39th. Massachusetts also ranks number one in the nation in terms of parent education with more than 60 percent of parents earning a college degree. In California only 38 percent of parents make it through college. The point of all this is that Massachusetts, a high income state, where 90 percent of parents are fluent in English, and 60 percent are college educated has just as large of an achievement gap as California which ranks 51st in terms of English fluency for parents, and 39th in terms of parent education. An "instructionist" approach has not closed the achievement gap in either state.

The bottom line is that content-based reform has not been a panacea in California or Indiana or even Massachusetts. Students with wealthier and higher-educated parents are thriving under a strong standards-based regiment. But content standards have had little impact on one of the most intractable of education dilemmas. It has not closed the achievement gap between lower and higher income students, where not even 50 percent of these students score proficient in reading or math.

That's the major reason why school reformers shouldn't place too many eggs in the "instructionist" basket. Families still need school choice. Public schools, especially in low-performing urban districts, still need competition, which gives students a right of exit to higher performing schools and gives public schools an incentive to improve in order to keep students enrolled.

Stern is too quick to dismiss the impact of school choice on urban school districts. Stern's best case for dismissing the effects of school choice on public schools is Milwaukee, where public schools face competition from vouchers and charter schools. Yet in Milwaukee, test scores have been slowly moving up in every grade since 2004. Reading proficiency for all students is up by seven points on state tests since 2004. It is up by six points for blacks, eight points for Hispanics, and up by seven points for economically disadvantaged students. In addition, the achievement gap has been shrinking. For example, Hispanics have closed the achievement gap in reading proficiency by 10 points with their white counterparts since 2004. While perhaps not revolutionary change, Milwaukee's data do not seem enough to throw in the towel on the entire school choice movement.

Stern is also overly dismissive of the impacts of robust public school choice programs where money is attached to the backs of children. He claims that in New York City the "Bloomberg administration and its supporters are pushing markets and competition in the public schools far beyond where the evidence leads." Considering that 2007 was the first year that any market reforms were implemented in New York City on a district-wide basis, it is yet to be determined what the future effects of these reforms might be.

In California, Oakland Unified has seen rapid improvements for disadvantaged students on multiple performance measures under its New York City-style school choice plan. In 2003-04, for instance, the city's high schools offered 17 advanced placement classes; last year, the district offered 91. About 800 high school students studied first-year physics last year -- nearly triple the number taking the course in 2003-04. Since 2003, the number of graduates qualified to enter the University of California and California State University systems has nearly doubled.

In 2006 Oakland had the highest student achievement gain of the 30 largest districts in California. Oakland has also shrunk the performance gap for low-income students in 4th grade reading who qualified for the free lunch program. They went from a 45 point gap to a 25 point gap between 2002 and 2006.

To date there have been very few school choice programs that have offered public schools real competition in terms of actually losing students or dollars. Yet as more districts have higher concentrations of students enrolling in various school-choice programs, we may yet get to test the important idea that "competition lifts all boats." Until then, it's wrong to bet on instructional reform becoming a cure-all for disadvantaged students left behind in terrible public schools.

Lisa Snell is the director of education policy at Reason Foundation.

Experimenting With School Choice

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:02:00 EST

Policymakers, unlike scientists, don't have the luxury of conducting controlled experiments to test competing solutions to social problems. But when it comes to reforming failing public schools, something close to that is occurring in two California school districts: Oakland and Compton.

The districts, comparable in many respects, are opting for completely different approaches to fixing their schools. And so far, Oakland's policy of giving parents more choice is showing far more success than Compton's strategy of micromanaging classrooms.

Oakland and Compton are not identical, of course. Compton, located in the outskirts of Los Angeles, does not have the gorgeous San Francisco Bay scenery of Oakland. It has a quarter of Oakland's population and no wealthy neighbors. But they are both high-crime inner cities. Both have a large Hispanic and black population, and a small Asian and white population. Average family incomes are comparable—about $40,000 for Oakland and $33,000 for Compton.

They both became targets of a state takeover and a large financial bailout in the last decade. And the federal No Child Left Behind Act for two years in a row has ranked them both among California's 162 districts "in need of improvement."

In short, the two districts have similar student bodies, similar challenges, and—until now—a similar history of failure. But Oakland is beginning to break away from this history, and the reason is the weighted-student-formula program it embraced some years ago and fully implemented last year.

Under this program, kids are not required to attend their neighborhood school, especially if it is failing. Rather, they can pick any regular public or charter school in their district and take their education dollars with them; more students therefore means more revenues for schools. Furthermore, as the name suggests, the revenues are "weighted" based on the difficulty of educating each student, with low-income and special-needs kids commanding more money than smart, well-to-do ones. Schools have to compete for funding, but the upside is that they have total control over it.

Compton has stuck to a completely different approach that does not involve empowering parents—or decentralizing control to schools. Instead, it has tried to fix its failing schools by mandating "classroom inputs." To this end, all Compton schools over the last few years have been ordered to reduce class size by 12 percent, improve teachers' credentials, adopt a tougher curriculum, and even clean up bathrooms.

What are the results so far? Oakland schools have shown a remarkable flexibility in responding to student needs, while Compton has stagnated. In 2003-04, for instance, Oakland's high schools offered 17 Advanced Placement classes. Last year, they increased this total to 91, or about one AP class for every 143 students. By contrast, Compton's AP offerings went up by two that year, to one class for every 218 students. Oakland students also are taking high-level math and science courses more frequently. About 800 high school students studied first-year physics last year—nearly triple the number taking the course in the 2004 school year.

More to the point, of course, are student-performance measures. Oakland kids have shown major improvement on the California High School Exit Examination, which all students must pass in English and math before graduating from high school. Sixty-two percent of high school students passed the English-language-arts portion, compared with 57 percent in 2005—a 5-point gain—and 60 percent passed math, a 6-point jump from the year before. By contrast, Compton showed no gains in English—staying stuck at 58 percent—and posted a 2-percentage-point drop in math, from 50 percent to 48 percent.

Similarly, Oakland's score on the state's Academic Performance Index—a numeric grade that California assigns to its schools based on the performance of their students on standardized tests—went up by 19 points. Compton, in contrast, gained only 13 points. Yet even this overstates Compton's performance, because almost all of its gains came at the elementary level, where students are not so intractable. Compton's middle schools lost an average of 6 points, while Oakland's gained an average of 16 points. Meanwhile, half of Compton's high schools lost points on the API score—including Compton High, where now fewer than 6 percent of males are proficient in reading, and fewer than 1 percent in algebra. Conversely, Oakland high schools gained, on average, 30 points. Even Oakland's economically disadvantaged and limited-English students have shown major improvements. In 2006, its economically disadvantaged students gained 60 percent more on the performance index than Compton's, and its English-language learners gained 120 percent more.

Nor is Oakland's progress in any way anomalous. Oakland borrowed the weighted-student program from San Francisco, where the approach has already had six years of success. San Francisco kids in every grade level in every subject have consistently performed above the state average. Since 2001, its low-income students have posted gains of 83 points, 16 percent more than Los Angeles' and 25 percent more than Compton's. Last year alone, San Francisco students overall earned the highest API test scores of any urban district—97 points higher than Los Angeles and 150 points higher than Compton. Even San Francisco's minority, poor, and special education students have shown major improvements. English-language learners, a challenging group, gained 12 points in 2006, compared with zero points for Los Angeles'. Similarly, San Francisco's special education students gained 19 points that year, whereas Los Angeles' gained only 1 point.

What's more, a wide array of schools have cropped up in the city, catering to practically every student need and interest by offering dual-language programs, college-preparatory classes, performing-arts electives, and advanced math and science courses. In fact, every public school in San Francisco is fast developing its own unique blend of size, pedagogic style, and course offerings.

Meanwhile, Oakland hosted a daylong fair last month at which the district's 120-plus schools could vie with each other to entice parents, handing out information about course offerings, highlighting accomplishments, and answering questions. In short, schools are being forced to sell themselves to each and every parent. Compton and the majority of low-performing schools nationwide that can count on a captive audience have no such plans.

What's more remarkable is that Oakland's turnaround happened at a time when the state had initiated a hostile school takeover, triggering protests from the community and the school board. The state-appointed administrator for the Oakland schools was forced to hire a bodyguard because of threats to his life at community meetings. But because the weighted-student formula decentralized control to individual schools and effectively put parents in charge of enforcing accountability, principals were insulated from this ugly infighting, allowing them to focus on what matters: students. In essence, this mechanism proved stronger than district politics.

