Copyright © 2014 by Hugh B. Price

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ISBN 978-1-937650-46-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948504

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Contents

Prologue

1 The Perennial Quest to Improve America’s Schools

2 Children Still Left Way Behind

3 Why Youngsters Dial Out of School

4 Social-Emotional Skills Matter

5 Can SEL Be “Taught” in School?

6 Needed: A New Paradigm

7 Military Engagement in Public Education

8 ChalleNGe: A Successful Case in Point

9 Impact and Implications of ChalleNGe

10 Attributes Worth Emulating

11 Issues and Limitations

12 Public Academies for Disengaged Adolescents

13 Gauging Academy Effectiveness

14 Cost-Benefit Considerations

15 From Idea to Implementation

16 Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Prologue

Experiences during our formative years often make enduring impressions that indelibly shape our personal and professional lives. This book stems from the confluence of three such experiences—one when I was growing up, the second while I was in law school, and the third early in my marriage.

The first dates back to my childhood in Washington, D.C., during the 1950s. Some of my male classmates simply weren’t into school. Eventually they dropped out of school and out of sight. When I encountered a few of them several years later, they had joined—or been drafted into—the Army. These guys were ramrod straight in their crisp uniforms, purposeful and polite. In other words, the Army had virtually reinvented them.

Since I never served in the military, exactly how the Army accomplished this turnaround was a mystery to me. But I was struck back then by the transformative power of the experience that these guys had undergone. Either the Army possessed a magic potion, or, more likely, it operated a potent training and educational regimen that worked wonders with these tough young men who were utterly turned off to school. Beyond the legendary discipline imposed by the Pentagon, my strong hunch was that the intricate system of incentives and ranks helped motivate boys who have little help, let alone hope. Years later, I became fixated on this question: Can the way the military educates and trains troubled and troublesome recruits be adapted to serve youngsters who are struggling in school and in life?

The second formative experience occurred while I was in law school. I was married and a father by the middle of my second year. To earn extra money, I served in the local antipoverty program as a social group worker and mentor for a half-dozen inner-city teenage boys who were constantly in scrapes with the law. These kids qualified as bad actors by the standards of those days. They robbed parking meters, tossed lit matches into the gas tanks of cars, and engaged in other hell-raising. They were a huge headache for the courts and on course to become gangbangers and hardened criminals. The idea behind hiring me was to connect them with a caring adult who might be able to steer them back on the right track before they permanently ruined their lives, or worse.

I worked three afternoons a week at the old Prince Street School in the Hill neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. It took awhile to break the ice with these teens and gain their trust. After all, they were street toughs, and I, a Yalie, was anything but. They greeted me with skepticism, and I initially felt insecure dealing with them. Yet eventually, we bonded. We hung out together and talked about everything and nothing. We shot hoops and even formed a basketball team that competed in the municipal park-recreation league. That was important because it introduced structure and teamwork into their aimless lives. I took them to New York City to see the sights and ride the Staten Island Ferry. They visited our apartment, where my wife taught them to bake cakes. I dropped by their homes to get acquainted with their families, usually a mother or grandmother with several siblings, but seldom a father in sight.

I met with these fellows several days a week, three to four hours per day. I did not realize how much our relationship had come to mean to them until I showed up late one afternoon because a law school class had run long. Speaking on behalf of his buddies, one of the youngsters said something that has stuck with me ever since. “Mr. Price,” he began, “being together with you and the guys at three o’clock has become the most important thing in our lives. If we’re going to keep this going, we need to know that being here at three o’clock with us is also the most important thing in your life. If you’re ever late again, we’ll know it isn’t and that’ll be the end of it for us.”

During our two years together, the guys had nary another encounter with the cops or the courts. They stayed completely out of trouble and persevered through school, although admittedly it was a struggle. In short, we really bonded, and some of the guidance and support I had hoped to provide apparently actually penetrated. I discovered from this experience the power of mentors who are a reliable presence in the lives of youngsters with few other caring adults they can look to and trust.

Reflecting on this experience, I can attest that troubled boys aren’t necessarily lost causes to be consigned to the human dumpsters we call prisons. In other words, I gained an early understanding of the wisdom of one of the key ideas advanced in this book, namely the critical importance of fostering the academic and social development of youngsters who are teetering on the brink of disconnecting from school and society.

