PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "Changing Our Schools"

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Changing Our Schools

Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I¹m Ben Wattenberg. In the PBS documentary ³AKA
Creek: Educating a Big City Schoolboy² the story of one troubled Los Angeles
high school student stands in for the problems of failing schools and
failing students across the country. Some critics blame those problems on a
lack of funds; others on a lack of choice. Among the suggested solutions:
vouchers, charter schools, smaller classes, better paid teachers, home
schooling. What reforms will give students and parents the biggest bang for
their buck?

To find out, Think Tank is joined by Chester Finn, former assistant
secretary of education in the Reagan administration now the John M. Olin
Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author or coauthor of 13 books on
education, including Charter Schools in Action: Renewing Public Education.
And Andrew Rotherham, former special assistant for domestic policy to
President Bill Clinton and now director of the 21st Century Schools Project
at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, DC.

The topic before the house, Changing Our Schools. This week on Think Tank.

(animation)

Ben Wattenberg: Demands for education reform are nothing new in America,
but two recent developments may lead to more than just debate. In January
2002, President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act.
The legislation requires so-called ³high stakes² standardized testing in
reading and math for grades 3-8. Students from schools that fail the tests
become eligible to transfer into a better public school. Also in 2002 the
Supreme Court upheld the use of vouchers to help pay tuition for private
schools in Cleveland opening the door for new voucher programs around the
country. But critics question whether either vouchers or standardized
testing will solve the deeply ingrained problems of America¹s most troubled
schools. Through the personal story of one struggling LA high school
student named Anner Alvaro, the PBS documentary ³AKA Creek² shows just how
complex those problems can be.

(clip from documentary)

Anner Alvaro: I hope Miss Dryer lets me in. Damn it¹s packed full. I
think we¹re going to be a while in there because there¹s a gang of people.
I could be considered a dropout because I haven¹t been in school for so
long. Yet I¹m not, because I¹m still enrolled. All I have to do is go get
an absence slip and I¹m back in school after a month and a half of absence.
You know, I don¹t know. It¹s just weird. It¹s just weird how the whole
system is being worked. And how, you know, people are getting around it,
and how nobody seems to give a damn. You know, nobody seems to care whether
or not people are learning or not. Got it. It¹s my absence slip. Lets me
back into all my classes successfully without no teacher telling me
anything. They just look at me likeŠ(shrugs).
And, uh, let¹s see if Gabriel¹s coming out.

Gabriel: You see how dumb they are, man? They didn¹t even check the last
names.

(discussion)

Ben Wattenberg: Gentlemen, Andrew Rotherham, Checker Finn, thank you for
joining us. Tell me what you thought when you saw this ³AKA Creek²
documentary. What did you think you were seeing and what did you think of
it? Was it representative?

Andrew Rotherham: Well I think you have to be very careful. Unfortunately
in education the plural of anecdote becomes data. And that¹s not the case.
I think it is representative of an experience that too many young people
have, particularly in high poverty schools, in the sense that this school
let this child down. Certainly he had a lot of family circumstances that
were very troubling and other aspects of public policy ought to be
addressing that, but the fact of the matter is, the school let this kid
down.

Ben Wattenberg: What about the episode in AKA Creek that takes place in
Detroit? What was that designed to show?

Chester Finn: That was to show the debate over vouchers as it was raging in
Detroit before the last election when there was a referendum in Michigan on
a voucher scheme, a statewide voucher program, which lost. But also Detroit
was showing you the inside of a couple of terrific charter schools, all
black as far as I know, where the kids are learning good stuff.

Ben Wattenberg: The black, inner city communities are the most favorably
attuned to the idea of vouchers schools, is that correct? When we look at
the public opinion polls.

Chester Finn: They are, and they areŠ Yes, it¹s the white suburbs that are
wary. There¹s a very interesting political reversal also going on in this
country

Ben Wattenberg: I mean there¹s a ³not in my back yard² kind of thing that
they¹re afraid that inner city kids would be coming into their schools.

