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Drawing upon their new edited volume of essays looking back on the school reforms of the Bush and Obama years, the authors explain just how few of those reforms went according to plan. Some of the unexpected outcomes were positive, they note, pointing to the improvement of school data systems and the bipartisan compromise that put an end to No Child Left Behind. Some of them were negative, such as a public backlash against achievement testing in general and the implementation of the Common Core in particular. And all of them should lead reformers to question their own certainty about how their policy ideas will play out.

Over the last two decades, federal and state policy makers have launched a number of ambitious, large-scale education reform initiatives —No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core State Standards, and others — only to see them sputter and fail. In 2017, the authors convened a number of leading scholars to explore why those initiatives failed and what can be learned from them. Participants agreed that to be more successful in the future, reformers will need to balance ambition and urgency with humility, political acumen, and the ability to recognize when it’s time to slow down or scale things back.

This chapter focuses on meta-analysis, the most thorough yet conducted, on the effect that school choice has on educational attainment. It attempts to collect every experimental and quasi-experimental study of school choice in the US. The chapter examines a very specific question: whether the relative impacts of school choice on achievement are correlated with the relative impacts on attainment, for the population of empirical studies that examine both outcomes. One mechanism is private school vouchers, where students are awarded vouchers to cover tuition at any one of a number of private schools of their choosing. If test score gains are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for producing long-term gains in crucial student outcomes, then current approaches to accountability for school choice programs are questionable at best. The most obvious implication is that policymakers need to be much more humble in what they believe that test scores tell them about the performance of schools of choice.

There is strong evidence that the fiscal position of states moving forward will require K–12 schooling to become less expensive. States are projected to see spikes in pension contributions for public sector workers and increased expenditures related to Medicaid expansion. While these bills are coming due, the country is also projected to change demographically, increasing the number of dependents (the old and the young) relative to the number of workers contributing taxes into the system (Vincent & Velkoff, 2010). Taxpayer-supported private school choice programs offer a powerful mechanism to create more efficient educational options. This article offers lessons from the private sector that schools of choice and designers of choice programs could leverage to improve the efficiency of the American K–12 education system.

Created to fix problems that NCLB either started or couldn't fix itself, the Common Core faces its own challenges — seen and unseen — during implementation.

School voucher programs have become a prominent aspect of the education policy landscape in the United States. The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program is the only federally funded voucher program in the United States. Since 2004 it has offered publicly funded private school vouchers to nearly four thousand students to attend any of seventy-three different private schools in Washington, DC. An official experimental evaluation of the program, sponsored by the federal government's Institute of Education Sciences, found that the students who were awarded Opportunity Scholarships graduated from high school at a rate 12 percentage points higher than the students in the randomized control group. This article estimates the benefit/cost ratio of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, primarily by considering the increased graduation rate that it induced and the estimated positive economic returns to increased educational attainment. We find a benefit to cost ratio of 2.62, or $2.62 in benefits for every dollar spent on the program. © 2013 Association for Education Finance and Policy

On November 20, 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama addressed a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire. At the time, he was locked in a three-way battle in the Democratic primary, behind Senator Hillary Clinton and not far ahead of former Senator Jonathan Edwards. The next day, Oprah would announce that she planned to campaign with Obama in three early primary states, a move that was to elevate his campaign to a new level.

Since at least the Nixon administration, elites of both parties wanted to develop and impose national standards, largely for the reasons outlined in Chap. 1. Standards are seen as a way to assure that American public schooling will have transparent targets to aim for, and to promote school and teacher level accountability. Since nearly all other developed nations have national academic standards, elites see national standards as a way to modernize a decentralized, locally focused system.

What does the 2016 presidential election say about the Obama education agenda? Will that agenda stick, or face erosion? We will address this in this, the closing chapter. As we write, after former Texas Governor Rick Perry and immediately after Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker pulled out of the presidential race, there are still an astonishing 14 GOP candidates running. The numbers reflect a GOP resurgence and the difficulty any party, in this case the Democrats, has winning three consecutive presidential races. This makes the Republican nomination a much sought-after commodity. We can broadly characterize the 14 remaining GOP presidential candidates as local education libertarians and business-driven modernizers.

As we detailed in Chap. 1, education reform had little success for decades. Though incremental strides were made in one state or another or one district or another, generally the relative policy monopoly of the educational industrial complex stymied efforts to impose more accountability on schools and teachers and provide more choices for parents.

Book under review:William L. Riordan. (2008). Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics by Ex-senator George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Philosopher, fr...

There is probably no city in America that has seen as much change to its school system as New Orleans has over the past decade. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, state and city leaders decided to d...

As the three quotes above suggest, neither the Obama administration nor the most powerful teachers’ union has complete power. Mainly, this chapter concerns power, but it must start out with basic facts. There are numerous misconceptions about the nature, role, and relative success of American public schools, and one cannot properly evaluate President Obama’s plans without knowing the basic facts of schooling. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Ironically, given that the subject is education, to a surprising degree, discussions of education policy occupy data-free zones. Indeed, some scholars in the field argue that the key determination of how a policy should be viewed is not whether the data indicate it will help children, but rather who proposed it, with voices outside traditional education policy networks as immediately suspect (Glass 2008 , 146). Those on different sides remain convinced of their opinions, even when measurable facts show otherwise; hence, our second maxim: you have to measure. We feel that to a significant degree the public acceptance of misinformation reflects the power of the Educational Industrial Complex (EIC), though increasingly, education reformers have spread myths of their own. Accordingly, this chapter will begin with basic myths spread by the EIC (as well as one myth spread by reformers), and brief refutations of those myths.