The third experience that made a lasting impression occurred in the late 1960s when my wife and I lived in a New Haven neighborhood known as Newhallville. We enrolled our daughter in one of the first public schools—Martin Luther King Elementary School—where James Comer, the renowned child psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center, had recently initiated his School Development Program (SDP). The SDP emphasizes the academic and social development of youngsters, particularly low-income and minority children. It engages educators and parents in deep collaboration to foster the success of students.

While I would like to think my wife and I provided ample doses of social and emotional development for our daughter, the reality is that most of her classmates came from low- and moderate-income families that were coping with many stresses. Newhallville was a predominantly black, inner-city neighborhood with many single-parent households and families on public assistance. Plus, there was plenty of crime. In fact, our home was burglarized a half dozen times in four years.

Yet MLK School, with its emphasis on academic and social development along with abundant parent participation, worked well for our child and for the other students. It posted gratifying scholastic gains. Dr. Comer went on to become the preeminent national exponent of academic and social development, and many “Comer” schools have registered impressive results.

Three lessons from these formative experiences roughly a half century ago resonate to this day:

• The critical importance of academic and social development

• The power of consistent and intensive mentoring

• The potential of military educational and training methods to transform young people on the precipice of failing in school and in life

When I served as vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was instrumental in spawning an innovative approach to turning around the lives of high school dropouts. The National Guard embraced and subsequently implemented my proposal that it create a quasi-military youth corps for dropouts. Known since its inception in 1993 as the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program, this initiative has achieved impressive results, as documented by a longterm evaluation conducted by the social policy research organization MDRC utilizing random assignment, and as further validated by a cost-benefit analysis undertaken by the RAND Corporation. Among the many surprises embedded in ChalleNGe is the fact that, contrary to the military’s prevailing image, this program espouses the development of the whole person.

Cumulatively, these lessons derived from my formative experiences and from ChalleNGe, coupled with nearly a half century of witnessing public schools, especially urban ones, wrestle with the burdens of educating children who present significant academic, motivational, and behavioral Challenges, have made a profound impression on me. Indeed, they have utterly convinced me that the conventional model of schooling that concentrates exclusively, or even primarily, on academic instruction and high-stakes testing is off the mark and will not work with many youngsters who are barely getting by or dropping out of school.

We urgently need a new paradigm. We need to create public schools—actually, for the sake of differentiation I much prefer calling them academies—whose overt mission is to advance the academic and social development of youngsters who clearly are struggling in school and in life. The purpose of this book is to make the case for this new paradigm and articulate what it might look like.

Let me alert readers that the design and implications of the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program feature prominently in this book. I know from years of exploring this avenue of school reform that allusions to the military are off-putting to some educators, parents, and policymakers. I ask skeptics and naysayers to indulge me and read on. By invoking and examining ChalleNGe, my goal is to glean lessons from this demonstrably effective intervention for disengaged adolescents that might be applied in a strictly civilian context.

This book is not a brief for militarizing public schools. Nothing could be farther from my purpose in writing it. My sole mission is to look outside the proverbial box for ideas, experiences, and evidence that might help us imagine a robust intervention with the potential to rescue adolescents who are chronically disengaged from school before they become hopelessly disconnected from society.

1

The Perennial Quest to Improve
America’s Schools

In 1983, a panel appointed by U.S. Secretary of Education Terrell Bell issued a report that jolted the country. In A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, the National Commission on Excellence in Education castigated American education by declaring:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.¹

The educational Challenges spotlighted in that report persist to this day, as do equally dire warnings about the consequences. In 2012, a task force convened by the Council on Foreign Relations and cochaired by former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein bemoaned the fact that only 22 percent of American high school students were deemed “college ready” in their core subjects.² The ratios were even worse for African-American and Latino students.