The success of the weighted-student-formula program has not gone unnoticed. The Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation last year touted the approach as an important tool for school reform. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige has praised it in The New York Times. Although most teachers' unions resist handing control of school funds to principals, out of fear that this might dilute their ability to enforce such union work rules as seniority-based promotions, some unions have given cautious approval to the concept.

Nationwide, close to 10,000 schools are considered to be failing under the No Child Left Behind Act, hundreds for more than five years. Yet less than 1 percent of students in these schools manage to transfer to a higher-performing school, even though they have that right under the federal law. Political leaders can change this by building on Oakland and San Francisco's modest experiment in school choice. No student deserves anything less.

Lisa Snell is the director of education policy at the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonpartisan think tank. Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the foundation. This article first appeared in Education Week.

Big Easy Choice

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 09:37:00 EST

One unexpected by-product of Hurricane Katrina: New Orleans is now the only city in America offering unfettered public school choice.

Schools have dropped residency requirements, so any student living anywhere in the city can register at any school on a first come, first served basis. (If individual schools are oversubscribed, a lottery determines who gets to attend.) This year, students can choose from 31 charter schools, 17 state-run schools, and five schools run by the local district. Twenty-five different organizations, from nonprofits to national charter chains, are running schools, and the options run from comprehensive curricula to niche schools featuring early college, French immersion, Montessori, the arts, and architectural design.

Schools fought to attract customers with radio and TV advertising, enrollment fairs, visits to local churches and community groups, and roadside signs pitching the benefits of their programs. The New Orleans Times-Picayune told parents, "Think of yourselves as consumers in a brand new marketplace."

Critics predicted chaos all summer. In August, The New York Times ran a negative piece headlined "Rough Start for State's Efforts to Remake Faltering Schools in New Orleans." Tulane University education professor Lance Hill told the Times, "We've created the most balkanized school system in North America. The average parent is mystified.">

But as the Times-Picayune reported a month later, 53 schools with 34,000 students have opened with relative calm and few snafus. Parents somehow managed to navigate their choices without mass chaos, and now one of America's pre-eminent cities is getting a dose of educational liberty. All it took was a hurricane.

Bad Education

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EDT

When actor-director Rob Reiner turns his focus to public policy, things get expensive. His latest tax referendum, dubbed Preschool for All, would cost California $2.4 billion per year. The program would offer every 4-year-old in the state 180 days of three-hour-a-day "free" preschool, financed by a 1.7 percent tax on individuals who earn more than $400,000 a year and couples who earn more than $800,000.

The punchline: Two-thirds of California's 4-year-olds already attend preschool. Reiner's referendum, which voters will consider in June, aims to have 70 percent of them attending, an increase of 22,000 children. That makes the marginal cost for each additional kid $109,000 a year.

Will it be worth it? Experience suggests not. None of the 10 states that score best on the National Assessment of Educational Progress offer universal preschool. The only two states with long-running universal preschool programs, Georgia and Oklahoma, are at the very bottom of national reading achievement rankings for elementary school children.

The Agony of American Education

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST

Imagine a city with authentic public school choice—a place where the location of your home doesn’t determine your child’s school. The first place that comes to mind probably is not San Francisco. But that city boasts one of the most robust school choice systems in the nation.

Caroline Grannan, a public school advocate and super-involved parent, lobbied hard to wear down the San Francisco school district back in 1996 and get her son William, then an incoming kindergartner, out of his assigned neighborhood school, Miraloma Elementary, and into a “more desirable” alternative school called Lakeshore. In 1996 Miraloma had low test scores and a low-income student body bused in from other neighborhoods; its middle-class neighbors shunned it. Lakeshore had a better reputation and higher student performance.

Once, Grannan remembers, it was conventional wisdom in San Francisco that there were only five decent public schools in the city; if you couldn’t get your child into one of them, it was time to move to the suburbs or to find a private academy. But a lot has changed since 1996. Today Grannan could send her child to any school within the city. What’s more, she would happily send her kids to Miraloma, one of many elementary schools in San Francisco that now attract eager middle-class clients. Miraloma has a new principal with a parent-friendly attitude, has begun to raise its test scores, and is more diversified. Families now feel secure taking advantage of Miraloma’s longstanding positive attributes, including its small size and its sheltered and attractive setting.

Grannan’s more recent experience with her children’s middle school also reflects how San Francisco schools have changed. Her son William just graduated from Aptos Middle School, and her daughter Anna started sixth grade there this year. This school is now in high demand, but in 1996 parents considered it dirty, dangerous, and academically weak. Today it offers enriched language, arts, and music programs, and its test scores continue to improve.

Grannan is more than just a concerned parent. She is a founding member of the San Francisco chapter of Parents for Public Schools, a PTA board member, and a prolific writer whose articles about local schools appear in the San Francisco Examiner and other publications. She has argued passionately against both vouchers and charter schools, and would wince to be portrayed as a partisan of school choice. Yet she has become an avid supporter of the San Francisco system and the benefits it brings to San Francisco families.

San Francisco is one of a handful of public school districts across the nation that mimic an education market. In these districts, the money follows the children, parents have the right to choose their children’s public schools and leave underperforming schools, and school principals and communities have the right to spend their school budgets in ways that make their schools more desirable to parents. As a result, the number of schools parents view as “acceptable” has increased greatly in the last several years. In Grannan’s words, “Parents who are willing to go beyond the highest-status schools can now easily find many more acceptable options, and can avoid the fight for a few coveted seats in the most prestigious schools.”

Decentralization Rules

Give credit to Arlene Ackerman, San Francisco’s superintendent of schools since 2000. Ackerman introduced the weighted student formula, pioneered in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1976, which allows money to follow students to the schools they choose while guaranteeing that schools with harder-to-educate kids (low-income students, language learners, low achievers) get more funds. Ackerman also introduced site-based budgeting, so that school communities, not the central office, determine how to spend their money. Finally, she worked to create a true open-enrollment student assignment system that gives parents the right to choose their children’s schools.

In San Francisco the weighted student formula gives each school a foundation allocation that covers the cost of a principal’s salary and a clerk’s salary. The rest of each school’s budget is allocated on a per student basis. There is a base amount for the “average student,” with additional money assigned based on individual student characteristics: grade level, English language skills, socioeconomic status, and special education needs. These weights are assigned as a percentage of the base funding. For example, a kindergartner would receive funding 1.33 times the base allocation, while a low-income kindergartner would receive an additional 0.09 percent of the base allocation. In 2005–06 San Francisco’s base allocation was $2,561. Therefore, the kindergartner would be worth $3,406, and the low-income kindergartner would generate an additional $230 for his school.

The more students a school attracts, the bigger the school’s budget. So public schools in San Francisco now have an incentive to differentiate themselves from one another. Every parent can look through an online catalog of niche schools that include Chinese, Spanish, and Tagalog language immersion schools, college preparatory schools, performing arts schools that collaborate with an urban ballet and symphony, schools specializing in math and technology, traditional neighborhood schools, and a year-round school based on multiple-intelligence theory. Each San Francisco public school is unique. The number of students, the school hours, the teaching style, and the program choices vary from site to site.

The pressure to attract children has produced not just a greater variety of unique schools but new school capacity based on the specific demands of parents. For example, as demand has exceeded the number of available seats the district has added more Chinese and Spanish dual-language immersion programs. The weighted formula ensures that schools have an incentive to recruit and serve students with learning disabilities, limited English proficiency, and other difficulties.

All this diversity is useless if parents don’t know about it, so schools have an incentive to market their programs as well. Much of the marketing is done through a local chapter of Parents for Public Schools. The district and the chapters host school enrollment fairs, and the schools offer parent tours throughout the school year. Parents can select up to seven schools on their enrollment application. In the 2005–06 school year 84 percent of parents received one of the schools they listed, with 63 percent receiving their first-choice school. More than 40 percent of the city’s children now attend schools outside their neighborhoods.

Decentralized school management is a growing trend in the United States. To date the weighted student formula has been implemented in Cincinnati, Houston, St. Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, and Oakland. This year a weaker version that does not include school choice is being implemented statewide in Hawaii, and pilot programs are underway in Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

By contrast, most districts in the United States use a staffing ratio model, in which the central office directs school sites to spend their resources in a particular way, through allocations of staff and a small supplies budget. For example, a school might be sent one teacher for every 28 students. This system gives individual institutions little control over their financial resources and personnel choices. Under the weighted student formula, each school site receives a budget denominated in dollars instead of positions and decides what staff and nonstaff items to purchase with that money.Oakland, which completed its first year of the weighted student formula in 2004–05, is taking the decentralized concept further than any district in the United States. Edmonton, San Francisco, and the others all charge each school not for the actual salary of each teacher but for “average teacher salaries” in the district. This means that, for the sake of school budgets, differences in teacher salaries are ignored; on paper, a first-year teacher costs the same as a 30-year veteran. This practice hides funding inequities within districts where more desirable schools are stacked with senior teachers and other institutions are staffed with less experienced instructors. In practice, schools with lower-paid teachers end up subsidizing schools with higher-paid teachers. In Oakland, by contrast, schools are charged the actual cost of their employees, so a school with more novice educators has more money left over to pay for training or supplies or even to hire another teacher and reduce class size—all of which could make a school more attractive to potential students.

