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From Excellence to Equity:Observations on Politics, History,and Policy

Joseph P. ViterittiDepartment of PoliticsPrinceton University

The little blue booklet still sits at the of top my bookcase as if I had justput it there yesterday, prominently displayed for fear that it might get lostamong the other publications if shelved in the usual fashion. I could hardlybelieve that this slim document—36 pages in all, without the appen-dixes—was all that there was to the report that had ignited so much debateon the condition of American education. I was an attentive observer at thetime. Just a few months after the report appeared in the spring of 1983, Ihad published my first book on education, which I wrote after serving for 3years (1978–1981) as a special assistant to the Chancellor of the New YorkCity public schools.1 I had come into that job straight out of graduateschool when my dissertation advisor, Frank Macchiarola, was asked to be-come head of the school system. Among my duties was to direct the Chan-cellor’s Office of Policy Analysis, Research, and Planning.

Between my service in New York and the publication of the book, I alsohad the opportunity to serve with Robert (Bud) Spillane, who in 1981 was

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1I focused on five policy issues that had risen to prominence in New York and other citiesaround the country: funding, standards, desegregation, special education, and teacher ac-countability (see Viteritti, 1983).

Requests for reprints should be sent to Joseph P. Viteritti, James Madison Program, De-partment of Politics, 205 Bobst Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544–1012.E-mail: jviterit@princeton.edu

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the newly appointed Superintendent of Schools in Boston. At the time, Iwas in residence as a research fellow at the Harvard Graduate School ofEducation, living on a generous grant provided by the now-defunct Na-tional Institute of Education (NIE), while completing my book on NewYork. With 3 hot years of experience under my belt working in the thick ofit all in the Big Apple, Bud, another New Yorker, saw me as a seasoned vet-eran who could help him chart a course in the politically turbulent watersof Boston. As director of his transition team, my assignment, to be com-pleted over 2 months, was to oversee the development of a policy agendafor the new school administration. The job provided me with a chance toobserve high-level policy making in another urban school district. Bostonwas very different from New York both in its size and political history, butthe two school chiefs with whom I worked in the early 1980s were bothcoping with a changing national mood that ultimately produced A Nationat Risk (NAR; National Commission on Excellence in Education [NCEE],1983). About half way between then and now, I had my third opportunityto work in an urban school system when in 1992 Waldemar “Bill” Rojas,another veteran of the Macchiarola team, became Superintendent ofSchools in San Francisco. Once again I was put in charge of the transitionand asked to draft a new policy agenda for the school district. San Fran-cisco was distinct yet from either of the two east coast cities that I hadknown—more ethnically diverse, financially strapped, and then grapplingwith the physical and psychological damage wreaked by a dreadful earth-quake; but more important, it was already functioning in a national envi-ronment that had changed considerably since the publication of NAR.

My charge in this article is to assess how the political context of educa-tion policy making has changed since the publication of NAR, and how theappearance of the report has influenced those changes. This is a bit like achicken and egg kind of problem. Most observers agree, including thosewho opposed its message (e.g., Berliner & Biddle, 1995, pp. 139–144), thatNAR has had a significant impact in shaping the dialogue on educationalpolicy over the last two decades. The truth be told though, by 1983 achange in thinking was already apparent in some parts of the policy com-munity. NAR served to crystallize it and give it momentum. NAR articu-lated a demand for educational excellence and an understanding that forreform to be meaningful it must result in changes that have tangible aca-demic results. That sounds like common sense to most folks today, whichsupports my point, because it wasn’t always that way. Recently the excel-lence movement has been linked to a more concerted effort to promote ed-ucational equity so that the academic needs of underserved populationsare better addressed. This new linkage between excellence and equity alsoreflects a changing political environment, one that might have been pre-

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dicted in a country that committed itself to equality of educational oppor-tunity 50 years ago.2 Less predictable was the dramatic realignment of po-litical coalitions—partisan and ideological—now operative around theconcept of equity, not only with regard to how it is defined, but more im-portant how it can be translated into tangible outcomes for less advan-taged children. As President George W. Bush continues to shape No ChildLeft Behind (NCLB) to conform to his own vision of reform, the new con-sensus he is trying to forge can in hindsight be seen as a compromise be-tween what a federal panel appointed during the Reagan administrationmight have been expected to recommend and what it actually recom-mended.

Text and Context

Writing for The Public Interest, Bell (1966, p. 7) outlined a number of func-tions that blue ribbon panels perform in government. According to Bell,these commissions can provide a mechanism through which constituentsadvise policy makers, serve as a sounding board to explore the feasibilityof particular actions, offer elite groups a forum for direct participation ingoverning, or act like a public relations device to call attention to a problemor build support for a policy. Although all such panels perform all suchfunctions to a greater or lesser degree, the NCEE that prepared NAR wasdecidedly focused on the latter. In his personal memoir, former Secretaryof Education Terrell H. Bell, who commissioned the report, revealed, “Iwanted to stage an event that would jar the people into action on behalf ofthe educational system” (Bell, 1988, p. 115). Jarring it was. The words “ris-ing tide of mediocrity” will live in perpetuity in the annals of American ed-ucation. The warning that the United States had lost its pre-eminence inthe world as a leader in commerce, industry, science, and technologytouched a sensitive chord within the American populace. The analogy toan “act of war” may seem especially hyperbolic in a post-September 11world that brings the prospect of carnage to our shores, but it was not thefirst time in memory that a military analogy was used to stir a renewedcommitment to education. The National Defense Education Act of 1958was a direct response to the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union andthe fear that American security was being compromised by the rise of atechnologically superior, belligerent foreign power.

