Federal Alphabet Soup Won’t Fix Schools
President Bush signed the bi-partisan America COMPETES act on August 9th, with the acronymic goal of Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science. Come September, Congress will debate reauthorization of the 5-year-old No Child Left Behind act, or NCLB, which aimed to improve math and reading performance. But before our federal representatives serve up another acronym-laden education program, Americans might want to signal for the waiter, because there’s a fly in Washington’s alphabet soup: these programs will not, indeed cannot, fix our schools.
The problem is best demonstrated by the America COMPETES act, which was inspired by the National Science Foundation report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm.” The NSF observed that “a substantial portion of our workforce finds itself in direct competition for jobs with lower-wage workers around the globe,” and argued that this intensifying competition from abroad now compels us to improve our schools.
Given its pedigree, not to mention its name, you might think that America COMPETES would actually promote competition among schools – harnessing on the domestic stage the very same forces that the law touts on the international stage. It does no such thing. Instead, it simply throws more money at the existing system, which, thanks to its monopoly on education tax-funding, is protected against competition from independent schools. In other words, the America COMPETES act does not remotely live up to its name.
It does, however, conform to a popular definition of insanity – it repeats the mistakes of an earlier program, the National Defense Education Act of 1958, while expecting different results. The NDEA was enacted for much the same reason as America COMPETES; fear of foreign competition. In the wake of the Soviet launch of the satellite Sputnik, Congress feared the U.S. had fallen behind in math, science and technology. Its response, then as now, was to ignore %%AMAZON=1933995041 the merits of competition and parental choice in education%% and to instead throw money at the public school monopoly in an effort to improve its curricula and teaching methods. The materials and programs funded by NDEA grants were adopted only slowly and unevenly, and their quality was dubious.
The results were inevitable. According to the Long Term Trends report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (“the Nation’s Report Card”), science achievement among American 17-year-olds fell significantly between 1969 (the first year of the test) and 1999 (the most recent). Though mathematics trend scores for younger students show signs of improvement over the past thirty years, those improvements evaporate by the end of high school. The math scores of 17-year-olds are essentially unchanged. This educational stagnation and decline, remember, came over a period during which real annual per-pupil spending in public schools doubled (to over $11,000 today), the personal computer was invented and fantastically improved, and the Internet ushered in previously undreamed of educational possibilities.
As if to tacitly acknowledge the futility of America COMPETES and other federal education programs, the U.S. Department of Education has quietly withdrawn from a test scheduled for next year that will compare the advanced math and science knowledge of top students internationally. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2008 will be the latest installment in a series dating back to the 1970s, which has revealed an alarming trend: the longer U.S. students stay in school, the further they fall behind their peers in other countries. We score near the average of industrialized nations at the 4th grade, somewhat below it by the 9th grade, and are at or near the bottom of the heap by the end of high school. [pdf]
Mark Schneider, commissioner for the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, has cited cost as the main reason for withdrawing from the test, which would tip the financial scales at between $3 and $10 million according to John Ewing of the American Mathematical Society. The America COMPETES act, meanwhile, authorizes $43.6 billion in expenditures. How many times does $10 million go into $43.6 billion? You do the math….
Which brings us to No Child Left Behind, a law intended to improve overall performance in both math and reading, and to reduce achievement gaps between racial and socio-economic groups. It was supposed to accomplish those aims mainly by encouraging public school systems to test more students more often, and by increasing the number of teachers with state certification in the subjects they teach. Though early NCLB proposals made a fair bit of noise about promoting competition and parental choice, nothing of substance in these areas made it into the final legislation.
So how has No Child turned out? According to the most thorough analysis of its effects to date, published by Harvard University, “NCLB does not appear to have had a significant impact on improving reading or math achievement…. [and] does not seem to have helped the nation and states significantly narrow the achievement gap.”
Just as with the NDEA, we should not be surprised by these results. Measures like NCLB, America COMPETES, and their fellow alphabetic travelers are the education policy analogues of perestroika — Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to “fix” Soviet socialism by tinkering around its edges. Gorbachev’s efforts failed, it is now widely acknowledged, because they omitted certain crucial elements of free markets: prices that are determined by supply and demand instead of by central planners, private instead of state ownership of enterprises – that sort of thing. America’s public school monopolies are like socialist economies in small; centrally planned, uncompetitive, state-owned. Just as Gorbachev’s piece-meal reforms couldn’t fix his system, neither can such half-measures fix ours.