Another way some districts go further than San Francisco is in the extent to which parents are allowed to choose their children’s schools. Edmonton’s system is particularly robust, allowing students to apply directly to any school in the system. Similarly, Cincinnati’s high school open enrollment system allows students to apply directly to 26 different high school programs on a first come, first served basis. Such systems stand in stark contrast to the form of choice embedded in the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Under federal law students in failing schools are guaranteed the right to transfer to a school that isn’t failing. But districts have not made a good-faith effort to implement public school choice. In New York City this year, for example, 11,000 kids applied to leave failing city schools, but only 2,250 city kids received one of their choices. Since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, fewer than 2 percent of parents nationwide have used the law’s provisions to transfer their children to other public schools.

School closure is another prominent feature of the weighted student formula model. In Edmonton, if a school declines to the point that it can’t cover its expenses with the per student money, the principal is removed and the remaining teachers and facilities are assigned to a strong principal—or the school is closed altogether, and the staff is moved to other, more successful schools. The San Francisco school district closed five schools in 2005 because of underenrollment and is considering closing or consolidating 19 other schools.

Lifting All Boats

San Francisco’s system produced significant academic success for the children in the district. Miraloma Elementary, the school Caroline Grannan would not consider for her children in 1996, has seen test scores for second-graders in English language improve from 10 percent proficient in 2003 to 47 percent proficient in 2005. “Now’s the time to get in on the ground floor of one of the most up-and-coming schools in San Francisco,” one Miraloma parent recently wrote in an anonymous review for greatschools.net. “Student achievement is rising, parent involvement is soaring and the entire community is working very well together to improve the quality of every aspect of the school.…Parents are moving their kids from private schools to Miraloma because they like what they see. Yes, there is still work to be done but I am very confident that Miraloma will be the next Rooftop or Alvarado.” (Rooftop and Alvarado are two previously average schools that are now considered top-notch by parents due to high student achievement.) Greatschools.net had 19 similarly positive reviews for Miraloma.

Similarly, at Aptos Middle School, where Grannan’s daughter started this year, the share of students scoring proficient in English language increased from 29 percent in 2002 to nearly 50 percent in 2004–05. Aptos is also the most ethnically diverse school in the district: Its demographic composition in 2004–05 was 26 percent Hispanic, 32 percent Asian, 19 percent black, 13 percent white, 6 percent Filipino, 3 percent multiracial, and 1 percent Native American. Close to 50 percent of the students participate in the federal free lunch program, which is the standard proxy for poverty in public schools—schools with large free lunch populations generally have a more difficult time with academic achievement. California’s academic performance index (API) ranks a student body’s performance on several standardized tests. Aptos’ score has just risen from 6 out of 10 to 7 out of 10 (10 is best); it ranks 8 out of 10 when compared to schools with similar demographics.

Such gains have been made throughout the school district. Every grade level in San Francisco has seen increases in student achievement in math and language arts, and the district is scoring above state averages. (Fifty percent of San Francisco seventh-graders were proficient in language arts in 2005, compared to 37 percent proficiency statewide.) Even high schools, the most intractable of all schools, appear to be improving. Mission made Newsweek’s 2005 list of the nation’s top 1,000 high schools. Galileo has shown a big jump in test scores—its statewide API ranking jumped from a 3 to a 6 in just one year, while its ranking compared to similar schools climbed from a 2 to an 8. Balboa is on the radar for families who never would have considered it a few years ago.

These gains have been made even as students who used to be excluded from standardized tests are increasingly being tested. In the last year of Superintendent Bill Rojas’ administration, 1998–99, only 77 percent of the district’s students in the tested grades were included, with kids who were deemed likely to bring scores down left out whenever possible. In 2003–04, 98 percent of students in the tested grades were included.

San Francisco is not alone. William Ouchi of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management has done extensive research on the effects of school district decentralization throughout the United States. Ouchi and his team of 12 researchers studied three very centralized public school districts: New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago; three very decentralized public school districts that used the weighted student formula: Seattle, Houston, and Edmonton; and three very decentralized Catholic school systems: Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles. In his 2003 book Making Schools Work, Ouchi found that the decentralized public school districts and private Catholic schools had significantly less fraud, less centralized bureaucracy and staff, more money at the classroom level, and higher student achievement.

He also found that most districts merely give lip service to local control. According to Ouchi, the money must follow the child. The only true local control occurs when the principal controls the school budget.

At John Hay Elementary School in Seattle, which Ouchi profiled, the principal controlled about $25,000 a year before decentralization and now controls about $2 million. The principal used her new freedom to hire 12 part-time reading and math coaches and set up a tutoring station outside every classroom, plus another station in a wide hallway, for “turbo-tutoring” the gifted children. Now the school teaches reading in groups of five to seven students while other classes are in larger sections, and every student who is behind grade level receives one-on-one tutoring.During a four-year period following the change, the school’s standardized math scores rose from the 36th percentile to the 62nd, and reading scores rose from the 72nd percentile to the 76th. In third grade, black and white students now have identical reading scores, and all of them are at or above grade level.

Such gains also occur in other districts that have implemented public school choice and the weighted student formula. After Oakland’s first year of student-based budgeting, a majority of the city’s African-American students met basic reading standards at their grade levels in 2005—probably a first in recent district history. In addition, every grade level in Oakland saw increases in the number of students who were proficient in reading and math. Similarly, in 2005 Cincinnati public schools, where 70 percent of students are African-American, improved their state rating from “Academic Watch” to “Continuous Improvement,” and test scores were up for most students in most grade levels. Seattle also continues to see increases in student achievement and in 2005 reduced the number of schools rated “failing” under the No Child Left Behind Act from 20 to 18, even as the state raised the bar for proficiency.

As a result of these changes, parents are returning to public schools. In Seattle, the public school district has won back 8 percent of all students from the private schools since implementing the new system. In Edmonton, where it all began, the public schools are so popular that there are no private schools left. Three of the largest private schools voluntarily became public schools and joined the Edmonton district. (This has not held true in San Francisco, where families continue to leave the city, largely because of high housing costs. San Francisco’s private schools have lost enrollment as well, as the city’s child population reaches an all-time low of 11 percent.)The

Constraints of Public School Choice

Public school choice is not a panacea. In many districts there have been tensions between parents who want more choices and parents who want their children to have a guaranteed spot in a neighborhood school. In Seattle, the district recently considered abolishing the school choice system in favor of the traditional system based on a child’s address. The district’s reasoning is that busing students all over Seattle is complicated and expensive. So far, a parental outcry has staved off the plans to return to residence-based schools. Parents have suggested charging for transportation or leaving it up to families rather than killing off school choice.

In addition, unlike an actual market system in education, public schools are still strapped with myriad local, state, and federal regulations. No matter how decentralized San Francisco schools become, they still must comply with the No Child Left Behind Act and abide by silly state laws, such as the California statute that forbids parents from bringing home-baked cupcakes to school to celebrate their children’s birthdays with classmates.

Public school choice is at best a weak substitute for true school choice, where parents are not bound by excessive government regulations. In support of this point, Ouchi’s research found that the three Catholic school systems he examined—Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles—were the most decentralized. They have very small central staffs, spend the least money per pupil, and have the highest student achievement. (While demographics do not affect the per-pupil spending or smaller centralized staff in Catholic schools, they probably contribute to higher test scores. For example, the New York City Catholic schools in Ouchi’s study have only 32 percent low-income children, compared to 74 in the city’s public schools.)

Ouchi’s findings reinforce the main criticism of decentralized public schools: Is it really necessary to stay within the bounds of the existing public school system and complete the difficult task of changing the system from within? A better alternative would be to move to a direct financing mechanism through vouchers, tax credits, or charter schools—an arrangement under which per-pupil funding immediately empowers parents and leads to the most decentralized schools of all, with 100 percent local budget control.

Yet the better alternative is not always the politically feasible alternative. School decentralization offers a compelling model for restructuring school financing, giving principals and parents true control over their schools, and offering real school choice to all students within the constraints of a public school system. It also gets parents used to the idea that schools need not be linked to real estate. And it demonstrates that even within a limited pseudo-market, when families become consumers of education services with the right of exit, schools quickly improve to attract them.

