What's Right about American Education,
Sandra Feldman, President, American Federation of Teachers

Commentary: The Third Way and Public Education,
Penn Kemble, Acting Director, US Information Agency

Progress in Public Education: The Washington, DC Example,
Joyce Ladner, Fellow, Governmental Studies, The Brookings Institution

A Third Way for Education Reform,
Richard Kahlenberg, Fellow, the Century Fund

What's Right about American Education

Sandra Feldman, President, American Federation of Teachers

In 1983 a report came out called "A Nation at Risk." It said that American education was suffering from a "rising tide of mediocrity," and that this fact was actually putting the country in danger. The report suggested that if something was not done, the economy would go into decline and the country would lose its place in the world.

At that time, my predecessor, the great Al Shanker, took the position that rather than being defensive, we ought to embrace the report and start fighting to make the kinds of changes needed to bring education up to where it belongs. Our union started then to fight for the changes I will talk about in this presentation.

That was in 1983. It is now 1999. And I'd like to point out that the American economy is the strongest in the world; we have low unemployment and we have low inflation. Yet there is no report out there saying, "look at our economy -- the schools of America have done a fantastic job." Education has many problems, but we don't seem to be getting any credit for the contributions made by the public schools.

So I think it is appropriate to begin this discussion by acknowledging that there has been improvement -- significant improvement -- in American schools since that report came out. We are now educating the broadest spectrum of racial, ethnic and class diversity of any nation in the world. Achievement is rising. The National Assessment of Educational Progress tells us achievement is steadily rising. We have fewer dropouts; we have many more graduates of high schools; more and more of our children are going to college, and this progress is found across all racial and ethnic groups.

This optimistic view is shared in an article by Greg Easterbrook in the recent issue of The New Republic entitled, "America the OK." He says, "I don't wish to alarm you, but American life is getting better. Crime has fallen sharply. The economy is booming. Teen pregnancy is declining. The federal budget is in surplus. The air and water are getting cleaner. Health is improving by almost every measure, including the first-ever decline in cancer incidence. Death from accidents is decreasing. Standards of living continue to improve. The use of drugs and cigarettes is waning. Levels of education keep rising. Women and minorities are acquiring an ever-larger slice of the national pie. Personal liberty has never been greater, while American culture becomes more and more diverse. Even home-runs are at an all-time high! Yet," he says, "the steady betterment of American life is practically a taboo subject for intellectual debate." So it is important to acknowledge this progress.

Most of the newspapers and the pundits you read may cause you to think that the New York City schools, for example, are no good, but there are lots of children who are getting very well-educated in those schools, and that's true of schools all across this nation. I graduated from a neighborhood high school in New York City, James Madison High School. My niece just graduated in June from that very same high school. My nephew goes to that high school. I have a grandson in a school in Brooklyn. We have all received an excellent education in the public schools.

The Root of Education Problems – Inequality

The American economy has a long way to go. While it is the strongest in the entire advanced industrialized world, it also features the widest gap between the haves and the have-nots. This gap is actually getting wider rather than narrower. The gap is particularly wide when you compare the incomes of the top educated people and the lesser-educated people. Childhood poverty in the United States has persisted at roughtly the same levels over the past ten to fifteen years. It has not gotten any better. We still have the highest poverty rate in the advanced industrialized world - the strongest economy and the highest childhood poverty rate. There is obviously something very wrong here.

This dichotomy is also true of the schools. We have public schools that are among the greatest in the world, where children are getting a really good education. We also have schools that are educating the poorest of our children, and those are the schools with enormous problems. If you compare some states -- not the whole country but some states – with the other advanced industrial nations, our education system produces the highest achievers in the world. But when you include all the states, including those with the poorer children, America drops enormously in that comparison.

It is commonplace to say, "You can't throw money at the problem, money is not the answer." Yet it is indisputable that most schools with poor children have fewer resources. Poor districts spend a lot less per student than wealthy districts, maybe half as much. They have larger class sizes, less well paid teachers, and too often, less well educated teachers. They have dilapidated buildings and they lack funds for arts and sciences. These schools also don't have the technology that they need; there is a dearth of books and supplies. That is shameful in America, in 1999.

What Works? The Third Way is the Hard Way

Yet within these schools, millions of children are doing okay. We have examples of successful schools in urban centers all over the country, public schools as well as parochial schools. It is said that Catholic schools do well with poor children. There are just as many - even more - public schools that do well with poor children.

What do they have in common, these schools that do well? They usually have an orderly, disciplined environment, and there are ways to accomplish that. They also have good leadership, which means good management -- usually a good principal. They have qualified teachers, parental involvement, higher standards and expectations for the children, a challenging curriculum. And they use proven programs and methods.