From its initial enactment as part of President Johnson’s Great Society, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) has spearheaded federal involvement in local public schools. Johnson, who began his career as a teacher in a low-income community, believed that education was essential to the war on poverty and that the Great Society would be one in which “no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled” (Johnson 1964 ). However, from 1965 to today, education commentators, politicians, and policy entrepreneurs have argued about the proper federal role in education. This problem, predictably, was less of an issue when ESEA simply meant the federal government pouring money into struggling school systems. However, as outlined in Chapter 4 , No Child Left Behind (ESEA’s most recent iteration) paired assessment and accountability with those dollars, causing school district officials to recoil.

For public education, it is either the best of times or the worst of times. For certain, the times are changing. Predictable EIC policy dominance is gradually giving way to something else, more quickly than most predicted. Even now, in out of the way places such as Exton, Pennsylvania, the unthinkable is happening. The lead author, who lives in Arkansas, serves on the (unpaid) board of Achievement House, a cyber charter school located in Exton that teaches students from more than a hundred school districts all across the Keystone State. The mere fact that someone in Arkansas can serve, and, if state laws were modified, even tutor or teach “in” a school a time zone away shows the potential for technology to change everything. At a recent physical visit to Achievement House, the author attended the 8:00 a.m. daily meeting of the tenth-grade at-risk team. In the meeting room, a screen showed a cyber class in progress, with images of the teacher and students flashing up as each made comments, their points scrolling down the screen for the rest of us to monitor if we wished. The team included the principal, the western site director (who attended via conference call), the special education coordinator, six teacher-advisors for the tenth grade, and the Chief Curriculum Officer (CCO). Each morning, a different grade-level at-risk meeting takes place, with the school attempting to employ behavioral contracts and frequent contact with students and parents before pressuring anyone to withdraw for tardiness or absence.

A previously stated, the Educational Industrial Complex is best viewed as a rational coalition protecting its perceived material and ideological interests. Often, education debates devolve into a series of “who loves kids more” competitions replete with ad hominem attacks and accusations of ill intent. This is not helpful. In order to reform education, or anything else, for that matter, leaders should understand that those working in organizations have complex motivations (Downs 1967 ). Of course, one primary goal is their continued employment. This does not make them “bad” people—it just makes them people. People enjoy getting paid, and holding all other things constant, would like to continue to be employed, preferably with more money and less work. The sooner leaders figure this out, the sooner they can harness the human capital of their employees and serve the mission they envision for their organization.

Much maligned but little understood, No Child Left Behind set the stage for education reform in the Obama presidency. Replacing a system that was previously relegated to data-free discussions of schools believed to be failing, NCLB forced schools and school districts to measure and report student achievement disaggregated by demographics. With NCLB information, the federal government and states pushed school districts to attempt a wide variety of approaches to improve. Some of these interventions worked, others did not, and most were simply circumventions of the requirements of the statute. Still, NCLB did far more good than harm by bringing into the sunlight that which had previously been in darkness, and by highlighting the successes of some public schools that closed achievement gaps.

Education standards codify the goals and expectations a community has for its students. In her authoritative tome on the issue, education historian Diane Ravitch (1995) outlined the three types of education standards. Content standards list and describe what is supposed to be taught and what students are expected to know. Performance standards are degrees of mastery or attainment of the information or skills laid out in the content standards. Finally, opportunity to learn standards are expectations of the availability of services for students. As Ravitch points out, all of these are interrelated. “Content standards without performance standards are meaningless” she argues (13), because, as we have stated earlier, what doesn’t get measured doesn’t count. Similarly, without the framework of the content standards or the information gleaned from the application of the performance standards, policymakers have no idea what services students need in order to have the opportunity to succeed. As Ravitch points out, relatively clear, objective standards play a role in virtually every facet of industrial and postindustrial life, from the quality of McDonald’s hamburgers to orthopedic standards for setting broken limbs to NASA standards for inspecting space vehicles. Without standards, we can neither know if what we do works as intended, nor can we figure out how to do it better. Without standards, we must rely on traditional authority, trusting educators because of their titles, rather than rational legal authority, trusting them because of their effectiveness.

In July 2009, President Obama and Secretary Duncan announced the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) program—a nation-wide, state-level competition aimed at overhauling the infrastructure of education throughout the United States. The primary objectives of RTT included toughening state standards, improving the tracking of students’ performances, turning around failing schools, and improving the recruitment and retaining of effective educators (The Guardian 2009). President Obama accentuated the importance of RTT, deeming it “the single most important thing we’ve done [in education]” (Klein 2010 ). With the conclusions of two rounds of competition (and the ongoing discussions of the possibility of a third round), RTT received its share of praise and criticism. Praise has stemmed from RTT’s successes in fostering meaningful policy discussions regarding the education reform environment at a relatively low cost to taxpayers (Brooks 2009 ), while critics have questioned the application process along with its ability to bring about substantial outcomes (The Wall Street Journal 2009).