As Rice and Klein warned in their report, “The lack of preparedness poses threats on five national security fronts: economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, U.S. global awareness, and U.S. unity and cohesion. . . . Too many young people are not employable in an increasingly high-skilled and global economy, and too many are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have an inadequate level of education. . . .”³

Rice and Klein contend that human capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America’s security. “Large, underdeveloped swaths of the population,” they continue, “damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy.”⁴

A Nation at Risk helped start a torrent of school reform measures aimed at improving America’s schools, closing the achievement gap along ethnic and economic lines, and thus boosting the performance of youngsters who are bringing up the rear academically. These reform initiatives have targeted public education from every conceivable angle—from on high by the federal government to ground up in the classroom and local communities. Reforms have been imposed consecutively, concurrently, even at cross-purposes. It is a gross understatement to characterize the last 30 years of school reform as a fertile era in public education. Still, the jury remains out on how productive this profusion of policies and interventions has been, especially when viewed through the prism of students who are persistently faltering in school.

A Dizzying Array of School Reform Initiatives

The roster of school reform initiatives over the years is imposing. Little point is served by listing them all. Let me summarize a cross-section of the more noteworthy policies and interventions.

No Child Left Behind—President George W. Bush championed this aggressive federal law that was enacted in 2001 with bipartisan congressional support. The legislation set lofty—many educators and experts would say unattainable—goals for America’s schools and schoolchildren. It imposed an unprecedented federal oversight regime on local public schools by calling for pervasive testing, grading of schools according to their “average yearly progress,” disaggregation of achievement data by socioeconomic group, and transparent reporting of individual school results to the media, parents, and the general public. The law remains in force, albeit under mounting fiscal and political pressure and modified in recent years by waivers granted to states.

Higher Academic Standards—For years, state education agencies and local school districts promulgated their own academic standards that set forth what students should know and be able to do to advance from one grade to the next and ultimately graduate from high school. In response to charges that the standards were lax, especially compared with the academic norms of nations whose students routinely outperform ours, many states have stiffened their standards and aligned the tests accordingly.

Common Core—Since these standards vary by state, it has been difficult to gauge whether and to what extent American students overall, as opposed to those in individual states, are progressing vis-a-vis commonly accepted norms of achievement. That is why, with the encouragement of the U.S. Department of Education and funding from large foundations, most states and the District of Columbia so far have coalesced around an effort to define common core standards they all will implement in their jurisdictions.

High-Stakes Tests—Spurred by No Child Left Behind and the gettough atmosphere generated by the law, state education agencies and public schools embarked on a testing binge. High-stakes tests are taken by all students—typically at the conclusion of the fourth, eighth, and eleventh grades—to determine whether they have sufficiently mastered the required course material to be allowed to progress from grade to grade and to graduate from high school. Pupils who do not fare well may be held back in grade as part of the crackdown on so-called social promotion. With their tenure, ratings, and salaries increasingly dependent on the results, teachers often teach to the tests in an effort to boost their students’ performance. Since principals’ jobs may also be on the line, they too obsess about test results. So do school superintendents and everyone else on the education totem pole. The fixation these days on testing carries a price. Teachers, parents, and students—just about everyone except politicians—complain bitterly about regimented instruction, loss of creativity, and, sacrifice of arts and physical education classes in favor of extended courses and supplemental instruction in core subjects that are tested.

State Takeover—Exasperated governors and state education agencies occasionally seize operating control of entire school districts that are wracked with educational or fiscal failure (or, quite likely, both) and seemingly clueless about how to improve student performance. High-profile examples include St. Louis, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Newark, New Jersey. State officials typically appoint a superintendent or oversight board to run the district. Yet state takeover seldom proves to be the antidote for low performance, and local politicians and parents bitterly oppose the negation of home rule.

Few states dare to take over entire districts any longer. However, variations on this intervention still crop up these days with the establishment by states of special districts that incorporate, in the case of the Achievement School District in Tennessee, the lowest 5 percent of schools in the state. This collection of schools is overseen by a state-appointed commissioner or superintendent. Another example of this approach is the Education Achievement Authority in Michigan, which mainly oversees faltering Detroit public schools but also includes others around the state.

Mayoral Control—Some venturesome mayors have wrested policy, operating, and fiscal control of school systems from local boards of education. Prominent examples include Michael Bloomberg in New York City and Adrian Fenty, the former mayor of Washington, D.C. These “education” mayors then appoint superintendents or chancellors who report directly to them and impose the mayors’ own reform agendas. While mayoral takeovers capture headlines and potentially can be game changers because of the consolidation of power, they are not a commonplace approach to school reform.

