[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON APRIL 25, 2003 ]

Students in a fog

By Richard Rothstein

Federal law now demands that schools close the achievement gap between middle-class children and those from low-income or minority families. But all the money, teacher education and standardized tests in the world aren’t going to help if students are at home sick or falling asleep in class.

That is why educators should be alarmed by last week’s report from Harlem Hospital medical researchers who found that 26 percent of children in central Harlem had asthma. This is notonly a health crisis but also an educational one. Asthma is the chronic ailment most responsible for school absences of low-income children nationwide. Even when they make it to school, asthmatics, drowsy after a sleepless night of wheezing, have a tough time paying attention.

Although there may be a genetic predisposition to asthma, its growth in places like Harlem is almost certainly due to environmental hazards. Young people in a densely populated area like Harlem breathe more pollutants than suburban youths.

Fortunately, there are ways to cut down on urban pollutants that affect children. One would be to replace diesel-burning trucks and buses with vehicles using natural gas. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York uses natural gas for most buses on Long Island, but for few in Manhattan. Five of Manhattan’s seven diesel bus depots — where buses give off pollutants as they idle and re-fuel — are north of 96th Street, in or near Harlem.
Diesel-powered school buses, like those used in New York and many other cities, may add to the asthma problem. Children breathe diesel particulates as they stand on sidewalks, waiting to board. Buses idle at schools before dismissal. According to a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, exposure to fumes is even greater inside the buses than outside them. It would be costly to require bus contractors to convert to natural gas, but if the expense were presented as a way to raise test scores, it might be more palatable.

When the children get home, they face another threat. Federal law requires trucks and buses to get the sulfur content in diesel fuel down to 15 parts per million by 2006. But this doesn’t cover home heating oil, which can have a sulfur content of 3,000 parts per million. In poor urban places, landlords tend to use oil with a higher particulate count because it’s cheaper. For New Yorkers, a bill pending in Albany would apply the diesel standard to home heating oil, but it is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled State Senate. In the meantime, New York City should step up its presently weak enforcement of laws that prohibit burners from spewing black smoke.

Asthma is not the only urban environmental scourge that depresses school performance. Lower birth weights — more likely with newborns in minority, low-income neighborhoods — are also associated with greater exposure to pollutants and can lead to lower I.Q.’s.

Likewise, we’ve long known that lead poisoning can cause cognitive damage that inhibits children’s abilities to learn. Nationwide, lead poisoning rates declined once lead was removed from gasoline in the 1970’s, but the improvements were less dramatic among low-income urban children. Congress banned use of lead-based paint in home construction in 1978, but low-income children are the group most likely to live in buildings constructed before that date. Children can ingest lead from peeling paint or from dust generated when windows are opened and rub along their frames.

In 1999, New York City weakened its lead control law; landlords are no longer required to remove lead paint that might cause dust, but only peeling paint. A bill to strengthen the law is before the City Council, but shows little movement.
There are many reasons that children from poor households struggle academically: inferior schools, health care, housing and nutrition; financial insecurity; and exposure to pollutants. Each has only a small effect on education, but combined, the impact is huge. All need to be addressed if we want to close the test-score gap.

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[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON OCTOBER 30, 2002 ]

Juggling 3 school goals, Texas trips

By  Richard Rothstein

PLANO, Tex. — Most Americans want low taxes, good schools and equal access to public education for the rich and the poor. Texas has pushed this combination farther than any other state, but the three elements are contradictory. The Texas system is about to implode, with lessons for other states (like New York) that will later face similar crises.

Texas has one of the most egalitarian school finance systems in the nation: Average spending varies between rich and poor districts by only about $600 per student. This has been accomplished by limiting the property tax rate to no more than $1.50 for every $100 of assessed valuation in rich and poor districts alike, and by forcing rich districts to transfer some of their revenue to poor districts.

Texans call their school finance legislation, adopted in 1993, the Robin Hood law.

Communities with more than about $300,000 of assessed value for each enrolled student must turn over any taxes they collect on value above this amount to the state for redistribution. Or they can donate the excess directly to poorer districts. Because wealthy districts cannot make up for this loss by raising taxes above the $1.50 limit, they have no choice but to reduce the quality of education as costs rise.

That is what is now taking place in Plano, a wealthy suburb of Dallas. This town of affluent professionals and corporate headquarters turns over one out of every four property tax dollars it collects to poorer districts. Plano East High School is now slashing the elite programs that prepare its youth for competitive colleges and professional careers.

