Top Down Failure from Right to Left

Whether attempted by nominally conservative Republicans or genuinely liberal Democrats, efforts to reform public schools from the top down seem to have a higher failure rate than most inner city public schools. We’ve catalogued the rise and fall of No Child Left Behind in scores of stories on this website.

Now the pet projects of the Bush Administration’s successors seem to be heading down the same path, although the dollar amounts spent on them are considerably greater than the scale on which NCLB was funded. “The stimulus bill requires all school districts to report per pupil spending for 2008-2009 if they are receiving Title I funds, which is most schools,” John Affeldt, the managing attorney for Public Advocates, Inc., said at the Center for American Progress (CAP) on May 26, 2010. “The data were due on March 30 and we’re looking forward to seeing them.”

Affeldt’s group worked on similar initiatives in California that ran into similar snags. “There was not common definition for school versus district expenditures or for instructional personnel,” Guillermo Mayer, another attorney at Public Advocates noted at the CAP seminar.

They did eventually learn that 85 percent of school spending goes towards teacher salaries. In CAP’s sample of 1,692 California schools, teacher salaries averaged:

• $50-55,000 in 150 districts
• $55-60,000 in more than 350 districts
• $60-65,000 in 450 districts
• $65-70,000 in nearly 350 districts and
• $70-75,000 in more than 150 districts.

That’s better than four-fifths of the districts making the salary range many Americans have never seen.

“Do the salaries match student achievement?” Raegen Miller, the associate director for Education Research at CAP asked. Not in California, according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The CIS found that:

• “In 1970 California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008, it ranked 50th, making it the least-educated state. One in six workers in the state has not graduated high school.
• “The decline in education in California is large relative to other states. The percentage of Californians who have completed high school has increased since 1970; however, all other states made much more progress in improving education levels. As a result, California has fallen behind the rest of the country.”

Still, Miller argues that lower teacher salaries lead to a drop in test scores. We’ve never really had a chance to find out.

“While seventeen-year olds scored little better on reading tests in 2004 than they had in 1971, African-Americans and Hispanic high schoolers made noticeable progress in reading during the seventies and eighties, but their performance has slipped since then,” Paul E. Peterson writes in his book Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. “The story is much the same in math.”

“Less than 40 percent of kids can read at grade level,” Susan Patrick, the CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning pointed out on May 27, 2010 at the Heritage Foundation. She also noted that “30 percent of schools offer no advanced placement classes.” Additionally, Education Week found that 1.3 million students fail to graduate.

Meanwhile, “Per-pupil expenditures for public schools in the United States have more than tripled, in real dollar terms, since the 1960s, and class sizes—as indicated by the number of pupils per teacher—have fallen by a third,” Peterson notes. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck professor of Government at Harvard.

“A hard-nosed but committed mathematics professor at Johns Hopkins gave his 2006 students the same test in Calculus I that he had given in 1989,” Peterson relates. “The two classes had similar SAT scores, so it is a safe bet that the ability of the students had not changed over time.”

“And it seemed as if they were learning more in 2006 than students had back in the 1980s, because the instructor awarded better grades in 2006 than in 1989. In 2006, he gave 69 percent of the students an A or a B, as compared to 50 percent in 1989. But then the professor ran a check to see what the grades in 2006 would have been if he had been as tough a grader as he had been in 1989. He discovered that in 2006 only 27 percent would have received one of the two top grades, not the 69 percent he actually had awarded.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.