Teacher Accountability, Tenure, and Merit Pay—The accountability movement in education extends beyond testing and transparency to the performance of principals and teachers. In politically fraught legislative and labor negotiations across the country, elected officials and local school boards in many districts have managed to introduce policies that take students’ academic performance into account in the hiring, retention, promotion, and compensation of teachers and principals.

Public School Choice—In the past, children routinely attended the school that served their neighborhood or, in education-speak, their zone. If these schools performed reasonably well and parents were pretty satisfied, they basically went about their business year after year. However, if these schools were lousy, chaotic, and unsafe, parents who could not afford private or even parochial school tuition had no alternative but to stick it out. Enterprising parents traditionally have exercised public school choice in a variety of ways. Families with enough money move to neighborhoods or towns with solid, perhaps even superb, public schools. Or if their youngsters are high achievers, they may enroll them in selective public schools like Boston Latin or Bronx High School of Science in New York City. That was then. The school choice game is radically different now. Many local districts allow vastly more parents and children to play, sometimes whether they want to or not, by offering a growing range of choices, including:

• Assignment to customary neighborhood schools

• Limited competition for slots in magnet, charter, or alternative schools

• Widespread choice, with neighborhood schools as the fallback for parents who do not make a selection⁵

Choice may even be universal in some districts and at certain grade levels. For instance, New York City conducts open enrollment for all high school students, requiring that they submit a list of preferred schools without any assurance they can attend their neighborhood school if their other selections fail to materialize. A computer matches students with their first choice, which works for close to half of them. Assuming the assignment system works as expected, if that preferred school is filled, the matching system moves on to the second choice and so forth until the youngster is placed.

Magnet Schools—Since the late 1960s, school districts have established so-called magnet schools with a distinctive theme or focus designed explicitly to attract an ethnically and economically diverse student body. Magnets grew during the 1970s and ’80s. By the turn of this century, there were just over 3,000 such schools in the U.S.⁶ Most choose their students by lottery, but many use merit or talent as the basis for selection. When it comes to creating alternatives to traditional schools, however, the momentum has shifted away from magnets to small public schools and charter schools. These days, those magnets that exist are part of the menu of choices available to parents.

Small Public Schools—Choice is fueled and facilitated by a major change in the local education landscape—the advent of small public schools. Traditional zoned schools still exist, but they no longer hold a monopoly on students. Small schools have blossomed all across the country. They typically are organized around a curricular theme, such as science or the arts, and enroll roughly 100 pupils per grade. The small school movement has taken root with varying degrees of robustness around the country. Quite often these small schools, as well as charter schools, are actually schools-within-schools. In other words, they share space in larger buildings with other small schools, charter schools, or what remains of traditional ones. In New York and elsewhere, they primarily serve minority and disadvantaged students.

Charter Schools—Another formidable player in the school choice game is charter schools, which are publicly financed but typically operated by nonprofit or for-profit groups instead of school systems. Nationally, charter school enrollment has surged as states encourage expansion by relaxing legislated limits on the number of charters allowed. This is a sure sign of their popularity among parents and politicians seeking alternatives to traditional public schools for educational and, in some cases, ideological reasons. Charter schools operate by different rules than regular schools. They tend to be about the same size as small public schools. Charters usually are exempt from some bureaucratic regulations and they enjoy more leeway than regular schools when it comes to hiring and firing teachers and deciding how their budgets will be spent. Charter schools spring from many impulses and points of origin. They may be:

• Conceived and operated in a number of cities by highly resourceful national nonprofit outfits like the Knowledge Is Power Program (a.k.a. KIPP);

• Founded by entrepreneurial nonprofit charter entities, like Harlem Village Academies, that operate a portfolio of elementary through high schools in a particular city;

• Formed by parents, teachers, and community members with a specific philosophy about educating children;

• Created by the local school district; and/or

• Established by for-profit charter management companies.

School Vouchers—Parents use vouchers to help pay tuition for their children at nonpublic schools. In essence, some of the tax money collected for education ends up at private, parochial, and other religious schools instead of all of it going to public schools. Vouchers subsidize the ability of parents to exercise school choice. Aside from the notable examples of Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., vouchers are seldom offered. Not surprisingly, school districts vehemently resist them out of fear they will drain public resources from public schools.

