From the WSJ Opinion Archives
OUTSIDE THE BOX
Two Decades of Mediocrity
America's public schools: Still risky after all these years.
Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the release of "A Nation at Risk," the devastating 1983 report on the state of education in America. We all remember its key conclusion, that the "intellectual, moral and spiritual strength of our people" were threatened by a failing education system:
The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."The report's recommendations for reversing our national failure included hiring better-educated and -qualified teachers, regularly assessing teacher and student performance, and performance pay--higher pay for better teachers. Then lengthening the school day and the school year, more homework and a much stronger curriculum, particularly in math and English.
So, 20 years later, how have we done in meeting the challenge that was threatening "our very future as a nation?"
Although "A Nation at Risk" did not recommend it, we have devoted a lot more money to education. Federal spending under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has risen from $4 billion a year to $22 billion. In the most recent fiscal year the nation as a whole spent $480 billion on elementary and secondary education (compared with $360 billion on defense). Since "A Nation at Risk," inflation-adjusted teacher pay is up 12% and per pupil spending is up 60%.
But in regard to most of the recommendations of the 1983 report, there has been no progress at all.
Yes, classes are smaller--18.6 pupils per class then, 15 now--and there is more emphasis on English and math.
But has performance pay for teachers been implemented? No. Teacher assessment? No. Is there a longer school day? No. School year? No, it is actually shorter. More homework? No, it still averages one hour per day. Do teachers work 11 months, as recommended? No, still nine. Are there more teachers with basic teaching degrees? No, there are a few less. Are there more teachers with master's degrees? No, 70% less.
Some of these reforms of course have been adopted in some school districts and a few states, but as a nation we are still where we were 20 years ago.
How are our students performing twenty years later? By any measuring stick, no better. SAT scores have declined. National Education Assessment Program test scores have risen marginally. Graduation rates are down, and on international education measurements, relative to other nations American children do worse the longer they stay in school.
When the NAEP test scores were released in 2001, only 32% of American fourth-graders could read proficiently or better. As The Wall Street Journal summed it up: "63% of black fourth graders, 58% of Hispanics, 60% of children in poverty, and 47% of children in urban schools scored at 'below basic' competency levels, which means they can't read."
It isn't a money problem, for a great deal more money is being spent on education. It isn't an urban problem, for charter and private schools successfully educate urban children. It isn't an immigration problem, for as Harvard professor Paul Peterson notes in the Hoover Institution's new book "Our Schools and Our Future: Are We Still at Risk?," "The test scores of white seventeen year olds remained essentially flat over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. One cannot attribute educational stagnation to the influx of immigrants from Third world countries."
It is an institutional problem; a problem created and sustained by layers of immovable bureaucracy in public-school administrations, state departments of education, legislatures and teachers unions.
These questions were discussed at a 20th-anniversary debate last month at the U.S. Department of Education in Washington by three Harvard professors--also contributors to a new book on the subject, "A Nation Reformed"--and three members of the Hoover Institute's Koret Task force.
Why has American primary and secondary education improved so little over the past 20 years? Checker Finn of the Koret Task force says it is because public schools "have not been obliged to produce results." They have not lengthened their school year, assessed their teachers or implemented performance pay for teachers, because they have not had to, because they "have a captive student body and a guaranteed source of income forever."
Harvard's Pat Graham noted that schools in affluent communities are doing much better than schools with low-income students, to which Koret's Caroline Hoxby replied, "If Pat Graham is right, isn't the answer to give low-income families school choice--the power to move their kids to better schools?"
Why is it, Ms. Hoxby continued, that the union bureaucracy in low-income schools so fiercely resists choice and performance pay? Unions don't resist performance pay in competitive industries--automobile manufacture, for example--because they know they have to survive in the marketplace to keep their jobs and higher pay encourages better performance. It is unions in protected monopolies that are the problem, for their members do not have to improve to survive.
The reason our public education system is failing our children is that monopolies don't work. Insulated from competitive pressures--with a guaranteed student body and annual income, as Mr. Finn noted--school-board, state administrative and union bureaucracies govern the educational system.
American education needs choice and competition and the freedom to innovate if it is going to improve. The rising tide of educational mediocrity so startlingly revealed in 1983 has not ebbed, and until the market forces that have propelled America to the top in other endeavors replace the establishment public education bureaucracies, it may even continue to rise.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.
