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Spring 2001
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Marshall S. Smith
Former Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Education Professor of Education, SUSE, Program Officer for Education, Hewlett Foundation m.smith@hewlett.org |
This policy extends current law in the Title I program, a version of which was first enacted in 1988 and later modified and extended in 1994. The motivation for such proposals is transparent. Far too many of our schools with very high percentages of low income and minority students have high percentages of low achieving students and have failed to improve over time. Most Americans agree that this problem should be quickly addressed.
As is the case with many general policies, the problems lie in the details and in the implementation. Accountability must be viewed as fair by the people being held accountable – otherwise trust in the system breaks down. In this case, this means that schools that are identified as low achieving should be given support to help improve before they are sanctioned. It also means that the assessments that are used in the accountability system should be aligned with the state standards (the knowledge and skills that the schools are expected to teach) so that teachers who work hard and competently are rewarded by students achieving to higher levels. Both of these conditions should be met.
To further complicate the picture, as Congress has debated these measures this year, a “tougher than thou” mentality seems to have taken over. Where the 1988 and 1994 legislation gave two or three years for identification of schools that need improvement, the Senate version at the time of this writing gives only one year for identification and only two years for improvement before the sanctions kick in. This has the obvious problem that it typically takes more than two years to turn a school around. It also has a serious psychometric problem that stems from the reliability of school averages – there will be many false positives, schools that are identified erroneously as not improving, particularly when the schools are small in size.
Finally, the President has proposed that one of the sanctions would be to give low achieving students in schools that do not improve the opportunity to take a small amount of Title I money and use it to go to a private school. While the motive may be pure, that is, to give low-achieving students better opportunity, the policy has many faults – among other problems, the money is very little compared to most private school tuitions, the supply of private school seats is small, the original schools need the resources to help improve, transportation is not provided, and the policy is a transparent attempt to get the government to step onto a slippery slope that leads to greater involvement with vouchers that provide public funds to support religious and non-religious private schools.
In every issue, the Educator poses a question about a timely topic. Selected members of the community (alumni, faculty, and students) are invited to respond. If you have a suggestion for a future Forum Question, or would like to be a respondent for a particular topic, please contact the editor at suse.alumni@stanford.edu.
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Eric Hanushek
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution Stanford University Member, Koret Task Force on K-12 Education hanushek@stanford.edu |
President Bush has proposed holding educators accountable for the programs sponsored by federal money. By emphasizing accountability, he also clearly hopes to apply pressure on all schools that are not performing up to expectations. In this regard, his call for more regular testing, and for making the test results more available to parents and policy makers, can only be thought of as very desirable moves.
The most controversial part of his proposal is giving students in failing schools the option to find a better situation. This would occur after giving schools a three-year grace period in which to improve. (This grace period would start after the initial diagnosis that the school’s programs were not working).
One concern often expressed over such "exit voucher" programs is that they hurt public schools by taking money away from them. But this seems like a silly response for two reasons. First, the failing school has already demonstrated it is not spending existing funds well, so it is the student who has been most hurt, not the school. Second, the school no longer has to provide services for any student who leaves, so funding requirements go down. The school is hurt by a student’s exit only if the school was not only failing but also making a profit on the departing student; i.e., only if the school was using a portion of the funds allocated for a student for some other purpose.
A second concern raised over President Bush’s plan is that the three-year grace period is too short. A failing school, some argue, should either be given more time to fix its problems, or the state should step in to improve it, say through installing better management. But those arguments also ignore the students, who get just one chance at school. Exit vouchers are focused on students who have been hurt for at least three years – or a quarter of their time in schools. While long run improvement of the existing public schools is on everybody’s agenda, the current students have to be given some opportunity to recover from the identified poor provision of schooling.
In sum, amidst all the discussion, we must remember that failing schools are the most important equity issue facing policy makers today. Here policy makers must not forget that it is the student who matters most.
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Tony Byrd Principal, Farnham School San Jose, CA
Masters in Administration and Policy Analysis ‘96 Graduated from Prospective Principals Program ‘98 byrdt@cambrian.k12.ca.us |
The first step in Bush’s plan is to have districts/states identify failing schools and then demand an improvement plan. While the measurement mechanisms for identifying low performing schools could be debated for days, the general idea of improving low performing schools is hard to argue. Bush’s plan begins to darken, however, for those schools that do not improve after two years. Students in these schools will have the opportunity to use Title 1 funds to transfer to a different school. While this might be a nice way out for some, what will happen to the schools that lose these students? Will they magically improve because they have lost families that have lost faith in their work? Will they feel empowered to change? Will they encourage the “left behind” students to perform at a higher level? The answer is clearly NO to all of these questions.
Bush’s plan for reforming failing schools will leave us with even greater problems: disillusioned leaders, teachers, students and parents of low performing schools that do not improve, and an even larger gap between low and high performing schools as a result of “low performance flight.” Threats and punishments are not an effective way to reform our existing educational system.