School Turnaround—The economic stimulus package advanced by President Barack Obama and enacted by Congress in 2009 designated roughly $3 billion for so-called School Improvement Grants (SIG). Local districts competed for these grants, which are aimed at turning around woefully underperforming schools. The districts were obliged to choose among several courses of action, such as (a) closing the school, (b) removing the principal and half of the teachers, or (c) implementing a less traumatic transformation plan that might entail replacing the principal, extending learning time, and instituting a new teacher evaluation system.⁷ There are roughly 1,200 SIG-funded turnaround efforts underway.⁸

Student Performance: the State of Play

Glimmers of progress can be spotted through the pervasive haze generated by all this reform. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) serves as the nation’s report card for public and private school students. NAEP, which is taken by 50,000 students each year, is overseen by the National Assessment Governing Board, a bipartisan panel created by Congress in 1988 whose members, appointed by the U.S. secretary of education, include state school officials, governors, educators, businesspeople, and public representatives. In addition to issuing annual reports of student achievement, NAEP’s governing board occasionally publishes long-term trend assessments, most recently covering the span from 1973 through 2012.⁹

According to the 2012 report, 9- and 13-year-olds scored higher in reading and math in 2012 than did their counterparts in the early 1970s. Yet academic gains for 17-year-olds have stagnated over that lengthy time span. The achievement gaps between white and black students and between white and Hispanic students have closed significantly over the course of four generations due to larger academic gains registered by minority versus white youngsters.¹⁰ As Kati Haycock, president of a leading advocacy group known as the Education Trust, observed, “While it might have seemed impossible 25 years ago for black and Latino nine-year-olds to reach the proficiency levels that white students then held, they have indeed reached those levels in math.”¹¹

This encouraging news notwithstanding, the long-term assessment also paints a sobering picture. With the exception of 13-year-old Hispanic youngsters, who continued to gain in math, the achievement gaps in reading and math that plague black and Hispanic youngsters have barely budged since 2008. As Haycock warns, “If we have a crisis in American education, it is this: that we aren’t yet moving fast enough to educate the ‘minorities’ who will soon comprise a ‘new majority.’ At best, students of color are just now performing at the level of white students a generation ago.”¹²

Let’s turn specifically to urban districts. The Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) is a national organization comprising nearly 70 of the largest districts. These school systems contain roughly 16 percent of the nation’s public school students, one-third of the black, limited-English-proficient, and Hispanic students, and about a quarter of all economically disadvantaged students in this country.¹³ A 2011 report by CGCS indicated that, in general, students in its member districts continue to make important gains in math and reading scores on state assessments.¹⁴ Although achievement in these urban districts still falls below the averages on state tests, the gaps appear to be narrowing. The trend lines do vary by school district, and elementary school gains generally outshine those in middle schools.

The picture gets murkier, however, when student performance in member districts is measured against national norms embodied in NAEP. The council found that students in large cities and those in public schools across the nation made significant gains from 2005 through 2009 on NAEP math assessments in grades four and eight, whereas notable progress in reading was recorded only at the fourth-grade level.¹⁵ While some students in these districts outperformed their peers nationally in reading and math, few urban districts eclipsed public schools nationwide on NAEP.¹⁶

Turning next to small public schools, one large, random-assignment study, which is considered the gold standard in evaluation, reported impressive results for those schools located in New York City. MDRC, the esteemed evaluation outfit that conducted the study, contrasted the outcomes for pupils in these schools with a control group of comparable students who did not attend them. The evaluation found that:

• Participants were more likely than nonparticipants to earn 10 or more high school credits;

• They also were less likely to fail more than one core subject;

• 58.5 percent of participants were on track to graduate in four years versus 48.5 percent of controls;

• Small schools increased overall graduation rates by 6.8 percentage points, from 61.9 percent for students who attended traditional schools to 68.7 percent for those who went to small schools; and

• Higher proportions of students in small schools passed the English Regents exam administered by New York State.¹⁷

Several things stuck out in this study. First, the students in these small schools were genuinely disadvantaged by any accepted definition. Ninety-three percent were black or Hispanic, 83 percent qualified for free or reduced lunch, and virtually all of them resided in inner-city neighborhoods. These students typically entered the ninth grade performing below grade level. They usually had labored in school and seldom graduated on time. Second, minority boys as well as girls profited from the robust benefits of these small schools. Lastly, this wasn’t a smattering of pilot schools. Taken together, the enrollment of the small schools in MDRC’s study equaled that of the high schools in all of Houston. School reform initiatives rarely achieve comparably strong results on this scale.

