The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools? By David K. Cohen and Susan L. Moffitt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 336p. $35.00.
Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America's Public Schools. By Eric A. Hanushek and Alfred A. Lindseth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 432p. $29.95.
The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools. By E.D. Hirsch, Jr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 288p. $25.00.
Framing Equal Opportunity: Law and the Politics of School Finance Reform. By Michael Paris. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. 336p. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.
Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. By Paul E. Peterson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 336p. $25.95.
Ever since 1954, when a unanimous Supreme Court declared that education is “a right that must be made available to all on equal terms,” Americans have been debating the meaning of educational equality, how it might be attained, and through what instrumentalities of government.Footnote 1Brown v. Board of Education was arguably the most important Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century, not only because it ended legal segregation in schools but also for incorporating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as a tool to promote racial equality in other aspects of American life.Footnote 2Brown also thrust the federal courts deeply into primary and secondary education and opened the door to further federal intervention in a sphere of government that historically belonged to the states and localities.Footnote 3 Debates over federalism, separation of powers, policy alternatives, and the role of government in promoting educational and social equality remain very much alive today as the Obama administration puts forth its education agenda, states struggle with its demands, and Congress reconsiders the contours of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
The equality gap in education is part of a larger problem that political scientists have been alerted to for some time. In 2004, a task force of the American Political Science Association issued a report warning that despite advances in civil rights realized during the 1950s and 1960s, the nation is experiencing rising disparities in income, wealth, and access to opportunity that endanger cherished democratic ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government.Footnote 4 The APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy identified three related areas of concern involving citizen participation, government responsiveness, and patterns of public policymaking, all of which are manifest in terms of race and ethnicity. More recent research that grew out of the APSA report indicates that the interlocking problems of economic and political inequality have become worse since its publication and show no signs of abatement.Footnote 5
Although the APSA Task Force did not focus on elementary and secondary education per se, the relevance of disparities in academic achievement to a larger social inequality is all too obvious, since education has played an epic role in the American story of social mobility. This story is changing. A recent report published by the Educational Testing Service found that while some gains were realized in closing the racial learning gap during the 1970s and 1980s, progress has now slowed. The books under review go a long way in helping us understand why. After critically outlining each of the authors' major arguments, this essay will explore the historical, institutional, policy, and financial factors that explain the collapse of American schooling as they pertain to the books under consideration. The essay will conclude with a short commentary on the distinct role that political scientists can play in addressing our education dilemma.
Two of the titles under review—those by Paul Peterson and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.—are big picture books. While neither pretends to be a comprehensive history,Footnote 6 each takes a broad-brush approach for examining the purposes, achievements, and shortcomings of public education from the origins of the common school to the present day.
Peterson is a political scientist with a long record of scholarship in education.Footnote 7 In Saving Schools, he traces the rise, decline, and possible resurrection of public schools through the contributions of six historical figures: Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Shanker, William Bennett, and James Coleman. At times, the organizational scheme seems awkward. Not every reader will agree with bundling this cast of actors together, and anybody familiar with education history might add his or her own candidates to the list or remove others. Nevertheless, the book succeeds as a critical review of the evolution and failure of education policy since the idea of the common school took hold in America. In Peterson's mind, the unanticipated consequences of well-meaning reforms have made schooling more centralized, bureaucratic, litigious, expensive, and ineffective. Per-pupil spending has more than tripled since the 1960s, with no commensurate improvement in academic performance (pp. 271–2). He remains hopeful, however, that the sensible implementation of standards will eventually bring more accountability, and that the expansion of school choice will put more control in the hands of parents.
In The Making of Americans, Hirsch takes us back to the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Noah Webster, Abraham Lincoln, and other Founders to remind us of the civic mission of public schools, which, he tells us, are instrumental in our quest to accommodate a diverse people without forcing any group to compromise its own identity. Hirsch's answer to the challenge of American diversity is a curriculum based on the principles of liberty, equality, and tolerance. He does not underestimate the challenge of designing such a curriculum when there is so much room for disagreement, and he approaches the task with balance. He rejects Samuel P. Huntington's definition of American identity as being too narrow,Footnote 8 and chides liberals for banishing glorious accounts of the American past from the classroom.Footnote 9 Unfortunately, Hirsch does not give sufficient space in the book to explaining the choices he makes for his history/geography curriculum; and political scientists will wonder why he does not include more civics.
