Is Public Education Working? How Would We Know?

By Robert Freeman

Imagine you're five feet eight inches tall. When you change the unit
of measurement to yards, you're 1.9 yards tall. Are you shorter
because the number is smaller? No. Or go to centimeters. Now you're
173 centimeters tall. Does the larger number make you taller? Of
course not. Yet this is the effect we experience trying to judge the
quality of public education in the U.S. There are so many different
standards, all competing for mindshare with the public, it's almost
impossible to know what's right any more.

There are state standards. And in some states, such as California,
there are multiple state standards. There are the new federal No
Child Left Behind standards. There are the National Assessment of
Educational Progress standards. The Scholastic Aptitude Tests. The
frequently heralded International Math and Science Test standards.
Advanced Placement exams for more advanced students. And so on.

Some of these standards, like those of the No Child Left Behind Act,
are new. We don't really know yet whether they're actually telling us
what they say they are. These things take years, maybe decades, to
shake out. Some tests, such as the International Math and Science
tests compare apples to oranges, testing small groups of elite
students in other countries against the broad average of students in
American public schools. Predictably, elites do better than averages.
If you test athletes against the general public, guess who is more
physically fit?

So what is a parent or a citizen to do? It is a ritual incantation of
American civic discourse that public education is critical to the
future of our country. How, then, can we be so confused? How can we
know if public education is working or not?

Part of the problem is that over the last two decades an intense
lobby has emerged that wants to turn public education over to private
industry, make McStudents of the nation's youth. It has operated a
not-so-stealth campaign to disparage public education and to try to
convince Americans that it isn't working. This campaign has mounted a
relentless, mantra-like vilification of public schools: schools are
failing; teachers are lazy; education bureaucracies are unresponsive;
students are being cheated; America is at risk. Sound familiar?

Some of this lobby's motivation is ideological: they dislike anything
that smacks of government control, the more so if the service is
effective, for such examples repudiate the theological superiority of
all things private. Some of its motivation is directed toward
right-wing social engineering: they want to control the curriculum
that future generations of American students must absorb. And much of
it is simply economic: these "prophets of profit" want to get their
hands on the $500+ billion that is spent every year in the U.S. on
public K-12 education.

This isn't, per se, bad. We do, after all, live in at least a
quasi-capitalist society where the pursuit of profit isn't a social
evil. But it's the bashers' hypocrisy that rankles. They don't
declare any of these motives openly. Rather, they talk of such
vaguely incongruous motives as "empowering minorities" and
"streamlining" education. These, of course, are the same corporate
zealots who brought the "magic of the market" to a formerly vibrant
public health system. They are the pious do-gooders (remember Enron?)
who bestowed energy privatization on California, the better to reap
the "efficiencies" of competition. They are the same bleeding-heart
altruists who profess wanting to "save" social security by turning it
over to the tender mercies of the financial services industry.

So again, how would we know if public education is working or not?
Probably the most reliable, broad-based, long-term tool for measuring
the quality of public education is the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The
SAT has five strengths that make it the most useful measure of
American educational progress.

First, it has been in place for over four decades so it reveals
trends that span multiple generations of students, teachers, and
schools. Second, it is given to high school juniors and seniors so it
reflects the cumulative success (or failure) of the entire K-12
educational system, not just performance in a single year. Third, the
same SAT is administered across the entire country so it compensates
for the variation in how different states test and account for
educational progress. Fourth, the SAT cuts through the "grade
inflation" that has become a standard fixture of all educational
systems over recent decades. Finally, the SAT measures not just a
single, narrow skill but a broad range of intellectual development,
from cultural knowledge and logic, to specific academic content,
computation, and communication.

Because of its long history, its nationwide reach, and its
comprehensive nature, SAT results transcend the negative one-off
anecdotes commonly bandied about to disparage public education. No
other instrument even comes close to equaling these strengths as a
singular measure of national educational progress.

So what do the SAT's tell us about the performance of public
education in America?

Last year's SAT scores were the highest in 30 years. English scores
were the highest in 28 years. Math scores were the highest in 36
years. The scores were at record levels for all ethic groups: whites;
Asian-Americans; African-Americans; Native Americans; and Latinos.
And they were achieved by the broadest test-taking pool in testing
history. Forty-eight per cent of the nation's 2.9 million high school
seniors took the test--a record. Thirty-six percent of the test
takers were minorities, another record.

Thirty years ago, only the most elite 15 percent of students took the
test. And remember, elites usually test better than averages. So the
fact that scores have gone up while the test-taking pool has gotten
both larger and more diverse may be the most powerful performance
indicator of all. These scores are a huge victory for those who have
believed in and fought so hard for public education.