The welcome findings in New York City notwithstanding, the story nationally for small schools is more equivocal. Some research continues to suggest that small schools outperform large schools in critical ways.¹⁸ Yet the pace of new school formation has slowed markedly. One reason stems from the withdrawal of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from further bankrolling the expansion of small schools in favor of focusing on broad policy reforms like common core standards and teacher accountability.¹⁹

As my graduate students at Princeton reported after surveying the research landscape, there is empirical support for social benefits conferred by school size, but inconclusive evidence regarding academic gains.²⁰ They noted that since the height of the small-schools movement in the mid-’90s, mixed evidence has led to a reconsideration of the role of school size in secondary school reform.²¹ As their report concluded, “Advocates of small schools agree that size is not a sufficient criterion for success, but there is disagreement among proponents about whether small size is necessary for, or simply conducive to, success. Opponents argue that some features of small schools are detrimental, with most of their objections focusing on issues of equity.”²²

When it comes to evidence, charter schools also present a mixed picture. A random assignment evaluation of KIPP Academies conducted by Mathematica found that for the vast majority of their schools, the impacts on KIPP students’ math and reading scores on state assessments were positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.²³ KIPP’s students are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic and most qualify for free or reduced lunch. In fact, their student bodies have higher concentrations of poor and minority youngsters than the public schools they previously attended. But their proportions of special education and ESL (English as a second language) youngsters are lower.²⁴

KIPP schools experience high rates of student attrition, especially among African-American boys.²⁵ These patterns lead some observers to attribute KIPP’s success to admission—and expulsion—practices that yield enrollments composed of youngsters who will benefit from attending school with peers who are engaged, have supportive families, and are willing and able to work hard in school.²⁶

As with small public schools, the national picture of charter school performance is best captured by the phrase “It all depends.” A meta-analysis of the literature published in October 2011 identified positive academic effects compared with traditional public schools in some locales, subjects, and grade levels, but negative effects in others.²⁷ The authors found larger effects for charter schools in inner-city neighborhoods compared with those serving wider areas. To this point, they particularly cited KIPP Academies as well as charter schools in New York City and Boston.

In 2013, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) issued the most recent analysis of charter school performance nationally, namely in 25 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City.²⁸ This study built on CREDO’s earlier assessment entitled “Multiple Choice; Charter School Performance in 16 States,” which was released in 2009.²⁹ In their 2013 study, the researchers found that charter schools are educating more disadvantaged youngsters compared with 2009. Also, charter school quality remains uneven across states and schools.

When it comes to academic performance, “charter schools now advance the learning gains of their students more than traditional public schools in reading, and academic growth in math is now comparable to peers in traditional schools.”³⁰ The CREDO researchers acknowledge that they cannot ascertain whether charter schools manage recruitment to enroll academically stronger students. That said, the biggest leap was registered among Hispanic students who are English language learners; they gained 50 days of learning in reading and 43 days in math. Black students living in poverty progressed, gaining 29 days in reading and 36 in math. Special education students also benefitted. Yet white students in charters regressed in both reading and math, while Asian students slipped in math.³¹

The jury remains out on school vouchers. After a review of the evidence, Lisa Barrow and Cecilia Rouse concluded that: “The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero....Many questions remain unanswered, however, including whether vouchers have longer-run impacts on outcomes such as graduation rates, college enrollment, or even future wages. . . .”³²

A study of the New York School Choice Scholarship Fund, which provides vouchers or tuition aid for youngsters to attend private schools, picked up on this point about longer-run impacts. Receiving a voucher generally did not increase the likelihood that most recipients would attend college. On the bright side, however, African-American beneficiaries of vouchers were 24 percent more likely to attend selective private universities than their peers who sought but did not receive vouchers.³³