The San Francisco parents I spoke with probably would be alarmed by the market metaphor. In general, these parents do not support education tax credits or school vouchers. They are for public education. Yet San Francisco has adopted a school district financing system that mimics a school market and has led to a revitalization of the city’s public schools. And these parents have taken full advantage.

Caroline Grannan admits she probably could have worked the old residential assignment system to get her kids into good schools. But times have changed in the City by the Bay. When Grannan’s son William was applying for high schools, she was one of many middle-class parents now willing to send her child to Balboa High School, which not long ago was viewed as a low-performing, dangerous “ghetto school.” William ended up going to SOTA, the School of the Arts, to which students are admitted by audition. But as Grannan says, “Knowing that we were fine with Balboa if he hadn’t gotten into SOTA made the entire process much lower-stress.” The difference, she says, is “the comfort in knowing that parents have more than one option.”

Meet Arlene Ackerman

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST

Interviewed by Lisa Snell.

No person deserves more credit for introducing a robust school choice system to San Francisco than Arlene Ackerman, 59, the district’s superintendent since 2000. The city had experimented with open enrollment since the ’70s, but it was Ackerman who made the size of a school’s budget dependent on the number of students who attended the institution, thus introducing a market-like feedback mechanism; it was Ackerman who gave schools the autonomy to use those budgets as they saw fit; and it was Ackerman who made parental preferences the first criterion for school assignment.

Her relationship with the Board of Education has been frequently stormy, in part because of ideological differences and in part because of her management style, which critics consider autocratic. Indeed, she will be leaving the district at the end of the school year, invoking an “incompatibility” clause in her contract that allows her to resign with severance pay. But while in office, she was able to introduce some radical changes to the ways the city educates its children, and student achievement improved immensely as a result.

Despite her departure, Ackerman is optimistic about the future of the reforms she put into place. She is now bound for Columbia University Teachers College, where she will run a leadership program for aspiring superintendents.

Lisa Snell spoke with her in January 2006.

Reason: How did the weighted student formula get put into practice in San Francisco?

Arlene Ackerman: We started with a year-long pilot program. We took a cross-section of about 27 schools—schools that had a lot of parent involvement and schools that didn’t have a lot of parent involvement. That gave us an opportunity to look at what kind of resources we needed at the district level and what kinds of support the schools would need regardless of the conditions on their individual campuses.

We paid them $200 per student to participate.

We went full-scale the second year.

Reason: What has been the impact of the new system?

Ackerman: Five consecutive years of academic improvement for all groups of students at every level. I mean all groups—even special ed.

When I first came to the district, the African-American students’ achievement was going backwards. We reversed that. The last two years we have been the highest-performing large urban school district in California. This last year we were up for the Broad Prize as one of the five top urban school systems in the country. I’d say that’s pretty good.

I’d link our success not only to the weighted student formula but to the fact that the formula is linked to an academic planning process that’s based on trend data and performance targets that every school has to meet.

Reason: What’s the role of school choice?

Ackerman: As a school’s academic performance index gets better, the school becomes more desirable to parents. We had schools that were 8s [in their academic performance index rating] that are now 10s and schools that were 3s that are now 6s and 7s. When I arrived six years ago, those were not schools that parents were choosing. Now they are, because their academic performance has increased and they are much more desirable.

A new union president came in about three years ago who wanted to get rid of the weighted student formula. There was a resounding no from the majority of the schools because they like making the decisions. For example, we’ve had to make deep cuts for the last three years. In the past those decisions were made in the central office. Many of the schools felt that was inappropriate because the central office is too far away from the needs of the students. Even when it’s been difficult to make hard choices, I’ve heard parents and principals and teachers say that they’d rather make those choices than someone else.

Reason: What do you think is the future of school choice and the weighted student formula in San Francisco?

Ackerman: I’m not really worried about the weighted student formula and the academic planning process because I think people in the schools really appreciate it. As for the student assignment process, we just have to wait and see. The board is very split on whether or not race should be used as one of the guidelines for choice. I think they are going to adjust the diversity index [part of the formula for determining who can attend popular schools], and one of the new factors might be race.

I’m proud of the work I’ve done in San Francisco. This is a great city, and I leave a legacy that I know is going to continue after I am gone.

Hey, Teacher Union! Leave Those Kids Alone!

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

California has more than 1,700 schools failing to make adequately yearly progress according to No Child Left Behind Act standards. And the U.S. Department of Education just delivered more bad news to California students and parents. The newly-released 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which reports on reading and math achievement scores in every state, shows California fourth graders scored an average of just 207 out of 500 in reading, with eighth graders scoring 250 out of 500. Only students in Mississippi and Washington, D.C., scored worse.

The state's poor academic performance and the large number of struggling schools demonstrate our ongoing failure. That may be the best argument for two ballot initiatives slated to come to a vote November 8: teacher tenure (Proposition 74) and paycheck protection (Proposition 75).

Over the long haul, Prop 75, which would prohibit unions from spending member dues on political contributions without explicit consent from individual members, could turn out to be a deciding factor in whether or not we can stop wasting education money on bureaucracy and red tape, and get more money flowing into classrooms. In recent years, the teachers' union has shown a troubling tendency to put union power and financial interests ahead of students' educational interests.

Why does a 2002 state law say that a catering company can't provide school lunches, and a local cleaning company can't clean classrooms?

Simple, the union only wants dues-paying union employees in those jobs—even if it costs taxpayers more, taking money out of classrooms.

Unions used their political war chests to lobby for, and pass, a law prohibiting California schools from hiring private firms for food, transportation, janitorial and landscaping services. Meanwhile, studies show that school districts in other states are saving 20 to 40 percent by outsourcing these very services. If California saved 40 percent on the more than $13 billion it spends on these types of school services, we'd be looking at around $5 billion that could go to books, computers, or even more teachers each year.

Most good teachers wouldn't care who cuts their school's grass, especially if it meant they'd actually have the books and computers they need inside their classrooms. And if the union had to justify and explain the causes on which it spent money—and the tradeoffs involved—to rank-and-file teachers, we might actually lay the groundwork for some real education reform.

Increasing the requirement for teacher tenure is also likely to spur improvements. Prop 74 would extend the time it takes for teachers to become permanent public employees to five years. Current teacher tenure laws give teachers lifetime employment guarantees after just two years, making it difficult for principals to hold teachers accountable for student achievement.

A new study by researchers from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and EdSource, a nonpartisan education organization, interviewed over 5,500 teachers and 257 principals, and found that the schools with high test scores are "more likely to have teachers that report school-wide alignment and consistency in curriculum" and provide "instruction that is closely based upon state academic standards."

Many principals are doing their best to analyze test results and identify teachers who need help and additional training, but they have little or no recourse if the teachers do not improve. New tenure rules would give principals the added ability to ensure that teachers who receive multiple years of negative evaluations and low test scores can be replaced with more effective teachers.

If principals have more control over the quality of their teachers maybe California will no longer find itself at the bottom of the nation's student achievement rankings.

Tenure reform and paycheck protection are the first steps in leveling the playing field between policymakers who are focused on improving student achievement and those who support labor interests over student interests.

How Schools Cheat

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

On March 17, 2005, 15-year-old Delusa Allen was shot in the head while leaving Locke High School in Los Angeles, sending her into intensive care and eventually killing her. Four months before that several kids were injured in a riot at the same school, and last year the district had to settle a lawsuit by a student who required eye surgery after he was beaten there. In 2000, 17-year-old Deangelo Anderson was shot just across the street from Locke; he lay dead on the sidewalk for hours before the coroner came to collect his body.

Violent crime is common at Locke. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, in the 2003-�04 school year its students suffered three sex offenses, 17 robberies, 25 batteries, and 11 assaults with a deadly weapon. And that's actually an improvement over some past years: In 2000�01 the school had 13 sex offenses, 43 robberies, 57 batteries, and 19 assaults with a deadly weapon.

Sounds unsafe, doesn't it? Not in the skewed world of official education statistics. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states are supposed to designate hazardous schools as "persistently dangerous" and allow their students to transfer to safer institutions. But despite Locke's grim record, the state didn't think it qualified for the label.

Locke is not unique. In the 2003�04 school year only 26 of the nation's 91,000 public schools were labeled persistently dangerous. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia proudly reported that they were home to not a single unsafe school. That would be news to the parents of James Richardson, a 17-year-old football player at Ballou Senior High in Southeast Washington, D.C., who was shot inside the school that very year. It would be news to quite a few people: The D.C. Office of the Inspector General reports that during that school year there were more than 1,700 "serious security incidents" in city schools, including 464 weapons offenses.

