Still at Risk

We've learned a lot about school reform in 25 years, lessons that suggest that it is possible, eventually, to achieve "A Nation at Risk'"s ambitious aims. We've learned that a lot of public schools require incentives to lift their sights for their students. The nation's long tradition of letting local school boards set standards isn't going to get us where we need to go educationally. If anything, NCLB's requirement of statewide standards needs to be taken to its logical conclusion—rigorous national standards. Make them voluntary. Give states and school systems different ways of measuring their progress against the standards by sanctioning a number of different national examination boards (the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams are good models). And reward educators for meeting the new standards (NCLB only punishes schools for not meeting state standards, which encourages states to keep standards low because they don't want a lot of their schools labeled as failures).

But improvement can't merely be imposed on schools from the outside. Schools are complex social enterprises; their success depends on thousands of daily personal interactions. They are, in the end, only as good as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So it's crucial to get everyone in a school community invested in a school's mission. Ownership is key. That comes from giving schools autonomy—in staffing, budgeting and instruction. From giving families a chance to choose their public schools. And from school leadership that promotes a strong sense of school identity and clear expectations of success. Reform has to come from the inside-out as well as the outside-in. There's a human side of school reform that we ignore at our peril.

Raising student achievement is hard work. Ask any of the earnest, Teach for America-trained Ivy Leaguers who have taken on the daunting task by opening charter schools in some of the nation's toughest urban neighborhoods in recent years. They clock 12-hour days, six days a week with millions of dollars of philanthropic support to give their disadvantaged students the extra instruction, personal attention and enrichment that they need to climb out of the educational cellar.

And there's another, larger problem in education that makes school reform steadily more difficult: in sharp contrast to many other enterprises, schooling isn't significantly more efficient than it was a century ago. Computing, we all know, gets steadily faster and cheaper. Schooling gets increasingly expensive because schools have to raise teachers' salaries. But we haven't been able to improve on the traditional model of teachers in classrooms with roughly the same numbers of students they've taught for generations. That's one reason why many high-performing charter schools require infusions of philanthropy, why independent day schools have broken the $30,000 tuition barrier (they tend to have very small classes) and why Roman Catholic schools are going out of business as they are forced to replace unpaid religious faculty with lay teachers (even with large classes they can't keep tuition low enough to attract the mostly low-income urban families they serve today, especially as competition intensifies from tuition-free charter schools). 

But if achieving "A Nation at Risk'"s vision is becoming increasingly difficult, the alternative is really no alternative. The American economy hasn't collapsed in the absence of public-school reform because its success is driven mainly by the small segment of the workforce that is highly educated. But the plight of the middle class that the reform reports of the 1980s warned about has worsened as the wage gap between high-school graduates and the college-educated has widened, creating an increasingly two-tiered society—and an ever-greater need to arm every American with the high-quality education that "A Nation at Risk" envisioned. 

Thomas Toch is codirector of Education Sector, a Washington think tank, and author of “In the Name of Excellence,” a history of American education in the 1980s.

© 2008