Beneath the Surface

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Robert Samuels charges that large public universities have been shortchanging students by charging them higher tuition while spending less of their revenue on undergraduate instruction. Students face larger classes and more classes taught by graduate students, part-time instructors, and other untenured faculty. Some courses may be less available altogether, so that students take longer to complete their requirements, driving up their expenses even more.

How much all the cost-cutting actually affects the quality of college education is harder to say. Samuels is sure that it does, since he believes strongly in small classes taught by fully credentialed professors with job security (and the academic freedom that goes with it). He cites research showing that “students understand and retain information best when they apply new knowledge in an interactive fashion, [but] most large lecture classes at research universities give students very few opportunities to interact with each other, the professor, and new research.” As a retired educator, I agree with him. A good lecture can certainly convey knowledge, but higher education should also give students an opportunity to develop their own thinking processes through engagement with the thought processes of their professors and fellow students. That requires more than a transmission of knowledge packages from teaching authorities to passive learning receptacles, and more than a completely free discussion without informed critical feedback on what is said. It’s never easy, but professionally guided, interactive learning is learning of the most creative kind. Without it higher education becomes a misnomer.

The negative aspects of large classes often become apparent when students take a small class and demonstrate that they cannot speak or interact in an effective manner. Since their big lecture classes have rewarded them for being silent memorizers who try to figure out what the professor will put on the next test, they are unable to think independently or to examine the ideas of others critically.

Now I’ll ask the reader to assume that Samuels is right, that university cost-cutting is jeopardizing the quality of undergraduate education. That raises the deeper question of why a public university would choose to shortchange its own students. I say “choose” because although public funding has fallen, the total revenue from undergraduate instruction seems more than enough to support it.

Samuels develops two different kinds of answers. One is that large public universities give priority to other aspects of their educational mission, namely graduate education and research. They cut costs on undergraduate teaching so deeply that undergraduate revenue subsidizes other legitimate activities. The second answer is even more troubling: that universities are losing sight of the educational mission itself, focusing instead on financial goals that are in tension with educational quality.

In some ways, graduate students seem to benefit from trends in public education. While undergraduate programs bear the brunt of the cost-cutting, grad students get small classes and opportunities to earn money as teaching or research assistants. However, because universities do rely on them so heavily as a source of inexpensive labor, their job duties can interfere with their studies and prolong the process of completing their degrees. If and when they do complete their degrees, they are unlikely to obtain secure college teaching jobs because universities prefer part-time and/or temporary labor. Many students spend years running up debt to complete their doctorates, only to discover that universities now offer very few positions providing pay, benefits and security commensurate with their qualifications. “In other words, most of the graduate students are really untenured faculty on short-term contracts and are being trained for jobs they will never get.”

Research can go hand-in-hand with instruction in a mutually supportive relationship. “We can understand research to be the scientific, critical, and creative investigation of truth, and we can define instruction as the effective communication of that truth.” But after examining university finances, Samuels concludes that a heavy emphasis on research comes at the expense of undergraduate instruction. “Once research becomes the priority at a college or university, the cost of administration and facilities skyrockets, and this increase is paid for in part by undergraduate tuition and state and federal taxes.” And later, “There is…no way of knowing if universities lose or gain money overall from research. However, we do know that money from student tuition and state funding that is earmarked for instruction ends up being used for research, although it is rare for any money that is made through research to end up funding teaching.” One way that research universities can shortchange undergraduates is by releasing professors from teaching and replacing them with less qualified substitutes; another is by hiring professors for their research abilities and overlooking their ineffectiveness as teachers. Samuels is also concerned that some of the research conducted at public universities primarily serves private interests. The purpose of some research grants is to promote corporate products  rather than develop new knowledge, and the research may be highly biased and secretive.