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2“the opportunity of an education … is a right that must be made available to all on equalterms.” Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 494 (1954).

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The early 1980s was a period of grave self-doubt for the American peo-ple. The taking of American hostages in Iran was a national humiliation, adrama played out on an international stage in which the so-called leader ofthe free world was rendered helpless by a small hostile dictatorship. Athome the economy was in a tailspin with unemployment, inflation, and in-terest rates reaching record high levels. When I relocated from New York toCambridge in 1981, the interest rate on my new mortgage was 18%, consid-ered quite a bargain at the time. In the organizational management class Iwas teaching at Harvard, everyone’s favorite topic of discussion was Japa-nese management, the widely held assumption being that American in-dustry had lost its way.3 And, as NAR was soon to tell us, a big part of theblame could be placed with our failing system of education. Commentingon the report, educational historian David Tyack recently observed, “Itsaid, ‘Look we are going to hell in a handbasket’…. And that fit the moodof the Reagan years …. It was a text for the times” (Barnard & Mondale,2001, p. 185).

Given its meager size, NAR was relatively light on the presentation andanalysis of hard data, astonishingly so for a report that drew so much at-tention in the media and the education profession. Some well-regarded re-searchers, expecting a bulky marshalling of facts to make a case for sys-temic reform, took the NCEE to task on that account (Stedman & Smith,1983). NAR, however, was not written primarily for academic consump-tion. It was scripted in plain language for the general public, designed tocreate a public disposition for change that would move educators and pol-icy makers beyond their plodding incremental instincts.4 In that sense itwas a political document, although the politics were not necessarilyRonald Reagan’s. The message it delivered was direct, substantive, andwell-founded. It cited several clear indicators of the sorry state of Ameri-can education: international comparisons; high rates of adult illiteracy; de-clining scores on college entrance examinations; and a rise of remedialeducation programs in colleges, corporations, and the military. Its recom-mendations were equally specific. It called for a strengthening of highschool graduation requirements; setting rigorous, measurable perfor-mance standards; the more effective use of time in school, as well as a lon-ger school day and school year; and improvements in the preparation,compensation, and accountability of teachers. NAR was as bold as it was

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3Two popular books commonly adopted for classroom use at the time were Pascale andAntos (1981) and Ouchi (1981).

4There is an abundant literature on incrementalism; see Simon (1945) on organizations,Lindblom (1959) on government, and Tyack and Cuban (1995) on education. For a critique ofthe practice and its effects in education, see Viteritti (2003b).

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provocative, but it was hardly a reflection the conservative philosophy ofthe Reagan administration.

Secretary of Education Bell recalls that there was great ambivalence inthe White House over the idea of producing a federal report on education.If Bell had it his way, the panel would have been appointed by thePresident himself, giving its findings more political stature (Bell, 1988, p.114–143).5 The President’s advisors were concerned that a federal reportwould misleadingly signal the administration’s intension to enhance thefederal role in education. Ronald Reagan had made a campaign promise in1980 to eliminate the federal Department of Education, which had onlybeen created in the waning days of the Carter Administration. As historianRavitch (2000) pointedly reminded us, “Regan had a “distain for a federalrole in education.” (p. 411). Therefore the report was a source of anxiety inthe department, with Bell and his staff feeling uncertain about how itwould be received in the Oval Office right up until the day it was released.It was disseminated at a meeting in the State Dining Room on April 26th.When President Reagan addressed a full contingent of the Washington, DCpress that day, he spent no time discussing the report. He praised theNCEE members for their work, acknowledged the importance of educa-tion, and noted that it was essential to implement their recommendations.He then went on to elaborate on his three major education priorities, noneof which were mentioned in the report: school prayer, education tax-cred-its, and school choice.

Although the Department of Education managed to survive, there wasno increase in federal spending during the Reagan years, and by 1983 Da-vid Stockman’s budget ax had already begun to exact big cuts in its budget.Funding for education research was especially hard hit. I remember ameeting I had in Cambridge in the spring of 1981 with my program officerfrom the NIE when she told me that my grant had just gotten in under thewire in the final days of the Carter administration, and that researchmoney was about to disappear. Over the next 7 years the budget for NIE,an invention of the Nixon administration designed to upgrade educationresearch, was cut by 70% (Vinovskis, 2003, p. 122). The Reagan team hadviewed the federal department as an institutionalized collection of orga-nized interests, which, as all federal departments, it was. They had a partic-ular suspicion of the research enterprise, deeming self-serving and irrele-vant, which also had a measure truth (excepting my project of course).However, they misjudged the staying power of an entrenched federal bu-

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5Bell’s account of the White House reaction was corroborated by Milton Goldberg, the Na-tional Commission on Excellence in Education’s Executive Director (see Goldberg & Renton,1995).

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reaucracy and how agencies tend to function as monuments to the nation’scommitment toward certain policy priorities, whether or not the agenciesor their policies succeed in achieving their stated public ends (see Rourke,1969). The same public sentiment that contributed to a growing dissatisfac-tion with the quality of education made it difficult to garner political sup-port for the elimination of a federal department bearing its name.

