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« Back to Saving our Schools main page   Transcript for: Saving our SchoolsANNOUNCER: Funding for Think Tank is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Donner Canadian Foundation.(Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Education has become issue number one out on the political hustle this year. Governor George Bush is trying to capitalize on this traditionally Democratic issue. Vice President Gore has responded. What are the differences in the Republican and Democratic approaches? How much of a role should the federal government play in local schools, and just what is wrong with our schools anyway? To find out Think Tank is joined by: Jane Hannaway, director of education policy research at the Urban Institute; Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and author of Charter Schools in Action, Renewing Public Education; and Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy and author of Why National Standards and Tests, Politics and the Quest For Better Schools. The topic before the house, saving our schools this week on Think Tank. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: Polls have shown that education ranks number one among voter concerns. The candidates are responding, both parties are advocating an expanded federal role in education. But, their approaches have distinct differences. Bush’s plans focus on making schools more accountable for student performance, and he stresses local control. He proposes spending $48 billion over the next 10 years, primarily to help children learn to read. Gore proposes a larger increase in federal spending, not $48 billion but $115 over 10 years, much of which would go to preschool programs, and school construction. Gore and Bush have different ideas about what to do with schools that consistently perform poorly on tests. Gore would shut down failing schools, and reopen them under new leadership. Bush’s proposal goes like this, if a school fails to meet standards after a period of three years, he would give the school’s share of federal aid to parents for use at any school they wish, public or private. That plan opens up an argument about the V-word, vouchers, public money for private schools to help underachieving children. Beneath the smoke of rhetoric, one fact looms large, as of now the federal government plays a fairly limited role in American education, only 7 percent of all spending on public schools comes from Washington. States and local schools districts have always made the day-to-day decisions about matters like hiring teachers, and designing the curriculum, and they have paid by far the largest share of the bill. Will either or both of the current plans change that? Lady, gentlemen, thank you for joining us. Let’s go around the room first with a simple question, Checker Finn, old friend, what’s wrong with the schools? MR. FINN: Well, the central problem is most kids aren’t learning nearly enough. We’ve known this for 17 years since the famous Nation At Risk report, American achievement lags behind that of most of the rest of the world, and for poor kids, disadvantaged kids, central city kids, they are not only not learning nearly enough, they are in retched, dangerous, dysfunctional schools for the most part. MR. WATTENBERG: Jane? MS. HANNAWAY: I think what Checker has referred to is a consequence of what has been wrong with the schools, which I think is very weak accountability systems. And I think that’s what’s changing now. And I think both candidates are pushing for greater accountability. MR. WATTENBERG: But, you’re saying that his diagnosis is essentially correct? MS. HANNAWAY: That’s right. MR. WATTENBERG: That we have problems big time in the schools? MS. HANNAWAY: I think the schools are underperforming, especially for poor kids. And I think part of the problem has been a weak accountability system. MR. WATTENBERG: Jack? MR. JENNINGS: Well, I will agree. I think that Checker has put his finger on the main problem, kids don’t know enough, especially kids in poor schools are not being given an adequate opportunity or being challenged enough to know more. But, once having identified the problem, it comes down to how do you identify the solutions. American schools aren’t failing, because the United States is the strongest country militarily, it’s the strongest country economically, 90 percent of our citizens have gone to public schools and our success is due to those citizens. Therefore, we’re not failing as a country, we’re not failing as a school system, but we’re clearly not doing well enough, and we have to do much better for the future. MR. WATTENBERG: That’s a pretty good point. I actually intended to bring that up. I mean, you all in the permanent crisis business go around saying, oh my God, the sky is falling, we’re doing this wrong, we’re doing that wrong, and here we are as Jack says in just about every field of national endeavor way at the top of the heap. We may be lower in math scores, but we’re not lower in getting products