One of the things I’ve learned by studying nonprofit organizations like hospitals and charities is that the lack of a profit motive doesn’t stop such organizations from being financially driven. The decision-makers in those organizations can still want to generate a lot of revenue and earn large salaries. In recent years, institutions of many kinds have become caught up in an effort to generate higher incomes for their best-paid employees, while at the same time cutting labor costs down the line. At the University of California, Samuels found that in just two years, compensation went up almost 40% for professors and administrators making over $200,000 per year, and that “virtually none of the top thousand earners in the UC system have anything to do with undergraduate instruction.” At the other end, undergraduate teaching is increasingly synonymous with low pay and job insecurity, even for highly qualified, effective teachers. “In this system, a small minority of wealthy star faculty are rewarded for concentrating on research, while the people who are teaching the undergraduate courses are often punished with lifetime job insecurity and low compensation.” In addition, administrators are becoming more numerous and better paid than faculty. While universities are often considered “the last bastions of liberal ideology, they actually are leaders in the generation of income inequality and the movement of wealth to a small minority of star faculty and administrators.”

Large universities are also major investors. When their investments do well, they can spend more on programs that add to their reputations, generate more grant money and student applications, and increase compensation for star faculty and administrators. When their portfolios do poorly, they use the losses to justify more cuts in undergraduate instruction. As major investors, universities are also heavily influenced by financial advisors such as bond rating agencies. The advice is based on financial rather than educational considerations: Cut instructional costs, avoid unions, rely less on public funding, borrow heavily to invest in projects with a future return, boost investment returns by accepting more risk, and so forth. The reports of the bond raters bolster Samuels’ claim that universities cut undergraduate spending because they choose to, not because they have to. “For instance, in 2010, at the same time the UC system was claiming a dire financial emergency, Moody’s gave it a high rating for its financial health.”

Economic considerations also help explain why students put up with being academically shortchanged. They need a college degree more than ever to get an edge in a competitive job market. They are, quite frankly, less concerned about the size of their classes and the quality of their instruction than about the ease with which they can accumulate credits and graduate. They don’t like the high tuition, but the fact that they will graduate deeply in debt only reinforces the idea that college is for getting a good job, not becoming a more creative thinker. Many students like large, impersonal classes because they are unchallenging. The tests are multiple-choice, the assignments are shorter and quicker to grade, and average study hours per week have dropped from 24 to 14 in the past half-century. It’s just easier all around.

From the professor’s perspective, it is simply easier to present knowledge and not have that knowledge questioned or criticized. From the student’s perspective, it is easier to just record, memorize, and then forget information; and it is much more difficult to actually think about and examine critically the knowledge presented in a class. In this type of educational cease-fire, students agree not to challenge the teacher, and the teacher agrees not to challenge the students. Everyone is happy, but is this good for democracy or even capitalism?

Samuels thinks not:

In response to this analysis, many people will argue that students go to prestigious institutions because they have great reputations, which allows students to go on to the best graduate schools and get the best jobs. If students at elite institutions do not get an effective education but simply purchase prestige, our country will produce leaders, workers, and citizens who lack the basic skills and knowledge to be effective inside and outside of the workplace.

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Robert Samuels. Why Public Education Should Be Free. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Robert Samuels is a lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara and the author of the Changing Universities blog, as well as several books in the area of cultural studies.

For this book, I would have preferred a slightly different title. Samuels doesn’t come to discuss his proposal for free public universities until Chapter 9, and the rest of the book has much to offer readers who may not agree with his ultimate recommendations. Mostly it is a book about how tuition hikes and cost-cutting are shortchanging college students. In Samuels’ view, they are paying more and getting less. If that is true, it’s a matter of concern for everyone.

I also wish that the book had been longer, with more supporting research. Although it is heavily footnoted, I would have appreciated more extensive research summaries to support some of the crucial conclusions. In particular, how much a university can both control costs and maintain quality is a very difficult question, especially because a high-quality educational experience is an elusive goal. Samuels maintains that it can be done, but that public universities are generally failing to do it. I think he makes a good prima facie case, but more research would help make the argument fully convincing.

