GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT SCHOOLS

...is John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation...

...But the White House is working harder and faster...

...They demand value for their money...

...They would also leave states free to embrace other strategies...

...Even Bill Clinton’s first Goals 2000 proposal was sent back for redrafting because the plan wasn’t sufficiently centralized to suit House Democrats...

...Such rigidity has become a drag on serious education reform...

...Yes, most successful Republican governors have been bipartisan in their approach to education, but they have not allowed themselves to be rolled...

...And during the past six years, almost every effort to inject more consumer- centered or marketplace-style reform has come to naught, either perishing in committee rooms or struck down by Clinton’s veto pen...

...LET STATES MINGLE THE dollars from those dozens of categorical programs and spend this money on whatever their students need most: better teachers, new tests, tutors, reading programs, bricks and mortar, whatever...

...They’re spreading like wildfire, with at least 400 new ones just this year...

...It came out of the 1998 election with the education wind at its back and wants to maintain that lead during the coming presidential contest...

...So, too, are the GOP governors who have done well with the education issue...

...To date, compromise in the education arena has meant giving the White House nearly everything it wants while attaining no Republican objectives...

...Accountability flows in two directions: to public authorities, who set the standards and monitor the test scores, and to families, which are free to choose different schools if they conclude that it will help their kids...

...Many, however, move in the opposite direction...

...The program’s modest grants are a boon to the founders of such schools, and boosters are glad it’s there...

...Think of it as an unprecedented chance to do things differently...

...Three simple ideas should guide the 106th Congress...

...Indeed, Chester E. Finn Jr...

...The federal role in education research is up for extension, too...

...these programs now get in the way of change-minded states and communities...

...Dollars follow pupils to the schools of their choice—and no pupil is confined to a bad school...

...The only obligation that Uncle Sam should place on states in return for federal education dollars is that they participate in the National Assessment and publicize their results...

...He will trot out more focus-group-tested proposals for new programs such as school construction and after-school services...

...And think of it as smart politics, too, especially for Republicans...

...We might also expect them to make common cause with their party’s successful “education governors,” for example, the Bush brothers, John Engler, Tommy Thompson, and Tom Ridge, all of whom have launched bold state-level school reforms that are showing good results and have even managed to turn K-12 education into a Republican political asset...

...Second, these governors have been willing to spend money on good education delivered to real kids in real classrooms...

...Even New York, for a long time the most centralized and union-dominated of state school systems, now has a passably serious charter law...

...It’s not a cry for Uncle Sam to get out of education by scrapping programs, abolishing agencies, and slashing budgets...

...How does Washington treat charter schools...

...The question is whether this next cycle will be any different...

...Second, strap the federal money to the kids’ backs...

...They have been Reaganesque: principled, resolute, and sly, yet forward-looking, openhanded, and cheerful...

...Clinton and company are masters of that rhetoric...

...The “regional education labs” then waste more millions disseminating information, often about faddish, unproven instructional methods, as if educators still inhabited the pre-Internet world of 1965 when the “labs” were created...

...Taken together, they would legitimize the hybrid approach to education reform in Washington and buttress rather than frustrate state attempts to make it work...

...That means top-down efforts to change whole state and local school systems via central planning: centrally determined goals and standards, centrally managed licensure and accreditation schemes, centrally monitored inputs and services, and centrally enforced accountability strategies...

...Observe what this is not...

...They are also ripe for rethinking...

...So how come those Republican governors have made it work politically for them...

...If a program is meant to assist children who are poor, handicapped, or don’t speak English, whatever aid a youngster qualifies for should accompany him to whichever school he enrolls in...

...What compromise could be more timely than one that enables states to take charge of school reform and doesn’t try to make them all do the same thing...

...Not really...

...Jurisdictions that prefer to keep receiving their federal dollars wrapped in red-tape should be free to do so...

...The program’s protectors and interest groups then trot out a package of minor amendments and promise that this time, for sure, cross our hearts, the program will succeed so long as it is recalibrated in the ways they suggest...

...Third, focus on quality...

...FIRST, GET OUT OF THE WAY...

...The federal money that he benefited from while in public school never belonged to him...

...schools neither safe nor drug free...