designed and manufactured that involve math. MR. FINN: We let people have 1,000 chances, we pay twice and thrice for their education when they come back for community college, and college, and then employer provided training. We import highly skilled and highly trained people from other countries, where they got a good education. We do a lot of coping that enables us to be a successful country in spite of the performance of our schools. MR. WATTENBERG: It sounds like our healthcare system. MR. FINN: Pretty much, we improvise. MR. WATTENBERG: Do you all buy that? MS. HANNAWAY: I buy that, yes. I think we do have many chances. I think unlike a lot of European countries kids can go back if they missed something. MR. WATTENBERG: But, we’re still doing a very sloppy, and in the case of poor kids a dangerous job of what’s going on. MR. JENNINGS: Can I interject? MR. WATTENBERG: Please. MR. JENNINGS: One of the reasons we’re sloppy is because of the way we’re structured as a country. The founding fathers intentionally decided not to centralize power in this country through the Constitution, by delegating power to the state and local level, by having an extremely complex form of government, where you have three divisions at each level, you have three different levels, and the presumption is that the people have power and not that the government has power. So we are intentionally localized, we are intentionally sloppy, we are intentionally inefficient, because we don’t want centralized power. Therefore, it’s harder to find solutions in our country. MR. WATTENBERG: Are you suggesting that federal control and direction of the schools would be better than local? MR. JENNINGS: No, what I’m saying is that every country is unique. Our country is unique in that we as a people want local control and we don’t want centralized government. MR. WATTENBERG: And you subscribe to that? MR. JENNINGS: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: And you subscribe to that? MS. HANNAWAY: Certainly. MR. WATTENBERG: I know you subscribe to that? MR. FINN: Mostly, I’m coming to believe more and more in states as places that should be more vigorous. MR. WATTENBERG: As opposed to localities. MR. FINN: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: We have been doing this Think Tank program, we’re in our seventh season now, and this must be at least our eighth or ninth program on education. And everybody always comes on and says, we ought to do this, we ought to do that, we ought to do the other thing. And every time we come back to it, here it is again, the same old problems, poor kids in inner cities. Have we made any progress? MR. FINN: There is some good news, and there is some bad news. We had a whole lot of new data come out in the last few weeks from the National Assessment, from the SAT scores, from the Brookings Institution. Mostly the data are flat over the long haul, over the last 30 years. There are some upward blips in math, that are -- MR. WATTENBERG: This is among poor or minority students? MR. FINN: Well, it includes them to some degree. But, the average performance is up some in math, basically flat in English. The growth is very slow. A colleague at Brookings calculated that at our current rate of improvement for our 8th graders to catch up with Singapore’s 8th graders in math would take 125 years. So we’re improving at a slow rate. There has also unfortunately been some -- MR. WATTENBERG: Unless we pull the Singaporeans backwards, that might do it. MR. FINN: Well, sure. There’s been some recent and very troubling widening of the black-white achievement gap over the last six or ten years, that had begun to close in the ’80s, and has been widening a little bit during the ’90s. MR. WATTENBERG: And not only in poor schools, as I understand it? MS. HANNAWAY: Many black kids with middle class families are underperforming from what you would expect, given their family background characteristics. Some good news, though, to build on what Checker was saying, there are some states that are showing a decrease in the gap between minorities and whites. MR. WATTENBERG: Governor Bush goes around saying that that has happened in Texas. MS. HANNAWAY: And it is. MR. FINN: It has. MS. HANNAWAY: It has happened in Texas. MR. WATTENBERG: Do you agree with that? MR. JENNINGS: I do agree with that. But, you know, there is good news. I mean, we shouldn’t concentrate so much on the bad news we forget the good news. The good news, in 1950 about a fourth of blacks finished high school, today it’s almost the same percentage as the majority of the population. That’s a big success story. MR. WATTENBERG: In terms of high school graduation, regardless of grades you have black-white parity now, just about? MR. JENNINGS: Black-white parity in terms of graduation, especially if you look at GEDs and attainment of GEDs by 24-year-olds. But, there also has been an increase -- MR. WATTENBERG: But, Latinos are way behind? MR. JENNINGS: Latinos are way behind, partially because you have an immigration of teenage Latinos into the country and they’re not educated in their own country. And then they come to our country and they drop out of high school. