The New Republic

In the only exchange on education during the 2004 presidential
debates, John Kerry made one argument: "The president who talks
about No Child Left Behind refused to fully fund [it] by 28 billion
dollars ... he didn't put in what he promised, and that makes a
difference in the lives of our children." George W. Bush responded
acidly: "Only a liberal senator from Massachusetts would say that a
49 percent increase in funding for education was not enough. We've
increased funds. But, more importantly, we've reformed the system."That sums up the education debate in last year's campaign. Bush
championed reform and resources. Although Bob Dole had once wanted
to shut down the Department of Education, in his first term, Bush
supported standards-based accountability through the No Child Left
Behind Act (nclb). And, though he fell short of his promises on
money, Bush did approve more than $30 billion in new K- 12
education funding.

While Bush and the Republicans moved to the middle, Kerry and the
Democrats retreated from it. When Bush signed the nclb in 2002,
liberal lions like Ted Kennedy stood by his side. But, in 2004,
Democrats regularly attacked the law as "punitive." Howard Dean
pilloried his opponents for supporting reform. John Edwards, though
offering a detailed reform plan, said he regretted voting for nclb
because of how Bush administered it. Kerry, a longtime reformer,
said the law "terrified" teachers. The party's top three education
demands were money, money, and money. "You cannot promise to leave
no child behind and then leave the money behind," Kerry often
said.

While Democrats reinforced the old idea that they just want to
spend, Bush appealed to a public that wants both accountability and
funding. In 1996, two out of three registered voters thought Bill
Clinton was the best candidate on education. By the end of the 2004
campaign, Bush enjoyed a small lead over Kerry on the issue.

These are vivid memories for me. I was one of Kerry's education
advisers during the general election. I previously worked for--and
have since advised-- Edwards. The views expressed here are my own,
but I bear plenty of responsibility for the developments described.
Yet the attitudes of the candidates reflected the attitudes of the
party. Top congressional Democrats today say nothing different.

It's stunning to see Democrats lose their edge on education. That's
because, on education, Democrats don't need to explain why the
United States needs vigorous government; Americans already want
effective public schools. Through education, Democrats reach for
their own deepest aspiration: a country where birth doesn't dictate
destiny. Nothing offends Democratic ideals more than the fact that
a typical poor or African American twelfth-grader reads at the same
level as a typical middle-class or white eighth-grader. Nothing is a
greater threat to middle-class prosperity than mediocre schools. If
Democrats cannot speak powerfully to an issue that speaks so
powerfully to them, they cannot expect to prevail on tougher
ideological terrain.

To get the politics right, progressives need to act on a policy
principle that Americans understand: Money ain't everything. The
United States has tripled education funding per student since the
1960s, and we now outspend all but a few countries. But our
students' reading and math scores have edged up only modestly, and
our achievement remains in the middle of the developed world. Yes,
money matters; the shortfall in nclb funding has hurt the law's own
cause. Democrats deserve credit for supporting more spending on
schools. But they squander that credit when they make money their
only focus.

In emphasizing resources, Democrats evade questions of culture and
institutions. Those matter, too. It matters whether we set high
expectations for schools and teachers or accept mediocrity, and
whether we impose consequences for failure or excuse it. That
Republicans are fond of making these points--and unions and school
officials are not fond of hearing them-- does not make them less
true.

Progressives are misled by the logic of their own Bush-hatred: Bush
is for nclb, so nclb must be bad. Never mind that President Clinton
embraced accountability before President Bush, Governor Ann
Richards before Governor Bush. As the demands of nclb mount, and as
resistance to those demands spreads into conservative strongholds
like Texas and Utah, many progressives are joining the fun. But
opportunistic attacks are not an affirmative agenda.

At a time when Americans seek strength in their leaders, Democrats
should find the strength to speak hard truths about our schools and
support essential changes. At a time when Americans are unsure what
Democrats stand for, Democrats should give some resounding answers:
The achievement gap is a national disgrace, and equal opportunity
is a national command. Democrats will require greater support for
schools, and greater demands on them, than ever before. They will
use federal power to pursue equal justice--even at the expense of
states' rights, even in the face of their own constituencies.
Democrats will put children first.

The first task is to stop the unprincipled attacks on nclb. At its
heart, this is the sort of law liberals once dreamed about. In the
1970s, liberal litigators fell one vote short of a Supreme Court
decision requiring evenhanded education funding. Nclb doesn't
guarantee funding, but it goes one step further by demanding
educational results. It says that, when states accept federal
funding, they must ensure that all children (except the most
disabled) meet "challenging academic standards." This has made
achievement a legal command, not just a gauzy aspiration. The law
requires a form of affirmative action: States must show that
minority and poor students are achieving proficiency like everyone
else, or else provide remedies targeted to the schools those
students attend. The law's unyielding demands have created a
powerful tool to raise both expectations and money.