...But what might federal education policy look like if Republicans set out to change it and, perhaps, made common cause with reform-minded Democrats such as senator Joe Lieberman...

...Instead of adjusting existing programs to accommodate the new schools and their students, the federal government set up a thin stream of funding for charter schools alone...

...Systemic reformers trust experts and favor government- style solutions...

...Almost nobody offers any serious alternative—and those who do are promptly branded enemies of public education...

...And so forth...

...Then there are the regulatory hassles and misdirected dollars...

...Federal education policy today, as in 1965, recognizes only public school systems, not the refugees from those systems even though they represent the front lines of education reform...

...But study after study shows that this effort has failed...

...Since the nation was declared “at risk” in 1983 because of the shoddy state of our K-12 education system, the systemic philosophy has governed nearly everything done in Washington...

...Just as important, the competition from charter schools, for pupils and revenue, is spurring public-school systems to become consumer-minded...

...Besides interfering with state reforms, the federal programs don’t accomplish their own objectives...

...What, then, is it...

...New York was the thirty-fifth state to pass the necessary legislation...

...It does not push states and communities around, substituting one set of Washington- style nostrums for another...

...The governors have been visiting Capitol Hill...

...The creation of this program was a typical Washington maneuver, and as such, it is a useful illustration of how the federal government funds and views school choice...

...They’re skeptical of charter schools, hostile to vouchers, uneasy with private enterprise, and wary of too much involvement by politicians and parents in important education decisions...

...That’s not bipartisanship...

...Perhaps congressional Republicans will find a way to do likewise...

...It’s reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s approach to d?tente...

...It’s near-capitulation...

...The General Accounting Office has found that many schools don’t know how to get these funds or are frustrated in their attempts to do so...

...Bush offered a blend of systemic and marketplace strategies, but the latter got nowhere on Capitol Hill...

...The other side gets to take Afghanistan and Ethiopia but we get to keep France and Canada...

...As with welfare reform, change is most apt to come to an entrenched system if states are allowed to make such decisions...

...Although Congress cannot improve schools, it can insist that states show the public how well their schools and students are doing...

...The Senate’s keenest education reformer, Georgia’s Paul Coverdell, is beavering away on legislation...

...The Congress assents to the recommended tweaking—after ensuring that no school system will lose any money...

...Education has, in fact, been a debacle for Republicans at the national level...

...An evaluation says the program isn’t working...

...What parents (and taxpayers) want for children is basic skills, high standards, safety, sure-fire classroom methods, terrific teachers, and greater say over how the kids are educated...

...Beginning with his State of the Union address, President Clinton will again trumpet his education agenda...

...In the legislative round that begins this year, the Republicans will be in charge of reshaping ESEA for the first time...

...If they fear the sunlight, they can forgo the money...

...Consider the 1,100 charter schools now operating, the publicly funded voucher programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee, another 50 or more privately supported voucher schemes, and the hundred or so public schools now managed by private firms...

...Over the years, Washington’s response to this dismal record has become ritualized and predictable...

...With one exception, it pretends they don’t exist...

...THE 106TH CONGRESS, ONCE IT GETS PAST THE impeachment drama, will have a rare chance to tackle another set of Washington-style crimes and misdemeanors: 34 years of federal education policy and programs so misguided that today they undermine the prospects of reforming the nation’s woeful schools...

...They have no faith in markets, scant confidence in laymen, and little interest in diversity unless it is centrally planned...

...The Eisenhower Professional Development Program hasn’t even come close to producing the crackerjack math and science teachers that are its stated mission...

...And in due course, another evaluation reveals, yet again, that the program is not accomplishing its stated purpose...

...The one exception is a special program of federal aid specifically for charter schools...

...The money belongs to him, not the bureaucracy...

...What could be more bipartisan than a hybrid strategy that embraces standards and accountability, on the one hand, and freedom and choice on the other...

...That’s what we see in Texas and Florida, in Michigan and Pennsylvania, in Arizona, Minnesota, and Massachusetts...

...it belonged to the public school system and, although the student fled that system, Washington still sends it there...

...The National Assessment needs a legislative overhaul, too, to buttress its independence from the federal Education Department and the school establishment and to make its tests more frequent and more accessible...