There is considerable agreement about what works for children, and more and more states are now putting these practices into place. There is considerable change going on in America. There are still problems, but the change is pretty exciting.

There are states putting standards into place. Some of them are very high, perhaps too high. There is debate about whether cut off scores are too low or too high. But standards are being into place, and it is being done quite transparently. This bears watching.

Many states and districts are ending "social promotion" - the practice of sending children on to the next grade without having mastered the requirements. States are lowering class sizes, especially in early grades where research indicates that this makes a tremendous difference for children. In high schools, some states are requiring more rigorous courses.

Tests for new teachers are being put into place. There is more and more support for our peer evaluation and review programs. We find that teachers evaluate other teachers much more rigorously than management does.

The result of all these changes is substantial gains in achievement. Efforts are underway to ensure that tests and assessments of achievement are meaningful. There are problems with these efforts, but solutions are being found and they are having a big effect. Whole states have made such changes. The state of Texas, for example, where there are tremendous numbers of poor children and many non-English speaking children has made very substantial gains in achievement in a fairly short number of years. So has North Carolina.

A number of cities are also working very hard to upgrade education for poor children: Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C. Joyce Ladner will speak about Washington, D.C., which has just begun its efforts. It has a very long way to go, as do many of these other places. But as they put in place the programs that work, they quickly begin to see increases in achievement.

There will still be headlines about a high percentage of failure on statewide tests. When that happens we need to honestly look at the reasons. Perhaps the cutoff score was not done right; perhaps the test was flawed, but perhaps the schools failed. We need to fix what's wrong, not abandon them, or the kids who will inevitably be in them. But there are changes under way which are improving the education of children, and we have to stay the course -- if we care about having a public education system in the United States of America.

The Trouble with Privatizing Education

Some believe that the solution to our education problems is to privatize schools, to put vouchers into place, and to let market forces determine how to provide the best education for children. Support for this view comes largely from the Right, but also from some minorities and from some parents who are frustrated about the pace of change. This argument says basically "Let's have marketplace competition in schools, and let's make sure that there is no union in those schools, because the union is a big part of the problem."

It should be noted that there is no advanced country in the world that has a marketplace school system. They all have national systems, and they are all very strongly unionized. (By the way, the best U.S. schools are also highly unionized, such as those in Scarsdale and Shaker Heights and other wealthy suburbs). Other advanced countries have national curricula, and they have very high standards. These countries also have real social safety nets. People are not allowed to drop into an abyss in these societies. They provide health care for children who need it.

For example, France has a large immigrant population with many problems. A few years ago, France launched an early childhood program for three-year olds. It was basically aimed at immigrant children, because they don't want to have two school systems like we have in America. Rather, they wanted one school system where everyone meets the same standards. The program was open to all parents using a sliding fee scale. France now supports universal education of three-year olds. Middle class mothers, even the stay-at-home mothers, wanted their children in these preschools because they offered such a rich educational experience. They are now making these pre-schools available to two-year olds.

There is still a slight gap between poor immigrant children and native French children, but it is nothing compared to what we have in this country. Countries like France rigorously educate their prospective teachers. They pay them well; they give them respect. (I don't know how many of you remember that Simone de Beauvoir was a high school teacher.)

The idea of giving an emergency credential to a teacher is a totally foreign idea in these countries. They don't understand it. In this country, one of the really harmful practices, especially with the neediest and the most fragile and the poorest children, is the provision of emergency credentials to huge numbers of people who are not qualified to teach. This practice has to stop. (I am not talking about alternative certification -- those programs for getting good people into schools by helping them get their credentials, like the Troops for Teachers and Teach for America. Those are nice programs. But you're not going to massively educate 53 million children in America with Troops for Teachers.)

So the push for vouchers, for privatizing American education, and unfortunately, for certain kinds of charter schools, is not something that is being done in other advanced countries which our critics say have higher educational achievement levels than the U.S.

Vouchers would take the responsibility for education away from our society. Advocating vouchers and subsidies for private schools is much easier than taking public responsibility for educating children, especially if our commitment is to educating all the children. This requires dealing with the many problems that some of our children bring into school. It requires up-front investment, and changes are difficult to implement . The voucher route provides an easy way out. You can satisfy the people who are complaining and you don't have to assume so much responsibility for the outcome. You can avoid some of the difficult work that is necessary for real change.

Charter schools are a mixed bag. We support charter schools where they are laboratories for new ideas, smaller schools, and alternative schools for disruptive and violent children who can get a lot more attention than they would in a large school. I personally participated in the development of a hundred and fifty small charter-type schools in New York City.