Chester Finn: What we also saw in Detroit were these black, inner city
charter schools, the Colin Powell charter school, actually. Terrific place
started by a charismatic black preacher for kids who lived in his tough
neighborhood. And so these kids deserve a decent school. Under Michigan
law we¹re allowed to create a charter school, let¹s do it.

Andrew Rotherham: Ben, you¹re right about the fact that urban African
Americans overwhelmingly do soŠ. There are those who continue to deny it,
but the fact is reliable polling data shows they do overwhelmingly favor
vouchers.

Ben Wattenberg: And yet the Democratic Party almost without exception,
Democrats almost without exception, oppose vouchers.

Andrew Rotherham: Well, the Democrats are all over the place on this issue,
but yes overwhelmingly. But I think that the thing you have to remember
with these parents is that conservatives misread this that they¹re buying
into an entire ideology. They¹re not. They have kids who are in dreadful
schools, they¹re desperate for something, and they are going to grasp at
anything, very understandably. And what we ought to be doing, both
political parties, not just Democrats, is getting really serious about
fixing their schools.

Ben Wattenberg: Let¹s go back, what is going on with American schools now?
We¹ve seen two big events, the Supreme Court voucher decision allowing
vouchers, and President Bush¹s big, new education bill, ³No Child Left
Behind.² Are we finally getting some action?

Andrew Rotherham: Yes, I think we are. I think we¹re moving towards a
debate with a lot more nuance, rather than the chicken little, the sky is
falling, all of our public schools are terrible to a debate where people are
talking about there is a subset of schools, they are largely urban schools,
high poverty schools, that are not doing well and that we need to get
serious and be much more creative about different remedies to improve them.
But that overall, the public schools you find in America¹s suburbs and so
forth can certainly be better but are doing well and by no means failing.
And that¹s good because rather than have these sort of blanket policy
prescriptions that miss a lot of kids we¹re focusing on the kids who need it
most, and those are the low-income onesŠ

Ben Wattenberg: In a more open way than we¹ve done before, with more
options.

Andrew Rotherham: I think there¹s a greater willingness to innovate than
there has been in a long time. There are still a lot of people on both
sides of the debate who are stuck to real old ways of thinking, but you¹re
starting to see around the country a lot more innovations and a lot more
willingness to try new things.

Ben Wattenberg: How about you, Checker?

Chester Finn: I¹m probably a little gloomier than Andy about the severity
of the problem today because I think it belongs to suburban schools as well
as inner city schools. But having said that, I¹m more optimistic than I¹ve
been in a long while about the chances of our solving it. I think this is a
time of ferment and openness and creativity in American education, because
of two big energy sources for change that are at work today. And you¹ve
alluded to both of them. One is the push for choice and competition in
education and the other is the push for standards, tests, and accountability
in education. And between these two reform ideas, and at the very
interesting intersection between them, I think we have a real chance of
making the kind of progress we have not made since 1983 when we were
declared a nation at risk.

Ben Wattenberg: How can you have a nation where the schools are failing,
and yet producing so much creativity and with high productivity rates, and
so on and so forth? Is there an answer to that?

Andrew Rotherham: Yes, it¹s a terrific question. The economy is changing.
The schools we had for most of the 20th century they were very well suited
for our economy, which was largely an industrial economy. People earned
their living primarily by making things and moving them around. If you
look at the structure of the economy and how it¹s starting to change,
particularly the growth in jobs that require more intellect, more thinking
skills. Those are the jobs that, first of all, give people more personal
economic opportunity and, secondly, they are jobs that are driving the
economy. We are woefully underprepared in terms of getting people into
those jobs. So the issue of how good our schools are, how good they were,
sort of misses the fundamental point, they are not where they need to be in
terms of the demands of the 21st century economy.

Ben Wattenberg: Do you buy that?