The early returns on the federal SIG initiative aimed at turning around the lowest-performing schools are murky, albeit with some encouraging signs.³⁴ Disputes have arisen about the adequacy of data collection. The U.S. Department of Education preliminarily reported that during the first year of the initiative, two-thirds of the schools registered gains in reading and math, while roughly a third slipped backwards academically.³⁵ Some schools that have yet to register achievement gains nonetheless report improvements in discipline and attendance. Students say their schools are calmer and more challenging academically.³⁶

Even so, Education Secretary Arne Duncan cautions that it is far too early to draw any reliable conclusions about the impact of SIG. One among many open questions about these early returns is how the SIG schools that were not covered by the department’s report are faring. More importantly, what enduring impact, if any, will SIG have on struggling students and schools once federal funding provided under the 2009 federal economic stimulus package expires?

Looking beyond the impact of specific reform initiatives, there is heartening news on the school dropout front. According to the Research Center of Editorial Projects in Education (publisher of Education Week), the nation’s high school graduation rate climbed to 74.7 percent for the class of 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available.³⁷ This represents a 2 percent improvement in a year and an 8-point gain in the past decade. It falls just shy of the previous high-water mark of 77.1 percent back in 1973. Among minority groups that traditionally bring up the rear, the graduation rate for Latino students soared 16 percentage points to 68 percent over the past decade. The rate for black students climbed 13 percentage points to 62 percent. The Latino-white gap shrank by half, while the black-white gap closed by almost 30 percent. Only Native Americans have slipped backwards.

According to Robert Balfanz, the nation’s leading expert on this phenomenon, the number of “dropout factories,” i.e., high schools with graduation rates below 50 percent, and the number of students attending them declined by 23 percent in the last decade. Better yet, the rate of decline is accelerating.³⁸

Though modest, these gains thankfully extend to black males, who routinely suffer the lowest graduation rates among all racial, ethnic, and gender groups. As the Schott Foundation concluded in a report aptly titled The Urgency of Now, over the past nine years there has been progress in the national graduation rate for male students across the board. The rate for black males has increased by 10 percentage points, from 42 percent in 2001–02 to 52 percent in 2009–10.³⁹ Schott celebrated the fact that for the first time, more than half of the nation’s black males in grade nine graduated with regular diplomas four years later. What’s more, the Latino graduation rate has increased by 12 percentage points, from approximately 46 percent to 58 percent, and the white, non-Latino graduation rate has increased by seven percentage points, from 71 percent to 78 percent.⁴⁰

Taking stock of a sweeping law like No Child Left Behind is daunting because it contains so many components, sets such aggressive targets, impacts so many facets of public education, ricochets in so many directions, and potentially generates so many intended and unintended consequences. Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington/Bothell, contends that NCLB deserves credit for shedding light on how public schools are performing and for ratcheting up pressure on them to improve. I agree. The annual publication of students’ test scores—school by school, grade by grade, group by group—enables, indeed empowers, parents to hold their schools to greater account and, when disappointed with the results, to seek out alternatives like small schools and charter schools. Transparency and the resulting pressure provided the impetus for the Obama administration to launch the SIG initiative aimed at turning around woefully low-performing schools.

The Downside of High-Stakes Tests

The national obsession with testing and accountability continues to roil public education and arguably is even counterproductive. So says a blue ribbon committee established by the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences.⁴¹ The 17-member panel reviewed and synthesized research from economics, psychology, education, and related fields about how incentives work in educational accountability systems such as NCLB, as well as test-based teacher incentive pay systems and high school exit exams. The committee reached two sobering conclusions:

• “Test-based incentive programs . . . have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries.”⁴²

• “The evidence we have reviewed suggests that high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement. The best available estimate suggests a decrease of two percentage points when averaged of the population.”⁴³

The NRC panel’s scan of the literature raised other warning flags when it comes to students who are struggling in school. It noted, for instance, that when performance incentives for educators and schools are pegged to the number of “proficient” students, the result is extra attention to those who are just below the threshold of proficiency, and may even trigger competition for proficient students, who do not pose a threat of negative consequences.⁴⁴ Furthermore, the panel found evidence of attempts to increase scores in ways that are completely unrelated to improving learning, such as teaching test-taking skills, excluding low-performing students from tests, feeding students high-caloric meals on testing days, providing help to students during a test, and even changing student answers on tests after they were finished.”⁴⁵

Cheating scandals attributable to the pressure to produce better test results erupt periodically in school districts. Indeed, the former superintendent of the El Paso, Texas, schools was convicted and imprisoned for forcing some students out of school and otherwise manipulating test results to improve the district’s ratings. In Atlanta, the high-profile superintendent and nearly three dozen former principals, teachers, and administrators stand indicted on charges of erasing and then upping pupils’ test scores.