Unfortunately, a lot of charter school programs are being used by Republican legislators and governors to create private schools which get public funds and which are not held accountable in the way that the public schools are held accountable. According to the studies, such schools don't do any better, and some do worse, than regular schools. This approach will not ensure that we educate all of America's children, including poor children.

These approaches remind me in some ways of the fight we had over community control. The community control movement had a similar argument: the education bureaucracy has failed, so let's turn the problem over to someone else – in this case, the local communities and the parents. In New York, the community control movement won, and we lost a couple of generations of children. When its failures became apparent, there was a return to a more centralized system. It was discovered that you can't have standards-based reform without some authority making sure the reform is working. Unfortunately, the voucher movement to privatize the schools and subject them to market forces may also make it harder to make sure that every school meets a high standard.

I am not against the market economy. (There was a time in my childhood when I was, but now I am not.) The market economy certainly has been good for America. But the market economy is not good for all its citizens. It does not work for everybody. In poor neighborhoods, for example, you don't find these huge, beautiful, shining supermarkets that you find in the suburbs. Instead, you find some 7-11 or some dirty grocery stores. The market economy has not provided this choice for poor people. I don't know why -- I'm not an economist. But I notice that poor people, especially poor children, don't get the kind of health care that wealthier people get; they just don't get it. The market economy has not provided this.

So we have to decide what we want government to take responsibility for. Government should not take responsibility for making sure that companies make a lot of money, or for regulating the whole global economy. But there are certain things that government must take responsibility for, and public education is one of them. If you want to educate all of your country's children, rich and poor, then government must assume the responsibility. The market will not do this. The Road Ahead – the union must change

So we are left with the hard work of implementing the things that need to be done in schools -- the high standards, the ending of social promotion, the redesign of low performing schools, and public school choice, which we favor of as long as every school becomes a school of choice. This agenda presents a very big challenge to our union. Although the AFT has been in the forefront of fighting for these reforms, it is clear that in order to succeed, the union has to do ever more. The union has to shift from a situation in which it fought mainly for benefits and salaries to an organization that can also deliver the help and support our members need to improve the schools.

To be able to help the children, teachers need help. They need more access to information about what works, and they need staff development. Our union is providing such help in many places, especially where we have a partner on the management side, such as with the mayor and superintendent in Chicago and Boston. Partnerships are necessary because it is very hard for unions to support teacher testing and high standards in a high-stakes situation in which members are blamed when the standards aren't met. We need help and support from the people who hold the purse strings. Our union is now in the process of becoming a vehicle for our members' professional development to make these changes happen. We are pushing for this even in places where the school district is not. Our leaders -- our elected people -- have to be out front, encouraging our members to do some very difficult things. I've done this, and I know how difficult it is.

To succeed, we need support. We need the support of political leaders and intellectuals. Currently, the privatizers are dominating the op-ed pages. Their market vision of society is very different vision from the kind society we want. Our vision is for a more democratic society: more economically democratic and socially democratic. To get there, the people in this room will have to get involved in the fight to support the difficult, step-by-step, one school at a time changes that are necessary to improve the public schools. If we fail and education is left to the tender mercies of the market economy, we will have a very different society from the one we want to leave to our children.

Sandra Feldman is the 15th president of the one-million-member American Federation of Teachers, and the union's first female president since 1930. She also serves on the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO. From 1986 through 1997, Ms. Feldman was president of the 130,000-member United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City, the largest union local in the United States and an affiliate of the AFT. During that time, she also served as a vice president of the AFT. Ms. Feldman is widely recognized as an authority on urban education and an advocate for children. Her long-standing commitment to social justice dates back to her involvement with the early civil rights movement, both locally and nationally, when she was arrested during the Freedom Rides and other protests in the 1960's. U.S. presidents, governors and mayors have appointed her to numerous commissions and taskforces tackling education, economic, child-welfare, labor and other social issues. Ms. Feldman is a vice president of Education International, an organization of teacher unions in democratic countries. She also participates as a board member or activist in many community and civic organizations including: Council on Competitiveness, Child Labor Coalition and National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Ms. Feldman was born in New York City and educated in its public schools, including James Madison High School and Brooklyn College. She holds a master's degree in English literature from New York University.

Commentary: The Third Way and Public Education

Penn Kemble, Acting Director, US Information Agency

The issue of education is central to almost any discussion about the Third Way in politics and social policy. If you are an advocate of the "first way," one would suppose you would say that the supply of workers will follow the demand for workers, and that workers themselves will know how to meet the demand by educating themselves to be marketable. That would, in its caricature, be a kind of free market way of placing value on education.