Samuels begins Chapter 1 with his main charge:

Every year, tuition at American colleges and universities goes up, but virtually no one seems to know why. In fact, the average cost of higher education in the United States increases at twice the rate of inflation, and by going up 8 percent each year, the cost of tuition doubles every nine years. Meanwhile, educational institutions claim that they are losing money and that they have to rely increasingly on large lecture classes and inexpensive, untenured faculty in order to remain afloat.  In other words, the cost is going up, but the money spent on undergraduate education is going down. And once again, no one appears to have a coherent explanation for this state of affairs.

Part of the explanation is that state funding has been falling for public education since 1980. However, Samuels reports that despite this, the revenue generated by state funding and tuition combined far exceeds the amounts actually spent on undergraduate education. By considering such factors as class size, number of classes per student and the compensation for different categories of teachers, he estimates the direct instructional cost at $2,656 per student, far less than the average $7,000 tuition plus $8,000 in state funding received by public universities. Research by Charles Schwartz on the University of California found the average instructional cost to be $3,330, and the non-instructional costs attributable to undergraduate education (such as libraries, student services, administration and utilities) to be another $6,817, for a total of $10,147. But the tuition and public support was so much higher, that “the university was still making about $10,000 on each student.”

At the same time as they have been raising tuition, universities have been saving a lot of money by increasing average class size and turning over more of the undergraduate teaching to lower-paid part-time instructors, graduate students, and other non-tenure-track faculty (that is, faculty with no prospect of a permanent position).

“A common annual course load for a student at an American research university is six large classes (averaging 200 students each) and two small courses (averaging 20 students each).” Obviously, classes of 200 only require one-tenth the professional staffing as classes of 20. If that tends to make education too impersonal, universities mitigate the damage by breaking the large class into small discussion sections conducted by graduate teaching assistants. One hour a week taught by a graduate student is much less expensive than three hours a week taught by a professor.

I might add that as a first-year grad student at the University of Pittsburgh, I was assigned to attend a large-lecture class and teach three discussion sections each week. The discussion sections themselves usually had over 30 students. The graduate assistants also constructed and graded the exams. Although I’m sure many students managed to learn something and receive a fair grade, I think the arrangement left much to be desired.

The percentage of undergraduate classes taught by traditional tenure-track faculty has fallen to about one-third. Another third are taught by part-time faculty and the remaining third by other non-tenure-track faculty. Many–although not all–of the latter two groups are less credentialed and experienced than the tenured faculty. On the other hand, Samuels also complains that many of the tenured faculty received tenure more on the basis of their research and publications than their teaching ability. One of his recommendations is to reward different kinds of professors for doing what they do best. Free great researchers from teaching undergraduates if they’re not good at it, but improve pay and job security for more undergraduate teachers who are.

That raises the question of how effectively universities and their customers evaluate undergraduate instruction.

A central explanation for why research universities have been able to get away with shortchanging instruction–as they pursue other areas of interest–is that there is little effective instructional quality control in higher education. Not only are there no shared tests for all universities to see if students are actually learning their course material, but many universities evaluate professors based on their research and not on their teaching, which means that a professor can have a long history of being an ineffective teacher with no negative repercussions.

The reputations and ratings of public universities don’t seem to depend very much on the quality of undergraduate instruction. This is partly because the quality of the classroom experience isn’t as visible as other things colleges provide. “When students and their parents go on college tours, much of the information given them relates to noneducational topics like housing, parking, dining, fraternities, athletic facilities, and entertainment options.” Universities can boost their ratings by providing misleading statistics. They can inflate the amount they spend per student by including graduate and professional students in the average instead of focusing on undergraduates. They can exaggerate the percentage of full-time faculty by not counting untenured instructors as faculty. They can underestimate typical class size by reporting the percentage of classes that are small instead of the percentage of student credit hours that are actually earned in small classes. (To understand the last difference, consider this analogy. The US has a large number of small towns and a smaller number of big cities, but a large majority of the people actually live in the big cities. Similarly, university undergraduates spend most of their time in the big classes.)