Before the Robin Hood law, high school English teachers in Plano could critique a lot of written work because they taught only 80 students in four classes. Now the student load is 140. Advanced placement class sizes have grown to over 30 students from under 20. Before Robin Hood, if a few students wanted to study Russian or Japanese, Plano hired teachers for them. No longer. Small classes to explore careers in psychology or law have been eliminated.

Mary Lou Buntyn, chairwoman of the Plano East history department, said she used to teach seminar-style, with chairs arranged in a semicircle and students challenging each other’s interpretations. Now, with as many as 35 in a class, students sit in rows and are more passive.

Last year, Plano and other wealthy districts sued the state, claiming the Robin Hood system prevented them from providing the “general diffusion of knowledge” to which children are entitled. The suit was dismissed. The appeals court said the Texas constitution only entitles children to attend an accredited public school, not get all the benefits of schooling at Plano East. A tax rate of $1.50 is certainly enough to support a minimally accredited school.

The trial judge quipped, “Football is not protected by the Constitution.”

Opposing Plano and the other wealthy-district plaintiffs were the property-poor districts whose spending has gone up from receipt of the excess payments of the rich districts. Leaders of the poor districts say they do not oppose letting places like Plano spend more money, provided all schools can spend more, and equalization is maintained.

Anger about erosion of a privileged status is spreading in wealthy (and politically influential) districts. Hyperbolic language grows. Some parents in Plano say they want to secede from the state. The superintendent of another district said there would be “blood in the streets” if she continued to cut programs.

But nobody seems to know where to find the money to let places like Plano keep high standards while preserving equality for poorer districts. The Texas Constitution prohibits an income tax unless voters approve, and even then requires that most of the new revenue be used for property tax reduction, not education or other services. The sales tax in urban areas is already 8 ¼ percent and cannot go much higher.

Texas school leaders say they need more money but are afraid to advocate new taxes. Corporate executives support better schools but have little appetite for paying to achieve them. Escaping the state’s business tax by reorganizing with a Delaware address is one gambit.

A court ruling in New York has also said that state’s Constitution mandates only a minimal education, not a good one. Advocates for urban districts that spend less than the suburbs are now negotiating with the governor for new financing that will bring needy schools more dollars. But nobody has broached reaching the full equality that would allow New York City to have the kind of education found in Scarsdale.

In Texas, it has become ever more clear that low taxes, great schools and equality are incompatible. Sooner, rather than later, Texans will have to choose which they plan to forgo. Then, so will the rest of us.

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[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON OCTOBER 23, 2002 ]

Voter mandates and bilingual education

By  Richard Rothstein

Carrollton, Tex. — In November, voters in Colorado and Massachusetts will decide on initiatives that would ban bilingual education. Arizona and California have already adopted similar measures. Proponents, who want all instruction in English, rely on a claim that early-20th-century immigrants succeeded by that method, called English immersion.

But the claim is largely false. A century ago, dropout and failure rates were much higher among the many immigrants from illiterate backgrounds than they are today.

Secretary of Education Rod Paige opposes the proposals, saying decisions about the proportion of English and a child’s native language should be made at the “point of instruction.”

That is the approach here in the affluent Dallas suburb of Carrollton, which is mostly non-Hispanic but has a growing population of Hispanic immigrants. Decisions about how much English a child should have at any given time are made by teachers, with parents’ consent. The many factors they weigh show why a flat ban on bilingual education is unlikely to improve immigrants’ chances of success.

Carrollton’s providing some instruction in Spanish is intended to help students reach grade level as rapidly as possible. Children learn English for part of the day but study other subjects in Spanish. Then, when they are ready to join regular classes, they don’t start off behind in math, science, social studies and literary skills.

Even English-speaking children will often do poorly if their parents had a poor education and are unfamiliar with academic culture. When those handicaps are compounded by trying to learn in a language that the student does not comprehend, success is even less likely.

So when children from Spanish-speaking homes in Carrollton enter school, teachers assess their fluency in both English and Spanish. Those who are stronger in Spanish are put in bilingual classes where math, science and social studies are taught for half the day in Spanish, with the other half in English.

Some immigrants may be stronger in English, though far behind their peers in both languages, if their home literacy in Spanish is poor. This gives teachers little on which to build in Spanish, so such children get classes taught mainly in English.

Most language experts say it usually takes Spanish-speaking children five to seven years of bilingual instruction to be ready for mainstream English classes. But Carrollton administrators usually move children to regular classes after three years, provided they pass the Texas minimum-skills test in English.

Annette Griffin, superintendent of schools, says her staff balances several factors in deciding how much Spanish and English each child should have. Bilingual teachers are in short supply, so the district concentrates them where they are most needed, in the early grades. After three years in bilingual classes, many children have enough English fluency that regular teachers can give whatever extra help they need.