The "second way," to stick with caricature, might be described as saying that workers should be protected and receive generous benefits from the state regardless of their capability to contribute to the productivity of the economy.

The Third Way, and this will probably be a little bit of a caricature too, is that social policy and government institutions should improve education so that those workers who are not able to maintain a standard of living through market mechanisms can prepare themselves to rise to levels demanded by the New Economy. Schools and other institutions of society have an important role to play in this. Their future cannot simply be left to the market.

I call to your attention to an article by Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin in the latest issue of the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council, in which they contend that unions have a central role to play in enhancing the skills and education of the workforce, and that this can be an important tool in trade union organizing as we move deeper and deeper into a New Economy. Those of us who have had long associations with teacher unionism and with the role of the AFL-CIO in promoting public education know that this is an important issue for the whole labor movement. If my history is right, labor was the key force in American public life pressing for universality and equality in education and demanding that government assume the role of providing that education for the whole of society.

But while everybody agrees that education is one of the paramount justifications for strong and effective government, we nevertheless face an intense and sometimes ferocious debate about how education should be structured, and what philosophy should be followed, in providing the best education for our citizens. This education debate is at the center of our conversation about the Third Way. How much of it should be public and how much should be private is a central question for any dialogue with our own Administration and with other countries which have adopted a Third Way, social democratic outlook. There are any number of presidents and prime ministers and chancellors and governors throughout the world vying to capture the title of "education president" or "education chancellor." The outcome is important not only to parents and to people who are concerned about the well-being of children and families, but to those who sit in boardrooms and on planning groups that guide industry and finance, both at the national and the international level.

Sandra Feldman's message is one that is echoed in other areas of public debate, especially among people who would associate themselves with the Third Way position. She spoke about what's right in America as well as what's wrong. There is wisdom in being able to acknowledge what has been accomplished. Otherwise, if you only talk about gloom and doom, it becomes more difficult to convince people there is any hope of solving the problems. President Clinton's State of the Union message, as well as comments by some of the newly elected leaders in Europe demonstrate this wisdom.

The Left made the mistake in times past of emphasizing gloom and doom, which is what people on the Right are doing today. They are going to lose if this is all they can preach.

The labor movement and public institutions have done things in America that are extremely successful. If we deny that there has been any success, why would anybody give us the authority or the power to solve any problem. We have got to be able to say, "We did some things right, they worked, let us do more." I believe that is one message of the Third Way.

Progress in Public Education – the Washington, DC Example

Joyce Ladner, Fellow, Governmental Studies, The Brookings Institution

I will talk about a reform agenda for the public schools from the perspective of having served on the D.C. Financial Control Board for three years ending May 31, 1998. It was a very difficult job, but one that had to be done.

Let me begin by saying that not all of our schools are failing, even in, and especially in, the inner cities. Not all of our teachers are ill prepared; not all our principals are ineffective. One can find pockets of excellence in this city -- and all over the country -- where the schools never stop being anything but very good. Unfortunately, however, many of our urban, inner city and poverty-area schools across the country have earned a reputation for being very, very poor. Although that's not always the case, there are some very serious problems.

In his State of the Union message, President Clinton stated that there are more children from diverse backgrounds in our public schools than at any other time in history, and that their education must provide the knowledge and nurture the creativity that will allow our entire nation to thrive in the new economy. As Sandra Feldman spoke, I thought about all these young people, including those in Silicon Valley, who are developing the technology that is the wave of the future for the world. Most of them, in fact, have grown up in public schools in this country.

The President went on to identify the resources that the government has to put into public education. He talked about the goals that have been attained and noted that much needs to be done. He said that his proposed education accountability act will require that school districts which are receiving federal aid help take certain steps to achieve these goals. I was disappointed that he mentioned the Chicago school reform without mentioning the District of Columbia's public schools. The legislation that he is sending to the Congress will work to end social promotion, turn around the worst performing schools by reconstituting or closing them, insist that school districts and states hold teachers accountable, empower parents, issue report cards on each school so that parents and others -– citizens and taxpayers -- know what the schools are doing, and it will press for the adoption of sensible discipline policies.

The Washington, D.C. Case

I was a member on the five-member Control Board when we took the bold step, and what some say was a terrible step, of taking over the District of Columbia schools. I certainly was a strong, strong advocate for this. I don't apologize for this advocacy today even though some of my closest friends said that we abdicated the rights of citizens and overturned democracy. I had discovered that the way this democratic process was working in the schools was part of the problem -—part of the reason they were the way they were. The District had a school board -- and I am not talking out of turn here, because I told them the same thing -- that never really learned how to set policy. Rather, they dabbled in the inner workings of the schools in their wards. I frankly think that all school board members ought to be appointed or better still, elected at large in all cities, so that they don't become ward politicians as we have certainly seen take place in this city.