One statistic that plays a special role in evaluating universities is the average SAT scores of admitted students. A university may spend a lot on attracting far more applicants than it can admit, so it can be as selective as possible. It may also spend a lot on generous financial aid offers to high-SAT students, who tend to come from wealthy families. Meanwhile, students of more typical financial means and ability have to manage the increased costs of their education by going deeply into debt, if they can get into their public university at all.

Samuels summarizes:

Although tuition has been going up at a high rate during the last thirty years, the use of large classes and nontenured faculty has actually pushed the costs of instruction down. It is therefore false for many universities to claim that they are losing money on each student; the truth is that they are often making a huge profit off of each undergraduate. What research universities do not want to disclose is that the inexpensive undergraduates are subsidizing expensive graduate students, administrators, and researchers.

If public universities are shortchanging undergraduates, it is not because of sheer incompetence or indifference. It is because of other priorities.

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Having critiqued many of the key elements of market-based school reform, Diane Ravitch ends her book by describing a few recent developments and summarizing the lessons she has learned.

President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included $4.35 billion for “Race to the Top,” a program in which states could compete for funds by submitting their plans for educational reform. Ravitch complains that instead of asking the states for their best ideas, the administration published a list of its own ideas, based less on evidence than on the currently fashionable market-based approaches. States were told that they had to eliminate any barriers to the creation of charter schools and the use of student achievement data to evaluate teachers and principles. In 2010, seven civil rights groups attacked Race to the Top as an inadequate framework for helping students with the greatest needs. That was just one of a number of setbacks to market-based reform in 2010 and 2011. New York City ended its program of distributing bonus pay to schools that raised test scores, after a Rand Corporation study found it ineffective. The National Research Council of the National Academies of Science released a study finding that “test-based accountability led to score inflation, to gaming the system, and to behaviors that undermined the value of the scores,” and that it had little success in raising student achievement. Consistent with those findings, several cheating scandals came to light, notably in the city of Atlanta. The Department of Education published results of a comparison of charter and regular public middle schools, with no significant differences in either academic outcomes or behavior.

Ravitch obviously feels that the movement for school reform has taken a wrong turn in recent years. She is much more sympathetic to the earlier attempt to raise curricular standards, as recommended by the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983, and the attempt to strengthen the teaching profession, as recommended by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future in 1996. She wants every school to have a “well-conceived, coherent, sequential curriculum” covering many academic areas. She wants assessment systems that reflect the full range of subjects taught. She wants teachers to be highly qualified professionals who “love learning and love teaching what they know.”

Ravitch thinks that the United States can learn something from other countries with more successful educational systems. She quotes Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy as pointing out, “The education strategies now most popular in the United States are conspicuous by their absence in the countries with the most successful education systems.” Those countries have not achieved what they have through privatization, test-based accountability, merit pay and de-unionization. In Ravitch’s words, “Teachers in these nations are highly respected professionals, with competitive compensation, high-quality professional training in elite institutions, and broad professional autonomy in the workplace. Each of these top nations has a broad national curriculum that includes the arts and music, social sciences, and other subjects.” I have noticed before that America’s leaders often cite global competitiveness as an excuse to justify policies that are quite different from those of our successful competitors; for example, our tough labor policies with severe restrictions on vacation time and parental leave. So of course we blame teachers’ unions for our educational problems, even though an excellent system like Finland’s has unionized teachers.

One of the main reasons why the United States lags behind other countries is our great divide between rich and poor, complicated by our peculiar racial and ethnic history (slavery and high immigration). American schools with a low percentage of poor children compare very favorably to the best school systems in the world. Our educational problem is largely a poverty problem, not because poor children can’t learn, but because they need help overcoming the obstacles to learning that a disadvantaged background places in their way.

Our schools cannot be improved if we ignore the disadvantages associated with poverty that affect children’s ability to learn. Children who have grown up in poverty need extra resources, including preschool and medical care. They need small classes, where they will get extra teacher time, and they need extra learning time. Their families need additional supports, such as coordinated social services that help them to improve their education, to acquire necessary social skills and job skills, and to obtain jobs and housing.