In a way, NAR was a transitional document, caught between two dis-tinct periods of time and the thinking that shaped their respective agen-das. Through the 1980s, the federal role in education had been largely fo-cused on the needs of racial minorities and it was believed that thenation’s responsibility to African American children could be met in twoways, through racial integration and generous spending. But neither ap-proach had proven to be effective in meeting the instructional needs ofpoor children. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed atthe urging of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, brought about thelargest infusion of federal money for education up until that time (seeBailey & Mosher, 1968). In just 1 year federal spending on education dou-bled from $1 billion to $2 billion and it grew to nearly $3 billion by theend of the decade. Title I of the act was supposed to target assistance tochildren who lived in poverty, which was easily correlated with low aca-demic achievement. By the early 1980s, studies were indicating that thebillions of dollars spent on compensatory education for poor childrenwere bearing no tangible results in the classroom (Carter, 1984). This wasespecially troubling news in the midst of a national recession, during apresidential administration that had grave doubts about supporting anambitious federal role in education.

Although most Americans had supported efforts mandated by the fed-eral courts to dismantle de jure segregation in the south, Whites and Blacksalike were growing weary of controversial busing plans that pursued ra-cial integration as an end in itself. Whites saw school integration as de-structive to neighborhood schools and Black parents were reluctant tosend their children into hostile environments, especially when there wasno tangible evidence that the ordeal was beneficial. Research conducted byColeman and others was showing that school busing had resulted in Whiteflight, thereby undermining integration efforts (Coleman, Kelly, & Moore,1975). In 1974, Congress passed the Equal Educational Opportunity Act,declaring that all children “are entitled to an equal educational opportu-nity without regard to race, color, sex, or national origin.” The same legisla-tion stipulated that failure to achieve racial balance is not necessarily ille-gal and it acknowledged that “the neighborhood school is the appropriatebasis for determining public school assignments” (cited in Salomone, 1986,p. 60). Over the next 6 years, it was common practice for Congress to add

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riders to appropriations bills that discouraged transporting children greatdistances to achieve racial integration.

Black scholars like Ron Edmonds and Derrick Bell, both of Harvard,questioned the wisdom of divisive policies focused on racial integrationwhen it was clear that minority children were still not mastering basicskills in reading, writing, and math.6 It wasn’t that they approved of racialsegregation. They just challenged the notion that Black children had to besitting next to White children to receive a good education or more impor-tant that all Black schools were destined to fail. Edmonds’s research wasdesigned to prove that predominantly Black schools could be education-ally effective. It began as a response to the first Coleman report, whichfound that family characteristics were a more reliable predictor of studentperformance than what happens in a particular school (Coleman et al.,1964). He was especially troubled by the “schools don’t matter” mindsetthat the report created in the education profession and the sense of resigna-tion many educators displayed toward minority children. (Although itshould be noted that the Coleman report also had a major influence inshifting the focus of education policy studies from inputs, measured interms of resources, to outcomes measured in terms of performance.)

In 1978, Edmonds took a leave of absence from Harvard to become thesenior instructional advisor to the Chancellor of Schools in New York.Ron’s central role in the administration was to develop a set of local stan-dards for teaching and learning in the lower grades that were consistentwith standards the state was already implementing at the high school level(Viteritti, 1983, pp. 17–23, 99–156). These standards were linked to a systemof accountability anchored in standardized tests, and a new promotionalpolicy that would hold students back in fourth grade and seventh grade ifthey did not perform adequately on these tests. The long-term goal was toeliminate “social promotion” in all grades. Opponents of the plan arguedthat it was unfair to hold students back who suffered from economic andeducational deficits and that the testing program would have a disparateimpact on disadvantaged children. Ron responded that setting lower stan-dards for poor and minority students violated the notion of educationalequity. He argued that urban school districts should focus their energy andattention on low performers so that all children could become proficient inbasic skills. After Macchiarola and Edmonds undertook a long ardent cam-paign to persuade parents and political leaders of the merits of their pro-gram, it was finally adopted by the Board of Education and funded by theMayor and the City Council.

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6See Edmonds (1974, 1980) and Bell (1976, 1980). For a brief overview of Edmonds’s work,see Viteritti (1984).

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The terms of Edmonds’s appointment in New York allowed him tospend up to 2 days per week on released time to pursue his research on ef-fective schools. But for Ron, effective schools was not just a research pro-ject—it was a movement. Edmonds traveled the country to argue that edu-cational equity cannot be severed from educational performance and thatequality of educational opportunity must be calculated in terms of mea-surable academic results. His egalitarian assumption was that all children,no matter what their background, could be brought to an acceptable levelof proficiency. His studies documented the variables associated withinstructionally effective urban schools. Among those variables was the es-tablishment of high standards of performance for all children and a regu-larized program for monitoring academic achievement through the use ofstandardized tests (Edmonds, 1979). Before his untimely death in the sum-mer of 1983, Ron’s mantra “All children can learn” became a widely recog-nized call to excellence, signaling the emergence of a new consciousnessthat was beginning to redefine the discussion in education. Although NARacknowledged that educational excellence and reform must not beachieved “at the expense of a strong public commitment to the equitabletreatment of our diverse population” it did not make a strong connectionbetween the two goals. But NAR, coupled with the work of people like mylate friend Ron Edmonds, made it increasingly difficult to discuss equity oropportunity without tying it to excellence.