We were convinced after doing the study, which was called "Children of Crisis," that empirically, the longer children stayed in the schools, the worse they did. They came in and some -- many of them -- above the national average. We have a nationally renowned preschool program in the city that never stopped being good. It existed before the Control Board takeover, and it still exists. But as the kids got older and older, they plummeted, and their scores plummeted. And they did worse and worse.

We had to ask the question what happened to them? Governance was not the only issue, but it was a major part of the problem. Capital improvement was a also a major, major problem. Getting the schools opened on time was a problem. Social promotion was rampant, that's why we have been turning out kids who even today are not literate, and some are only semi-literate.

We got rid of the superintendent. We brought in one person, a general in the military and who I will always view as a ind of a turnaround person, and we gave him the title of Superintendent/CEO.

But the best thing we did was to bring in a person, his deputy, as the chief academic officer who is now the Superintendent of Schools and who is a real educator. After that period of a year or so of turnaround, we now have an educator at the helm who is really doing phenomenal things.

Let me just go over the list of things that have been done.

First, as President Clinton urged, for example, we stopped social promotion last spring. We had a record 25,000 attend summer school. We prepared for 15,000, at the most 20,000, to come to summer school. We ended up cutting off enrollment at 25,000. And, this is not just students for whom it was mandatory, but other students who wanted to come and whose parents felt that it was a good thing for them to be there. We have Saturday academies, we have extended day programs. We were able, after putting all of our emphasis on raising student achievement to see an improvement in test scores. We instituted a capital improvement plan that opens schools on time. You may not think that's terribly important, but in Washington where we have had trouble opening our schools, the beginning of the school year has become a political and a practical nightmare for parents and students. We were able to implement new math and reading content standards. One of the best things that we are about to unveil very soon, if we can get it passed through all these politicians, is school-based budgeting. We want a situation where there will be more equity and more parity in the poor schools and that all the resources will not be targeted to those areas where they are less needed than they are in some of the poorer areas. That's going to be a political fight.

We have also been able to bring in at least $9.5 million for school-to-career grants and have implemented a new instructional technology department. We now have all of our schools wired with the Internet for administrative purposes. Still, a major, major technology impediment remains. Urban schools, especially the older ones, are not adequately wired to enable us to bring all the students on line. And so I would urge you, if you are involved in your schools and in your communities, to advocate for more capital improvement funds in order to bring the schools up to standard.

This next point is very, very important, especially for union people. We have also implemented new evaluation standards for teachers and for principals. A lot of people simply say, "get rid of the poor performing teachers." But a lot of school systems have not had mechanisms in place to do so. But you can't do this arbitrarily -- the union is not going to allow you to kick people out if you haven't had due process for the teachers.

In the District of Columbia we now use uniform standards on which the union and the District have agreed. We have dismissed some teachers and we have dismissed some principals. We didn't just reassign bad principals and put them in another school. We took them out altogether. And that's how it should be. We also hired almost 40 new principals.

President Clinton said we need to empower parents. Well, we have established a parent's affairs office and a corporate community affairs office as well as a teacher's affairs office, all within the last year. He said we needed to train teachers, and we've developed and implemented professional development institutes for the teachers. We realized that a lot of these teachers are operating with one hand tied behind them. The data show that there is a disconnection between what is being taught in the schools of education by those who have little real-life experiences and what the teachers have to teach and what they have to cope with on the job. That is going to remain a major problem until we get more people who have applied knowledge about teaching and who can integrate theory and practice.

We've increased the number of whole-school reform models, based on partnerships with industry and with the religious community. One computer corporation, for example, a software development company, Oracle, has put computers on kids' desks and in their homes. I think that more partnerships like this one have to take place. We've done some other things, but for the most part these examples are the changes that we can see in the two years -- a little over two years -- since the schools have been under a different governance structure.

The elected school board will take over again in June 2000. It is absolutely necessary that the school board be given the opportunity to get the kind of training available to some school boards around the country. Ours has not yet taken advantage of that kind of opportunity, but they really need to. Otherwise they come in and they see their role as that of advocating and protecting the schools in their ward, regardless of what the system is doing. They want to give direction to the Superintendent, who really does not need day-to-day guidance on how to run a system. In fact, that's the last thing a School Board should do. Rather, it should set broad policy and then work hand-in-glove with the people who are running the system.

