The Washington Post

The “education summit” of President Bush and the nation’s governors signals an important national commitment to the task of overhauling America’s schools. But no one should underestimate the difficulty of the challenge.

It is one thing to set “performance goals” for the schools; it’s infinitely harder to come up with the strategy for achieving them. Seven weeks before Bush’s “summit,” a group of education and business leaders met under the auspices of the Institute on Education and Economy of Teachers College, Columbia University. I was unable to listen in on the discussions, but this past week I received the papers that were prepared for the seminar.

One in particular, by Lorraine M. McDonnell, a senior political scientist with the Rand Corporation, is a strong reminder of the difficulty of carrying out the summit commitment.

In its 67 pages, McDonnell looks at a wealth of evidence bearing on the question whether the kind of “restructuring” now under discussion “really holds the potential for significantly improving American schools, or is…just another educational fad, signifying good intentions, but with little hope of fulfillment?”

“These proposals are not new,” she says, adding that the slipperiness of the “restructuring” concept “can be used to give the illusion of reform where little may exist.”

At the Charlottesville summit, and in other forms, politicians are advocating different and conflicting approaches. They will not add up to a national program for education, she warns, unless policymakers find a way to reconcile them with each other—and with the contraints the political system and budget impose.

One approach, for example, emphasizes decentralization of decision-making to the individual school. It reflects the new thinking in American industry, appeals to anti-bureaucratic sentiments and offers the promise of attracting better people into teaching by “empowering” them to make more of the decisions that count. Its effect on student performance, however, remains unproven and its up-front training costs would almost inevitably be high.

A second approach, endorsed by Bush, calls for parents to be given greater choice of schools their children attend, on the theory that the simulated market forces will reward good schools with increased patronage while punishing schools which are failing in their mission. But stats experiments in this field are just beginning and the effects on students are largely unproven.

Both decentralization and choice strategies imply acceptance of sharp quality distinctions among schools, which raises important questions of equity. A thrid approach, pushed by various intellectual disciplines, calls for stiffening curriculum requirements in all schools to give students “higher-order thinking skills” that the new economy requires. It seems sensible on the surface, but McDonnell reminds that previous efforts led by the National Science Foundation and others did little to change what happens in classrooms or to improve students’ skills.

A fourth approach calls for tightening the links between schools and other institutions, either to bring new resources into education (as with companies’ “adopt a school” programs) or to make schools the centers for delivery of a wide variety of social services—counseling, health clinics, job placement, etc. McDonnell suggests, quite sensibly, that of all the approaches, this one has the greatest practical difficulties and the least assurance of paying off.

But why, people ask, can we not just insist on greater performance accountability from the schools? The answer, McDonnell says, is that schools will in fact strive to meet external standards, so we had better be careful what we ask them to do: “Educators take the reporting of accountability data very seriously and alter their teaching to improve student performance on whatever indicators higher governmental levels stress. The problem is that…only student achievement on standardized tests is typically stressed…The effect in many schools has been a narrowing of the curriculum in ways that are inconsistent with the kind of analytical skills and subject-matter knowledge that students will need for future employment.

Despite these defects, accountability measures are “powerful lovers for changing” what happens in the schools. The key question that the new education-reform effort must resolve is who should hold those levers. Teachers and principals in individual schools? Parents, exercising choice among schools? Scholars in each discipline, prescribing tougher curricula? Or businessmen, defining the skills we need in order to compete?

This is the underlying governance question that only political leaders can resolve, after consulting their constituencies. If America tries to pursue all these education-improvement strategies at once, they will almost certainly collide and fail. We have to decide where to place our bets—and then give the people we’re betting on the resources to succeed.