Even more impressive, public schools have accomplished these new
highs while confronting some of the greatest obstacles they have ever
faced. Consider just a few of these almost Herculean challenges:

* Most mothers left home in the past 30 years to join the workforce.
No more Mrs. Cleaver at the door with warm cookies, milk, and help
with the homework when Beaver comes home.

* Over the past decade, American schools have absorbed the largest
wave of immigrants in history. Most of these immigrants spoke no
English when they came to this country. Many had little if any
comparable educational preparation in the countries they left.

* Schools have been saddled with vastly expanded responsibilities in
recent years, much of it wholly unrelated to general academic
performance. This includes broadened mandates for everything from sex
and drug education to increased demands for help with learning and
physical disabilities.

* As a nation, we have almost completely surrendered students'
socialization to television. By the time they are 18 years old,
children have watched 450,000 commercials! Meanwhile they spend only
9 percent of their time in the classroom.

* Millions of the best teachers have left teaching for other fields.
This is especially true with women who used to have few career
options (nursing, teaching, etc.) but who can now go into law,
medicine, engineering, business, etc.

Despite all of these challenges, and throughout one of the most
vitriolic, unremitting campaigns of character assassination in
American history, public education has delivered the highest
performing group of graduates in over a generation.

Against this record, those who would "privatize" public education
have virtually nothing to show for their decades of hucksterish
claims. In trial after trial, experiments with educational vouchers
(the most popular form of school privatization) have proven a bust.
Voucher programs in Milwaukee, New York, Washington D.C., and in
Dayton and Cleveland, Ohio have shown no long-term gains in student
achievement. And this, despite in some cases skimming the cream off
the top of local student populations-recruiting only the best
students while keeping problem or special-needs children out.

For example, the longest-running evaluation of a publicly funded
voucher program ever conducted, by Indiana University of the
Cleveland, Ohio program, found that "student academic achievement
presents no clear or consistent pattern that can be attributed to
program participation." In other words, the results are no different
than those for public schools. This is especially surprising because
the program participants were more white, more wealthy, and more
stable than students in the local population. If privatized education
can't make it with this kind of free pass, it's not going to make it.

Besides educational failure, the economic failure of the
privatization model is reflected in the dismal fate of the country's
largest company providing such services. Edison Public Schools lost
over $350 million dollars trying to perfect the McStudent formula.
Yet, after repeatedly failing to deliver on its promises and
continually losing contracts, it was finally forced to be de-listed
by NASDAQ. It has converted itself back to a private company and no
longer publishes its financial information.

Nor do "charter schools" fare any better than voucher schools.
Charter schools are self-governing public schools frequently run by
private corporations. They were conceived as a way to "liberate"
public schools from conventional constraints in hiring, curriculum,
and administration. But in August, after the most extensive
examination in the history of the country, the Department of
Education published data showing charter school students lag public
schools students in almost every category of performance. In math,
fourth graders were a full half year behind public school students.

Given this record, it comes as no surprise that voucher and charter
advocates have started changing their story. No longer do they claim
superior results (not that they ever actually delivered them).
Instead, they begrudgingly claim that improved public school
performance is due to the threat of competition from privatization.
This, of course, is conveniently unprovable but sounds a lot like the
rooster taking credit for the sunrise. Meanwhile, support for public
funding of private schooling has plummeted. In the past year, the
number of Americans favoring such programs dropped from 46 percent to
38 percent according to a recent Gallup Organization poll. Why the
change of attitude?

It'seems the prospect of millions of American families turning their
children over to someone whose main motive is to make a profit off of
them has lost its appeal. Or perhaps they saw what privatization did
for energy costs in California or to the healthcare system nationwide
and don't want to take a similar chance on their most precious
assets. Whatever the reason, the once bright luster of privatizing
the nation's schools is fading. Not that the hucksters will give up.
There is too much at stake in their ideological, social engineering,
and economic agendas. But neither should they be given a free pass
any more to disparage public education the way that they have.

To be sure, public education still faces tough challenges. Schools
remain underfunded. Teacher pay continues to fall behind that of
other professions. American spending on education as a percent of GDP
lags that of many third world countries. Inner-city schools still
score lower than schools in more affluent suburbs. And the
Orwellian-named No Child Left Behind Act is a thinly disguised
formula to make schools fail artificial and unattainable
standards-the more readily to justify their privatization.

But the question of whether public schools can deliver should no
longer be open for debate. The only question is whether we have the
courage to now properly fund public education so that it can take our
children and our society to even higher levels of achievement. I
believe we can because I know that we must. Public education is not
only the most important democratizing institution in America today.
It is the foundation of our economic future as well. It never really
went away. But still, it's good to have it back.
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Robert Freeman writes about economics, history and education. His
email address is: robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.
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