I think also that we as a nation -- and Sandra [Feldman] really pointed this out in her comments -- have not put our support dollars behind our schools. We do not budget appropriately at the federal and state level. In this city, where we have no state, our money comes through direct acts of the Congress. If we don't get the money from the Congress, we're generally very, very short. They have not built new schools in this city since the 1970s. All of the school facilities are in trouble. This means that old inventory that needs to be retired cannot be retired. In fact, it is very, very important all over this country to lobby for capital funds to rehabilitate old buildings and to build new schools.

From Busing to Neighborhood Schools

I believe also that we must shift the emphasis away from busing for the purpose of achieving racial integration. Rather, we need to go back to building high-quality, competitive neighborhood schools. I do not believe, and I don't think I have ever really been convinced, that moving a child from one neighborhood school to another neighborhood school really is going to give that child the superior education that is supposed to be the result.

I guess the reason I feel these beliefs so strongly, is because I grew up in the segregated Mississippi, where we always had substandard schools. We played basketball. We didn't have a football team because the county wouldn't buy our uniforms. We had outdoor clay courts for basketball courts. We had no lab equipment; we had hand-me-down textbooks from the white schools that came to us after they had used them for five years; only then did we get the books.

But what we had then and what so many children lack today are teachers who were part of our community. These were teachers who also believed firmly that their success was based entirely on their effectiveness in teaching us. They held themselves accountable. They felt that they were personal failures if we didn't learn. And since they were part of the community, they and our parents and all the other people in the community supported the same kinds of uniform values.

We don't have many uniform values in this country any more because of our diversity. But we do have uniform values on the concept of excellence. All of us believe that schools should have standards and that achievement is very, very important. We have recently developed uniform values on safety in schools. We are saying that schools have to be safe and that you must have an orderly environment in which to teach effectively. But the key is not to put the emphasis on racial diversity for its own sake. Rather, we must bring up the standards for all the schools regardless of which neighborhood or in which environment they are located.

I believe strongly that we ought to develop as many community schools in neighborhoods, especially in the high-need areas, as possible. New York City has done a wonderful job with its Beacon schools, they have life-long learning facilities and they have counseling facilities. But the great thing about the Beacon schools is the lack of stigma associated with attending them. No one knows why a person is going to the school. No one knows if someone is going into the school to get counseling for a drug or alcohol problem or if the reason is just to play bridge. I am not saying that teachers ought to assume responsibility for keeping schools open until midnight. But I believe that there are enough other people in communities. Why do we close these schools at three o'clock? The greatest asset, the greatest physical asset in the neighborhood is there - and it's empty.

National Standards and Core Knowledge

I also believe in national standards. I believe in core knowledge. I believe in "direct instruction" —- very specific instruction of selected knowledge and skills -- where necessary. At the same time, as an educator, I certainly believe in the flexibility of teaching styles. But I believe that there is in our society -- and competitive job markets are demonstrating this today -- a core body of knowledge to which all students ought to be exposed. I don't want to get into the cultural variation issue, but I think that we do need to teach all our students to learn, to express themselves verbally and in written form, and to compute. I don't know how you can function if you can't do those things, at least at a basic level.

I've been provost, chief academic officer at the University at Howard and then I was acting president, and I see what kind of people teach teachers. And not just Howard, but all over the country, half of them really don't know which end is up. They really do not know.

So, we need to address teacher training; that's a critical area. I'm not quite sure what to do about it. But we need a different kind of training in the colleges.

The education of the children is the most important thing for all Americans, whether or not they have children in the schools, whether or not they have grand kids. I cannot think of another area that is more important than the ability of the society to perpetuate itself at the highest level possible.

Joyce A. Ladner is currently a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She was named the first woman president of Howard University (1994-95). She was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the District of Columbia Financial Control Board, and she is a member of the U.S. Department of Justice's Advisory Council on Violence Against Women. Ms. Ladner has lectured, given television interviews, and published extensively in the areas of diversity, education, urban issues, public policy, the family, and child welfare. She has been a frequent contributor to the Washington Post Outlook, and she has published as well in the New York Times, Ebony, Essence and the Black Enterprise. She has authored or co-authored several books, including the recently published The Ties That Bind: Timeless Values for African American Families (1999); Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman (rev. ed.), (University of Nebraska Press, 1995); The Death of White Sociology (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1998); Mixed Families: Adopting Across Racial Boundaries (Doubleday, 1977); Adolescence and Poverty: Challenge for the 1990s (with Peter Edelman), Center for National Policy Press, 1991); Lives of Promise, Lives of Pain: Young Mothers After New Chance, Janet Quint, Judith Musick and Joyce Ladner, New York: MDRC, 1994. Ms. Ladner has received numerous awards including the Distinguished Alumni award from Washington University, St. Louis; the Doctor of Humane Letters from Howard University and Tougaloo College. Ms. Ladner received her BA in sociology from Tougaloo College in 1964; her MA in 1966 and the Ph.D. in 1968 in sociology from Washington University in St. Louis.