Although such children are not as English-fluent after three years of bilingual education as most American-born peers, they may benefit from the influence of English-speaking classmates. The social value of an English environment has to be weighed against the instructional value of more Spanish teaching. (This consideration, to be sure,  is a luxury that other districts can’t indulge if they have few nonimmigrant peers with whom the immigrants can integrate.)

Support of “point of instruction” decisions on the teaching of immigrants is a rare case where the Bush administration wants to defer to teachers and professional educators. Perhaps the reason is that Texas, the president’s home state, has a policy of teaching in native languages and introducing English gradually. That bilingual approach has proved more successful than English-only.

Some districts have had success by using even more Spanish than Carrollton. A recent study of the schools in Houston, where Secretary Paige was previously superintendent, found that when Hispanic immigrant children had more instruction in Spanish, their English scores were higher than those of other immigrants and they were less likely to drop out.

Houston usually keeps children in bilingual education longer than the three years Carrollton aims for. In fact, the Texas Education Agency recently told Carrollton schools to increase their emphasis on Spanish.

Perhaps Carrollton’s effort to speed the transition to English has been unwise, and academic gains from more Spanish instruction outweigh social gains from integrating native and non-native English speakers. Perhaps scarce bilingual teachers should be spread among more grade levels. Perhaps regular teachers give poor support to English learners in busy classrooms.

Or perhaps future research will show that immersing immigrants in English-speaking classes has benefits that have yet been undetected.

But one thing is certain: The worst way to resolve these issues is by voter mandates that prevent the decisions from being made at the “point of instruction.”

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[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON OCTOBER 16, 2002 ]

With this gift horse, take a very close look

By  Richard Rothstein

At a meeting of foundation executives last week, Secretary of Education Rod Paige was asked how school superintendents should handle philanthropists. Dr. Paige replied that they should be more willing to turn away donors whose offers do not advance a district’s own priorities.

Caroline Kennedy should ponder that advice in her new role as the chief fund-raiser of the New York City schools. Some wealthy patrons may care more about making a name for themselves by financing unique projects than about supporting the unglamorous work of operating good schools. The judgment of donors is sometimes wiser than that of school officials, and sometimes not.

Michael E. Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, has observed that some of what foundations give away is in effect the public’s money. Philanthropists get tax breaks when they endow foundations: for every $10 they donate, government loses about $4 in taxes.

Because foundations give away only about 5 1/2 percent of their assets each year, public institutions would do better in the short run if grants came directly from individuals: for the $4 in lost taxes, schools and other services get foundation grants of 55 cents a year.

This trade-off is worthwhile when a foundation suggests projects that public officials didn’t imagine or for which they could not get political approval to spend public money, or at least spend as much of it as they need to. But it is hard to separate good ideas from foundation proposals that, while seemingly attractive, may be passing fads or only a way to advertise a donor’s virtue.

In New York City, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is helping to break up large high schools into smaller units. The idea is that adolescents need stable relationships with teachers who understand each student’s intellectual and personal problems. Some New York educators already valued small schools and had developed about 100 of them before the Gates Foundation came to call, so private money reinforced a priority that many in the system had already embraced.

But another foundation helped to create the problem that Gates now hopes to solve. Giant high schools were promoted 40 years ago, when the Carnegie Corporation sponsored a campaign by James B. Conant, a former president of Harvard University, to consolidate small high schools. Dr. Conant wanted schools to be large enough to offer both an elite curriculum to students who scored well on standardized tests and a large variety of vocational and less demanding courses to the rest.

Many urban schools were already large before the Carnegie campaign, but the rise of large schools was accelerated by the foundation’s influence.

Only a few years ago, most big donors believed that middle schools needed more attention than high schools. Influential foundations financed training for middle-school teachers to create personalized environments and better instruction.

Have most large foundations now turned their attention elsewhere because middle schools are fixed? Did the Gates Foundation adopt change in high schools because a focus on middle schools was wrong? Or did Gates want to promote its name in a new field rather than play second fiddle to those already working to improve middle schools?

Gates’s small-schools initiative may now be just what is needed, but the foundation’s earlier ventures were flawed. For example, it previously offered a few days of training to every principal in the country, an effort to which states gave matching funds. (Nobody, after all, is against training principals.). Training so brief will have little lasting effect, and took school officials’ scarce time and energy to administer.

Grants for principal and superintendent training are fashionable nowadays. Many foundations believe that executives with private-sector experience have a lot to teach about leadership, and that may often be true.