Chester Finn: Well, the productivity gains that the country has
indisputably made come not from our elementary-secondary school system, they
come from our amazingly big higher education system, which keeps picking
people up, wherever they are, and remediating them, and carrying them on as
far as they want to go.

Ben Wattenberg: So that means that, in that sense at least, the school
system as a totality, if it doesn¹t get the kid the first time, it
remediates him and gets him the second time.

Chester Finn: Those that want to be gotten. A lot of kids fall through the
cracks here because they never want to be retrieved. But anybody with the
slightest desire to get more education in this country has an endless
opportunity to get it. And that¹s a good thing.

Ben Wattenberg: More so probably than any other nation in the world They
can go to night school, they can get GEDŠ

Chester Finn: Community college, technical institutions, and on and on and
on

Ben Wattenberg: Andrew, what do you think about this Supreme Court verdict?
First of all, tell us what it is, so we all know what we¹re talking about.

Andrew Rotherham: The Supreme Court said it was ruling on a private school
choice program in Cleveland that gave vouchers to low-income parents to
choose from a variety of schools, including private schools and parochial
schools. And this was challenged on constitutional grounds that it offended
the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Ben Wattenberg: Establishment clause? Between church and state.

Andrew Rotherham: Between church and state, right. It was a very important
case because it not only dealt with the specific issue in Cleveland, it was
going to set a precedent for several other programs, notably in Milwaukee
and Florida, that are also operating and set a precedent for whether or not
this was a course of action that legislators could pursue. What the court
said is that if parents have an actual choice among different schools, both
sectarian and non-sectarian, that it¹s not a problem if parents are choosing
religious schools with public money. And that¹s a landmark precedent.

Ben Wattenberg: And that was not withstanding the fact that what
ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of the kids who opted for school
vouchers in Cleveland did go to Catholic schools. Is that right?

Chester Finn: They did partly because of the design of the voucher program
in Cleveland, which doesn¹t actually give them enough money to go to
expensive private schools and because the suburban public schools around
Cleveland refused to take these kids, refused to take these kids. So what
was left, willing to take these kids and affordable at twenty-two hundred
dollars per kid were Catholic schools.

Ben Wattenberg: Were you pleased with the verdict?

Chester Finn: Yes indeed. I think that it¹s very important to have it
concluded that it¹s possible, if a state wants to do this, to set up a
choice program that includes private schools.

Ben Wattenberg: I mean how about you? Were you pleased?

Andrew Rotherham: I was neither pleased nor displeased. The church-state
concerns to me are secondary to some educational issues of how do we want to
structure our education system in order to expand opportunity. And the
court¹s case, while very important on first amendment grounds, there really
wasn¹t so much an education verdict as a church-state verdict.

Ben Wattenberg: Let¹s talk about this voucher idea. I mean that¹s become
the buzzword: school vouchers. Checker, quickly, what does it mean and
what do you think about it?

Chester Finn: Vouchers say that you can take the money or some of the money
that the government would otherwise have spent on your public school and you
can take it to a private school and use it as tuition dollars there. And so
instead of sending the money to the public school, the state hands the money
to the parents and says go buy a school education for your kid.

Ben Wattenberg: Hand them the money, hands him a ticket, a voucher.

Chester Finn: A ticket equivalent to money.

Ben Wattenberg: Equivalent to money.

Chester Finn: I approve of it for two reasons. One is that it helps needy
kids get out of bad schools and go to better ones if they want to; it
doesn¹t make them do that. And secondly I believe that we¹re going to see
over time that this competition has the effect of toning up the public
school system. Once they realize that they don¹t have a monopoly and that
they actually have to deliver goods that people want or people will go
shopping somewhere else.

Andrew Rotherham: The problem is not allowing money to follow kids. I think
actually that Checker and I would generally agree on that in terms of public
school choice, public charter schools and so forth. The problem is what
kind of accountability should be attached to public dollars. And where I
get concerned is when we start to say that education is fundamentally a
private right and that the public and society has absolutely no interest in
where a child goes to school.