A Third Way for Education Reform

Richard Kahlenberg, Fellow, the Century Fund

In This Document: At a recent conference in Washington, Kahlenberg, a Century Foundation fellow and frequent commentator on education, equal opportunity and civil rights, insists that education, now foremost on the minds of Americas, must be improved dramatically. As a counter to the Clinton Administration and GOP plans, he proposes "a Third Way of sorts on the education front" -- not simply spending more money, but making "common schools more common" by integrating them by economic status. Kahlenberg contends that greater diversity in the classroom based on class rather than race is a better option than privatization and school vouchers.

The conventional wisdom today is that we're not ready for more big ideas, certainly not more big initiatives from government. But in fact, there is a tremendous opportunity in the education field for us to do some very exciting things to improve public education. I say that for three reasons: The first is, we clearly have the public's attention. Education is the number one issue in all the polls. President Clinton clearly understands that. People have mentioned that he acts like the Superintendent of the United States, which is very smart politically. Dick Morris has noted that for a dozen years the Republicans ran their presidential candidates as sheriff for the United States, turning the crime issue into a federal issue, which it had never been before; and that Clinton, quite rightly, has nationalized the education issue. So, the first point is that the public is engaged.

The second point is that the voucher threat is greater than ever, as Sandra Feldman mentioned. There as been a dramatic drop in opposition to vouchers. There were 74 percent in opposition as recently as 1993, and now it's down to 52 percent. Some polls show that a majority of Americans support vouchers. Although that is a troubling development, it represents an opportunity to do some very dramatic things to improve public education. That is to say, those on our side of the voucher question will be more open to radical change because of the voucher threat.

The third reason there is an important opportunity to reform education is that education is the only area where Americans remain truly progressive. If you ask Americans why they think poor people are poor, they list five reasons. The first is lack of thrift; the second is lack of effort; third is lack of ability; fourth is negative attitudes; and the fifth is bad public schools. The last reason is the only public policy handle we have. For the most part, people in America believe that the poor are poor because of personal failings. The one exception is the public schools. This provides a real chance to do something dramatic.

A Third Way Based on Class, not Race

Since this conference is about the Third Way, I will propose a Third Way on the education front, not so much a centrist, compromise type of third way, but a third approach to addressing equal opportunity that goes beyond traditional reforms.

The First Way was Brown v. Board of Education and racial desegregation. Here, I differ somewhat with Joyce Ladner. Studies suggest that there were gains in academic achievement among African Americans because of desegregation, particularly in the South, and that white scores didn't decline. But I agree that this movement has pretty much run out of gas.

In the 1970s when the Supreme Court said that we couldn't pull in the suburbs to aid racial desegregation plans, we ended up busing poor whites and poor blacks back and forth within the city boundaries, and from an academic standpoint that does very little good. And today, even those particular court orders are winding down, city after city is being released and the courts view racial desegregation not as an approach to promote equal opportunity, but rather as a kind of temporary punishment for wrongdoing, and so there is not much hope in that way one.

The Second Way is an approach that emphasizes equal and compensatory educational spending. If we can't have integrated schools, at least let's make Plessy v. Ferguson work. That seems to be the approach, and Title I, which is up for reauthorization this year, is at the centerpiece of that effort. I clearly favor spending more on people who are in high poverty schools; I think that on the margins it can make some difference. But in the end, spending more hasn't worked historically and I don't think will work because it ignores what is really the difference between good schools and bad schools, which isn't so much money as something else, which I will get to in a second.

The studies show that if you put a given child in an integrated school that spends less and compare them to a very similar child who goes to a school that spends more but is segregated by race and class, the child in the integrated setting does much, much better. There are rare cases where we can make high-poverty schools work, but those are very difficult to replicate. After all of our efforts in the racial desegregation area and in the equalization of spending area, the average 17-year old who is urban and disadvantaged, reads at the same level as the average 13-year old who is advantaged and suburban. That is to say, there is a four-year gap on the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.

Clinton, GOP Education Plans

President Clinton has proposed a number of things -- ending social promotion, raising standards, reducing class size, improving teacher quality -- I am for all these things, but even if we succeed in every one of these areas, we will not have done all that much to reduce the gap between rich and poor. The alternative vision that I want to suggest is something much more ambitious.

The Republicans are proposing something very ambitious -- vouchers which would revolutionize the way we deal with education. We must respond with something comparably big and ambitious. I propose is that we integrate the public schools by economic status. That is to say, we go back to Horace Mann's idea of a common school, where you had the factory owner's child and the laborer's child going to the same school. This is a very American notion. It's also a very democratic notion and an egalitarian notion, but one that we haven't really put into practice. The idea here is to make the common schools more common.