For educators working in big city school districts with a substantial rep-resentation of poor and minority children, the connection was all too obvi-ous. But politics, and very often racial politics, distracted many superin-tendents from that focus. No city in the United States had been so torn bythe experience with busing as Boston (Formisano, 1991; Lukas, 1985).When Bud Spillane took the reigns as superintendent in 1981, few peoplehad confidence in the school system as a provider of educational services.As our transition report observed “the school system has lost its focus onchildren as learners” (Boston School Department, 1981). In the early daysof Spillane’s tenure, the business community, which ordinarily was wellorganized and public spirited, let it be known to him in no uncertain termsthat they had given up on the school system. They demanded more ac-countability from the new superintendent, but their notion of accountabil-ity could be defined primarily in terms of greater efficiency and less spend-ing. Spillane was greeted with a similar negative attitude by the city’sincumbent mayor, Kevin White, who originally had come into office as aliberal reformer. In their first face to face meeting, White told Spillane thathe wanted nothing to do with the schools because education was a no-winpolitical situation in Boston; and frankly, because the local school boardwas elected, it was somebody else’s problem, not his. However, because

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the school system was fiscally dependent on the city, the mayor warned thesuperintendent to hold down the rate of spending.

Boston had been absorbed in a decade-long struggle to carry out JudgeGarrity’s fateful court order, so that instruction was not part of the ongoingconversation about schools in the terribly polarized city. Therefore, the ma-jor thrust of Spillane’s agenda, articulated in our transition report, was toget beyond racial politics and refocus the school system on teaching andlearning. It was not unlike the agenda that Macchiarola and Edmonds pur-sued in New York. Spillane very much wanted to replicate their efforts inBoston, explaining, in part, why I was brought in to run the transition. Ourreport, written with the strong endorsement of the Superintendent, calledfor the development of new curriculum guidelines in basic skills, higheracademic standards, and the application of standardized tests to measurestudent performance against the standards.

San Francisco had also been the scene of desegregation battles thatdated back to the early 1960s. In 1983, a month after the publication ofNAR, attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement ofColored People, the school district, and the state signed a consent decree infederal court that reformulated their joint expectations with regard to apossible settlement. Their new focus was indicative of the changing times.Although their agreement did not remove racial integration as a goal, itspecifically required “continued and accelerated efforts to achieve aca-demic excellence throughout the S.F.U.S.D.” (Fraga, Erlichson, & Lee, 1998,p. 70). Just as Bill Rojas was about to take over as superintendent in 1992, aCommittee of Experts appointed by the court completed a 10-year review.Their report found that the district had met its goals with regard to racialbalance, but that it fell short in raising the academic achievement oflow-performing schools. Rojas seized on the report, and subsequentlyused the consent degree as a bold instrument to engineer a reform programthat, among other things, was focused on the reconstitution of chronicallyfailing schools. As in Boston, the focus of activity in San Francisco hadchanged from integration to education.

Changing Politics, Changing Agenda

President Ronald Reagan’s desire to eliminate the U.S. Department ofEducation and his failure to succeed were indicative of a deep-seated na-tional ambivalence about the governmental role in education. It is not thatwe as a people ever questioned the value of education. Our understandingof its importance dates back to the founding fathers (Pangle & Pangle,2001; Ravitch, 2001). John Adams and Benjamin Franklin believed that a

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sound education is essential for cultivating moral citizens, Thomas Jeffer-son argued that an educated populace is a prerequisite for a vibrant de-mocracy, and George Washington wanted to establish a national univer-sity. A federal office of education was created in 1867 (Warren, 1974). Soonthereafter it was downgraded to a bureau and was subsequently housed inseveral different locations within the growing federal bureaucracy. That itwas not elevated to a cabinet-level position until more than a century laterprovides us with some insight into conflicting national attitudes on thesubject. The long hesitation has much to do with our thoughts about Amer-ican federalism, or more precisely, our ambivalent views about the properrelation between the federal and state governments in fixing the schools(Kosar, 2003). For as long as can be remembered, Americans have consid-ered education a state and local function. NAR shook that consensus a bit,but it did not alter it.

Despite the fact that it was hatched in Washington, NAR, in the first in-stance, was a source of political pressure that made it difficult for stateleaders to ignore the call for higher education standards. If nothing else,Secretary Bell’s wall chart ranking of the states by their performance onstandardized tests was an unavoidable embarrassment for any governorwho had to face the electorate of a state that was not doing well. Manystates created their own task forces to assess the problems that had beenidentified. A follow-up report commissioned by Secretary Bell a year laterfound that 35 states had enacted new graduation requirements, 22 hadadopted curriculum reforms, and 29 passed new policies with regard totesting (U.S. Department of Education, 1994). To be sure, some of these ini-tiatives were in the making prior to the publication of NAR, and many, ifnot most, were less ambitious than what was called for. Yet, it is undeniablethat NAR gave velocity to the standards movement, which eventually be-came widespread throughout the states (Ravitch, 1995; Ravitch, 2000, pp.408–452). NAR also set the stage for subsequent studies conducted underthe auspices of professional organizations, business groups, and privatefoundations that would focus national attention on quality, accountability,and teaching (Fuhrman, 2003).

