As the characteristics of successful charter schools become better understood, it will, no doubt, be possible to ensure that charter schools are more successful, but it is worth noting that the organizations that run the best charter schools are not keen to expand quickly, so any impact on the whole education system will be slow. For example, if we assume that the North American school population increases, as it has in the past, at a rate of around 0.7 percent per year, and the number of charter school places increases by 250,000 each year (the average rate over the last few years), then even if these new charter schools are as good as KIPP schools, it will be 2058 before students achieve an extra three weeks’ learning per year (Wiliam, in press a). Of course, we could expand charter schools more aggressively, but this would be likely to result in lower quality, thus weakening the impact. Whatever their benefits, the creation of charter schools is not likely to have a substantial and immediate impact on student achievement (Carnoy, Jacobsen, Mishel, & Rothstein, 2005).
In England, the government has reconstituted many low-performing schools as “academies” that are run by philanthropic bodies but receive public funds equivalent to public schools, in addition to a large capital grant for school rebuilding. The principals of these academies have far greater freedom to hire and fire staff and are not required to follow national agreements on teacher compensation and benefits, nor to follow the national curriculum. Student test scores in these academies have risen faster than those in regular public schools, but this is to be expected, since such schools start from a lower baseline, and therefore have more room for improvement. A comparison with similarly low-performing schools not reconstituted as academies shows that they improve at the same rate (Machin & Wilson, 2009).
One of the most radical experiments in the organization of schooling has been taking place in Sweden. In 1992, the Swedish government invited for-profit providers to run public schools. Although many evaluations of this initiative found some successes, each of these studies contained significant methodological weaknesses. An evaluation from the Institute for the Study of Labour (Böhlmark & Lindahl, 2008), which corrected the flaws of earlier studies, found that the introduction of for-profit education providers did produce moderate improvements in short-term outcomes such as ninth-grade GPA and in the proportion of students who chose an academic high school track. However, these improvements appeared to be concentrated in more affluent students and were transient. There was no impact on longer-term outcomes such as high school GPA, university attainment, or years of schooling (Böhlmark & Lindahl, 2008), nor on employment, earnings, or engagement with the criminal justice system (Wondratschek, Edmark, & Frölich, 2014).
In England, since 1986, secondary schools have applied for specialist school status, along the lines of magnet schools in the United States. Specialist schools do get higher test scores than traditional secondary schools in England, but they also get more money—around $200 more per student per year. The improvement in results achieved by specialist schools turns out to be just what you would expect if you gave traditional public schools an extra $200 per student per year (Mangan, Pugh, & Gray, 2007). Moreover, specialist schools do not get better results in the subjects in which they specialize than they do in other subjects (Smithers & Robinson, 2009).
Other reform efforts have focused on curriculum. Almost every country aspires to have a 21st century curriculum. For instance, the Scottish government has adopted a Curriculum for Excellence, but whether anything changes in Scottish classrooms remains to be seen, and the short-term results are not encouraging (OECD, 2016). Trying to change students’ classroom experiences through changes in curriculum is very difficult. A bad curriculum well taught is usually a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught; pedagogy trumps curriculum. Or more precisely, pedagogy is curriculum, because what matters is how things are taught, rather than what is taught.
There is no standard definition of the term curriculum. The word originally (in English at least) described the selection of courses in Scottish universities in the 17th century, but over the years, it has come to mean activities that educational organizations arrange to help their students learn the intended material. However, there are at least three levels at which the word might be applied: (1) intended, (2) implemented, and (3) achieved. The intended curriculum includes the things that states or national governments determine students should learn in school. The implemented curriculum includes the textbooks and other materials that schools and districts adopt, and the achieved curriculum is what actually happens in classrooms. Needless to say, there is often some slippage between these three kinds of curricula. Often the textbooks that schools adopt do not align well with the intended curriculum (even though the publishers often claim that they do), and the way that teachers use those materials often does not accord with the intentions of those who wrote the textbooks (Wiliam, 2013).
While the way that teachers use textbooks may not always accord with the intentions of textbook publishers, textbooks do influence how teachers teach, and so there has been a great deal of interest in whether some textbooks are more effective than others. Some textbooks may align better with one state’s standards than others. However, as more and more states have either adopted common standards, such as the Common Core State Standards or the Next Generation Science Standards, or other similar local standards, alignment has become less of an issue. What has become apparent, however, and particularly in mathematics, is that some textbooks are much more effective than others at teaching the same content.
Initially, most studies of textbook adoption have found little evidence that changes in textbooks alone have much impact on student achievement. However, particularly in elementary schools, just changing the textbooks can have a marked impact on student achievement, increasing the rate of student learning by up to 25 percent (Agodini & Harris, 2016). When researchers consider all grade levels, it is only when the programs change teaching practices and student interactions that a significant impact on achievement occurs (Slavin & Lake, 2008; Slavin, Lake, Chambers, Cheung, & Davis, 2009; Slavin, Lake, & Groff, 2009). However, at present, it does not seem to be possible to predict which textbooks are likely to be the most effective. We know that textbooks make a difference, but we don’t know what makes the difference in textbooks. Thus, while textbook choice is important, it does not seem to be, at present, a reliable way of raising student achievement.
Many reforms look promising at the pilot stage but, when rolled out at scale, fail to achieve the same effects. In 1998, after less than a year in office, Tony Blair’s Labour Party launched the National Literacy Strategy and, a year later, the National Numeracy Strategy for elementary schools in England and Wales. Although these programs showed promising results in the early stages, their effectiveness when rolled out to all elementary schools was equivalent to only one extra eleven-year-old in each elementary school reaching proficiency per year (Machin & McNally, 2009). Bizarrely, the fastest improvement in the achievement of English eleven-year-olds was in science, which had not been subject to any government reform efforts.
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