Most American schools are fairly safe, it's true, and the overall risk of being killed in one is less than one in 1.7 million. The data show a general decline in violence in American public schools: The National Center for Education Statistics' 2004 Indicators of School Crime and Safety shows that the crime victimization rate has been cut in half, declining from 48 violent victimizations per 1,000 students in 1992 to 24 in 2002, the last year for which there are complete statistics.

But that doesn't mean there has been a decline at every school. Most of the violence is concentrated in a few institutions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 1999�2000 school year 2 percent of U.S. schools (1,600) accounted for about 50 percent of serious violent incidents--and 7 percent of public schools (5,400) accounted for 75 percent of serious violent incidents. The "persistently dangerous" label exists to identify such institutions.

So why are only 26 schools in the country tagged with it?

The underreporting of dangerous schools is only a subset of a larger problem. The amount of information about schools presented to the general public is at an all-time high, but the information isn't always useful or accurate.

Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, now three years old, parents are seeing more and more data about school performance. Each school now has to give itself an annual report card, with assessment results broken down by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and English-language proficiency. Schools also are supposed to accurately and completely report dropout rates and teacher qualifications. The quest for more and better information about school performance has been used as a justification to increase education spending at the local, state, and national levels, with the federal Department of Education alone jacking up spending to nearly $60 billion for fiscal year 2005, up more than $7 billion since 2003.

But while federal and state legislators congratulate themselves for their newfound focus on school accountability, scant attention is being paid to the quality of the data they're using. Whether the topic is violence, test scores, or dropout rates, school officials have found myriad methods to paint a prettier picture of their performance. These distortions hide the extent of schools' failures, deceive taxpayers about what our ever-increasing education budgets are buying, and keep kids locked in failing institutions. Meanwhile, Washington--which has set national standards requiring 100 percent of school children to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014--has been complicit in letting states avoid sanctions by fiddling with their definitions of proficiency.

The federal government is spending billions to improve student achievement while simultaneously granting states license to game the system. As a result, schools have learned to lie with statistics.

Prospering Cheaters

Under No Child Left Behind, if schools fail to make adequate yearly progress on state tests for three consecutive years, students can use federal funds to transfer to higher-performing public or private schools, or to obtain supplemental education services from providers of their choice. In addition, schools that fail for four to five consecutive years may face state takeovers, have their staffs replaced, or be bid out to private management.

Wesley Elementary in Houston isn't a school you'd expect to be worried about those threats. From 1994 to 2003, Wesley won national accolades for teaching a majority of its low-income students how to read. Oprah Winfrey once featured it in a special segment on schools that "defy the odds," and in 2002 the Broad Foundation awarded the Houston Independent School District a $1 million prize for being the best urban school district in America, largely based on the performance of schools like Wesley.

It turned out that Oprah was righter than she realized: Wesley was defying the odds. A December 31, 2004, expos� by The Dallas Morning News found that in 2003 Wesley's fifth-graders performed in the top 10 percent in the state on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) reading exams. The very next year, as sixth-graders at Houston's M.C. Williams Middle School, the same students fell to the bottom 10 percent.

The newspaper obtained raw testing data for 7,700 Texas public schools for 2003 and 2004. It found severe statistical anomalies in nearly 400 of them. The Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth districts are now investigating dozens of their schools for possible cheating on the TAKS test. Fort Worth's most suspicious case was at A.M. Pate Elementary. In 2004, Pate fifth-graders finished in the top 5 percent of Texas students. In 2003, when those same students were fourth-graders, they had finished in the bottom 3 percent.

In the Winter 2004 issue of Education Next, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and Brian A. Jacob of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government explored the prevalence of cheating in public schools. Using data on test scores and student records from the Chicago public schools, Jacob and Levitt developed a statistical algorithm to identify classrooms where cheating was suspected. Their sample included all student test scores in grades 3�7 for the years 1993 to 2000. The final data set contained more than 40,000 "classroom years" of data and more than 700,000 "student year" observations. Jacob and Levitt's analysis looked for unexpected fluctuations in students' test scores and unusual patterns of answers for students within a classroom that might indicate skullduggery.

They found that on any given test the scores of students in 3 percent to 6 percent of classrooms are doctored by teachers or administrators. They also found some evidence of a correlation of cheating within schools, suggesting some centralized effort by a counselor, test coordinator, or principal. Jacob and Levitt argue that with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, the incentives for teachers and administrators to manipulate the results from high-stakes tests will increase as schools begin to feel the consequences of low scores.

Texas' widespread cheating likely was a response both to high-stakes testing and to financial incentives for raising test scores. The Houston school district, for example, spends more than $7 million a year on performance bonuses that are largely tied to test scores. Those bonuses include up to $800 for teachers, $5,000 for principals, and $20,000 for higher-level administrators.

Texas is not the only state where schools have cheated on standardized tests. Teachers provided testing materials to students nearly a dozen times in 2003 in Nevada, for example. And Indiana has seen a raft of problems, including three Gary schools that were stripped of their accreditation in 2002 after hundreds of 10th-graders received answers for the Indiana Statewide Testing for Education Progress�Plus in advance. A teacher in Fort Wayne took a somewhat subtler approach in 2004, when school officials had to throw out her third-grade class's scores after she gave away answers by emphasizing certain words on oral test questions. In January 2005 another Fort Wayne third-grade teacher was suspended for tapping children on the shoulder to indicate a wrong answer.

Phantom Dropouts

If you want to make a school's performance look more impressive than it really is, you don't have to abet cheating on standardized tests. Instead you can misrepresent the dropout rate.

In 2003 The New York Times described an egregious example of this scam in Houston. Jerroll Tyler was severely truant from Houston's Sharpstown High School. When he showed up to take a math exam required for graduation, he was told he was no longer enrolled. He never returned.

So Tyler was surprised to learn, when the state audited his high school, that Sharpstown High had zero dropouts in 2002. According to the state audit of Houston's dropout data, Sharpstown reported that Tyler had enrolled in a charter school--an institution he had never visited, much less attended. The 2003 state audit of the Houston district examined records from 16 middle and high schools, and found that more than half of the 5,500 students who left in the 2002 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not.

The Manhattan Institute's Jay P. Greene argues, in his 2004 paper "Public School Graduation Rates in the United States," that "this problem is neither recent nor confined to the Houston school district....Official graduation rates going back many years have been highly misleading in New York City, Dallas, the state of California, the state of Washington, several Ohio school districts, and many other jurisdictions." Administrators, he explains, have strong incentives to count students who leave as anything other than dropouts. Next to test scores, graduation rates are an important measure of a school's performance: If parents and policy makers believe a school is producing a high number of graduates, they may not think reform is necessary. Greene writes that "when information on a student is ambiguous or missing, school and government officials are inclined to say that students moved away rather than say that they dropped out."

Greene and his associates have devised a more accurate method for calculating graduation rates. Simplifying a bit, it essentially counts the number of students enrolled in the ninth grade in a particular school or jurisdiction, makes adjustments for changes in the student population, and then counts the number of diplomas awarded when those same students leave high school. The percentage of original students who receive a diploma is the true graduation rate.

Using Greene's methodology, the national high school graduation rate for 2002 was 71 percent. Yet according to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2002 the national high school "completion rate," defined as the percentage of adults 25 and older who had completed high school, was 85 percent. As Greene notes, "There were a total of 3,852,077 public school ninth-graders during the 1998�99 school year. In 2001�02, when that class was graduating, only 2,632,182 regular high school diplomas were distributed. Simply dividing these numbers produces a (very rough) graduation rate estimate of 68%." The states show similar discrepancies between their reported graduation rates and the number of students who actually receive diplomas.

As Sharpstown High School's former assistant principal, Robert Kimball, told The New York Times, "We go from 1,000 Freshman [sic] to less than 300 Seniors with no dropouts. Amazing!"

The problem isn't limited to Texas. In March researchers at Harvard's Civil Rights Project released an analysis of state graduation rates for 2002, in which they derived their figures by counting the number of students who move from one grade to the next and then on to graduation. The report found serious discrepancies between the rates calculated by the Civil Rights Project and those offered by education departments in all 50 states. In California, for example, the state reported an 83 percent graduation rate, but the Harvard report found that only 71 percent of students made it through high school.

The Civil Rights Project's paper also found a high dropout rate among minorities, which California officials hides behind state averages. Almost half of the Latino and African-American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 39 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of African Americans graduated, compared with 67 percent of whites and 77 percent of Asians.