But not always. One businessman recruited to be a schools superintendent is Joseph Olchefske, in Seattle. Mr. Olchefske recently announced that budgeting errors had led to a $33 million shortfall in district finances. Having professional managers run schools is no guarantee of improvement.

With New York schools pressed for dollars, Caroline Kennedy will seek more gifts from foundations, corporations and individuals. But she will have to siphon fads that might later cause regret, like Carnegie’s comprehensive high schools, from well-thought-out ideas like the Gates emphasis on small schools today.

She will have to ensure that privately supported programs last long enough to make a difference, not only until a foundation’s new trustees or administrators have new (and not necessarily better) ideas about how to fix schools.

Secretary Paige warned last week that too many school officials were “jerked off center” by philanthropists with their own priorities. Ms. Kennedy should try to avoid that.

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[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON OCTOBER 9, 2002 ]

Dropout rate is climbing and likely to go higher

By  Richard Rothstein

With so much attention paid to test scores, an equally important gauge of school performance has mostly been overlooked. High school dropout rates seem to have jumped.

Although dropouts are notoriously hard to track, the best available data show that in 1990, 26 percent of American adolescents failed to graduate from high school. By 2000, the figure had risen, to 30 percent.

Some states may have done a better job than others. Dropout rates in New York and Texas appear to have gone up by about as much as the national average. California’s rate grew less, while rates in Massachusetts and North Carolina grew more.

Changes in dropout rates attract little notice, partly because they are difficult to calculate. A school has no way to keep track of students who leave. If they move, they may show up in another school and should not be counted as dropouts. Counselors have little choice but to accept the word of students who say they will enroll elsewhere.

Accounting for immigrants, whose numbers grew in the 90’s, confounds matters further. A teenager who migrates here and never enrolls in school or enrolls only briefly is counted as a dropout, although American schools should not be held responsible for the failure to graduate. These immigrants, however, may not explain all the increase in dropouts.

The most widely reported figures on completing school are from the Census Bureau, which regularly surveys young adults. But the Census counts as “completers” those who dropped out but passed a high school equivalency test.

The equivalency exam probably requires less proficiency than a diploma, even after it was toughened this year. Because the number of dropouts who received equivalency certificates grew in the 90’s, the Census’ completion rate has fallen more slowly than the actual graduation rate.

With dropout data so difficult to pin down, there has been too little discussion about why the rate apparently climbed. One worrisome possibility is that as states required students to pass tests for promotion, more pupils who were held back now leave school when they are old enough to do so.

States are beginning to require students to pass graduation exams that are tougher than the equivalency test. California, Florida, Massachusetts and New York are among these. If the modestly higher standards of the last decade were themselves enough to cause dropout rates to rise, the new exit exams could produce even more failure.

It is inevitable that tougher diploma requirements will cause some increase in dropouts. No exam should be so easy that everyone can pass. Students who succeed on the new tests may know more than their predecessors. The price for this higher achievement for some is that others will fail. The trade-off cannot be eliminated but can be made less severe by lowering standards or by giving extra help to those most likely to drop out.

The decline in high school graduation suggests that neither strategy was sufficiently employed in the 90’s.

Lowering standards, at least until we figure out why the dropout rate has gone up, may not be such a bad idea. Studies that compare high school graduates to young people who took equivalency exams find that even among those who have similar academic scores graduates have higher earnings, more employment success and less crime than those who received equivalency certificates.

A plausible explanation is that employers reward the social habits and discipline that youths gain from staying in school to graduate, even when their academic level is below what we now want graduates to achieve. Or perhaps the self-confidence of young adults is greater if they graduate from high school than if they drop out to earn certificates, and that confidence translates into greater adult success.

New York State used to award one type of diploma to students in college-preparatory programs and another to those who took less demanding courses. The second option has been eliminated. Students who fail on the academic diploma track will have little choice but to drop out.

Abolishing the lower track was justified by saying that schools have low expectations for many students, particularly minorities. Eliminating less demanding courses was expected to remove an excuse that schools might use to avoid challenging disadvantaged students to strive for college eligibility.

But a big jump in the dropout rate was not foreseen. Although some students were inspired to reach for a higher standard, too many others either have not had the opportunity to succeed at the higher level or have not been able to do so.

Without academic policies that are more realistically calibrated, both to students’ abilities and to their opportunities, the dropout rate could continue its climb.

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[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON OCTOBER 2, 2002 ]

Books often give history a facelift

By Richard Rothstein

The Texas Board of Education will decide in November which history textbooks may be used in the state. Activists on the left and right are lobbying the board, to influence its choices.