Hirsch—author of the bestseller Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and the companion Dictionary of Cultural Literacy—has a larger agenda.Footnote 10 Like Peterson, he blames the child-centered teaching methods of progressive educators for the absence of a curriculum that defines what a student should know in each subject by grade. Hirsch is also the principal architect of a Core Knowledge Curriculum, which does just that in hundreds of schools across the country, and with results (p. 116). He argues that a sound education based on content standards is a path to economic and social equality. Along the way, this emeritus humanities professor castigates whole-language instruction as an impediment to reading, and Ebonics as a substandard form of English that confines African American students to a culture of poverty.
Historian David Cohen and political scientist Susan Moffitt would agree with the need to adopt a better curriculum in schools, though not exclusively by selecting Hirsch's. Their book, The Ordeal of Equality, evaluates whether the federal attempt to implement educational standards over the past two decades has narrowed the learning gap defined by race and class. It explains how the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of the Great Society was converted from a poverty-based federal “entitlement” program into a standards-based accountability program under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Discussions of the latter two Administrations' efforts, as if they were the same, can be confusing at times, but the authors' analysis of how and why NCLB fell short is illuminating if discouraging, leaving readers wondering whether the institutional structure of government is capable of attaining meaningful reform.
According to Cohen and Moffitt, NCLB failed because it had to rely on a state and local infrastructure that was unable to reverse the long pattern of failure. This intergovernmental network was part of the problem that originally fostered educational inequality. It lacked a coherent curriculum, a technical capability for assessment, and well-trained teachers. Moreover, the states perpetuated a funding scheme that gave fewer resources to the most needy students.
The final two books under review are devoted to school finance reform in the states. Political scientist Michael Paris examines how the policy goals of reformers are translated into legal terms so that the courts may function as instruments for social change. His perspective on judicial policymaking is not as entirely novel as he would like us to think. Nonetheless, Framing Equal Opportunity is a worthy addition to the burgeoning literature on school finance litigation, containing comprehensive treatments of landmark cases in Kentucky and New Jersey. Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth would agree with Paris on the importance of education and the need to improve it for all children. The first chapter of Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses is chock full of data that correlate education with economic welfare. These authors also note that nearly half the twelfth graders in public schools test below the basic level in reading, math, and science; the average African American and Hispanic student is nearly four years behind the average white student in basic skills (pp. 30–33).
Hanushek, an economist, is an established critic of judicial intervention in education policy who has provided expert testimony in key cases in order to argue that spending more on education does not necessarily improve it.Footnote 11 That argument continues in this book. Here with Lindseth, an attorney active in such lawsuits, he turns his attention to the school finance cases in Kentucky, New Jersey, Wyoming, and Massachusetts. They find that except for Massachusetts, where increased spending was accompanied by far-reaching education reforms, investing more dollars in schools attended by poor children did not generate growth in performance or an erosion of the learning gap.
Instead of more litigation and spending, Hanushek and Lindseth call for a system of performance based budgeting. Their plan would include uniform standards, strong accountability measures, performance-based compensation, better management and spending controls locally, dissemination of performance data, and more incentives for all stakeholders—including administrators, teachers, and students—to work harder. Many of these ideas have merit and have gained support within the Obama administration. Even those who agree with the authors' proposals, however, might find the book less helpful in explaining how their ideas can be put into practice. Who would enforce them: the president, Congress, state legislatures, local executives, school boards? Why not the courts?
The causes of educational inequality in America are multiple and complex. It is tied to institutional incapacity, poorly prepared practitioners, ill-conceived policies, misappropriated resources, and a basic lack of political will to do what is needed to serve those who are most deprived. Political scientists have had a robust impact on discussions designed to reverse the course. As a profession, however, we still have much to offer. We have a unique capacity to assess whether existing systems of governance are capable of serving the needs of less powerful constituents. In light of growing economic disparities and their effect on the body politic, one might say that we have a vocational obligation to be mindful of such matters. In so far as schooling is concerned, we indeed have a larger role to play in reinforcing the deep historical connections between the nation's educational aspirations and its democratic ideals.