...The hybrid approach says all schools in the state must attain the same standards in core academic subjects, and all students must demonstrate their mastery by passing the same tests, but everything else is up for grabs...

...Three decades after Lyndon Johnson rammed through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, it’s generally acknowledged that the 60-odd programs enshrined in that massive statute (at an annual cost of some $11 billion nowadays) have failed to accomplish their goals or solve the country’s nagging problems of school effectiveness and pupil achievement...

...Some hew to systemic orthodoxy...

...Schools are essentially independent in their operations...

...These, of course, are the very bureaucracies that, in most places, fought to keep charter laws from enactment, and that charter schools seek to escape...

...Think of it as overdue consciousness- raising about the failure of the time-dishonored Washington approach...

...The Goals 2000 program, as of 1999, has moved us no closer to the national education goals set a decade earlier...

...But they have no patience for throwing more dollars at obsolete activities, dysfunctional programs, faddish methods, or swelling bureaucracies...

...How can this be...

...The 106th Congress could do worse than to emulate them...

...President Reagan sought to reverse the trend—he proposed voucherizing the big Title I program, for example—but was ignored by Congress...

...Systemic reform is the essence of Goals 2000 and was the driving philosophy of ESEA’s 1994 reauthorization...

...Uncle Sam entrusts his dollars to state and local education agencies from which charter schools must wrest their share if they can...

...It is not a blood-and-guts approach...

...The state reform schemes that show the greatest promise are hybrid strategies: They meld ideas from the systemic warehouse with elements of competition and choice...

...What about the push for bipartisanship and compromise...

...MEANWHILE BACK IN THE STATES, THE “LABORATORIES of democracy” where most significant education decisions get made, almost 50 different reform strategies are at work...

...Furthermore, a needy student enrolling in a charter school must forgo all other forms of federal aid...

...Besides ESEA, key measures slated for review by the new Congress include the administration’s signature Goals 2000 program and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka “the nation’s report card...

...Speaker Hastert seems to be heading down this path with his suggestion that the current half-baked federal program known as “ed-flex” be radically strengthened...

...It probably will...

...State efforts to ease the teacher quality crisis are confounded by Washington because it channels millions into traditional ed school programs...

...One of the nation’s keenest systematizers is Marshall Smith, former Stanford education dean and now number two at the Department of Education...

...It does not claim that vouchers alone will cure America’s education maladies...

...Third, they have nearly always cast their proposals in terms of what’s on parents’ minds, not abstractions such as block grants...

...And he will submit an ESEA reauthorization proposal that tweaks the statute further in the direction of what educrats call “systemic reform...

...school performance remains dismal, when surveys show education to be the domestic issue most on people’s minds, and when it’s clear that Clinton and his allies have outmaneuvered the GOP whenever this topic has been on the table, we might suppose that congressional majority leaders would place this at the top of their agenda...

...Title I, the biggest of them all, has sought to narrow the achievement gap between disadvantaged and middle-class youngsters...

...They compete for students and resources...

...Charter schools illustrate the problem...

...That’s been the pattern for 34 years...

...That means lowincome and disabled pupils in charter schools don’t get the federal aid they would receive in regular public schools...

...They make their own decisions about staff, schedule, technology, and a hundred other things...

...But this assistance is nowhere near comprehensive...

...First, they’ve made clear that they believe in public education, albeit public education redefined to include charter schools, contract schools, and any other school that’s open to the public, financed by the public, and accountable to public authorities for its results...

...Today’s infant charter school is apt to find the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights crashing down on it if it tries to do “special” education differently...

...They are hugely popular with parents— most have waiting lists—and early returns indicate that they’re generally working well, both in boosting pupil achievement and in meeting the needs of children and families...

...There are sounds of activity on the House side as well, including audible interest from Speaker Hastert...

...At a moment when U.S...

...It will not, it’s safe to say, if President Clinton and the Department of Education’s Marshall Smith call the shots again...

...The “safe and drug free schools” program has made U.S...

...Most of the big federal-aid programs are due for renewal this year...

...It’s common knowledge in Washington that administration officials and Democratic congressional aides regale each other with tales of their success in rolling the GOP every time education has been on the agenda since 1994...

...Even as hybrid reform strategies gain traction in the states, however, Washington hews single-mindedly to the systemic approach...

...Radical...