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush called the nation’s governors toCharlottesville, Virginia for a summit on education. The event was remark-able for a number of reasons. A Republican Chief Executive had deemedhimself the “Education President” and was summoning the chief execu-tives of the states to work with him to make education a national priority.The general response among the state executives was positive, althoughsome Congressional Democrats had resented that the White House was as-suming leadership on an issue they fancied as theirs. Many governors inthe southern and border states, sensing dissatisfaction among their constit-

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uents with the quality of public schools, had already begun to take mea-sures on behalf of reform (Vinovskis, 1999). Among the most notable wereBill Clinton (Arkansas), who chaired the conference; Lamar Alexander(Tennessee); Richard Riley (South Carolina); James Hunt (North Carolina);and Bob Graham (Florida)—all of whom pledged cooperation with thePresident. By the end of the meeting an agreement was forged to establisha set of national education goals and report annually on the state of Ameri-can education. Governor Bill Clinton took the lead in drafting the goals,which included higher academic achievement for all students and improv-ing the high school graduation rate. The National Governors Associationmoved to create a National Education Goals Panel that would assume re-sponsibility for developing a national report card to assess progress to-ward the attainment of the goals. These goals would become the basis for“America 2000,” a broader proposal put forward by the Bush administra-tion in 1991 that was ultimately defeated in a Congress dominated by theDemocrats in both houses.

In addition to proposing national goals, the “America 2000” packageincluded voluntary national testing and a program for creating and as-sessing “break the mold” schools to serve as models for reform—all ofwhich were consistent with the Charlottesville agenda (Ravitch, 1995, pp.138–148). It also would have permitted students in Title I schools totransfer to public, private, and parochial schools of their choice, takingtheir federal funding with them, which in some people’s minds was athrowback to the Reagan years. Congressional reception to “America2000” was a classic case study of the political and institutional obstaclesthat prevent the passage of meaningful national legislation on education.Already reluctant to give a sitting Republican President a victory on acrucial issue that could improve his chances for re-election, liberal Demo-crats, prompted by an assortment of educational lobbyists, could notbring themselves to raise standards for performance without a generousinfusion of additional funding to go with it, and they were absolutely de-termined to prevent public money from being used for students to attendnonpublic schools, even if the beneficiaries were poor children. Althoughconservative Republicans liked the choice proposal, they were suffi-ciently uncomfortable with any plan to define a more significant federalrole in education so that they failed to garner the support for their Presi-dent that was expected. Despite its defeat, however, “America 2000” didjust that; it put national education reform on the public agenda. It wasthe next logical step after the publication of NAR and the departure ofRonald Reagan from the White House. To maintain momentum for thepursuit of academic excellence, the Department of Education, the Na-tional Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Founda-

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tion awarded grants to private organizations to develop standards in avariety of subject areas.

When Bill Clinton became President in 1993, the Democrats were still incontrol of both houses of Congress and he sought to make good on hispledge to work toward the development of national education standards.“Goals 2000,” the first part of his legislative package, appeared like theDemocratic Party’s version of “America 2000.” (Ravitch, 1995, pp. 148–155;Riley, 1995; Smith, 1995). Despite attempts by some Republican congress-men to include it, no provision was made for school choice, neither publicnor private. Although Clinton had supported national testing in his cam-paign for the White House, he dropped that idea in drafting “Goals 2000”(Ravitch, 1995, pp. 148, 155–56). The final bill adopted in 1994 codified a setof national education goals and authorized the formation of a National Ed-ucation Goals Panel. It also created a National Education Standards andImprovement Council (NESIC) with authority to certify voluntary na-tional and state content and performance standards and assessments.

The thrust of “Goals 2000” was to provide incentives for states to de-velop their own improvement plans, making federal funding available tothose that met criteria set by either NESIC or the Secretary of Education.Grants were also provided for various consortia around the country to de-velop voluntary opportunity to learn standards with regard to curricula,instructional materials, and technologies for students; and professional de-velopment programs for teachers and administrators. The result was anelaborate intergovernmental network with the representation of federalofficials, state executives, legislators, school officers, education experts,college professors, principals, teachers, parents, students, school boards,community organizations, health professionals, labor unions, businessgroups, and just about anyone else who could claim an interest or stake ineducation. Complex and cumbersome as the structure was, it managed toadvance the national movement for standards and assessments furtherthan it had ever gone before that time. As a result, almost every state begandeveloping new academic criteria and measurements, although the crite-ria for review set by the Secretary of Education were not especially rigor-ous. In the end, President Clinton never appointed anyone to fill the vacantpositions on NESIC; after the Republicans gained control of Congress in1994, they abolished it. In 1996 the budget for the National EducationGoals Panel was cut by more than 50%; and, for fear of excessive federal in-terference in state policy making, opportunity to learn standards were re-moved from the Goals 2000 legislation.

As President Clinton was finishing his first term in office, some Republi-cans again talked about abolishing the Department of Education and fold-ing it into another agency. In the meantime, Title I (then called Chapter I) of

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the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was up for reauthorizationin 1994. Title I accounted for the largest expenditure of federal dollars ineducation. A substantial body of research, based on nearly three decades ofexperience, had shown that the program was largely ineffective. Monieswere distributed in such a way that they were not adequately directed atthose students who needed assistance the most and there was no evidencethat the billions of dollars invested were doing much to reduce the learninggap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged (U.S. Department ofEducation, 1993). Clinton’s response was to make Title I a standards-basedprogram. He proposed a significant increase in spending with the under-standing that states would need to demonstrate that they were adoptingrigorous academic standards and assessments to qualify. The ImprovingAmerica’s Schools Act (IASA) of 1994 established an important conceptuallinkage between compensatory spending and educational accountability.Something, however, got lost in the translation from adoption to imple-mentation . Because the Department of Education was reluctant to enforcetough standards when reviewing state applications for funding, the fullpotential of IASA as a lever for reform was never realized.