One text has already been withdrawn because it referred to prostitution in frontier towns. A board member felt this was inappropriate for high school students to read.

A group called the Texas Public Policy Foundation has attacked the simplistic glorification of minority groups that is now conventional in American education.

The foundation wants texts modified to tell how African chieftains, not Europeans, captured slaves for sale in America. It wants to emphasize the role of white Europeans in ending slavery. It objects to portrayals of President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as civil rights supporters, noting that the brothers refused to support the movement at crucial times.

The group also wants texts to say that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to own guns and that the wealthy pay a disproportionate share of income taxes.

American publishers sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of social studies texts each year. Texas is the second-largest buyer in that market, after California. Because issuing separate editions for each state is expensive, changes required by Texas will affect texts everywhere.

There is nothing new about this. As Frances FitzGerald noted in her 1979 book, “America Revised,” since the 1950’s “New England children, whose ancestors heartily disapproved of the Mexican War, have grown up with heroic tales of Davy Crockett and Sam Houston” — not because historians felt the war was justified but to appease Texans who decided which books were acceptable.

Nor is Texas the only place where schoolbooks have been pawns in adult political fights.

A new book by Jonathan Zimmerman, “Whose America?” (Harvard University Press, 2002), develops Ms. FitzGerald’s themes. Dr. Zimmerman shows how early 20th-century texts described the American Revolution as a complex event, including class conflict between propertied and poor colonists. Antagonism of colonists toward England was played down, and support for independence by some Englishmen was highlighted.

Dr. Zimmerman says this treatment partly resulted from growing numbers of immigrants in schools at the time. Educators aimed to get children “Americanized,” defined as adopting Anglo-Saxon culture and identity. Demonization of King George III would have undermined this goal.

The perspective was reversed in the 1920’s as newly powerful Irish immigrant leaders demanded a more anti-British stance. William H. Thompson, Chicago’s Irish-American mayor, had the city’s school superintendent dismissed for using “treasonous” pro-British texts.

The country’s most popular history textbook was then revised to remove descriptions of protesters against the Stamp Act as a “mob” and of Boston Massacre victims as “ruffians.” In New York City, politicians demanded that books portray the Revolution as a crusade of other nationalities against the British. Minor revolutionary figures like the Poles Thaddeus Kosciusko and Casimir Pulaski, the Jew Haym Solomon, the Frenchman the Marquis de Lafayette and the German Friedrich von Steuben became heroes in the revised curriculum.

This multicultural fable remains a staple of history texts.

Today’s books, and standardized tests issued by the same publishers, not only portray each minority as heroic, but every group (and each sex) is airbrushed to eliminate the possibility of stereotyping.

Portrayals of African-Americans as maids or athletes (except for Jackie Robinson), of women as housewives, of Mexicans as farm laborers or of Jews as businessmen are not permitted. This ensures that books and tests pass muster without objection from officials in Texas and other states that also allow schools to buy only approved texts.

Are books now more bland and mythical than before? Perhaps not, but they may be more dangerous. In the past, some states, districts and schools could dissent and use books with different slants from the one in fashion. Teachers who had historical sophistication could add their own materials or ignore the texts altogether.

But today, curriculums are more standardized, especially as we measure all students with similar tests. On the one hand, policy makers want teachers to have more knowledge in the subjects they teach and more skill in deciding how to teach them. On the other, teachers have less freedom to design their lessons.

It is unclear which tendency will prevail. But if standardization wins out, political fights like the one in Texas will become ever more influential in determining how the myths and realities of our history will be told.

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[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2002 ]

Teacher shortages vanish when the price is right

By  Richard Rothstein

Education analysts often say the nation faces a looming teacher shortage. Growing enrollment and the retirement of baby-boom teachers will aggravate the need, as will a new federal law that bans unqualified teachers.

But this year in New York City, the shortage mostly disappeared, despite the difficult conditions in many urban schools. Qualified teachers flocked to New York for starting salaries of $39,000 a year, up from $32,000 in 2001. Those with experience elsewhere started as high as $61,000. Certified teachers left parochial schools, the suburbs and other professions to work for the city. A slow economy helped by offering college graduates fewer options in the private sector.

New York’s experience suggests there never was a shortage, only an unwillingness of qualified teachers to work at previous pay levels. This will come as no surprise to economists, who say that real shortages are rare in a market economy. At the right price, supply grows to meet demand.

There might have been a temporary real shortage if there were no qualified teachers willing to work at any price. But this was never the case.