Tough accountability serves kids, particularly the poorest. Studies
of high- poverty, high-achieving schools (by Kentucky's Prichard
Committee, the University of Texas, Ohio's Board of Education, and
others) consistently show that high expectations are critical to
good results. The Hoover Institution's Eric Hanushek has shown that
states that had adopted accountability laws with consequences for
failure before nclb existed have seen greater increases in
achievement than states that didn't. Nclb's requirement to
disaggregate data based on race and income has cast a harsh but
necessary light on the achievement gap. It is too early to judge
the law's impact, but recent surveys by two respected think tanks,
the Center on Education Policy and the Education Trust, suggest
scores are rising and gaps are slowly narrowing.

In President Bush's first term, Education Department officials
fueled anger at nclb through indifference and incompetence. They
found the money to pay off Armstrong Williams, but not to pay for
high-quality tests that accurately measure achievement. They drew a
rebuke from the Government Accountability Office for failing to
give states key guidance. They conflated reasonable concerns about
inflexible regulations with unreasonable efforts to evade the law's
core demands. The new education secretary, Margaret Spellings, has
struck a better balance, but she is digging out of a hole. Bush
continues to prioritize plutocratic tax cuts over an education bill
that costs a fraction as much.

The law itself is too stringent in some ways and too lax in others.
Schools may be labeled as "needing improvement" because of
statistical anomalies. So many schools are subject to mandated
remedies that state bureaucracies are being overwhelmed. Because
nclb requires 100 percent of students to demonstrate "proficiency"
by 2014, but allows states to define proficiency as they please,
states can create the illusion of progress by lowering their
standards. Some states, like Texas, have done just that.

Instead of working to address these failures, too many progressives
have focused on pleasing angry activists. The Democratic primaries
brought tremendous pressure on candidates--partly because of
unions' influence and partly because of a primary schedule
frontloaded with states lacking any appetite for reform. When
Education Week ranked all state accountability systems, New
Hampshire and Iowa took the last two spots. Appealing to rural and
suburban audiences contented with their schools, Howard Dean won
cheers as he derided the "No School Board Left Standing" Act.; When
Democrats become champions of states' rights in schools, it is no
wonder voters think the party has no principles.

Resistance to federal power is now a progressive rallying cry in
education. Democrats at the National Conference of State
Legislatures recently helped draft a bipartisan report charging
that nclb infringes upon states' Tenth Amendment rights. Most Utah
Democrats supported a new state law jeopardizing $76 million in aid
to poor students on the grounds that the state's own assessment
system should have priority over nclb. But that state system does
not even exist today; the real question, as the law's lead sponsor
asked, was, "At what price is our sovereignty for sale?" The
National Education Association (NEA) is now suing Washington for
forcing states to spend more money on education. Connecticut's
Democratic attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, has praised the
suit and threatened to bring one of his own.

When Democrats become champions of states' rights in schools, it is
no wonder voters think the party has no principles. The federal
government has served progressive educational ends for decades:
demanding desegregation for African American children, offering
Head Start for poor preschoolers, providing Title I funding to
disadvantaged school-aged students, and requiring individualized
treatment for children with disabilities. Only the federal
government can ensure a fair chance for all American children.
Before nclb, most states didn't even track the performance of poor
students. Thanks to nclb, many schools are now offering those
students help they desperately need. If the NEA's suit prevails in
court, it won't even yield more money; it will just yield
precedents limiting federal power and enable states to ignore the
law's demands. That would be sad: One of the NEA's plaintiffs told
The New York Times that nclb had forced her district to offer
longer school days and Saturday classes for low-achieving students.
Progressives should celebrate that fact, not complain about it.

Democrats labeling nclb as "punitive" see the law through the wrong
end of the telescope. Schools that fall short under nclb may indeed
be required to offer tutoring after school, or to help students
transfer to other public schools, or to reopen as charter schools.
These steps may look punitive to many adults inside the schools.
For children who aren't learning, however, these measures offer
hope for a better education.