President Clinton finally attempted to make good on his original cam-paign promise to develop a system of national tests during his second termin office. His strategy was a familiar one: the tests would be voluntary andfederal support would be used as an incentive to bring states aboard. Butthe Congressional response was also a familiar one. Liberals protested thatit was not fair to expect children to perform at a higher level without pro-viding them with additional resources to do so. Conservatives were en-raged by the prospect of having the federal Department of Education over-see a system of national testing. In the end, the Clinton plan nevermaterialized. In 2000, Congress let the legislation for “Goals 2000” expire,and with it the National Education Goals Panel that represented Washing-ton’s commitment to fostering educational excellence in the states.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

Twenty years is a long time in politics. The turn of the century brought apresidential election in which the Republican and Democratic candidatescompeted to see who could outbid the other in defining a more prominentfederal role in education. There didn’t seem to be much doubt about the di-rection that American federalism was moving (at least with regard to edu-cation policy); the question was how far. By the time George W. Bushraised his right hand to take the oath of office, the governmental table was

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already set with a full menu of policy options from which he could choose.The sense of crisis that NAR had communicated in 1983 was still verymuch alive in the minds of the American people, as was the demand forstandards-based reform. Not all educators accepted the formula outlinedin NAR (e.g., Kohn, 2000), but higher aspirations, standardized testing,and increased accountability were widely supported by the American peo-ple (Public Agenda, 2002).

George W. Bush had laid out an ambitious education platform in his runfor the presidency; but the evenly divided (50 Democrats, 50 Republicans)U.S. Senate that greeted his arrival in Washington, DC promised that com-promise would be the order of the day in fashioning NCLB.7 As withClinton, Bush would have an opportunity to shape education policythrough the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary EducationAct (ESEA). NCLB was the instrument through which he would do so.NCLB married the demand for higher standards with the need to addressthe leaning gap between the races. For more than three decades, the aver-age Black student was 4 years behind the average White student in read-ing, writing, and math and there were no signs that this gap was shrinkingin any significant way since NAR breathed life into the standards move-ment (Jencks & Phillips, 1998; Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1997, pp.352–366). To get the Democrats to go along with his bill, President Bushagreed to a 20% increase in Title I spending, from $18.8 billion to $22.6 bil-lion, with promises for further increases over the next 6 years. His originalproposal had called for an increase of $685 million over what the Clintonadministration was spending (Clymer & Alvarez, 2001, p. 1). States and lo-calities were given more flexibility to transfer federal dollars among pro-grams without acquiring permission from Washington, DC. Reflecting apriority that Bush had established as Governor of Texas, the amount ofmoney made available for reading instruction was tripled, with the pro-viso that it would be used for phonics-based programs with a proven re-cord of effectiveness. Thus, although the Republican president was sup-portive of investing more federal money for instruction, he did not want tosee the money squandered on programs that do not work.

The centerpiece of NCLB is the requirement that every state develop itsown set of standards. By the 2004–2006 school year, these standards mustbe tied to a state-developed program of annual testing in reading and mathfor third grade though eighth grade. Scores on these tests are to bedisaggregated by school to reflect the demographic composition of the stu-

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7For an overview, see the website at http://www.nclb.gov. Or, for a good summary, seeClymer and Alvarez (2001).

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dents.8 Parents will be provided with an annual report card detailing theperformance of their child and their child’s school as compared to otherschools in the same district. The long-term goal, over 12 years, is to haveevery student performing at a proficient level. In the meantime, each stateis required to present the U.S. Department of Education with a plan map-ping out the annual rate of progress schools are expected to make inupgrading the performance of lagging districts, schools, and students.Schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress for more than 2 consec-utive years are identified as schools in need of improvement for which cor-rective action is to be taken. In extreme cases of nonperformance, federalmoney could be held back—at least theoretically.

All states applying for federal funding under the Title I program mustalso agree to participate in the annual National Assessment of EducationProgress (NAEP) in reading and math. This survey, commonly referred toas the nation’s report card, is a voluntary system of testing administered bythe National Assessment Governing Board, which measures the perfor-mance of a national sample of students in seven subject areas. A compari-son of each state’s performance on the NAEP reading and math exams ismeant to serve as a barometer for measuring the quality of the standardsand assessments that each state has adopted on its own. In the best of allworlds, states would be motivated to align their standards and assess-ments to the highly regarded NAEP exams. In a worst case scenario, stateswith low aspirations and achievement would be subject to embarrassmentby their relatively poor performance on NAEP, much along the lines of Sec-retary Bell’s famous wall charts from 20 years ago. Although NCLB has noexplicit opportunity to learn standards, it does require each school districtto assure that teachers hired after the 2002–2003 school year are “highlyqualified” and that by 2005–2006 all teachers are deemed the same. Amongthe objectives here is to guarantee that districts and schools with a dispro-portionate number of poor and minority students are not assigned a dis-proportionate number of unlicensed or unqualified teachers, as is typicallythe case in many urban areas.

Armed by NCLB with better information about the performance of theirchildren and the schools their children attend, parents with children inchronically failing schools are granted the right to transfer them to anotherpublic school. Children who attend schools found to be unsafe are alsosupposed to be granted a choice option. Those who do not exercise thechoice option are entitled to acquire supplementary educational servicesfrom outside providers. In his original proposal, Bush wanted the choice

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8Among the demographic variable used are race, ethnicity, gender, disability, poverty, andEnglish language proficiency.