Moving the Goalposts on Proficiency

A subtler way to distort data is to report test scores as increasing when in fact more students have been excluded from taking the test. One egregious example of this practice took place in Florida, which grades schools from F to A based on their standardized test scores. Oak Ridge High School in Orlando boosted its test scores from an F to a D in 2004 after purging its attendance rolls of 126 low-performing students.

The students were cut from school enrollment records without their parents' permission, a violation of state law. According to the Orlando Sentinel, about three-quarters of the students had at least one F in their classes, and 80 percent were ninth- or 10th-graders--a key group, because Florida counts only the scores of freshmen and sophomores for school grades. More than half of the students returned to Oak Ridge a few weeks after state testing.

The Sentinel also reported that in 2004 some 160 Florida schools assigned students to new schools just before standardized testing in a shell game to raise school grades. In Polk County, for example, 70 percent of the students who were reassigned to new schools scored poorly on Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test, suggesting they were moved to avoid giving their old schools a bad grade.

Florida is not alone. In a third of Houston's 30 high schools, scores on standardized exams have risen as enrollment has shrunk. At Austin High, for example, 2,757 students were enrolled in the 1997�98 school year, when only 65 percent passed the 10th-grade math test. Three years later, 99 percent of students passed the math exam, but enrollment had shrunk to 2,215 students. The school also reported that dropout figures had plummeted from 4.1 percent to 0.3 percent. Rather than a sudden 20 percent drop in enrollment, the school had used a strategy of holding back low-scoring ninth-graders and then promoting them directly to 11th grade to avoid the 10th-grade exam.

States are also excluding a higher percentage of disabled students and students for whom English is a second language. (Needless to say, these exclusion rates are not reported with the test score data.) And states often report that their test scores are going up when they've merely dumbed-down their standards by changing the percentage of correct responses necessary to be labeled "proficient" or by changing the content of the tests to make them easier. Of the 41 states that have reported their 2004 No Child Left Behind test results so far, 35--including all of the states showing improvement--had schools meet the targets not by improving the schools but by amending the rules that determine which schools pass and which fail.

For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported last October that Pennsylvania's "improvements" were a result of lower standards, not improved performance. These changes, approved by the federal government, allowed schools with lower graduation rates, lower standardized test scores, or lower attendance than in previous years to win passing marks. In 2004, 81 percent of the state's schools met No Child Left Behind's adequate yearly progress benchmarks using the new standards. But the Inquirer analysis found that if the same rules used in 2003 had been used in 2004, the number of schools falling short of the yearly benchmark would have grown from 566 to 1,164. Instead of 81 percent meeting the benchmark, just 61 percent would have succeeded. When the Pennsylvania Education Department announced in August that only 566 of 3,009 public schools failed to meet federal standards, it neglected to mention the role the rule changes played in the "significant gains" made.

This sort of thing has been going on for a while. Back in 2002 Education Week reported that "a number of states appear to be easing their standards for what it means to be 'proficient' in reading and math because of pressures to comply with a new federal law requiring states to make sure all students are proficient on state tests in those subjects within 12 years. In Louisiana, for instance, students will be considered proficient for purposes of the federal law when they score at the 'basic' achievement level on their state's assessment. Connecticut schoolchildren will be deemed proficient even if they fall shy of the state's performance goals in reading and mathematics. And Colorado students who score in the 'partially proficient' level on their state test will be judged proficient."

The federal government actually gives a seal of approval to states that are lowering the standards they had before Bush's era of "accountability." For example, the U.S. Department of Education allowed Washington state to lower its high school graduation rate from 73 percent to 66 percent and still meet No Child Left Behind requirements--with the promise of an 85 percent graduation rate by 2014. Apparently, the feds are spending billions to compel states to reduce their academic standards.

Lying by Omission

But the most common way school data deceive people is through omission. State and local education officials simply do not define their terms for the media or the general public. As we've already seen, "persistently dangerous" doesn't mean the same thing to officials that it means to you and me.

Another example: My local newspaper lists area schools that have met No Child Left Behind goals and are compliant with federal law. The article will tell you that every subgroup, from low-income children and Hispanics to special education children, is proficient in reading and in math. It will not say that in California, in order for yearly progress for each subgroup to be considered adequate, only 13 percent of the children in each group must be proficient. Imagine the difference--and how much more helpful it would be to a concerned parent trying to decide what is best for her child--if the newspaper article said, "Here is a list of schools where at least 13 percent of children in each group are proficient."

The newspaper should also explain what it really means to be "proficient" in reading. To be considered proficient for the third grade in California, you must score at the 51st percentile in reading and the 63rd percentile in math on California's standardized STAR test. In other words, all it really means when my school is listed as meeting "adequate yearly progress" under No Child Left Behind is that at least 13 percent of third-graders in every subgroup scored at the 51st percentile on the reading test.

Most parents assume that "proficiency" means grade-level performance. But proficiency standards are so different from state to state that students with the same skills will have very different proficiency rates. In third-grade reading, for example, Texas sets its cut score--the correct number of responses or percentile ranking a student needs to be considered proficient--at the 13th percentile. Nevada sets its cut score at the 58th percentile.

All this only scratches the surface of the ways schools use statistics to mislead parents and the public. From reporting teachers' salaries without including benefits as part of their compensation to reporting per-pupil spending while excluding billions in spending on school buildings and infrastructure, the list of deceptions goes on and on.

The No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to let parents and policy makers identify and fix failing schools. More important, it was supposed to give kids a right of exit out of failing or dangerous institutions. But that's meaningless if "failing" and "dangerous" can be defined away. Despite the violence at Locke High School, the teaching failures at Wesley Elementary School, and the high dropout rates at Sharpstown High School, the average kid in those institutions is no closer to escaping now than before the law was passed. And despite the glut of information being offered to parents--and the glut of dollars being spent on education--most families rarely see the facts about their schools' performance.

No Child Left Behind was sold as a way to make the schools more accountable. Instead, it has encouraged and abetted them as they distort the data and game the system. That may be the worst deception of all.

School Net Scams

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Puerto Rico has spent $101 million in federal grants to wire 1,500 public schools for Internet access. Yet the island-wide school district warehoused most of the equipment for more than three years, and only nine schools were actually connected to the Internet.

Like most large-scale government giveaways, the federal E-rate program, which collects $2.5 billion a year in telephone taxes to hook up schools and libraries to the Internet, has produced a huge amount of fraud and abuse. The Chicago public schools have more than $5 million in E-rate computer equipment sitting in a warehouse. In San Francisco school officials discovered that a $68 million project should have cost less than $18 million. In June the Federal Communications Commission reported that 42 criminal investigations were under way.

Large corporations have gained millions from the E-rate feeding trough. In May NEC Business Network Solutions pleaded guilty to rigging bids at six school districts; the company will pay a $20.6 million fine. And in June The New York Times revealed that the El Paso school district paid IBM $35 million to build a network powerful enough to serve a small city. When the school district could not run the network, IBM charged it an additional $27 million to build a maintenance call-in center that was shut down after nine months when funding ran out.

With the federal government auditing less than 1 percent of E-rate recipients, these cases may be just the tip of the iceberg in a program that has spent $13 billion to date. But the program enjoys bipartisan congressional support, and legislators argue that, thanks to E-rate, 90 percent of schools now have access to the Internet.

No Way Out

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Like every junior high school student in Camden, New Jersey, 12-year-old Ashley Fernandez attends a school that has been designated as failing under state and federal standards for more than three years. But low expectations were the least of this seventh-grader's problems. In 2004 Ashley's gym teacher became irritated by his unruly class and punished all the girls by putting them in the boys' locker room. Two boys dragged Ashley into the shower room. One held her arms and the other held her legs while they fondled her for more than 10 minutes. The teacher was not present, and no one helped Ashley.

Ashley's principal, who has refused to acknowledge the assault, denied her a transfer out of Morgan Village Middle School. Since the gym incident, Ashley has received numerous threats, including repeated confrontations with male students who grab her and then run away. When Ashley's mother began keeping her home from school, she got a court summons for allowing truancy.

Ashley is not alone. Last year Carmen Santana's grandson Abraham was afraid to go to his classes at Camden High School after two boys hit him in the face, broke his nose, and chipped his teeth. Santana was also charged with allowing truancy while she sought permission for Abraham to complete his senior year studies at home.

In 2004 Samet Kieng was almost killed at Camden's Woodrow Wilson High School after refusing to give up his chemistry class stool to a latecomer. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer story based on Samet's account, "his assailant, who outweighs him by about 60 pounds, typically arrived late for chemistry class and demanded Kieng's seat. Kieng was studying for the state's high school proficiency exam and refused to move. Kieng said he was surprised when the student confronted him later in the locker room." He was beaten by at least four students. Samet could transfer to the other public high school in Camden, but it is officially designated as "persistently dangerous."