Educational Equality: False Starts and Empty Promises
While several American Founders spoke with eloquence about the connection between education and democracy,Footnote 12 it is Jefferson who is most frequently cited. His writing is emblematic of the American narrative on schooling in both the best and worst sense. It is at once lofty, pragmatic, and ironic, if not altogether hypocritical—posing a grand vision, but delivering far less for disadvantaged people. Hirsch quotes favorably from a letter that Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1813 on the advantage of establishing a natural aristocracy of “talents and virtues” over an “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth” like those in Europe (p. 87). Hirsch mentions the letter in celebration of our ambition as a nation to give children of all origins a chance to participate as equals. A closer look at the plan for public schooling that a younger Jefferson put before the Virginia legislature in 1779 leaves a different impression that may have been more prescient in foretelling the history of American education.
Jefferson's proposal was ahead of its time as an argument for public schooling paid for with tax dollars. He made his idealistic case in utilitarian terms, telling fellow legislators that the survival of the government they were building depended on it. For Jefferson, a government by educated citizens was an alternative to tyranny.Footnote 13 His curriculum consisting of the “three Rs,” Greek, Roman, English and American history could easily fit within Hirsch's Core Knowledge Curriculum. But when the Sage of Monticello extolled a government by gifted men he meant it. Since women were not permitted to participate in government, his plan included them in only the first three years of schooling. The remaining four to six years, what he called grammar school, was open only to men, and it was paid for privately. Grammar school would weed out those who were endowed with the most promising “genius and disposition.” In order to create the semblance of a meritocracy, provision was made so that one poor student in each administrative district who was deemed so gifted would be allowed to attend grammar school at public expense. That student was always white, since slaves were not educated and there were serious doubts at the time that people of African decent could benefit from an education.Footnote 14
Between 1800 and 1834, eight new states joined the Union, and six of the original 13 wrote new constitutions. All but three contained education provisions, and two contained “equality” clauses.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, black children were rarely educated, and if so, separately. As late as 1789, plans to create grammar schools for girls in Boston were met with protests from opponents who claimed that females had inferior minds; and since there was no place for women in government or the workplace, there was not much reason to educate them anyway (or so it was thought).Footnote 16 By the time Horace Mann was appointed secretary of education for Massachusetts in 1837, the agenda for public education had become more ambitious. Mann's common school was a response to immigration, which was changing the face of his America—and in the eyes of reformers not necessarily for the better. Many Americans perceived immigrants, especially the Irish, to be dirty, vulgar, stupid, and prone to fighting, not to mention that the newcomers practiced an odd religion tied to a foreign power in Rome.
Mann appreciated the tie between education and a healthy republic. Before he could make immigrants into intelligent voters and self-sufficient workers, though, he had to make them good citizens. His program might have served as a progressive social engine that enabled the ignorant and unskilled, yet his notion of what it meant to be an American was narrow.Footnote 17 Mann equated national identity with a homogenizing form of American Protestantism. His schools required Bible reading, prayers, and religious hymns.Footnote 18 As Peterson points out, his approach marginalized nonbelievers. Catholics were the most conspicuous group of outliers because they were the largest and most capable of protest, but they were not alone.
Brown v. Board of Education altered the stakes of American schooling forever. If Jefferson and Mann wanted schools to fortify a young nation and a changing society, Brown sought to harness education as a tool to advance individual rights and human equality.Footnote 19Brown also provoked fundamental questions about the proper role of an unelected judiciary in policymaking, especially later when the federal courts reached beyond their original goal of undoing de jure segregation and tried to challenge de facto segregation through busing and other extraordinary means in order to attain integration.Footnote 20Brown indeed opened the floodgates to further rights-based litigation, but only after it became apparent that the states and localities were neglecting large populations of students.Footnote 21 This was especially true for students who were not English speaking, most of whom were from immigrant families, and for children with disabilities, many of whom were labeled “uneducable.”
Before the United States Supreme Court handed down Lau v. Nicols in 1974, many immigrant children routinely received instruction in English, even though it was beyond their comprehension.Footnote 22 Soon after the Supreme Court ruled, the executive branch and Congress enacted regulations and laws that codified the mandates contained in Lau and required schools to provide bilingual instruction. Congress did not pass legislation establishing the rights of handicapped children until 1975, following a number of federal court decisions that forced states and localities to recognize the educational needs of the disabled.Footnote 23 As a consequence, states were required to provide evaluation, instructional, and support services to handicapped students. While few observers are content with either the costs or the effects of education programs directed at immigrant or disabled children, the education they receive now is a vast improvement over the education to which they were once entitled.