Nationwide, only about two-thirds of new education graduates take teaching jobs. Of those who do teach, nearly one-third quit within five years. Although some may have been unsuited for the role, many leave education because they get better offers elsewhere. So there is a big pool of qualified teachers out there, ready to re-enter the profession when the price is right.

The shortage seems more real in some specialties: high school math and science, special and bilingual education and schools in high-poverty communities. But here too, there is no actual shortage.

Teachers in middle-class areas will move to disadvantaged schools if salaries in poor neighborhoods rise above suburban rates. The differential has to be big enough to compensate for the greater skill and dedication required. Professionals in other fields, including those with math and science degrees, will take up teaching if salaries in education are competitive. If apparent shortages remain, schools can raise salaries in shortage areas to induce college students to major in fields where lucrative teaching jobs beckon.

An impediment to this market solution is the tradition of paying all teachers on a common scale. This makes no economic sense. If it is harder to find high school math than English teachers, salaries for teaching math should rise. The gap should grow until the math shortage eases.

Likewise, with a surplus of suburban elementary school teachers and a shortage of urban ones, urban schools should pay more than suburban ones until the supply is balanced.

Impeding this approach is how we typically finance schools. Urban districts often depend on property taxes for revenue and cannot raise salaries to compete with property-rich suburban neighbors. So federal and state subsidies for urban teacher salaries are needed.

Yet for three decades, urban school leaders in many states have pressed for such subsidies, with only inconsistent success. In New York, the candidates for governor, H. Carl McCall and Gov. George E. Pataki, are now sparring about whether to oppose a court decision that said the state had no constitutional duty to expand its subsidies for urban schools.

Another difficulty is the reluctance of teachers’ unions to negotiate different pay for different specialties. Union leaders fear this will lead to bad feelings. But all social differentials can create bad feelings. In fact, that is the idea. If teachers in surplus areas feel badly enough, they will become certified in shortage areas.

Local, state and federal policies are taking small steps in this direction. New York City teachers can get a 15 percent bonus for work at the most difficult schools. The state has a program that provides an added $3,400 a year for such assignments.

Many states now subsidize the tuition of prospective teachers who agree to work in shortage areas. The federal government sells some housing at half-price to teachers who not only teach but live in poor neighborhoods. California gives certificates for a federal income tax credit to those who teach in shortage areas.

Bills now before Congress would give income tax credits to teachers in low-income schools. But the amounts are tiny ($1,000 in the Senate version, $2,000 in the House), too small to induce much growth in supply. The bills also do not provide incentives for teachers, other professionals and college students to switch fields to subject areas that are most in need.

But the bills take steps in the right direction. They acknowledge that a real shortage is mythical. As in most of the economy, if demand for teachers is bolstered with enough new dollars, supply will emerge to soak those dollars up.

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[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON SEPTEMBER 18, 2002 ]

How U.S. punishes states with higher standards

By Richard Rothstein

The new federal education law lets students leave high-poverty schools that are deemed failing. Districts must now use some of their federal money to bus these students to better schools.

In designing the new rules, President Bush and Congress hoped to protect local control while imposing an unprecedented standardization of education policy. So while schools must now bus children from failing schools, each state may define failure in its own way.

A perverse result is that the federal government now punishes states for having higher standards. Busing must be offered to children in any school that does not make adequate progress for two years in a row. The higher the state’s standard, the more progress a school must make.

The recklessness of this approach is evident from comparing states with large numbers of students who are now eligible for busing to states that do well on the only common test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (About two-thirds of the states now take part in this test; under the new law, all must do so.)

If the federal rules were rational, more busing would be required in states where children scored more poorly. But the opposite is mostly true.

For example, reading results for low-income eighth graders in Arkansas are close to the bottom of the nation. But the law mandates not a single Arkansas school to bus children out this year.

At the other extreme, New York State’s low-income eighth graders score quite high on the national reading test — seventh highest in the nation. But federal rules now require 19 percent of the state’s low-income schools to spend money on transportation to a different school, more than in three-fourths of the other states.

Massachusetts’ low-income eighth graders score about in the middle of the nation in reading. But 24 percent of the state’s low-income schools are deemed failing, higher than almost anywhere else.

Massachusetts policy makers pride themselves on having created some of the highest academic standards anywhere. But many of the state’s students are now being bused from “failing” schools that are actually better than schools in other states that are deemed “successful” and that receive bused students.

Paul Reville helped design the Massachusetts education plan and is now chairman of a commission that oversees it. Mr. Reville said the new federal law had made the state’s effort look silly, and state leaders are now wondering if they have to lower standards to avoid federal sanctions. Busing is only the beginning. Penalties become more severe each year.