In all, more than 100 parents have removed their children from Camden schools because of safety concerns. The school district's response: a truancy crackdown.

This situation is exactly the sort of problem that George W. Bush's much-ballyhooed No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was supposed to address. As the president said in a January 2001 press conference introducing the law, "American children must not be left in persistently dangerous or failing schools. When schools do not teach and will not change, parents and students must have other meaningful options. And when children or teenagers go to school afraid of being threatened or attacked or worse, our society must make it clear it's the ultimate betrayal of adult responsibility."

NCLB was supposed to rescue kids like Ashley, Abraham, and Samet. The legislation was passed in December 2001 by a bipartisan coalition led by President Bush and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). Its central components include annual math and reading tests for students in grades 3 to 8 based on state standards; parent-friendly report cards with assessment results broken out by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and English-language proficiency; and the promise to offer parents a choice of a better public school when their child's school is designated as dangerous or has failed to meet its state's academic standards for two years in a row.

As Bush explained in a January 8, 2002, speech at the University of New Hampshire, "If a school can't change, if a school can't show the parents and community leaders that they can teach the basics, something else has to take place. In order for there to be accountability, there has [sic] to be consequences. And the consequence in this bill is that after a period of time, if a parent is tired of their child being trapped into [sic] a failed school, that parent will have different options, public school choice, charter, and private tutoring."

Similarly, Kennedy -- who has since charged that NCLB has been inadequately funded and implemented -- initially declared that the bill's "message to every parent" is "help is on the way." In one of many press releases celebrating the act, U.S. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Education Committee, promised that "these changes represent a significant departure from the status quo and will empower low-income parents with new options and new choices."

Three years later, Camden's families across the United States are still trapped in failing and dangerous schools. There are many adjectives that describe their relationship with the public school system, but empowered is not one of them.

Since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, less than 2 percent of parents nationwide have transferred their children to other public schools. Teachers unions, school administrators, and journalists have argued that the low transfer rates prove parents do not want more choices and that they prefer their local schools. But while parents have more information than ever about the quality of their children's schools, in most cases they still have no way out of a failing institution.

Districts have not made a good-faith effort to implement public school choice. Sometimes parents are not notified of their option to change schools at all; other times they're told only after the school year is well under way. Some districts send parents letters discouraging them from transferring their kids. The choices themselves are limited to marginally better schools, with superior institutions often refusing to accept low-performing students.

One Bad School to Another

A February 2004 report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard found that in 10 urban school districts with large concentrations of children eligible to exercise school choice under NCLB, less than 3 percent of eligible students requested a transfer. Even with the small number of requests, no district in the study was able to approve all or even most of the transfer requests.

Many parents of students in failing schools are not even aware of the right to transfer. A federally funded survey of Buffalo parents by the Brighter Choice Public School Project found that 75 percent of the parents surveyed did not realize their children attended a school designated as in need of improvement, which means it did not make adequate yearly progress in reading or math for two consecutive years. A full 92 percent said they would like to switch schools. A comparable percentage of parents in Albany also were unaware of the transfer option.

Similarly, a survey by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute found that only 29 percent of parents with children in underperforming schools knew the status of their children's schools, compared to 59 percent of parents whose children attended satisfactorily performing schools. Few Massachusetts parents knew they could transfer their children from underperforming schools to more successful schools. Out of about 100,000 Massachusetts students eligible to transfer out of underperforming schools, fewer than 300 have opted to do so.

In the end, though, the problem is not the parents but the law itself. Under NCLB, Title I federal funding -- money used to provide extra educational services to disadvantaged students in high-poverty schools -- does not follow children to better-performing, non-Title I schools. The result is that better-performing schools have no financial incentive to admit low-performing children.

In practice, children are offered transfers only to other Title I schools. Since most Title I schools are mediocre performers at best, parents have a choice of schools that are only marginally better. Furthermore, the school districts decide which schools parents will be allowed to "choose"; often they offer only one or two alternatives.

Many parents are offered "choice" schools that are just as low-performing as the failing school they are trying to break away from. In the words of school choice advocate Angel Cordero of the New Jersey-based Education Excellence for Everyone, "Camden children are transferred from one bad school to another bad school."

In Chicago students in only 50 of the 179 federally identified failing elementary schools would be allowed to move into higher-performing schools. Parents could choose from a list of 90 schools and could not pick a school more than three miles away from home. In 70 of the 90 schools open to transfers, most pupils failed state tests last year.

In San Bernardino, California, the designated school of choice for high school students was Arroyo Valley High School, which had lower test scores than the schools that were officially designated as failing. How could that happen? Federal standards did not designate Arroyo as underperforming only because until 2003-04 it was not considered "fully functional." (That was the first year it served all four grade levels.) District officials acknowledge that Arroyo isn't necessarily any better than the rest, but it is the only high school option available, since four out of the five high schools are underperforming and considered in "program improvement," an NCLB euphemism for schools that have failed for more than three years in a row.

In October 2003 Connecticut's Hartford Courant described how for months Stacy May fought to transfer her son Taren out of Kinsella Elementary. Hartford school officials confirmed to the newspaper that May was welcome to transfer her son because Kinsella was now labeled a "school in need of improvement." But the district limited May's choices to three other schools, all of which had low scores on the state's standardized test and all of which are now also designated "in need of improvement."

In Palm Beach County, Florida, district officials are projecting that as many as 50,000 students at 64 of the poorest schools could choose another school this fall. But here again, many high-performing schools will be off-limits -- and parents will have only two weeks to decide whether they want their children to move.

Even when parents make direct requests for transfers, districts frequently refuse to grant them. In New York City in 2002-03, more than 278,000 students were eligible for school choice transfers, 6,400 students requested transfers, and the district granted only 1,500 requests. That same year Richmond, Virginia, had just 120 requests for transfer out of 8,000 eligible children, and the district honored only 30.

Transfers are refused because the better schools are at capacity. The federal law ignores the grim reality that many urban districts have few high-performing schools with open slots. As the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan, told Time magazine in September 2003, "It's not like we have a lot of high-performing schools at 50% capacity."

The lack of slots might be less of a problem if Title I dollars could follow children to higher-performing schools. But a better solution is to break up the education dollars to increase capacity, allow more competition, and increase high-quality choices. In June 2004, for example, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who is in the unique position of legally controlling Chicago schools, introduced a plan to open 100 of the city's worst-performing schools to competition. By 2010 Daley intends to recreate more than 10 percent of the city's schools -- one-third as charter schools, one-third as independently operated contract schools, and the remainder as small schools run by the district. Unfortunately, the governance structures of most school districts make it politically difficult to replicate Daley's plan: They would require approval by a school board or state legislation.

When parents are provided with real choice, demand increases dramatically. Since 1999, the privately funded Children's Scholarship Fund (CSF) has provided more than 62,000 low-income children across the nation with scholarships to attend private schools. The first year, more than 1.25 million children applied in 20,000 communities; since it was launched, the average income of participating families has been $22,000. The children's new schools may be parochial, denominational, independent, or a home school. They do not have to belong to any organization or meet any other requirement. The choice is left up to each family.

This year more than 24,000 kids are using CSF tuition assistance to attend a wide variety of private schools. In Los Angeles in 2003, only 229 children managed to transfer to a different public school under No Child Left Behind. Yet the Southern California Children's Scholarship Fund placed 1,600 children and has a waiting list of more than 5,000 names. Los Angeles charter schools such as Fenton Avenue Charter School, Camino Nuevo, and Accelerated Learning also have long waiting lists.

Around the country, the few bona fide school choice and tax credit programs continue to add children every year and often have long waiting lists as well. For example, Florida's Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship program, which provides scholarships to low-income children to attend public or private schools, serves 13,000 children, with another 20,000 waiting to get in.

Parents may not be getting much choice, but they are getting a big tax bill. In a July study, the Cato Institute's Neal McCluskey notes that federal spending at the more than 36 departments and organizations that run major education programs ballooned from about $25 billion in 1965 (adjusted for inflation) to more than $108 billion in 2002. This year funding for the U.S. Department of Education is at an all-time high: $56 billion, an increase of $2.9 billion over last year and $13.8 billion since Bush took office.

The president's 2005 budget would raise education spending still further, to $57.3 billion. Under No Child Left Behind, Title I aid has risen to $12.4 billion. Title I spending has increased more during the first two years of the Bush administration than it did during all eight years of Bill Clinton's administration.