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options to include private and religious schools, but he was forced to ex-clude such schools to get the Democrats’ votes he needed in the Senate.9The obvious flaw in the choice provision is one of capacity. School districtswith large numbers of failing schools, such as those in big cities, do nothave seats available in their relatively few academically rigorous schools.Unless the options are extended to include private and religious schoolswhere there are seats available, the choice option is an empty promise.

By forcing states and localities to disaggregate school and school perfor-mance data, NCLB exposes the most glaring failure of public education inthe United States, the inability of schools to meet the needs of poor chil-dren, a disproportionate number of whom are African American andHispanic. Moreover, as Ron Edmonds and a few other educators did 20years ago, NCLB defines educational opportunity in terms of educationalachievement. Although NAR talked the language of achievement, itssights were not set as sharply on the issue of equity. Its focus, and it was alegitimate one, had more to do with raising the overall level of academicperformance in the United States so that the country could better competein a technologically advanced world. When George W. Bush says, “Nochild should be left behind,” he is speaking about the children of the poorwho are routinely assigned to chronically failing schools. NAR ignored thechoice idea and never came to terms with the real prospect that manyschools would not meet its call for excellence. NCLB dealt with that realityhead on and adopted school choice as a “hold harmless” measure for stu-dents who were caught in a pattern of failure. This new focus on schoolchoice must be understood in a different context, however, from that inwhich Ronald Reagan perceived it 20 years ago.

When President Ronald Reagan supported tax credits and vouchers,what he had in mind was a Friedman-type of market mechanism that em-braced competition as a way of eliminating failing public schools. It was anapproach that rallied support among conservative Republicans, libertari-ans, and advocates of religious schools. It sought to make school choice, inone form or another, available to all parents. These groups on the politicalright still support school choice, but as a matter of practicality the issuenow has taken on a different meaning. Since Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and,most recently, Colorado have passed voucher laws, it has become evidentthat school choice also enjoys support among racial minorities who de-mand it as a mechanism for rescuing their children from failing schools(see Viteritti, 1999, 2003a). These parents, and a growing number of choice

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9President Bush later proposed an experimental voucher program for the District of Co-lumbia and seven or eight other cities as part of his fiscal year 2004 budget proposal, whichagain sparked opposition from Congressional Democrats (Strauss, 2003).

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advocates, would target choice so that it reaches children who need it themost—poor children who attend chronically failing schools. By targetingchoice to accommodate children in terrible schools, NCLB embraces thelater approach. The plan is hobbled, however, because it does not providestudents with access to private and religious schools that have the capacityand the will to receive them. This brings us to an interesting political twist.

There are three levels of political irony apparent now, the last one bor-dering on hypocrisy. Here we have a Republican president engineering themost significant intrusion of federal power in the history of American edu-cation. His reform agenda, although designed to have a beneficial effect onthe overall quality of American education, is especially structured to offerrelief to a population of students who have not been reached by the publicschools, a constituency that Democrats have become accustomed to callingtheir own. But in fact it is the Democrats who have undermined the effec-tiveness of the program by refusing to enact a meaningful program ofchoice, an approach that has increasingly gained support among inner cityminorities (Moe, 2001, pp. 193–255). It is especially notable to see such anobstacle erected in the U.S. Senate. As these lawmakers insist that disad-vantaged minorities must keep their children in public schools, surveysindicate that most senate members send their own children to privateschools (Garrett, 2002). Their children never seem to get left behind. Andthose whose children attend public schools live in communities where thepublic schools are sound.

Reform Prospects

Since 1980, total education spending in this country has increased from$200 billion to $350 billion in constant dollars and per-pupil spending hasincreased from $5,000 to $7,000 (Fuhrman, 2003, p. 20). American studentsstill do poorly on international comparisons, declining in rank as theyspend more time in school. They usually score at the top of the interna-tional rankings in the elementary grades, move toward the middle in mid-dle school, and drop toward the bottom by high school. Teachers remainamong the lowest paid professionals in the United States and there is noconnection between how much compensation a teacher receives and howwell his or her students perform. Despite numerous reports on the subject,the challenge to improve teacher preparation and credentialing is stillunmet.

Forty nine out of 50 states have adopted content standards in readingand math that are tied to assessments; by 2008, a total of 28 states will re-quire students to pass state administered tests for high school graduation

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(Fuhrman, 2003, pp. 10–11, 18). The quality of the state standards, however,is mixed, and on the whole is not especially demanding (Finn & Petrilli,2000). It remains to be seen whether NCLB will serve as a true impetus forthe states to raise standards or whether the fear of failure will motivate pol-icy makers to soften their expectations when setting the performance bar. Ifit is the latter, then the responsibility to enforce tougher standards will fallon the federal government. The historical record is not encouraging in thatregard. In the end, for reform to work it must be realized at the local levelwhere children attend schools, and parents live with the consequences ofwhat happens in them.