Ben Wattenberg: So you would consequently be against vouchers?

Andrew Rotherham: I would be against any kind of school finance scheme,
which is what vouchers are, that doesn¹t include basic public
accountability; things like equal access, non-discrimination, and
accountability for academic outcomes. We¹ve taken great strides in this
country since the Nation at Risk Report to try to improve the quality of
academics in our schools, and it doesn¹t make a lot of sense to now divert
down a path where we say we¹re going to move away from that. We should be
incorporating those sorts of standards into any choice scheme.

Ben Wattenberg: What happens if you set up, if someone sets up a voucher
school which is a madras, an Islamic school that preaches, just for the sake
of a model, hate America. Are we supposed to give voucher dollars to that
school?

Chester Finn: You aren¹t a school in America unless the state gives you a
license to operate as a school. That¹s a fundamental ground rule.

Ben Wattenberg: With vouchers or without vouchers.

Chester Finn: Even private schools have to have a license from the state to
open their doors and hang out a shingle. Believe it or not, the enforcement
mechanism here is the compulsory attendance law, of the state of Ohio, which
says that you are required to go to school until you¹re eighteen years old.
And so what is a school? Well it¹s not mowing your lawn. You have got to
go to a place that the state calls a school. So there is in fact a state
authority here, even with private schools. And that¹s true even without
vouchers.

Andrew Rotherham: I tend to think that to some extent it¹s a red herring and
that if you have in any sort of choice system, that includes charter
schools, public disclosure, public oversight, fringe groups are going to be
discouraged from participating in a system like that. I¹m concerned that
we may have inadvertently here set up sort of an entitlement for religious
organizations to operate schools and for parents to elect to send their kids
there. And that¹s one of the concerns I¹ve had with this church state fight
is it dodges the educational issues. These are the decisions, the range of
choices and so forth, the kind of accountability, admissions, things like
that; these are decisions that should be made democratically not judicially.
And it¹s very unfortunate the extent to which this whole school choice fight
has become judicialized.

Ben Wattenberg: let¹s say we go increasingly to a school voucher system,
how do you deal, and this is the point that the unions make, how do you deal
with the special ed kids, with the slow learners, with the kids with
dyslexia, with physical handicaps, with broken homes who have serious
emotional problems? This is the argument I guess that¹s sometimes called
creaming that, okay, the voucher schools would take kids who are in trouble
but the best of those and then you have left the real troubled kids

Chester Finn: I¹d say go visit Beverly Hills High School if you want to see
creaming by a regular public school. Secondly, I¹d sayŠ

Ben Wattenberg: You mean by people that are doing it anyway?

Chester Finn: Yes. People cream themselves and they do it in public
education too, and they usually do it by economics, and that turns out to
correlate with race and families and a lot of other circumstances.
Secondly, our increasing experience with charter schools where there¹re now
half a million kids going to them, suggests that creaming is less of a
problem than people originally feared. Poor and minority kids are flocking
into charter schools. And where the issue remains is with disabled kids,
especially severely disabled kids and of course kids from totally messed up
home circumstances. Choice plans of any kind do depend to some degree on
there being an adult in the child¹s life. And if there is no effective
adult in the child¹s life, then no choice program is going to work optimally
for that particular child.

Ben Wattenberg: What are the results showing now on both the charter
schools and voucher school? I know we¹ve done a number of programs on it
over the years and its a morass of data. And I know there¹s been some new
data. What¹s happening? Do they work?

Andrew Rotherham: The results are mixed. They¹re mixed as to individual
student effects and as to school system effects. Overall I would say
you¹ve seen where students have taken vouchers, you¹ve seen a slight
increase

Ben Wattenberg: Suppose we were to make you for a decade King Andrew
Rotherham. You are in chargeŠ

Andrew Rotherham: God forbid.