The idea of compensatory education grew out of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), which was conceived in the wake of Brown. Footnote 24 The demand that at-risk children receive more resources than others to overcome their economic and social disadvantages was quite progressive. It placed schools at the center of a redistributive policy agenda that had been promulgated by President Lyndon Johnson. It gave new meaning to demands for educational equality that went beyond the dictates of Brown: Equal treatment was not enough. If the poor, racial minorities, and other disadvantaged populations were to become full participants in American life, then schools would have to reach beyond equal opportunity and strive for equal results. Although ambitious, this was not an unreasonable expectation, given the important role that education plays in a free society and the way that Americans have repeatedly acknowledged it.
As Hanushek and Lindseth demonstrate, correlations between educational achievement and such economic indicators as poverty, employment, and overall economic well-being are indisputable (pp. 10–22.). Generations of political scientists have also found that education is a reliable predictor of civic activism, political participation, and political efficacy.Footnote 25 Furthermore, the relationship between education and civic involvement is reciprocal. Strong communities with high degrees of social capital help build strong schools.Footnote 26 While a commendable goal, providing educational opportunity to all may not be enough. Because academic achievement is a perquisite of political and social equality, schools must be effective. They must strive to achieve equal outcomes.
Who, What, How? The Institutional Perspective
There is a general understanding that the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a bold assault on federalism, under which Congress imposed education standards on the states. This is an exaggeration at best, for this legislation hardly came out of the blue. By 2001, every state in the nation had already adopted content standards in reading and math, and 28 had performance standards, albeit they did not aim very high.Footnote 27 Historians trace the origin of the modern school reform movement to the publication in 1983 of A Nation at Risk. Commissioned at the behest of President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Education Terrell Bell, the report was meant to alert the nation that it was lagging behind other countries in academic achievement.Footnote 28 Since President Reagan did not believe that education was a federal function, he did not do much about it. Instead, he wanted to abolish the Department of Education that had been created by President Jimmy Carter. Given the sense of alarm the report created across the country, however, eliminating the federal education agency became politically unfeasible. Secretary Bell began to issue reports ranking the states according to their performance on standardized tests. Within a year, 35 states adopted new graduation requirements, 22 enacted curriculum reforms, and 29 set new policies with regard to testing.Footnote 29
George H. W. Bush was the first occupant of the Oval Office to consider himself an “education president,” which was quite unusual for a Republican. In 1989, Bush attended a historic “Education Summit” sponsored by the National Governors Association in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which the president and state executives agreed to work together to articulate a rigorous set of national education goals and to report annually on the condition of American education. Beyond affirming a commitment from the White House, the event galvanized reform efforts that were already under way in the states.Footnote 30 Among the governors who assumed a leadership role in the effort was Bill Clinton of Arkansas.
Bush was never able to get Congress to cooperate in passing his “America 2000” program, but it became the blueprint for President Clinton's “Goals 2000” initiative that a Democratic Congress endorsed in 1994. The legislation provided financial incentives for states to develop improvement plans. With ESEA coming up for reauthorization that same year, Clinton had hoped to move the country closer to the establishment of national education standards, which he had promised in his campaign for president in 1992. As indicated by Cohen and Moffitt (pp. 46–98), decades of study had shown ESEA to be a failure. Title I money that was supposed to be allocated to impoverished students was being used as general aid, and there was no significant narrowing of the achievement gap. The purpose of the Improving America's Schools Act (IASA) of 1994 was to convert Title I into a standards-based program. It never succeeded. The Department of Education was reluctant to enforce tough standards, and tests remained voluntary.
While NCLB was passed during the administration of George W. Bush, it had strong bipartisan support. It was not a mandate. States were permitted to turn down federal funding if they chose, but the incentive grew when Title I funding was increased from $8.7 billion to $10.35 billion (Cohen and Moffitt, p. 148). The grand federalist bargain behind NCLB was to grant each state the authority to set its own education standards tied to its own program of annual testing in reading and math. It pledged that every child would reach proficiency in basic skills by 2014, an objective that has proved to be unreachable.