Lowering expectations is what happened in Ohio. When the federal government announced the busing rules in July, nearly a third of the state’s low-income schools had to provide busing, even more than in New York or Massachusetts. Ohio’s accountability program expected each school to get 75 percent of its students to a proficient level.

The federal rules require busing from any school that does not make steady progress toward the state goal, whatever that might be. In Ohio, this created an absurd condition. A school with stagnant scores, where 70 percent of students were proficient for two years in a row, would be deemed failing. Students could be bused from this school to one that had made more progress by increasing the number of proficient students to 20 percent from 15 percent.

So this summer Ohio changed its rules so schools had to get only 42 percent of its students to proficiency. This cut the number of schools subject to the federal busing requirement nearly in half.

Some of this irrationality may be fixed in 2003 because the law will then require every state to use the same definition of adequate progress toward its goal.

But states will still be permitted to set different goals, so those with higher standards may bear the brunt of federal sanctions.

National and state officials refer to the situation as an “unintended consequence” of the new law. But this lets them off the hook too easily. While the results may have been unintended, they could easily have been foreseen. Before the federal law was adopted, many skeptics warned that reconciling federal and local control of education would be impossible.

It is hard to imagine how tinkering with the rules can fix the problem. The only real solution is for the federal government to effectively repeal the law — by issuing waivers from the rules to states that want to improve schools in their own way.

This will be politically difficult. Secretary of Education Rod Paige has often denounced the Clinton administration for issuing waivers to states from testing rules in the 1990’s.

Mr. Paige has vowed that he will not be pushed around so easily, but this remains to be seen.

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[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2002 ]

Rx for good health and good grades

By  Richard Rothstein

Chula Vista, Calif. – Four years ago Dennis Doyle, an assistant superintendent of schools in this town on the Mexican border, reviewed attendance and test score data at the elementary schools. Not unexpectedly, schools with low scores also had poor attendance. Dr. Doyle figured that achievement would rise if he could keep the children, many from low-income and non-English-speaking families, in class.

Meanwhile, Britt Berrett, chief executive of Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center, worried about a related problem: his hospital’s uncollected bills for children without regular health care, who used emergency rooms for nonurgent treatment.

At a meeting of the local Human Services Council, Dr. Doyle and Mr. Berrett discussed their troubles and devised a solution: a mobile clinic sponsored by the school district, the city, Sharp Chula Vista and another local hospital. The clinic, with a nurse, a nurse practitioner and a nurse assistant, began rotating among five schools with high absenteeism, treating problems that would otherwise have kept pupils at home, like asthma.

Now attendance has improved, and scores have risen.

That success also stems from the clinic’s ties to other services. After a pupil has been treated at the clinic, volunteers introduce the child’s mother to a family center on school grounds. There, mothers are recruited for English-language classes, and a paraprofessional tries to enroll their children in a health plan. Some, whose family income is too high for Medicaid but too low to afford private coverage, may be eligible for the federally subsidized Children’s Health Insurance Program, enacted by Congress in 1997. Children who are not citizens may get coverage from a patchwork of less-well-known public and private programs.

Aida Meza, a paraprofessional at the family center adjoining the Vista Square Elementary School, says follow-up contacts are often needed because many mothers hesitate to enroll their children in the federal insurance program: although children born in the United States are eligible as citizens, their parents may be in the country illegally and fearful of government agencies.

Because the plan requires parents to enroll personally, Ms. Meza must call them back to the center at each step of the application process, translating for them on a speaker phone to health department officials. The plan requires small monthly premiums and periodic re-enrollment; Ms. Meza helps those daunted by the paperwork to comply.

Then she must take care that the coverage is actually used. Many immigrants are unfamiliar with the concept of preventive care and seek treatment for children only after an illness becomes serious. So Ms. Meza calls parents often, to ensure that their children get regular checkups and treatment for minor illnesses before they progress.

Largely because of Ms. Meza’s efforts, three-quarters of Vista Square pupils now have health insurance. Most of the rest get free care at the mobile clinic.

The family center also provides training for mothers who work as community liaisons throughout Chula Vista. The mothers conduct classes for neighbors on issues like the importance of prenatal care, watching for diabetes and identifying women in depression.

A mobile clinic at the school site creates more work, not less, for Vista Square’s regular nurse. Medications must now be dispensed. Children with asthma now have inhalers to be administered. With children enrolled in health plans, they now have regular doctors with whom the school nurse can consult when she observes new symptoms.

The clinic, the family center and the school nurse all share a common purpose: to keep children healthy enough to attend school, and alert enough to do well. Asthma, for example, does not harm performance just by keeping pupils out of class. If they are awake at night wheezing, they are too tired to pay attention even if they do
make it to school the next day.