Ben Wattenberg: ŠGod forbid. Right. You are now in charge of the whole
school system in the United States of America, public and private. What
would you do? We have this voucher thing. Checker thinks it¹s a first step
in the right direction. You¹re not nearly as pleased with it. What should
we be doing to make this thing work? And it¹s principally these inner city
schools.

Andrew Rotherham: We need to have some top down reforms along the lines of
standards; some bottom up reforms with choice. But it needs to be choice
that¹s coupled with accountability and it needs to be incorporated with
those standards. We would argue that any school that¹s accepting public
money for tuition needs to be held accountable for the results of those test
scores. It¹s not just an informational thing.

Ben Wattenberg: Well what does that mean held accountable?

Andrew Rotherham: It means what we¹re doing in a lot of states with the
federal law is now going to require every state to do which is start to
develop a system to get serious about low performing schools, including if
you cannot change the fact whether you changed a curriculum if the school
persists and doesn¹t improve to actually shut it down and get the kids into
other schools.

Chester Finn: It¹s my view that the centralized top down reforms such as no
child left behind and such as the state accountability and testing systems
are really good at spotting the schools that have things going wrong in
them. They¹re terrific at identifying failing schools. They¹re far less
good at fixing those schools. We don¹t have a track record yet of fixing
the bad schools. We are getting better and better and naming them. And the
question is what¹s going to fix them? And if nothing fixes them, what are
we going to do about the kids? And my view is let the kids out the door.
Let the kids go to a school that¹s working. If we don¹t know how to fix a
bad school, let¹s salvage the kids. There are good schools around this
country and there could be more of them. So let¹s let the kids vote with
their feet just as we would do if you were stuck in a lousy hotel and there
was a better one across the street. You would check out and then check in.

Ben Wattenberg: And this is part of that no child left behind legislation?

Chester Finn: Yes and no. The no child left behind legislation as
originally proposed by President Bush would have done what I just described.
It would have allowed the kids to check into basically any school if they
were stuck in a bad school.

Ben Wattenberg: Right.

Chester Finn: After all the lobbying and all the politicking was over, what
it does is it lets them check out into another public school within their
own district or into a charter school. It doesn¹t let them go to another
district and it doesn¹t let them go to a private school.

Andrew Rotherham: But where we need to be very clear here is the amount of
money, again, that the President was proposing was not giving these students
a choice between a low performing public school and a good private school,
to use Checker¹s hotel analogy. You¹re giving them a choice between the
Travel-Lodge and the Motel Six. This is notŠwe¹re talking about a subset of
schools that most people would never consider sending their kids to.

Ben Wattenberg: But if the voucher money instead of being two thousand two
hundred and fifty dollars were seven thousand two hundred and fifty dollars?

Chester Finn: New schools would be created by entrepreneurs.

Ben Wattenberg: What about the other issue that¹s getting an awful lot of
attention these days, which is home schooling. What do you think about
that? How does that fit into the voucher idea and the school choice idea
and this great morass of this American education industry?

Chester Finn: It¹s growing. Nobody knows quite how much.

Ben Wattenberg: On home schools, I mean what you see in your mind¹s eye
would be a mother saying, okay, Johnnie¹s going to be studying at home with
me. I know as much as teachers and I¹ll give him assignments and we¹ll do
this and we¹ll do that and we¹ll do the other thing. Now supposed Johnnie¹s
mother and Jimmy¹s mother get together and say between the two of us we will
home school and we¹ll switch. That would count as home schooling?

Chester Finn : Yes. Absolutely.

Andrew Rotherham: And there¹s a lot of that going on.

Ben Wattenberg: A lot? You mean of two or three or four parents with six
or seven, eight children?

Andrew Rotherham: Yes, there are networks on the Web. Right. And the Web
is making that even easier. Some of theseŠ I¹ve heard of ones as large as
fifteen or twenty kids are learning together. At some point it starts to
look a lot like a school quite frankly.