If you ask yourself why it is that certain schools are considered bad, people will talk about low standards, bad teachers, a negative environment, and inactive parents. But the common denominator is really the social class of the students attending the school. Incidentally, that is one of the major differences between our country and the European countries. Sandy Feldman was talking earlier about the fact that we haven't achieved at the same level. Those countries don't have the economic segregation of the public schools that we find in this country.

Studies shows that those born into a poor family have one disadvantage or one strike against them. But there is a second and independent disadvantage: Attending a high-poverty school. It is so bad in fact, that you're better off if you were born poor and attend a middle class school than you are if you born middle class and attend a high-poverty school. Middle class kids attending a high-poverty school achieve in the aggregate on a lower level than the poor kids attending middle class schools.

Three Problems With High-Poverty Schools

High-poverty schools are problematic for three reasons. The first is that if you go to a high-poverty school, students are much less likely to be high achieving. They come to the school with much smaller vocabularies; they are twice as likely to cut class; they are less likely to aspire to college; they are three times as likely to engage in misbehavior. Second, parents are much less likely to be involved and support in the school, and they are four times as likely to be involved in the PTA, for example.

Third, the teachers in the high-poverty school are, in the aggregate, not the kind of teachers that we want for those students who are most in need. They are four times as likely to teach out of field -- that is teaching in an area they are not trained in -- and they have very low expectations for the students. On average, earning a C in a middle class school is equivalent to earning an A in a high-poverty school. So the kids in the high-poverty school, even those who are talented and smart and deserve to be held to high expectations, are in fact receiving a watered-down curriculum, and are subject to low expectations.

So the point here is even if we equalize spending so that the high-poverty schools receive just as much or even more than the middle-class schools, we will not have done enough -- separate cannot be equal. And so I argue that we should try to integrate public schools, give more kids hope; expose them to positive peer influences; have them attend schools where there is a critical mass of middle-class parents who are involved in the school, where the teaching is likely to be of higher quality, and where the kids will get to know other kids who then will be able to help them get a job down the line, or whose parents would be able to help them.

A Legal and Political Strategy

I propose a legal strategy and a political strategy. Very briefly, the legal strategy is that in those states where the courts have ruled that we should equalize spending, we should push for an effort also to equalize access to middle-class schools, which as I pointed out is more important than the spending per se. There is a case in Connecticut, Sheff v. O'Neil, that said something very close to this and it's quite exciting. A case being brought in Rochester, New York, makes a similar point.

The second strategy would be political. We've got to harness the movement towards public school choice and towards charter schools to try to integrate the schools by social class. What is exciting about public school choice and what is exciting about charter schools is that they are not bound to the neighborhood per se. So there is a chance that if we assert public policy aggressively, we can create more economically diverse classrooms.

This is an ambitious proposal, but the polls suggest that that's what people want. They want our public officials to act boldly and aggressively. In 1997, a Wall Street/NBC poll asked, "What kind of change do you think we need in public education: fundamental change, some change, minor change or no change?" One percent said no change; 4 percent said minor change; 35 percent said some change; and 58 percent said we need fundamental change.

The Republicans and Conservatives are offering a vision of fundamental change; they want to privatize education. We have to have something in response that is more than school uniforms. The notion of the common school, which has always been the symbol of our democracy, offers a compelling vision that we ought to consider.

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a Fellow at the Century Foundation/Twentieth Century Fund, where he writes about education, equal opportunity and civil rights. He is the author of The Remedy--Class, Race, and Affirmative Action, published by Basic Books in June 1996. The book argues that preferences in education, employment, and contracting should be based on class disadvantage rather than race or gender. Mr. Kahlenberg's writings on affirmative action have also been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and elsewhere. Mr. Kahlenberg has discussed affirmative action on ABC's Nightline, CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC's InterNight with Katie Couric, and National Public Radio. He has spoken on affirmative action in numerous settings, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Georgetown, the University of Southern California, New York University, William and Mary, and the Brookings Institution. A legal scholar and political insider, Mr. Kahlenberg has served as a fellow at the Center for National Policy, a visiting associate professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, and a legislative assistant to Senator Charles S. Robb (D-VA). In June 1996, Mr. Kahlenberg began research on a third book, sponsored by the Century Foundation Twentieth Century Fund and the Spencer Foundation, on the subject of inequality in education. The book contends that integrating the public schools by social class will improve the life chances of disadvantaged students. Mr. Kahlenberg graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in1985 and cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1989.