In No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, the Thernstroms offer a thoughtful discussion of why public schools have failed, and are likely to continue to fail, to close the achievement gap between races. No Excuses cites institutional barriers and lack of proper incentives as roadblocks to excellence in education in the public schools. Unfortunately, the authors stop short of identifying the most fundamental obstacle to improvement: the “box” of government-run schooling itself.
Effective public schools are the exception rather than the rule, the Thernstroms report. A few public schools have managed to involve parents, to impose exacting standards on teachers and students, and to build academic skills in pupils at high risk for falling even further behind.
Those “wonderful schools” have a common thread. All are charter schools, and in most cases, part of the Knowledge Is Power Program, known as KIPP academies. While still part of the public school system, charter schools are somewhat less regulated and receive less public funding than do traditional public schools. KIPP schools demand contracts from students, teachers, and parents, and follow through with consequences if someone fails to keep their end of the bargain. KIPP schools mimic, as far as possible, the attention, time, and commitment available in the private education market, but tend to serve children who have made little academic headway in traditional public schools.
Competition for seats at KIPP schools motivates attendance, study, and behavior. Since charter schools are available on a limited basis within the public system, these demanding schools can afford to enforce the rules. The bottom line: KIPP schools get results. Compared to their traditional public school counterparts, black students at KIPP academies are steadily narrowing the black-white learning gap.
Traditional schools have their hands tied in a number of ways that prevent them from being effective. The authors cite teacher unions, with seniority and tenure demands, lockstep pay grades, and control of teacher education programs as the most significant stumbling blocks. Instead of trying to remove those obstacles, however, they would like to see reforms that can only be implemented, at present, in a charter school setting: performance and subject-based pay differentials, and an emphasis on teacher expertise rather than education credentials.
Can KIPP-style charter schools turn public education around? The success of KIPP academies makes a credible case for increasing the number of charter schools. The authors contend that “every urban school should become a charter.”
A wholesale conversion of traditional public schools into charters would depose the existing education bureaucracy, however, a move that will meet great resistance regardless of student success. “The job of unions is to protect the interests of teachers,” they note, while “the job of schools is to educate the students.” But, they add sardonically, “[w]hat’s good for unions is not necessarily what’s good for kids.”
No Excuses does an excellent job of analyzing the reasons why there is such a large racial achievement gap in “public education,” but the book remains wedded to the notion that public schools should continue to deliver the lion’s share of K-12 education. Suggested reforms never get outside the “box” of state education. To their credit, the authors recognize that charter schools are the only real light in that box, but prefer to refurnish government education with better tests, more vigorous standards, higher pay to attract better qualified teachers, and somewhat fewer regulations, rather than look outside the government schooling system itself. What the authors offer is a vision of a public education system populated by charter schools, with greater freedom of choice for parents, and market-driven incentives to train, hire, and pay for excellent teachers and superior academic results. If charter schools expand, the authors contend that American public education can be remade in a better form.
The authors are wise to point out how intractable the roadblocks of unions, teacher training, and administrative inflexibility have been thus far. But their solution falls short of the mark. If the federal No Child Left Behind law was “envisioned as a means of circumventing the many obstacles to change,” imposed by unions, it has made some aspects of public education even more inflexible than before.
The authors of No Excuses are stumped. They cannot embrace an unregulated private market for education, or see a nongovernment solution to the racial learning gap. This leaves them with little more to anticipate, finally, than a bitter contest over who will eventually control the contents — regulations, accountability standards, curriculum, etc. — of the government education box.