Chester Finn: There¹re also some fascinating new Web-based, Internet-based,
providers of curriculum and instruction for home schoolers to use in the
home so mother doesn¹t have to come up with the whole curriculum herself

Ben Wattenberg: How much of this whole problem that we talk about, about
the inner city school, and the failing of public school, is a question
really not so much of educational methodology or curriculum or teachers but
simply of discipline? The sense I get is that people who are concerned
about sending their kids to certain kinds of schools is discipline. It¹s
violence. It¹s detention in the school. It¹s all that kind of stuff.

Chester Finn: A lot of it has to do with the desire for safety for your
kid; physical safety, spiritual safety, moral safety. Some of the home
schooling is I¹m afraid my kid¹ll get stabbed or beaten up but some of the
home schooling isŠ

Ben Wattenberg: Or that he¹d take his lunch money or whatever.

Chester Finn: Yeah. But some of the home schooling is, I¹m afraid my kid
will be taught corrupting ideas or given bad habits.

Ben Wattenberg: Right.

Chester Finn: And so it¹s protect my kid. But this is also true in charter
schools. When you survey charter school parents, uh, why they like it
most of them do like it a lot of it has to do with these other factors.

Andrew Rotherham: And it¹s a shame that, you know, we have this huge phony
war going on when people should be sitting down and trying to figure out how
would you design a workable choice scheme that protects the public interest
and most importantly protect these children¹s interest. But the debate is
not there yet. The missing chair on my side and the missing chair on
Checker¹s side would not be talking about it the way we are now.

Ben Wattenberg: Šbecause everybody would be yelling at each other. My
thing works perfectly. My thing works perfectly.

Andrew Rotherham: And frankly because there¹s a lot of people in this fight
on both sides who really don¹t care about the resolution; they¹re just in it
for the fight. It¹s a long-standing ideological fight.

Ben Wattenberg: What is the root of the ideological fight?

Andrew Rotherham: The root of the ideological fight is public sector
organizations and organized labor against free market conservatives. And
it¹s a debate that¹s been going on for a long time.

Ben Wattenberg: Would you agree with that? Is that the argument?

Chester Finn: Yes. And two different philosophies of who¹s in charge of
education. Is it the state ultimately? Or is it the parent ultimately?

Andrew Rotherham: And I think what you see us arguing for, not exactly
agreeing, but in different ways, is that it ought to be a hybrid of both.

Chester Finn: Exactly.

Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Let¹s get out on this question: Is this a moment of
a new feistiness and a new openness into a situation that has been so
hidebound that we now can really look ahead. I mean if I asked you, say,
here¹s this new openness, let¹s look ahead 10 years, what¹s it going to be?

Andrew Rotherham: I think there is a new openness and I think there¹s a new
willingness. There¹s still a lot of people who are hidebound on both sides
of the debate, and there¹s a lot of phony wars that go on. But I think
there is a new willingness to innovate and a new willingness to get serious
about this real subset of schools that we¹re talking about. And it¹s not a
small subset but it¹s still not the overwhelming majority of American
schools. But the subset that are failing, to really get serious about
rolling up our sleeves. And I think what you¹re going to see is a variety
of strategies, the things we talked about tonight.

Ben: Wattenberg : Checker, is this a big brand new moment with more openness
that we can look ahead ten years and say we¹re going be moving the ball
down the field?

Chester Finn: I¹m more bullish than I¹ve been. I think that this is a time
of ferment and creativeness and willingness to try some new things in a way
I haven¹t seen before. It¹s a system with enormous inertia in it. But the
two energy sources are the two that you put your finger on. There is a lot
of energy in the idea of educational choice and competition and there¹s a
lot of energy in the idea of testing and accountability. And both of these
are going forward right now in a way I¹ve never seen either of them go
forward in the past.

Ben Wattenberg: So, choice and testing, much more of both, and that leaves
us with a somewhat optimistic future. Andrew Rotherham, thank you very much
for joining us. Checker Finn, thank you for joining us. And thank you.
Please remember to send us your comments via e-mail. For ³Think Tank,²
I¹m Ben Wattenberg

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