As noted earlier, the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik space satellite in 1957 suddenly made Americans aware that the United States was in danger of losing the global race for technological superiority, the one domain in which Americans had long displayed unchallenged leadership. The fact that the country might be overtaken not by a friendly Western competitor but by its dangerous Cold War adversary heightened Americans’ anxiety and sense of inferiority. The response of the Eisenhower administration was to launch a host of committees and studies and, ultimately, to sharply increase federal aid for public school instruction in science and mathematics.
In 1965, as part of the Lyndon Johnson administration’s “Great Society” reforms, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which, for the first time, specifically directed federal school aid to raise the academic achievement levels of underperforming schoolchildren, most of them poor, urban, and minorities. In terms of policy, this was the first concrete attempt to decouple student achievement from socioeconomic or cognitive determinants. This legislation also established Head Start, the first (and still the largest) federal foray into promoting preschool education for disadvantaged youngsters. (The importance and design of an effective preschool experience is the subject of chapter 3.)
A singular aspect of the new paradigm story is the expanding role of the federal government in education policy. In fact, to a large extent it is the “federalization” of education that has defined the new paradigm. The old paradigm, although strongly impacted by national intellectual and advocacy currents like the common school movement, nevertheless was implemented entirely by the individual states and localities. In contrast, every element in the new paradigm depends on national perceptions and national action. The U.S. Supreme Court ended school segregation. National Cold War anxieties and national civil rights advocacy prompted federal aid to address their concerns. One key advance in this march toward the federalization of education policy—along new paradigm lines—was the creation of a cabinet-level federal education agency. A modest movement in this direction had already been taken during the Eisenhower administration in the establishment of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in 1953. The definitive step, however, was the transfer of national education policy and oversight from HEW to an independent Department of Education under President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
A cascade of influential reports and popular books has both shaped and responded to federal education policy. Two books in particular that highlighted the failings of American public schools caught the public imagination: Death at an Early Age by Jonathan Kozol and Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch.12 These works drove yet more nails into the coffin of the old paradigm of socioeconomic and cognitive educational determinism. But the most influential of all the postwar education reports by far was A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, authored by a blue-ribbon commission of prominent educators under the auspices of the Reagan administration in 1983.13 The report charged that “the educational foundations of our society” were being “eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people” and “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Beyond its hyperbolic rhetoric, the report was one of the earliest to note the poor performance of American students on international tests in mathematics, science, and language arts. Among its many other indictments, it asserted that 23 million Americans (about 14 percent of all adults) were “functionally illiterate” and a majority of the rest lacked “ ‘higher order’ intellectual skills”; that Scholastic Aptitude Test scores for college-bound seniors had fallen over the previous twenty years; and that colleges had to offer remedial courses to a high proportion of their underprepared entering students.
Federal spending on education has grown dramatically as Congress has continually tweaked the various provisions of the ESEA under its successive reauthorizations. Federal aid to state and local public schools has grown from $2 billion in 1965 to more than $56 billion in 2008.14 But the reauthorization of ESEA in 2001—optimistically titled No Child Left Behind—exponentially increased the intensity of federal intervention in state and local school policy. This legislation, more than any of its predecessors, has already impelled states and their local school districts to introduce reforms that only a few years ago were unthinkable: the widespread establishment of charter schools; more rigorous evaluation of teachers, including assessing their effectiveness through pupil test scores; recasting of curricula; lengthening of school days and years; and a host of locally idiosyncratic experimental interventions. Chapter 3 will review in detail the value and costs of implementing the most pervasive of these reform initiatives.
The Obama administration has tried to speed up the pace of educational reform by dangling before states and localities the prospect of winning competitively awarded federal grants. Originally part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, and now funded through annual appropriations, the Race to the Top initiative has distributed, in three competitive cycles, more than $4 billion—with another half billion in the pipeline—to states that agree to implement more aggressive school reform measures. Success in winning a Race to the Top grant (or its size) has depended primarily on the willingness to implement a rigorous, student test–driven teacher evaluation system and substantially increasing the number of charter schools, while gaining the acquiescence of local teacher unions.
In parallel with the steady stream of publications that view American education with alarm and pieces of federal legislation, there have been substantial developments of the reforms themselves. The first truly new idea was the “charter school,” a tuition-free, publicly funded school available to parents dissatisfied with the zoned local district school, and operated free of the constraints imposed by unionized teachers and district administration. The idea of permitting independently operated schools to receive public funding is said to have originated with University of Massachusetts, Amherst, professor Ray Budde in 1988, and was embraced soon after by Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1991 Minnesota became the first state to authorize charter schools, followed by California in 1992. Today charter schools exist in forty-one states and the District of Columbia. The success to date of charter schools nationally will be considered in chapters 3 and 4.
Another independently developed but highly significant educational reform initiative is Teach for America (TFA), which was founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp and based on her 1989 Princeton University senior thesis. Its idea is to break the prevailing monopoly on teacher training of state teacher colleges—and their mediocre private collegiate brethren—by recruiting “the best and the brightest” graduates of U.S. Ivy League and other prestigious universities to become teachers, especially in the country’s most troubled neighborhoods. The TFA program involves, first, going to America’s best colleges and universities to attract teaching candidates—none of whom has ever taken any “education” courses—and then giving them a crash course in pedagogy so they can qualify to teach in public school classrooms in most U.S. states. TFA has by now become hugely successful in carrying out its mission; each year it currently attracts more than 46,000 candidates and trains and places about 4,500.15
It is indeed curious that, given the stress our national dialogue about public school reform has placed on the importance of recruiting and retaining highly effective teachers, there has been so little interest