Other proposals from the left would dash inner-city hopes to placate
suburban anxieties. Many parents at better schools now worry that
rote "teaching to the test" has crowded out better teaching. Much
of that problem could be addressed by spending more on complex
assessments worth teaching to. That would preserve the
accountability so critical in the worst schools, which, at least
now, are teaching to something. Yet many progressives, including
state legislators and Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, would allow
student performance to be counterbalanced by academic indicators of
states' choosing. In some iterations, these measures could include
parental satisfaction or student attendance. This regime would
replace the clear demand for student achievement with a malleable
nonstandard. It would be fine for most students in Greenwich, but a
step backward for Bridgeport and New Haven.

Progressives seeking to gut nclb should explain when, if their
effort succeeds, the federal government will again commit to
ensuring that every poor African American child can read.
Progressives should be working to fix nclb in a way that honors
their values. It is right to seek the $12 billion needed for full
funding of nclb but wrong to disable the law until that staggering
sum arrives. It is right to distinguish truly lousy schools from
those on the margin but wrong to leave the distinction to state
bureaucracies.

Rather than siding with foot-dragging states, progressives should
support more vigorous use of federal power in the service of equal
citizenship for all. National standards and national tests in
reading and math would advance that ideal. There is no reason that
50 states should have 50 different definitions of proficiency; the
reading and math skills required to flourish economically and
participate politically across the United States are increasingly
the same. In states across the South and West that now spend little
on schools and mask weak results by applying low standards,
national norms would become a lever to increase both achievement
and funding. Generous funding could ensure a high- quality test
that adequately measures complex knowledge and skills. (An existing
test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, does a good
job but is not widely used.) With a huge data set, educators could
better measure achievement. Parents would get a better picture of
their children's progress compared with others.

National standards and a national test aren't radical ideas. Clinton
proposed them on a voluntary basis; a few conservatives like the
Fordham Foundation's Chester Finn have supported them. The right
has kept standards entirely at the state level with talk of a
"national school board," but Americans are loyal to their
children's schools, not state bureaucracies. Polls have shown that
two-thirds of Americans would support a national test. Progressives
should welcome a debate over whether American citizenship should
mean the same thing everywhere or if states should protect their
prerogatives. Let Bush defend states' rights for a change.

The tougher challenge for progressives is not to fix nclb, but to
stop talking about it all the time--and instead offer an
educational vision of their own. Bush isn't vulnerable for
supporting standards; he is vulnerable for believing standards are
enough. Tests measure progress but don't teach children.

Progressives should tackle a challenge all but ignored by Bush:
strengthening the quality of teachers. As the Education Trust notes,
good teachers are the single most important factor in good
schools--affecting student achievement more than race, poverty, or
parental education. Three years of good teachers can lift students'
scores by 50 percentile points compared with three years of lousy
teachers, according to researcher William Sanders. But, as talented
women have moved on to other professions, teacher quality has
declined. Education majors score below national averages on
standardized tests. Most schools do little to draw or keep more
talented teachers: Onerous hiring procedures discourage able
candidates, while the lockstep pay scale rewards seniority and
accumulated degrees, not success. Schools offer $80,000 salaries to
middle-aged and mediocre gym teachers while losing bright young
chemistry teachers who make only $40,000. Today, a middling
performer can get a routine grant of tenure after three years, then
become virtually impossible to remove for three decades. One North
Carolina study showed that school superintendents would have liked
to remove about one in 25 tenured teachers per year, but actually
removed fewer than one in 600. Teacher quality is lowest in the
poorest schools, where good teachers are needed most. Students at
high-poverty schools are nearly twice as likely to be taught by
teachers who lack even a minor in the relevant subject.; A sound
national plan would put big money on the table for school districts
that adopt real reforms in pay, tenure, and licensing for
teachers.

Strengthening teaching requires changes to the pay system and school
culture that abet mediocrity. Standing alone, the usual liberal
solution--across-the- board pay hikes--perpetuates the
maldistribution of good teachers and reinforces the irrelevance of
achievement. High-poverty schools need to attract more teachers
with bonuses, and all schools need to attract better teachers with
the promise of higher earnings for better results. Teachers
reasonably worry about arbitrary merit bonuses, but performance pay
need not be arbitrary. Sanders and others are developing methods to
measure each teacher's contribution, accounting for students'
starting points and their expected progress. Together with peer and
principal reviews, these methods promise at least as rich a basis
for evaluation as those available in other professions where
performance pay is the norm.

While schools need better pay to attract good teachers, they also
need better systems to remove bad ones. Today dismissal can take
years, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and require proof of
outrageous conduct. That is unfair to students and good teachers
who want peers who work as hard as they do. Faculty deserve
protection against dismissals based on politics or personal animus,
but schools should extend the periods needed to get tenure and
streamline procedures so dismissals are fair but fast. Finally,
talented young people seeking to enter teaching should not be
required to get education degrees with no proven link to classroom
performance.

