Dueling Manifestos

The extremes in school-reform debates always seem to conspire against the middle, making change a lot tougher to achieve.

It happened again last week when two coalitions of pro-public-school educators and policymakers published reform manifestos. We’re not likely to see really significant, sustained improvement in the educational achievement of disadvantaged students unless we embrace the core recommendations of both documents. But from the way the two camps have framed their arguments—and caricatured each other’s—one would think that reform is a distinctly either-or proposition.

The first statement—A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education—is sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank. EPI president Lawrence Mishel and researcher Richard Rothstein enlisted Duke economist Helen Ladd, New York University professor Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant, a former Boston schools superintendent and U.S. assistant secretary of education, to help make an argument that Rothstein has made for several years—that “attempting to rely on school improvement alone to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children” is a mistake. And that “to be fully effective,” school reform “must be complemented by a broader definition of schooling and by improvements in the social and economic circumstances of disadvantaged youth.”

The key words here are “to be fully effective.” There’s ample evidence that millions of students from disadvantaged families suffer in the nation’s classrooms because they come to school ill-fed, ill-housed, lacking adequate heath care, and without sufficient exposure to language. And a wide range of notable educators, civil rights advocates and policymakers signed the EPI statement for just that reason, from NAACP Chairman Julian Bond to African American scholars such as Glen Lowry and William Julius Williams, present and past urban school superintendents Payzant, Arne Duncan, Rudy Crew, and Beverly Hall, and former federal education officials Payzant, and Diane Ravitch, and Marshall Smith (who sits on Education Sector’s board).

The problem is that many public educators have used the disadvantages that poverty inflicts on many students as an excuse for failing to even try to educate them. It’s an impossible task, they argue, we can’t overcome the baggage that our students bring with them to school. I’ve heard that lame lament over and over in hundreds of public schools in every corner of America. Educators declare that schools can’t make any meaningful difference in the educational lives of disadvantaged students absent the elimination of poverty’s debilitating effects.

They’re wrong. Schools can make a significant difference, even if they can’t be “fully effective” in overcoming the consequences of poverty.

And so advocates of educational accountability, those who say that the only way to give disadvantaged students a chance at a decent education is to hold excuse-inclined educators responsible for their students’ achievement, brought us state testing systems and, in 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act. This camp is behind the second of last week’s manifestos, which was organized by NYC Chancellor Joel Klein and Al Sharpton. Not surprisingly, past or present officials of the organizations that pushed Congress hardest for NCLB accountability, including The Education Trust, the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, and the Progressive Policy Institute (former PPI education director Andy Rotherham now co-directs Education Sector with me), were signers of Klein’s manifesto.

A fundamental failing of NCLB, however, is that it doesn’t account for the reality that some schools are dealt much tougher educational hands than others, by virtue of the fact that their students suffer from the ravages of poverty that the Broader, Bolder manifesto addresses. What we need to do is find ways to give schools credit for successfully improving the educational performance of the kids they have, by using so-called value-added measures of student performance, and by capturing more than just how well schools teach basic reading and math skills. Both are heavy lifts, but they would liberate schools to expand the scope of their mission and encourage them to work hard regardless of their students’ backgrounds.

So both camps are right, and wrong:

Yes, we should find ways to reduce the effects of poverty on students. Doing so will allow them to achieve at higher levels. But no, we shouldn’t assume that schools can’t make a difference on their own.

Yes, we need to hold schools and teachers accountable for their performance. Too many of them simply haven’t embraced high expectations on their own. But no, we shouldn’t pretend that poverty has no impact on students. No accountability system can work unless it is credible, and NCLB, as currently crafted, is not.