Since I left Boston 20 years ago, the education dialogue has largelyswitched from race to instruction. The elected school board has beenreplaced by one appointed by the mayor and Mayor Thomas Menino isproud to say that education is his responsibility. This has afforded a certainmeasure of stability to the system and it is now easier to integrateyouth-oriented municipal services with school-based programs (Usdan &Cuban, 2003). The business and civic communities have reconnected withthe leadership of the school system and have put their voices behindschool reform. This is evidenced by the growing influence of such organi-zations like the Boston Compact III, which provides an umbrella for civicsupport and the Coordinating Committee (commonly referred to as theVault), which represents the business establishment (Portz, Stein, & Jones,1999, pp. 82–105). The process of change, however, moves slowly; al-though there has been some progress in improving student performance, ithas been slow and inadequate. As I write, in the spring of 2003, the Massa-chusetts legislature is threatening to impose a 3-year moratorium on thecreation of new charter schools in the state. Because the enactment ofschool vouchers is politically inconceivable in the Bay State, charterschools offer the next best prospect for expanding the range of desirableeducational options for students stuck in failing public schools. The ongo-ing debate in the legislature illustrates that many politicians are more con-cerned with protecting the status quo than offering new opportunities forunderserved students.

Bill Rojas left San Francisco in 1999 after a contentious 7-year tenure assuperintendent. During that time there were encouraging improvementsin test scores and graduation rates; although performance at the nineschools targeted for reconstitution remained unacceptably low (Asimov,1999). One issue that alienated Rojas from some of the school board mem-bers in San Francisco was his desire to employ a private management com-pany to run chronically failing schools in the district. In the long run, SanFrancisco has stood out as one of the more promising urban districts in thecountry. In a recent survey of 59 districts conducted for the Council of

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Great City Schools, San Francisco was one of only four cities to registerreading and math scores in all grades exceeding its state average (Casserly,2003, pp. 4–5). Since 1992, California has been a leader in the charter schoolmovement, but in the 2003–2004 school year the state faces a serious fiscalcrisis that threatens to dampen hopes for further reform.

As I recommended in my book 20 years ago, the mayor of New Yorknow appoints the school board and for all practical purposes controls pol-icy making in the school system. At the beginning of the 2002–2003 schoolyear, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his hand-picked Chancellor ofSchools, Joel Klein, announced that all but 200 of the city’s 1,000 elemen-tary and middle schools would be required to use the same reading andmath programs—the assumption being that because the select 200 weremaking adequate progress in teaching basic skills, they should be left totheir own discretion. In response to strong protests from parents and pro-fessionals at schools excluded from the list, the Chancellor also developedan appeals procedure that added an additional 100 schools to the list andfed the perception that the rating process was both arbitrary and political(Goodnough & Medina, 2003; Herszenhorn, 2003). But there are more fun-damental problems with this program. First, officials in the U.S. Depart-ment of Education have questioned whether the selected reading programmeets guidelines set under NCLB, requiring that a program is re-search-based to qualify for federal funding (Goodnough, 2003). Althoughit would be unfortunate for the children of New York City to lose millionsof dollars in federal funding, it is even more troubling to think that a pro-gram mandated for more than 700 under-performing schools does nothave a proven record of improving the skills of lagging students. The mathprogram that was selected has come under similar criticism by well-re-garded experts.

Apart from the problems associated with the programs the chancellorchose, it is highly questionable whether one particular program in readingor math is suitable for 700 schools. The problem was compounded whenthe chancellor announced that the standards for selecting the 200 ex-empted schools would vary based on the demographic characteristics oftheir students. Schools with high concentrations of poor students wereheld to a lower standard of performance. It is widely known that economi-cally disadvantaged students who receive inferior educations have moreto overcome than their better off peers, but policy makers do not help themby setting different standards for students based on demographic or politi-cal considerations. All students should be expected to meet the same stan-dards over time and schools should have a variety of research-based pro-grams to select from in meeting standards.

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In January 2003, a group of parents in New York initiated a class actionlaw suit claiming that they had been denied the opportunity, guaranteedunder NCLB, to transfer their children out of low-performing schools(Fletcher, 2003). Although the lawsuit may have taken school officials bysurprise, the problem should not have. It is impossible to accommodate thelearning needs of thousands of children who attend failing schools in the300 or so schools that the Chancellor believes are functioning at an ade-quate level, even using the imprecise definition of adequacy that he has ap-plied. Here again the problem is one of capacity. As in Massachusetts, theNew York state legislature habitually toys with the idea of imposing a mor-atorium on charter schools.

As is the case in most local jurisdictions, the political establishment inNew York has been steadfast in its opposition to a voucher experiment,rising up in protest as if it were seeking the high ground on a settledmoral question, doing so at a time when numerous vacancies exist in thefinancially strapped private and parochial schools. Their political opposi-tion is especially hidebound in light of evidence showing that parochialschools in New York City better serve the educational needs of low-in-come minority children than do the public schools that these children arenot allowed to leave (Domanico, 2001). It is difficult to understand howstate and local officials can justify forcing poor parents to keep their chil-dren in failing public schools when so many of them—including themayor and the schools chancellor —have found public schools unsuit-able for their own children. Their position is not unusual. Many publicofficials around the country who oppose choice for the poor insist thatwhere they send their own children to school is none of anybody’s busi-ness. Their reasoning goes something like this: Where public officialswho run the government send their children to school is a private matter;where private citizens send their children to school is a public mattersubject to government discretion, unless the citizens can afford to paytheir own way. Put differently, choice is a privilege reserved for familiesthat are better off. So long as we have different aspirations for differentchildren, the attainment of educational excellence and equity remain afaint hope for many families in America.

Meaningful reform must begin with the widespread acceptance of twounderlying premises that are implicit in NCLB. We must believe that ev-ery child is capable of achieving basic proficiency in reading, writing,and math. We must decide that when a school is found incapable of de-livering on that promise, the responsibility of the state is to protect thechild, not the school or the system of which it is a part. We have a longway to go.

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