Although still in their infancy, reforms along these lines have
shown promise. When Chattanooga's lowest-performing schools offered
teachers $5,000 bonuses, free graduate-school tuition, and mortgage
assistance, vacancies dropped by 90 percent. The Milken Family
Foundation's Teacher Advancement Program offers bonuses up to
$5,000 based on a combination of evaluations and test scores. Most
schools in the program are outperforming similar schools outside
it. According to a recent evaluation, Teach for America's talented
novices, lacking traditional training, outperform typical teachers
in math instruction and equal them in reading.

A sound national plan would put big money on the table for school
districts that adopt real reforms in pay, tenure, and licensing for
teachers. To see what works best, schools should be encouraged to
try different--and ambitious-- approaches. With federal help, a
city might offer a promising new math teacher in a poor school
district $60,000 instead of $40,000; after excelling in the
classroom for two years, that teacher might earn $80,000. Raises
averaging $20, 000 for one-third of the teachers at 10 percent of
schools would cost $2 billion annually in a system spending over
$400 billion, but could show the way to transform teaching.

Progressive leaders should couple these reforms with a sustained
call for Americans to teach in troubled schools. Twelve percent of
Yale seniors applied to Teach for America this year. How many more
talented Americans, young and old, would teach if their country
called?

Most of these ideas have long been championed by the Progressive
Policy Institute and, more recently, by the bipartisan Teaching
Commission. But, while such proposals thrive in think-tank
hothouses, they wither in the heat of Democratic politics. Al Gore
and John Kerry both offered agendas along these lines for teacher
quality. But, after giving speeches and garnering media accolades,
both candidates barely mentioned their ideas again. Nor have
congressional Democrats stepped up to promote them.

One reason is ideology. Progressives remain uncomfortable with
market pressures in education. They prefer to talk about teachers
as saints who never worry about money. Most teachers are great
people, and many perform heroically in impossible circumstances.
But it is no insult to say that teachers are also human beings who
vary in talent, who respond to incentives, and who need to be
accountable like other professionals. At a time when capitalism has
enhanced productivity around the world, there is something sad
about liberals stopping performance pressure from improving the
public institutions they hold dear.

Political opposition from teachers' unions is a different problem.
Although the American Federation of Teachers has historically been
open to performance pay, the much larger NEA (with the exception of
one affiliate in Denver) opposes it. Both unions oppose serious
tenure reform.

But the unions do not control the agenda. After four years of
inaction on teacher quality, Bush has a performance-pay
pilot--though one funded far less generously than Kerry had
proposed. Republican governors like Tim Pawlenty and Arnold
Schwarzenegger are pushing performance pay, and Schwarzenegger is
putting tenure reform on California's ballot. Polls show broad
public support for teaching reforms; performance pay, for example,
is favored even by a majority of Democrats. A smart Republican
presidential candidate will probably press teacher reform in 2008,
as John McCain considered doing in 2000.

Progressives can let conservatives use teacher quality as a
political bludgeon, or they can make the teacher agenda their own
and attack the Bush administration's timidity. There is no question
that the bolder course will cause some immediate political pain,
but progressives must return to their roots as reformers if they
are to recapture their leadership on an issue at the heart of their
identity.

Many progressives are viscerally uncomfortable disagreeing with
unions while the president is assailing already decimated rights to
organize and bargain. But there has to be a distinction between
supporting the rights of unions and supporting their every demand.
And labor has a stake here, too. Support for reform feeds support
for resources. The number of Americans who identify lack of funding
as the biggest problem facing schools has risen since 2001, before
nclb passed. As Center for American Progress Fellow Ruy Teixeira
puts it, "Democrats will never build big majorities for more
spending on education, or any other social program, unless they
convince more voters they'll spend the money well."

Advancing national accountability and improving teacher quality
should be only parts of a progressive education agenda. The
achievement gap opens before children even reach elementary school,
yet U.S. support for preschool lags well behind other nations. So
progressives should press for big expansions in high- quality early
education. Parents want some choice and diversity among schools. So
progressives should renew their support for public school choice and
charter schools. There is probably much else besides.

But there should be a common thread to the progressive agenda. It's
about thinking big again. It's about offering resources and reform.
And it's about believing in public schools enough to challenge
them. If being a progressive means anything, it should mean
believing that public institutions like schools can take the hard
steps necessary to improve themselves and improve our society. It
is honorable to defend a Social Security status quo that works, but
it is something else to defend an education status quo that does
not. When progressives get their policies back in line with their
commitments, they will serve American children, and themselves.

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