NCLB requires performance data to be disaggregated by district and school, reflecting the demographic composition of the student body so that continuing gaps could be documented. It compelled each state to participate in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) that tested samples of students throughout the country. NAEP data highlighted the great flaw in the NCLB strategy, revealing that in order to look good, most states had set testing standards quite low. NCLB had more teeth than IASA in terms of school accountability, but they were baby teeth that crumbled under the pressure of strong local resistance. Districts with chronically low test scores supposedly could be penalized with the loss of federal funding, but they rarely have been. Students in failing schools are eligible for remedial work, but such programs are poorly run. Students in low-performing schools are also eligible for transfers to better public schools, but most struggling districts have few desirable options.
In its original NCLB proposal, the Bush administration had sought to include private schools among the transfer options, but the provision was taken out at the insistence of Democratic leaders. Bush had wanted to tap into the growing demand for choice in school districts where parents were seeking alternatives to chronically failing schools. However, he had underestimated opposition to a voucher option even among members of his own party.Footnote 31 Vouchers had become a reality by then in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Florida, and Colorado, and would soon be enacted by Congress for the District of Columbia. In each of those cases, passage was driven as much by local lobbying from African American and Latino activists as it was by Republicans or conservatives. As Peterson explains, so far as choice is concerned, charter schools attracted broader support than vouchers (pp. 183–228). These privately run and publicly funded public schools have been installed in 40 states and the District of Columbia. While almost entirely a product of state politics, charter schools won the endorsement of President Clinton and are a priority in the Obama administration, despite spirited opposition from the teachers' unions and other public school advocates that are typically in the Democratic Party camp.
A New Policy Consensus?
If the meltdown of the American economy since 2008 has had a damaging effect on state finances, Washington's attempt to respond to the crisis has been a windfall for federal education policy. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act added $10 billion to the Title I budget (Cohen and Moffitt, p. 194). It also provided Education Secretary Arne Duncan with $4.3 billion in discretionary funding that has been the cornerstone of his Race to the Top initiative. This competitive program gives priority to states that support charter schools, develop assessments, use test scores to evaluate teachers and principals, and adopt a prescribed menu of turnaround strategies for failing schools. Many of these ideas had roots in the prior Bush White House. Critics argue that there is no research evidence to support these priorities. Most assessments indicate that charter schools do no better than regular public schools, that state tests are a poor measure of student performance, and that there is modest evidence to support the turnaround strategies that Secretary Duncan has endorsed.Footnote 32
If it can be said that the education policy community is moving toward consensus, it is centered on the need for clear curriculum standards. The theme is consistent among the authors under review, and it has wide support in the scholarly community.Footnote 33 The movement in this direction is being led by the states and is designed to incorporate national rather than federal standards. Common standards announced in June 2010 are the result of a collaborative effort organized by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. With the help of financial incentives provided by Washington, it has garnered strong support among state legislatures and school boards.Footnote 34 For years, many states have put the testing cart before the teaching horse. In order for a testing program to be valid, it needs to be aligned with a curriculum, especially if the tests are used to make decisions about the promotion and graduation of students, or the compensation and tenure of teachers.
The implementation of national curriculum standards will not fix all that is wrong with American schooling. Many critics have complained that NCLB's focus on basic skills has detracted from teaching in other subject areas. For example, there is evidence that high school courses in history and social studies are in decline, thus undermining the civic mission of schools.Footnote 35 While this decline cannot be blamed on NCLB entirely, it is clear that high-stakes testing in reading and math focuses resources and energy on basic skills to the detriment of other important capacities.
So far as consensus is concerned, 57 years after Brown, it is all but settled that racial integration to eliminate de facto segregation is no longer relied upon as a significant tool for achieving educational equality. Aside from questions over whether integration actually improves educational achievement, busing and other forms of racial integration are politically unpopular.Footnote 36 As early as 1974, Congress passed the Equal Education Opportunities Act, declaring all children “entitled to equal educational opportunity without regard to race, color, sex and national origin”; but the law went on to stipulate that failure to attain balance on the basis of race, color, sex, or national origin does not constitute a denial of equal educational opportunity.Footnote 37 In 2007, the Supreme Court placed significant restrictions on the use of race as a criterion for student assignments when it struck down integration plans in Seattle and Louisville.Footnote 38
Litigation in the wake of Brown sensitized the nation to the education needs of distinct populations, such as the handicapped and English-language learners, but many of these needs remain unmet. Under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act passed in 2004, states are required to create plans that set goals for special education in 20 different areas of performance. Today there is widespread uncertainty about the quality of the plans, let alone the services provided to the 6.7 million students enrolled in special education.Footnote 39 As Hirsch has argued, schools play an important role in integrating children from different cultures into the American mainstream without compromising their own identities. Debates continue to rage in bilingual education about what that means as the country grows more diverse and is asked to accommodate families from non-Western cultures, who are more likely to maintain ties with their native countries, some of which have tense relations with the United States. As schools strive to prepare children for a global society, should they support immigrant children in maintaining their native language and culture? Or is bilingual education strictly about learning English and becoming American, whatever that means today? Presently, schools seem to have done neither well.Footnote 40
What's Money Got to Do with It?