If Americans want their children genuinely prepared to compete in the world economy, they will have to demand that their schools – public and private – be forced to compete on a free and level playing field for the privilege of serving them. And they would be wise to stay away from the alphabet soup.
Andrew J. Coulson is Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, and co-author of the forthcoming paper “End it Don’t Mend it: What to do With NCLB.” He blogs at Cato-at-liberty.org
As a non-teaching major who taught high school for two years, I have to say that NCLB has a couple of good impacts:
1, It requires schools and districts to look at teacher’s subject matter competence. In Alaska, You have to pass the Praxis I test now, and many veteran teachers could not. This is 10th grade reading writing and math.
For you subject areas, you have to pass the appropriate Praxis II tests. I passed Geography, Physical Science and General Science,and so was “Highly Qualified” to teach these subjects. You would be amazed at how many education majors can’t pass such tests.
2, It makes them re-examine social promotion. If you have a critical test in the 10th grade, or 8th grade, do you promote kids into these grades to screw up the tests? Currently, the answer is still yes, but slowly changing. We had a kid who attended about 2 weeks of 7th grade, yet got promoted to 8th. If NCLB provides motivation for schools to end that practice, then more power to it.
Ultimately, the problem in schools is not money, we all know that. The problem is crappy parenting, no good male role models for the kids in the homes and schools in too many cases, and kids who lack the discipline (and parenting) to buckle down and do work that doesn’t involve instant gratification or Disney-like entertainment.
I hope that someday we can also move back to having expert special-ed teachers teach special ed students, because nothing is as pointless as trying to teach Sophomore physical science to 20 kids that range from a 10th grade to 2nd grade reading level. They ALL get short-changed.
This is a superbly written piece, Mr. Coulson.
Spartacus is absolutely corrrect about the poor quality of teachers and the even poorer quality of parenting. It is up to parents to instill a respect for education and the expectation that the student will perform in school. Except for some minority groups, this is not often done. As a teacher who retired 17 years ago, I remember being told by “gifted” students that they were in school to see their friends. Schools, the Department of Education, and parents should acknowledge that not all children can learn at the same rate….or, for some, even learn at all. Every child should not expect to go to college; some should be trained for various trades.
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Spartacus,
NCLB certainly has some fine goals — raising achievement, improving the quality of teachers — and parents, of course, aren’t perfect. But the question for policymakers is this: what policies can we actually implement that will _fulfill_ NCLB’s goals (something the law itself has not done).
Having reviewed the historical evidence dating back to before your namesake, and the modern international research from all over the world, I’ve found that far and away the best policy is to promote universal access to a free and competitive educational marketplace.
NCLB and other central mandates are hobbled by the monopoly system in which they try to work. Sure, NCLB aims to improve the quality of the teaching workforce, but in almost every state in the nation you need to get a full college degree _in teaching_ from a state-accredited education school, in order to hold a permanent teaching job in the government schools. The result? Bill Gates couldn’t teach computer science, Lance Armstrong couldn’t teach phys. ed., etc. Maybe they and other subject area experts wouldn’t all turn out to be gifted teachers in the classroom, but under the current system we’ll never find out. In a competitive marketplace, schools have a powerful incentive to hire and retain the best teachers, regardless of their college pedigree.
What happened to universal private schools? How about an expansion of the system where parents get together, build a school and hire a teacher?
Certainly some equivalent of that would work better than what we have now.
I can tell you that Alaska’s program for non-ed majors teaching (Senate Bill 89) is being undercut by the unions and the University of Alaska system. They took over the Rural Educators Partnership Program, then stopped advertising it, then let it expire.
Idaho has a program for non-ED majors, and so does Florida. Maybe you should look into these programs, you will find great successes, and also see the pettiness of the establishment towards these programs. One good thing about the AK program, it brought in more males than females into a female dominated discipline. Disadvantaged kids need male role models badly, and the feminine and feminized school environment needs men too.