The challenge is to deliver a high quality of services to populations that cannot afford to pay for them. That is an inherently democratic–some would say socialist–goal. It’s just not something that the free market does very well. “The market, with its great strengths, is not the appropriate mechanism to supply services that should be distributed equally to people in every neighborhood in every city and town in the nation without regard to their ability to pay or their political power.” Most poor families do not expect to shop around for a school, any more than they expect to shop around for a fire department or a clean water supply. They need a good public education from a neighborhood school, and good preschool programs as well. Any poor child should be able to spend a good part of the day in a safe, supportive and culturally enriching environment staffed by highly qualified and well-paid teachers or caregivers.

Teachers are important, but they are not everything, as the reformers claim. That claim is too often motivated by a desire to scapegoat the labor force and its unions. (There is often a political motivation as well, since public employee unions are among the last bastions of union support for the Democratic Party.)  “Researchers have consistently concluded that the teacher is the single most important factor that affects student learning inside the school, but non-school factors matter a great deal more.” While the market-based approach divorces school reform from social reform, any real progress requires combining the two. Looking at the problem that way forces us to ask if Americans really have a strong enough faith in poor children and a broad enough concept of investment to devote public resources to the task. As long as we regard the poor as nothing but the cheapest and most expendible labor, or as freeloaders looking for a handout, the answer will be no. We will continue to adopt “reforms” that offer little to those who need them the most.

Instead of reforms based on free-market ideology, we need real innovations that can be shown to have raised the achievement of high-risk students. We need to discover such models and commit the resources necessary to emulate them on a larger scale. Readers will have to look beyond this book for that kind of discussion, since Raditch doesn’t get that specific. Any suggestions for other readings along those lines would be welcome.

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Diane Ravitch has changed from a supporter to a critic of the “market-based” approach to school reform that has been so popular in recent years. She is especially critical of “No Child Left Behind,” the reforms proposed by George W. Bush and enacted into law in 2002. Ravitch calls it “the worst education legislation ever passed by Congress” and claims that “its remaining supporters are few.”

The law set a goal for all students to be “proficient” in reading and math by 2014. This was an ambitious aim, considering that the National Assessment of Educational Progress found only about one-third of students proficient at the time. The law mandated that states test public school students in grades three through eight each year and break down the test scores by race, ethnicity, income, disability status, and English proficiency. Schools and school districts then had to show that they were making “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) toward proficiency for every subgroup. Ravitch describes the consequences of failure:

Any school that did not make adequate progress for every subgroup toward the goal of 100 percent proficiency would be labeled a school in need of improvement (SINI). It would face a series of increasingly onerous sanctions. In the first year of failing to make AYP, the school would be put on notice. In the second year, it would be required to offer all its students the right to transfer to a successful school, with transportation paid from the district’s allotment of federal funds. In the third year, the school would be required to offer free tutoring to low-income students, paid from the district’s federal funds. In the fourth year, the school would be required to undertake “corrective action,” which might mean curriculum changes, staff changes, or a longer school day or year. If a school missed its targets for any subgroup for five consecutive years, it would be required to “restructure.”

Schools that were required to restructure had five options: convert to a charter school; replace the principal and the staff; relinquish control to private management; turn over control of the school to the state; or “any other major restructuring of the school’s governance.” (Most states and districts ended up choosing the last, most ambiguous alternative, hoping to avoid the other prospects.)

Although annual testing was a federal mandate, states were free to set their own standards and design their own tests. Not surprisingly, states varied enormously in their standards of proficiency, and many were able to raise scores on state tests without demonstrating real increases in proficiency on national tests. “Most states reported heartening progress almost every year. Mississippi claimed that 89 percent of its fourth graders were at or above proficiency, but according to NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress], only 18 percent were.” The racial gap in achievement narrowed less after No Child Left Behind went into effect than it had been narrowing in previous decades.