Let us take at face value the claim by Hanushek and Lindseth, based on substantial research, that there is no empirical correlation between school spending and student achievement (pp. 44–70). We do not necessarily need to leap from that observation to the conclusion that money does not matter. A careful reading of the literature leads us to the more nuanced conclusion that money does matter when it is used well. This raises questions about institutional capacity introduced by Cohen and Moffitt and reinforces demands for fiscal equity made by Paris. Unless we are prepared to presume that institutional and political factors are altogether insurmountable, then an appeal for equal educational opportunity needs to involve a consideration of resources. If the policy objective is to get all students to an equal or at least acceptable level of performance, then compensatory spending on behalf of the poor is a reasonable strategy. Finding the source of such funding is more difficult.
Notwithstanding NCLB's lofty goal of making every child academically proficient by 2014, the federal government is not a likely source. According to Cohen and Moffitt (p. 149), federal outlays under NCLB constituted only 9.2% of all education spending nationally. The quartile of districts with the highest incidence of poverty received only 20.9% of the total allocation, while the quartile with the lowest incidence of poverty received 19%. The recent infusion of money by the Obama administration is only temporary, and competitive grants are targeted at states that demonstrate capacity, which is not necessarily where poor students are.
Education finance is thus fundamentally a state issue. Despite the call for equity enshrined in Brown, federal courts are not about to monitor the fairness of spending patterns by states and localities. The United States Supreme Court affirmed this in 1971 when it rejected a federal claim brought to equalize funding in Texas. While citing Brown to acknowledge the unique importance of education, the Court in San Antonio v. Rodriguez went on to find that education “is not among the rights afforded explicit attention under the Constitution,” further opining that “the Equal Protection Clause does not require absolute equality or precisely equal advantages.”Footnote 41 This ruling was a direct contradiction of Brown. Historically, the decision can be viewed as part of a larger retreat from the judicial activism of the Earl Warren Court. As a practical matter, it left school funding and disputes about it largely to the states. And that has not been good for the poor.
Because school funding is essentially a function of local property values, education spending favors the wealthy. Some would argue that the practice is fair because it merely lets fortunate families spend more of their own money on their own children; but spending less money on needy children flies in the face of rhetoric calling for equal opportunity. Paris counts 43 states in which litigation has been launched to reverse the pattern, with plaintiffs prevailing in 26 statesFootnote 42 (p. 47). As the standards movement won favor, courts became more assertive in dictating ways that money should be spent so that it could bring results.Footnote 43 Whereas Hanushek and Lindseth oppose unelected judges who take on the legislative role of allocating resources, advocates argue that it is the countermajoritarian nature of courts that allows them to better represent minority interests.Footnote 44 The same advocates point out that judicial victories have led to more spending and greater equity. In actuality, the results have been less than satisfactory. Additional resources do not necessarily result in equal distributions, let alone equity as defined here in terms of compensatory spending for the poor.Footnote 45
Immediately after the Supreme Court handed down Rodriguez, reform advocates turned to equality provisions in state constitutions as a basis for their claims. In response to resistance by state legislatures to comply with court orders, equality claims eventually gave way to demands for “adequacy.”Footnote 46 In theory, adequacy could be interpreted as meaning either more than equal or less than equal spending, but most settlements resulted in the latter.Footnote 47 The landmark Kentucky case from 1989 is illustrative. In response to a judicial ruling, the state legislature increased spending statewide. After establishing a certain base parity for all districts, it allowed wealthier districts to spend above the base. The plan did result in more generous and equitable spending, but poor students still received less money for their education.