Daniel Koretz, a member of the NRC panel and professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, summed up the worrisome findings: “We have put a lot into these programs over a period of many years, and the positive effects when we can find them have been pretty disappointing.”⁴⁶

Thus, when it comes to low-income and minority students, the bottom line, after all these years, all the interventions, all the tough love, and all the investment, is intermittently encouraging but still underwhelming. Improving how these youngsters perform in school and equipping them for adulthood thereafter remains a work in progress. America’s schools have made modest progress. But more arduous work and innovative thinking lie ahead.

2

Children Still Left Way Behind

In 1996, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future issued a trenchant warning in its report titled What Matters Most:

There has been no previous time in history when the success, indeed the survival, of nations and people has been tied so tightly to their ability to learn. Today’s society has little room for those who cannot read, write, and compute proficiently; find and use resources; frame and solve problems; and continually learn new technologies, skills, and occupations. . . .¹

In contrast to 20 years ago, the commission continued, individuals who falter in school have little chance of finding a job or contributing to society—and societies that do not succeed at education have little chance of success in a global economy.² A senior executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce put it even more bluntly: “If you want a real job, even a blue-collar job, you’re probably going to need some postsecondary education, but at the very least you’ve got to get those skills in high school.”³

These stark assessments predated the implosion of the U.S. economy in 2008. Compounding the difficulties facing poorly educated young people, the slack labor market these days places heightened pressure on them due to competition from better educated applicants who are desperate to land jobs they would have shunned in the past. Youngsters at risk of being left behind face—and present—an array of Challenges that must be addressed if they are ever to succeed in school and in life.

Weak Academic Achievement

Demographic trends indicate that the U.S. economy will rely increasingly on Latinos and African Americans because they, and especially the former, will comprise a steadily growing proportion of the adult workforce. Yet despite glimmers of progress in student achievement, these economically indispensable groups, along with the overlapping population of low-income youngsters, consistently lag farthest behind academically.

NAEP test results officially sort students into three levels of academic competence:

• Advanced — “signifies superior performance”

• Proficient — “represents solid academic performance for each grade assessed”

• Basic — “denotes partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade”⁴

Actually, there is a fourth tier of achievement on NAEP that is a national embarrassment. I refer to “Below Basic,” where an alarmingly high proportion of American youngsters have languished for years. As recently as 2013, 50 percent of African-American fourth graders and 47 percent of Latino fourth-graders scored Below Basic—roughly two notches under grade level—in reading, according to NAEP. That is certainly a welcome contrast to 2002, when 68 percent of black youngsters and 61 percent of Latino students, respectively, scored Below Basic at the same grade level.

Yet as Table 1 depicts, the trend in NAEP results since 1992 hardly provides a reason for school reformers to proclaim “Mission Accomplished.”

Thus in spite of all the reform initiatives and investments over the years, roughly half of African-American, Latino, and Native American fourth graders continue to languish way below grade level. In fact, the imperative of boosting youngsters from Below Basic to Basic and beyond transcends ethnicity, even though the proportions of low-achieving youngsters are most pronounced among black, Latino, and Native American students. White students far outnumber those from other ethnic groups, and they constitute 37.6 percent of all youngsters scoring in the lowest quintile, according to NAEP.⁶

Notwithstanding the modest gains in student achievement and the narrowed gaps between white and minority youngsters in some places, the pace of progress remains utterly unacceptable and obviously contrary to the national interest. What’s even more disturbing, a study by the Center on Education Policy projects that it could take decades for minority and low-income students to catch up with their better-performing peers.⁷ The center even offered the astonishing projection that in the state of Washington, for example, it will take 105 years to close the black-white gap in fourth-grade reading!⁸