Education Reform’s Two-Month Warning

By PAUL TOUGH

In writing my essay on education reform that appears in this weekend’s magazine, I parachuted myself into an already crowded (and fairly angry) field of pundits reacting to Diane Ravitch’s June 1 Op-Ed column in The Times. In the essay, I mentioned Jonathan Alter’s response and Tim King’s. There was also this retort from David Brooks and a reply to Brooks from the journalistJohn Merrow.

In the midst of that roiling sea of opinion, one commentary that I thought deserved more attention was this one, by Michael J. Petrilli, an education analyst and researcher with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

I disagree with some of Petrilli’s conclusions, but I admire his essay nonetheless. I like the clear-eyed way he analyzes the prospects of young Americans in poverty and the honesty he demonstrates in proposing a solution to their education challenges. He writes:

Rather than get defensive at Diane’s defeatism, we reformers should clarify the ends that education reform canachieve. If not 100 percent proficiency, then what?

Try this exercise. This fall, about 1 million poor children will enroll in kindergarten in the U.S. The vast majority of them live in single-parent families headed by women in the late teens or early 20s. Most of their mothers dropped out of high school; most of their fathers are nowhere to be seen. Most live in urban or rural communities hit hard by the recession where unemployment, addiction, and violence are commonplace. … Now, try to “see like a state” and play policy maker. When designing a school accountability system, what should its objectives be with respect to these 1 million children?

What I like about Petrilli’s approach is that it gets very specific and very immediate about the landscape in front of us: 1 million poor kids entering kindergarten in less than two months. And it challenges us with the fact that as policy makers – or voters or taxpayers – we are responsible for making dozens of different policy decisions, both inside and outside schools, that will directly affect how well those kids will do in school and how many of them will graduate from high school and from college.

I like Petrilli’s question. I just don’t like his answer. I think he sets the bar way too low:

Assuming that these 1 million kids remain poor over the next 12 years, what outcomes would indicate “success” for education reform? Right now the high school graduation rate in poor districts is generally about 50 percent. What if we moved that to 60 percent? Right now the reading proficiency rate for 12th graders with parents who dropped out of high school is 17 percent. What if we moved that to 25 percent? The same rate for math is 8 percent. What if we moved that to 15 percent?

To my eye, these are stretch goals – challenging but attainable. Yet to adopt them would mean to expect about 400,000 kindergarteners not to graduate from high school 12 years from now. And of the 600,000 that do graduate, we would expect only 150,000 to reach proficiency in reading (25 percent) and just 90,000 of them to be proficient in math (15 percent).

Petrilli is right that these results would be a significant improvement on where we are today. But I certainly hope that he’s wrong that they are the most we can hope to achieve. Do we really want to accept that the best that the United States can do for those 1 million 5-year-olds, with 13 years and vast resources at our disposal, is to get 90,000 of them to proficiency in math, while we let the other 910,000 fail?

To me, a goal that is more closely aligned with the ideals of the nation, while still entirely realistic, would be the one that the Gates Foundation has adopted, to have 80 percent of American teenagers graduating from high school “with the knowledge and skills they need to complete college.” Or thegoal of the KIPP charter schools: for 75 percent of their (mostly low-income) incoming fifth-grade students to go on to earn a four-year college degree.

Once we decide on the targets we want to reach, the rest is relatively straightforward (though still incredibly difficult): finding the cheapest, fastest and most effective interventions to get us there.

I don’t agree with analysts like Richard Rothstein, who argue that the best way to reach our goal is to embrace a traditional (and expensive) list of liberal social policies: increase the minimum wage, expand housing subsidies, strengthen unions, improve dental care, etc. Those may or may not be worthy aims on their own, but I have seen little evidence that they would have a significant effect on the academic achievement of low-income students. But I also don’t agree with those reformers who say that classroom interventions alone will get us to our goal. To me, the evidence from the last decade suggests otherwise.

Instead, I am trying to encourage reformers to add to their current list of policy goals some targeted, evidence-based programs that are narrowly focused on improving school performance for children from the most disadvantaged families. That might mean a radical overhaul of Head Start; it might mean more and better early-home-visiting programs, especially for young single mothers; it might mean a very different kind of child-protective-services system.

It will definitely mean a very different kind of conversation about education than the one we are having today.

Beginning that conversation would require all of us – including both reformers and their ideological opponents – to enter some scary and unfamiliar territory. But Petrilli has given us the perfect inspiration to overcome those fears: the image of 1 million poor 5-year-olds, getting ready to slip on their Dora the Explorer backpacks and head off for the first day of school this fall, counting on our help to get them to and through college.