These services cost an average of about $300 a pupil per year, paid by the two participating hospitals, San Diego County, the City of Chula Vista, Medicaid, private foundations and the school district. Dr. Doyle insists, and data seem to confirm, that this spending has contributed to gains in test scores and other measures of student learning.

In a report for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Janet Currie of the University of California at Los Angeles and Mark Stabile of the University of Toronto, both economists, estimated that among children whose mothers are not high school graduates, each incidence of serious disease or injury raises the chance of being in the bottom fifth of the test score distribution by 7 percent.

That is a bigger impact than most analysts have previously identified. But in Chula Vista, Dr. Doyle seems to have come to a similar conclusion, and acted upon it.

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[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON SEPTEMBER 4, 2002 ]

Conservatives, teachers unions and poisoned debate

By  Richard Rothstein

Conservatives have attacked the National Education Association, the teachers union, for its Web site that gives advice on how to teach about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. George Will, the Washington Post columnist, wrote that the site made the union “a national menace.”

The Washington Times, a newspaper that usually supports conservative causes, editorialized that “for the N.E.A., history is farce.” And Chester E. Finn Jr., an education official in the Reagan administration and now a prominent critic of public schools, called the site the main source of bad advice for schools, a “mishmash of pop-psychotherapeutics, feel-goodism, relativism and overblown multiculturalism, even more noteworthy for what’s not there: history, civics, patriotism.”

What seemed to agitate these critics most was the site’s recommendation that teachers not “suggest any group is responsible” for the terrorist attacks. But the passage clearly does not mean that Al Qaeda should be exempt from blame; rather, it argues that teachers should not blame Muslims as a group. This advice was no different from that of responsible national leaders, including President Bush.

It is also untrue that the Web site (neahin.org) ignores civic and patriotic material.

The site does give advice on how to comfort children who remain frightened and urges adults, perhaps inappropriately, to guide children’s emotions away from hatred and anger toward the perpetrators. But much more prominently, the site includes links to the home pages of the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Homeland Security, fact sheets from the Department of State on the war against terrorism, and the union’s own resolution, passed before the attacks, urging teachers to educate students about Taliban crimes in Afghanistan.

So use of this material to attack the union’s patriotism is curious, showing how poisoned public discussion about education has become.

Conservatives’ animus toward teachers unions goes back at least to the 1970’s, when Jimmy Carter was elected president with union support and then created the Department of Education. Union leaders thought a cabinet-level agency would give more federal attention, and thus money, to public schools. Ronald Reagan campaigned for president with a pledge to dismantle the department, his supporters contending that it was only a sop to the unions.

Since then, conservatives have often pointed to teachers unions as a chief cause of school inadequacy. In 1991, for example, Mr. Finn wrote that the unions were “smug, self-interested and allergic to change.”

There is some truth to this. Some union contracts prevent involuntary assignments of teachers to schools where they are most needed; unions often assert the procedural rights of teachers as a way to block efforts to remove poor performers.

But blaming “union rules” for school problems overlooks that every labor contract requires the assent of both union and management. When districts offer adequate pay in contract negotiations, unions typically agree to reasonable changes in assignment practices.

Union policies vary from city to city. Some local unions resist any proposal to improve education if it infringes on teachers’ narrow self-interest. Others take the lead in helping districts improve the quality of teaching. There are places in between.

In considering how to teach about Sept. 11 and how to comfort young children who remain frightened by it, there is room for civil disagreement about how much schools should emphasize patriotism, history and an analysis of the terrorist threat, how much they should warn that defense against Al Qaeda should not lead to intolerance against Muslims, and how much they should assure children that adults will protect them from danger.

Perhaps the union’s Web site does not get the balance precisely right. But the intemperate attacks against it go beyond reasonable criticism.

Last week, Mr. Finn published a book on the Internet, “September 11: What Our Children Need to Know”  (edexcellence.net), purportedly a response to the “nonsense” circulated by the union and other groups.

Yet a chapter in Mr. Finn’s book wisely cautions not to repeat the error of World War II when Japanese-Americans were unjustly interned. Another denounces the simplistic “American Pageant” approach to history, conventional 50 years ago, that celebrated only the country’s triumphs and ignored its problems. Another expresses outrage about the Taliban’s treatment of women and gays. Two chapters reject reliance on free markets alone to bring international peace.

If these very points had been made on a union Web site, some of Mr. Finn’s own contributors might have denounced it as a menace to the country. We will never improve schools with this approach.

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