In separate chapters, Ravitch points out the weaknesses in key elements of reform: school choice, standardized testing, and teacher accountability. A different school can sometimes be a better school, so being able to choose a new school can be a solution for some children. Whether school choice is a systemic solution, however, depends on whether the schools that start up or gain students are generally superior to the schools that close down or lose students, and there Ravitch doesn’t find the evidence convincing. Early supporters of school choice, such as Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, advocated vouchers that children could use in any school; that proposal ran into significant opposition from those who didn’t want public money going to private, often religious schools. Since the 1990s, supporters of choice have campaigned primarily for charter schools, privately managed but nonsectarian schools operating with state resources and authorization. The hope is that they can become models of educational innovation, unencumbered by the constraints of public bureaucracies and teachers’ unions. Making a fair comparison of charter schools and traditional public schools is not easy, because charter schools often have demographic and/or financial advantages. “Charters often get additional financial resources from their corporate sponsors, enabling them to offer smaller classes, after-school enrichment activities, and laptop computers for every student.” Although charters are expected to admit disadvantaged students, students have to apply to get in, often by participating in a lottery, a process that tends to attract more motivated students. Charters may also rid themselves of problem cases more easily, since they are freer to make demands on students (such as longer school hours and stricter discipline) without worrying about the ones who give up and leave. So while some charter schools are very successful, the success is often more attributable to the selectivity of the student body rather than the superiority of private management. The well-regarded charter schools in Boston were found to have fewer students with special needs or English-language deficiencies. At the other end of the spectrum, some charters “were operated by minimally competent providers who collected public money while offering bare-bones education to gullible students.” Several national studies have concluded that on the average, charter schools have not outperformed traditional public schools. Schools with private management and non-union teachers have not been found to do a better job of educating the students at greatest risk of failure. But they have benefited from a blizzard of positive publicity, including the popular movie Waiting for Superman, promoted with a $2 million contribution from Bill Gates. Ravitch says, “The question for the future is whether the continued growth of charter schools in urban districts will leave regular public schools with the most difficult students to educate, thus creating a two-tier system of widening inequality.” If so, No Child Left Behind will be nothing but an empty–albeit highly effective–marketing slogan.

Perhaps the most common complaint about No Child Left Behind is that it has placed standardized testing at the center of public education and forced teachers to “teach to the test.” According to Ravitch, “The intense pressure generated by demands for accountability leads many educators and school officials to boost the scores in ways that have nothing to do with learning.” Research studies have called into question the dramatic improvements in scores reported in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg, in Texas under Governor Bush, and in Chicago under Arne Duncan, who became President Obama’s Secretary of Education. As noted earlier, differences in scores can easily reflect differences in the testing and scoring process, or differences in the population of students taking the test. At best, reading scores differentiate good and poor readers, but not necessarily good and poor teachers, or good and poor schools. Even if standardized tests were adequate indicators of the quality of instruction, how No Child Left Behind uses them would still be troubling. One issue raised by sociologist Donald T. Campbell is that concentrating on narrow measures of performance tends to skew behavior away from other organizational goals. If reading and math scores are the sine qua non of pedagogical success, than everything else gets shortchanged. Ravitch is particularly distressed by the narrowing of the curriculum, as No Child Left Behind “ignored such important studies as history, civics, literature, science, the arts, and geography.” She also accuses the reformers of encouraging “‘punitive accountability’, where low scores provide a reason to fire the staff and close the school,” instead of “‘positive accountability’, where low scores trigger an effort to help the school.” This strikes me as being in the American tradition of “Social Darwinism,” where the losers are left to fend for themselves without help from the winners. That’s rather ironic, considering that No Child Left Behind was supposed to embody a new, “compassionate conservative” regard for poor children. Apparently no such compassion need apply to their hard-pressed teachers.