The New Jersey case first decided in 1985 was unusual in that the court eventually required the legislature to spend as much in poor urban districts as was spent in wealthy suburbs, and additional money was appropriated to meet the exceptional needs of at-risk students in the target districts. This led to some gains in academic performance statewide and a slight dent in the learning gap, yet the academic scores of children in urban areas remain unacceptably low.Footnote 48 In the final analysis, even compensatory spending, joined with court-ordered educational innovations, proved to be inadequate to turn the tide of chronic failure. These results are not encouraging for the vast majority of students in poor districts who receive less funding than their wealthier peers. This inequity is not likely to change, however. Legal research indicates that state courts are backing off from aggressive intervention on spending, even in politically liberal states like New York and Massachusetts.Footnote 49
Conclusion: The Distinct Role of Political Science
Jefferson's faith in education as a foundation for a strong democracy remains very much with us, but so does the breach between the language of equality and the reality. Government action to provide a decent education for all has moved haltingly over the past half century, in part because of the institutional structure that Jefferson's contemporaries left us, in part because of our ambivalence about how to achieve it. We better understand what is wrong with education than how to fix it. The lines drawn to define federalism or to check and balance power keep moving. Rather than a grand arena for institutional conflict, education policymaking proceeds like an unscripted dialogue among the levels of government and their various branches.
Political scientists are at the center of the conversation about education reform, and we have taken much from colleagues in other disciplines who are a party to it. Economists in particular have coaxed the discussion in ways that have been both useful and limiting, analyzing education as a process of production in which resources are converted into measurable outcomes. It is notable, for example, that while economist Hanushek focuses on the relationship between spending and achievement when discussing school finance cases, political scientist Paris does not pay any attention to academic performance when he assesses the results of litigation.Footnote 50 If we want schools to realize their potential as social levelers, we must insist on results. That being said, the study of education cannot end with test scores, especially for political scientists. In focusing on the all-important bottom line of achievement, political scientists at times have neglected other considerations germane to their discipline and the normative tradition that shaped it, which urge us to be as mindful about process as outcomes. Let me mention three previously discussed examples by way of illustration: desegregation, choice, and governance.
Although there may be sparse evidence that school integration boosts student test scores, racial integration is integral to the civic mission of schools, especially as school populations become more diverse.Footnote 51 Schools, after all, are supposed to be places where future generations of adults learn to live with others who are unlike themselves. Rather than assume that integration is off the policy table, we need to identify politically feasible ways to stem the increase in racial isolation.Footnote 52
The school-choice issue is even more complex. While it is important to ask whether vouchers and charter schools can raise academic performance, there are important normative questions inherent in the choice proposition that have received insufficient attention.Footnote 53 Does acquiring choice enhance the civic capacity of poor people? Does school choice undermine the civic mission of public schools? Does choice advance or diminish religious freedom when it involves public aid to religious schools?
Even political scientists who have delved into issues of school governance at times have given disproportionate attention to determining whether institutional restructuring elevates academic achievement. Aside from the fact that it is naive to suggest that structural reorganization, on its own, can boost test scores, the preoccupation with instructional outcomes in this context forsakes fundamental democratic concerns, such as access, representation, and responsiveness, that traditionally have been at the heart of political science.Footnote 54 School districts are not private corporations, nor are parents passive consumers of the products that schools deliver. School districts are public institutions. Parents and other stakeholders are citizens entitled to a voice in decisions that are made.
These (desegregation, choice, and governance) are complex issues, to be sure—not to be resolved here—and there are others of similar gravity. I mention them in closing to highlight a drift in the policy realm that can detach political science from its basic roots and undermine the unique role it can play in addressing the perplexing dilemmas that confound policymaking in education. We should learn from our colleagues in other disciplines, but we should not forget who we are.
However one slices the American pie—whether politically, economically, or socially—some people continue to get a smaller piece than others, and the disparity is growing.Footnote 55 The politics of education are a microcosm of the crisis in governance that the APSA Task Force Report on Inequality and American Democracy defined in 2004.Footnote 56 As meaningful participation in politics becomes more a function of wealth than it has ever been before, the capacity of the political system to respond with policies that accommodate the educational needs of the poor is diminished. This larger inequality can in part be traced to inequities in schooling, yet the relationship between schooling and the macro political-economic variables noted by the Task Force is reciprocal. There is much to be done. Political science has more to contribute.