Unenforceable Choice

Despite state education leaders' cries that schools cannot afford the choices that NCLB was supposed to enshrine in law, districts are sitting on $5.8 billion in unspent federal funding from previous years, including nearly $2 billion in Title I aid. New York ranks first with $689 million in unspent funds; California is second with $671 million. Such money could provide many scholarships to better-performing private or public schools. Local districts claim that the unused funding is already obligated to existing programs and that federal funding rules are responsible for the delays.

Extra dollars do not necessarily equal better performance. More than 26,000 schools have been designated as failing under NCLB. The 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that more than two-thirds of fourth- and eighth-graders were not proficient in math and reading. The NAEP also provides troubling news for students in Title I schools. In math, for example, 7 percent of black eighth-graders and 11 percent of Hispanics are proficient, while 61 percent and 53 percent, respectively, are "below basic."

Camden schools show that more money is not the answer. Camden is one of New Jersey's 30 Abbott districts -- districts with low property-tax bases that receive supplemental funding from the state. As a result, Camden's per-pupil funding is higher than the New Jersey state average of $10,000 and the national average of $8,000; the Camden district has revenues of approximately $15,000 per pupil and receives large portions of federal Title I dollars. Camden schools had more than 1,200 incidents of serious violence in 2001-02, an increase of 300 percent from the previous year. The district has refused to release updated school violence numbers since then, but this year saw several highly publicized incidents, including a foiled Columbine-style plot to shoot students and an increase in the number of schools labeled persistently dangerous.

In the beginning, supporters of No Child Left Behind argued that its problems were just a matter of districts' adjusting to the new law. But as we begin the third school year in which kids are supposed to be able to escape failing schools, a lack of meaningful choice appears to be the norm.

The paucity of choice reflects another failure of the law: It has no real sanctions for schools that fail to comply. Parents can't even sue the government to compel federal officials to enforce the law. When parents in New York City and Albany sued their districts for denying children their rights to transfer and to receive tutoring services, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that the law did not confer "choice" rights that could be enforced in court.

To judge from education activists' reports, going directly to the U.S. Department of Education doesn't seem to be an effective course of action either. New Jersey activist Angel Cordera repeatedly has tried in vain to get the Department of Education to enforce the law's school choice provision. In the meantime, he has worked tirelessly to find private scholarships for the most victimized children. Cordera recently found a place for Ashley Fernandez in a local Catholic school.

In the last two years, the Camden City Council (whose current members have never enrolled their own children in Camden's public schools) has twice passed resolutions calling for immediate school vouchers for the city's trapped children. Last fall the council voted 5-1 to ask the state of New Jersey to allow public funds to be used for scholarships. Such scholarships would enable children who are eligible to attend a school outside the Camden district, or even a private school. A 2003 survey by Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute found that 72 percent of residents in Abbott districts such as Camden support vouchers.

But for the time being, such options aren't available for students such as Ashley -- and Abraham Santana and Samet Kieng. They don't have 15 years to wait for the No Child Left Behind Act to increase reading and math proficiency. They don't need Washington rhetoric about accountability, empowerment, or the imminent arrival of help. They need real choices now -- while they're still in school and while they still have a chance to learn.

Capital Choices

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Sat, 01 May 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Beginning in fall 2004 the D.C. School Choice Initiative will provide $14 million for approximately 2,000 low-income children in failing D.C. public schools. Students will receive grants of up to $7,500 each to attend parochial or private schools, but the bill also provides $13 million for government schools and $13 million for additional charter schools.

That means the program lacks a key element of competitive markets: The D.C. public schools have no financial incentive to improve because the money does not follow the child leaving the public school. In fact, the D.C. schools will have significantly more money now than before the voucher initiative. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, arguably the father of public school choice, sums it up as "$40 million for 2,000 vouchers or $20,000 per voucher, of which at most $7,500 goes to the school accepting the voucher."

Despite this drawback, a few D.C. children will have more options, and some of the huge number of public education dollars will flow to other school providers. School choice supporters hope the high-profile program will spur similar legislation in other cities with failing public schools.

Waste Not, Why Not?

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:00 EST

The Web site for the Massachusetts State Auditor's Office proudly displays the motto, "The Cruelest Tax of All Is Waste." The same agency has agreed to audit 43 of the state's charter schools for saving too much money.

The Boston-based Citizens for Public Schools (CPS) called for the audit after discovering that the charter schools had $37 million in reserve funds, while Massachusetts' school districts have budget shortfalls. This despite the fact that, unlike traditional public schools, Massachusetts' charter schools must pay for their facilities out of their per-pupil funding.

CPS analyst Paul Dunphy argues that the unspent funds should be returned to the school districts. Local charter school operators contend that saving money is legal and point out that most of the reserves came from private donations. Community Day Charter School, for example, has about $1.3 million in savings, most of it from a fund-raising campaign and earmarked for building renovations.

Tough Sell

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:00:00 EDT

At the request of 50 desperate parents in Compton, California Assemblyman Ray Haynes (R-66th District) has introduced a limited school-choice bill. Any child within the Compton school district eligible for the free lunch program -- that is, 99.9 percent of students -- would be able to participate. Participating private schools would be required to use standardized tests to evaluate student performance.

If there was ever a district that needed change, it's Compton. The school system is notorious for its financial and academic bankruptcy. In 1993, the district had a $20 million budget shortfall that led to a 10-year takeover by the California Department of Education. But the state did little better by Compton kids, going through five different superintendents and eventually returning some financial control to the district, without ever improving academic performance. In the last two years some Compton schools have made modest gains, but more than 75 percent were still rated "well below average" in overall test-score performance.

Nevertheless, Haynes' bill faces stiff opposition from teachers unions, People for the American Way, Compton Superintendent Jesse Gonzales, and Mervyn Dymally, the Democratic assemblyman who represents Compton, along with most other Democratic legislators. Haynes, whose district is in Orange County, told the Los Angeles Times that it would be very difficult to push the bill through the legislature and to get Gov. Davis' signature. He plans to wait until the 2004-05 session for an actual vote, to allow time to build more support. According to the Times, he told the Compton parents that they'd need to build their group of 50 out to "something more like 10,000" for the bill to succeed.

In other voucher news, the Colorado state senate passed a pilot bill that, when signed, will mark the first voucher plan enacted since the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark school-choice decision last year. (The Supremes upheld a voucher program in Cleveland that allowed students to use state funds for both private and parochial schools.) The Colorado plan is limited to struggling, low-income students in low-achieving school districts. Texas is vying to be the third state (after Florida and potentially Colorado) to offer a statewide voucher program. Under the Lone Star plan, vouchers would initially be available only to low-income students in 11 urban districts.

No Dollars or Sense

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Sun, 01 Dec 2002 00:00:00 EST

When Chris Whittle started Edison Schools Inc. a decade ago, he envisioned a "National Schooling Company" that would provide a high-quality education while securing profits through "economies of scale" made possible by operating hundreds of schools nationwide.

Fast forward to this September, when Edison declared a $49 million net loss for the fourth quarter, bringing the company's total loss for 2002 to $86 million. Edison has shelved plans to build a $125 million, 15-story headquarters in East Harlem. NASDAQ has threatened to delist Edison's stock if it doesn't rise above $1 per share by November 25. Whittle himself owes Edison schools $10 million secured by the low-performing stock -- 20 percent of the company's current market capitalization.

The company has lost at least six major contracts in recent months and is barely holding on to others. Last spring Edison was expecting to manage 45 Philadelphia schools this term and play the role of central manager for the city's entire school system. Since then, the Philadelphia Inquirer has reported that truckloads of Edison's school supplies have been repossessed. Though the company denies that allegation, it is now contracted to run only 20 schools.

Behold Edison's grim, dispiriting bottom line: The company has spent more money than it has taken in. It has nothing to do with the education industry or public education, and everything to do with too many top-level executives making six-figure salaries.

On top of that, Edison has a lousy business plan. Instead of working with individual customers, it has dealt only with large government bureaucracies. To win contracts, it gave up the integrity of its original pedagogical model. Edison sometimes sacrificed key pedagogical components (such as longer school days and more teacher training) to satisfy the unions and school districts.

Many other for-profit education companies have realized that the key to growth is to satisfy students and their parents rather than the bureaucrats who can sign large government contracts. According to a January report by the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University, there were 36 for-profit education management companies in the U.S. in 2001, operating 370 schools in 24 states. An overwhelming majority of those schools are public charter schools, which receive their funding only after attracting students to enroll in their schools. These companies have managed to grow their businesses incrementally, hoping for a small profit at each school.

Only when the funding truly follows a child will we have a market in education that is responsive to the right customers: the students and their parents. To the extent that Edison has failed that test, the company has also failed public education.