Teachers should, of course, be accountable for doing their jobs well, as should all employees. However, a system of external rewards and penalties, such as merit pay based on test scores, may not be as helpful as its advocates think. The National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University conducted an experimental study comparing teachers who were offered a bonus for raising test scores with a control group who weren’t, and found no overall difference between the groups. Maybe most teachers do their best for reasons other than external rewards. “Modern motivational theory recognizes the primacy of intrinsic motivation, not rewards and punishments. Those who are motivated by idealism, autonomy, and a sense of purpose actually perform better and work harder than those who hope for a bonus or fear being fired. Relying on extrinsic motivation…may actually hinder improvement, because people will work to make the target yet will lose sight of their goals as professionals.” Ravitch is more sympathetic to reformers who want to strengthen the teaching profession by setting high professional standards, attracting talented people, educating them in the pedagogical skills and subject content they need, and instilling in them a love of teaching. Unionization has contributed to professionalization by improving pay and working conditions and protecting teachers against firing for reasons unrelated to the quality of their work. (In the past, teachers have been terminated for such things as getting married, becoming pregnant, or supporting civil rights.) Advocates of privatization see unions as an obstacle to management-led reform, including the freedom to replace uncooperative or underperforming teachers. “After the passage of NCLB, efforts to improve teacher professionalism were swept away by the law’s singular focus on raising test scores.” Reformers began to question whether teacher certification, advanced degrees, or even teaching experience mattered, since they weren’t always good predictors of student test scores. Why not let a lot of people try teaching, and keep the ones who get the best results? Just rank the teachers, let the “best” ones teach as many students as possible, and the scores will go up across the board.

There are at least two problems with this reasoning. First is the measurement problem, the difficulty of isolating the quality of teaching from a multitude of factors affecting student performance. If this isn’t done, teachers who are doing as well as they can with the classes they’ve been assigned may rank low and lose their jobs. Statistical methods exist for “value-added assessment,” (measuring the value added by the individual teacher), but they require sophisticated analysis of multiple years of data. An even more fundamental problem is the logical fallacy of attributing systemic problems entirely to individual differences. No matter how challenging the job and how difficult the working conditions, some workers will manage to do better than others. Put soldiers into a losing war, and some individuals and units will fight better than others. It doesn’t follow that replacing some soldiers with others or giving out more medals to some than to others will win the war, as if training, equipment, weaponry, strategy, tactics and logistics don’t matter. One can always rank teachers on the basis of test scores, do a mental experiment in which everyone performs at the top quintile, and then declare that “teachers are everything,” as did Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C. school system. Ravitch says, “This line of reasoning appealed to conservatives and liberals alike; liberals liked the prospect of closing the achievement gap, and conservatives liked the possibility that it would be accomplished with little or no attention to poverty, housing, unemployment, health needs, or other social and economic problems.” Ravitch knows of no actual school that has closed the racial achievement gap simply by taking teachers whose students have high average scores and assigning them to teach students with low average scores.

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Diane Ravitch. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Basic Books, 2011)

If there’s one thing that Americans agree on, despite their division into opposing camps on so many social issues, it’s the importance of education. A well-educated population is believed to be essential to national prosperity and a high quality of life. The decline in the number of jobs that used to pay pretty well but didn’t require much education, such as many manufacturing jobs, has given new urgency to this issue. Everyone agrees that today’s job-seekers need a good education to compete for high-paying positions, and that a country needs an educated workforce to compete for a good slice of the global economic pie. (At the same time, one should not jump to the conclusion that more education is sufficient for either individual or national success. The country must also invest in the kinds of work that require education, and organize work to produce high-quality products as opposed to merely cheap ones.)

Americans also generally agree that American students are lagging behind students of many other nations in academic achievement, and that the nation’s school system is in need of serious reform. What kind of reform, however, is hotly contested. Diane Ravitch’s book analyzes the wave of “market-based” reform that has swept through public education since the 1990s, especially the “No Child Left Behind” mandates signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002. Ravitch, who served as Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, supported this approach to reform until 2006, when she concluded that it was mostly a failure.

