Schoolyard Brawl

...but no “Milwaukee miracle,” no transformation of the public schools, has taken place...

...Yet under the strong leadership of smart, contentfocused reformers who make the liberal education establishment bristle, Massachusetts instituted a more rigorous curriculum, a focus on phonics and early reading, and real tests for its teachers...

...If so, they’re mistaken...

...But Sol Stern’s second thoughts suggest that a successful political movement for better American schools will have to do just that...

...Hirsch argues in his response to Stern...

...Their mistake, however, was in thinking that you could be agnostic on what these schools ought to be teaching...

...He points to recent success in Massachusetts, where there is no school choice, few charter schools, and very little in the way of competition to improve teaching...

...Is it merely because they hear the words ‘choice,’ ‘markets,’ and ‘competition’ and think that all is well...

...Neither the incentivist nor the instructionist side of the debate has been willing to take on both sides of the argument...

...Stern admonishes his friends in the school reform movement who have ignored the Massachusetts story but applauded the “competition” agenda embraced by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, which is full of cash incentives for principals and teachers who improve students’ test scores...

...He points to the spread of incentive pay for teachers and, of course, charter schools, which in places like Houston now command 20 percent of the market...

...But the real shortcoming in Stern’s argument is that, while he criticizes the political failures of school choice, he doesn’t offer an alternative political program for bringing about the changes he wants in a broad and sustainable way...

...If the school-choice movement has failed, what’s needed is a new political strategy to advance a different kind of education system, one that would embrace (or at least accede to) the rigorous content that experts like Diane Ravitch advocate...

...In Utah— Utah!—a school choice proposal was defeated almost two-to-one...

...The school choice movement correctly recognized that the quasi-monopoly powers that school boards and teachers’ unions exercise over public education is an anachronism in a society increasingly built around consumer power...

...One wonders why so many in the school reform movement and in the business community celebrate New York City’s recent record on education,” writes Stern...

...On Hillary Clinton’s website, you will see she wants to create “Green Schools in order to reduce energy costs and eliminate environmental hazards that can hinder children’s development...

...But to make this a compelling proposition, conservative reformers will have to make a case based on the content of the curriculum...

...Grade-by-grade core substance of the curriculum is what schooling is,” Hirsch writes...

...Most voucher students are still benefi ting, true...

...Massachusetts, for all we know, was just the benefi ciary of a fortuitous set of circumstances that won’t soon be replicated anywhere else...

...Instead they are “instructionists,” believing that the curriculum and the way it is taught are far more consequential to improving failed schools...

...In other words, school reform will have to be about not just the way we think public schools ought to be organized, but also what we want them to teach in the classroom at every grade level...

...Thomas Carroll, an education reformer, argues that market-oriented school reform means much more than vouchers...

...Now, to the dismay of his erstwhile intellectual allies, he has changed his mind...

...Over the last 15 years, school performance has improved far more than in most other states...

...That’s not only what parents really care about, it is the thing that matters most to educational achievement...

...In 2007, Massachusetts placed fi rst in the nation in the fourth and eighth grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math tests, universally regarded as the best measure of student performance...

...Hirsch has been nobly making these arguments for a long time (his Cultural Literacy was a bestseller in the summer of 1987), but they have largely been ignored by unions, school boards, schools of education, and the professional teaching organizations...

...He will also provide incentives to give teachers paid common planning time so they can collaborate to share best practices...

...Invariably that means some form of national or state curriculum, along with the sort of national testing that has begun under No Child Left Behind...

...He points out that today there are only three tiny voucher programs supported by public funds, one in Cleveland, one in Milwaukee, and another in Washington, D.C., while most other “parental choice” proposals have been resoundingly defeated in elections...

...tion scholars Diane Ravitch and E.D...

...What gives the City Journal debate an edge is that it begins with apostasy...

...Stern’s reluctant discovery that school choice is not working came as he listened more closely to educaloyal Daniel Casse is a senior director at the White House Writers Group, a Washington consulting fi rm...

...This might mean a thorough-going charterization program in which every school effectively becomes an “independent” school competing for teachers, funding, and students...

...The true believers in school choice—Andrew J. Coulson and Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute, and Robert Enlow of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice—give a doctrinaire defense of markets over government, undisturbed by evidence that voters (most of whom don’t have school-age children) aren’t swayed by these arguments...

...His article “School Choice Isn’t Enough” makes the case that after more than a decade of conservative and libertarian agitating, the school choice and voucher movements have been a colossal failure...

...Although Ravitch and Hirsch have been allies of the conservative education reform movement, they have never been cheerleaders for school choice in particular...

...You can’t be indifferent to the curriculum, E.D...

...Sol Stern is a long-time warrior for school choice and vouchers, having written a book on the subject and numerous well-researched and persuasive articles...

...Stern notes only in passing that the state’s assistant education commissioner whom he praises has already left town for an academic job...

...Stern is now convinced that they are right and that the “incentivists”— those who believe that bringing market structure and competition to school systems—are wrong...

...BY DANIEL CASSE Go to Barack Obama’s campaign website, click on the education link, and there you will read many ideas like this: “Obama’s plan will expand mentoring programs that pair experienced teachers with new recruits...

...But a few of the respondents do poke some holes in the reasoning Stern gives for his conversion...

...But Stern’s more devastating critique is that, where they have existed, school choice programs have failed to deliver the improvements promised by advocates: Fifteen years into the most expansive school choice program tried in any urban school district in the country, Milwaukee’s public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores fl attening in recent years...

...Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute warns that whatever salutary changes have occurred in Massachusetts can be quickly dismantled by a political administration in the grip of the faddish education school mafi a. And in fact, under Governor Deval Patrick, this is already happening...

...Hirsch Jr., two of the most infl uential writers about education reform who have long battled the education professionals and the graduate Ed School establishment...

...That’s why the next political agenda for school reform, if it ever emerges, will be one that fi gures out how to redefi ne the notion of the public school so that traditional school authorities lose their grip on local school systems...

...It is a must-read for anyone who has any interest in the future of education policy...

...The critical responses to Stern that City Journal has collected are, individually, less interesting and less persuasive...

...Is there another policy area where jargon, claptrap, and political correctness have such free rein as education...

...Without making content an explicit part of your education agenda, you abdicate to some third party—bureaucrats, textbook writers, political activists—control over what is actually taught every day...

...Violence and disorder throughout the system seem as serious as ever...

...Perhaps that is why it is both astonishing and refreshing to fi nd in the pages of the most recent City Journal a vibrant and bracing exchange about the future of the school reform movement...