To get an initial sense of what market-based reform is all about, think of a school as a business. Its product is an educated child. Its consumers are the families with children to educate. Its administration is management, and its teachers are labor. Quality control is accomplished by testing. Market competition exists if families are free to send their children to more than one school, and schools and their teachers are allowed to succeed or fail on their merits. Assume that education consists of a few well-defined skills that children must acquire. Assume that pedagogical techniques for instilling those skills are available, and that the quality of teaching determines whether or not children acquire them. Assume that standardized tests can accurately assess student progress, and that good test scores reflect good teaching. Assume that the quality of education will improve if management is free to reward and promote good teachers, defined as those whose students test well, and terminate or withhold rewards from bad teachers. Quality will also improve if educational entrepreneurs are free to start new schools, children are free to switch to better schools, and new teachers can easily enter the profession to replace those who are more experienced but less effective.

This market-based or business model of education has broad appeal, and it has set the agenda for most of the educational reforms of the past quarter century: frequent standardized testing to measure progress and hold teachers accountable, teacher compensation based on “merit” instead of credentials or seniority, efforts to weaken unions and abolish tenure to make it easier to fire teachers, school choice to give families alternatives to failing schools, and privatization to free school managers from the constraints of public bureaucracies. Conservatives have embraced this agenda most enthusiastically because of their belief in free-market solutions. The movement reflected the “government-is-the-problem; the market-is-the-solution” mood of the Reagan-Bush era. Many liberals have embraced it as well, in the hope that such reforms can expand educational opportunity and close the achievement gaps between rich and poor, white and minority children. In theory, such reforms might create both a freer educational marketplace and a more democratic society.

Ravitch begins her story with the “standards movement” called for by the National Commission on Excellence in Education in its 1983 report, A Nation at Risk. The report documented the poor performance of American students on national and international assessments and attributed much of it to weaknesses in curriculum content. The main solution was to set higher standards for both students and teachers. Some efforts to define national curricular standards followed, but the movement foundered when the attempt to set national standards for the teaching of history got caught up in the culture wars. Liberals proposed a more critical approach to American history emphasizing the struggles of disadvantaged groups for social justice, while conservatives preferred a more celebratory approach featuring the accomplishments of great (white) men. Ravitch feels that the advocates of national content standards gave up too easily when Congress and the media roundly rejected the proposed standards. What we got instead was a narrow focus on reading and math skills, with little regard for any substantive curriculum whatsoever.

In the 1990s, a particular New York City school district, District 2 covering part of Manhattan, got a national reputation for effectiveness in raising reading scores. The district superintendent, Anthony Alvarado, mandated a specific reading program, “Balanced Literacy,” which he implemented with intensive teacher training, close monitoring of instruction, and heavy commitments of class time. The San Diego school system then brought Alvarado in as chancellor for instruction and implemented a similar program citywide, concentrating on both reading and math. This was done from the top down, with heavy-handed tactics by top administrators, demotions and firings for uncooperative principles, and high attrition of teachers. The San Diego experiment in turn became a model for the New York City reform effort launched by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein. “They reorganized the management of the schools, battled the teachers’ union, granted large pay increases to teachers and principals, pressed for merit pay, opened scores of charter schools, broke up large high schools into small ones, emphasized frequent practice for state tests, gave every school a letter grade, closed dozens of low-performing schools, and institutionalized the ideas of choice and competition.”

According to Ravitch, none of these experiments was as clearly successful as its proponents claimed. Rising test scores can mean improved instruction, but they can also mean changes in the tests themselves or their scoring, or demographic changes in the students taking the test. District 2 “was one of the most affluent districts in the city and became even more so during Alvarado’s tenure,” with a rising proportion of white and Asian students. At the time when San Diego’s scores were rising, they were rising just as much or even more in other areas of the state without the same reforms. And in New York City, test scores were “hugely inflated by the state’s secret decision to lower the points needed to advance on state tests.” When students were tested on the more objective National Assessement of Educational Progress, most tests showed no improvement, and the achievement gap among racial groups remained just as wide. Nevertheless, favorable media attention and strong financial backing from private foundations (especially those controlled by Bill & Melinda Gates, the Walton family, and Eli Broad) helped turn this approach to educational reform into a national movement. The centerpiece of that movement was No Child Left Behind.

Continued