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask a couple of questions. There have been some stories in the papers recently. One is that some of these experiments with public-private vouchers have worked rather well. Have I read that correctly? MR. FINN: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: I know you’re going to say yes. MR. FINN: It’s more than that, the little foundation that I run has helped pay for the program in Dayton that was one of the three sites for the evaluation that you’re referring to. There were three cities, New York, Washington, and Dayton studied, over a two-year period. And what’s interesting about this is that for black kids non-trivial increases in English and math in all three cities over that two-year period, if they took the vouchers and went to private school. No change for non-black kids, very interesting, very perplexing. White kids didn’t change, the Hispanic kids didn’t change. MR. WATTENBERG: When they went to a private voucher school? MR. FINN: That’s correct. And these were all low income kids, so low income white kids, and low income Hispanic kids did not do better in the private voucher school, the private school with the voucher, but the black kids did by a non-trivial amount. And that’s one of the things that cheers me up, as I look at otherwise gloomy statistics. MR. WATTENBERG: Do you all buy that new data? MR. JENNINGS: No. I buy it in the sense that -- MR. WATTENBERG: Here we go again. Go ahead. MR. JENNINGS: I think that Checker is doing the right thing by having the right type of study, randomized selection, and that is progress, but this is one test, or this is one report, and it has some ill effects about older kids being expelled from school, and so on. This is just one report. You have to look at the panoply of reports. We did a study for over a year looking at publicly funded voucher programs, and what we found is that you couldn’t look at any one report. You had to look at them all. And there we showed no overwhelming evidence that kids were doing better. They might over time, but right now we don’t know. MR. WATTENBERG: We shot a program in Milwaukee and had Mayor Norquist on, and he maintained very vigorously with a whole raft of data that the voucher program in Milwaukee, which I guess is the most extensive in America now isn’t it, was doing just fine. MS. HANNAWAY: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: And not just fine, was doing very well, was yielding results. MR. JENNINGS: But, you know, in Milwaukee the state legislature will not require a study of that program, and they will not require a collection of data in that program that’s a legitimate collection of data. And therefore, you can’t say for sure that that program is succeeding. Why if government -- MR. WATTENBERG: You don’t trust Mayor Norquist. MR. JENNINGS: I would trust a large sum of money being spent on the two voucher programs, or actually three if you count Florida, that are in existence now, over a long period of time, to find out whether they really work or not. But, this is one thing -- MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you a question, we talked about it back in the green room. MR. JENNINGS: Right. MR. WATTENBERG: Are you opposed to vouchers? MR. JENNINGS: I’m opposed to the media’s preoccupation with vouchers, because what you have today are 10 percent of the American kids going to private school. I think we should put our concentration on improving public schools, because even if you double the number of kids in private schools you go to 20 percent of the kids, which would be very hard to do, 80 percent of the kids would still be in public schools. And if you look at the types of teachers who are in public schools in the poorest areas, they’re the least certified, the least experienced, they’re not the teachers who should be teaching in the worst schools. MR. WATTENBERG: I understand, but wait a minute. With all due respect, are you going to give me a yes or no answer to the question, are you opposed to vouchers? MR. JENNINGS: I’ll give you my honest answer. I’m a product of private schools, I know the merits of private schools. I also know in the private schools I went to they threw kids out if they were causing trouble, and I also know that the parents in those private schools were more motivated to make sure that their kids succeeded. And I don’t think in the United States we’re going to be able to expand our private schools enough, and have motivated parents sending those kids to the private schools to solve our educational problem. Therefore, the attention is being spent on something that may help some kids, but it’s not going to solve the basic problems in American education. MR. WATTENBERG: Jane, do you favor experimental use of vouchers? MS. HANNAWAY: Definitely, I think to be fair to the studies that are out there, I think almost every study has shown that there is some benefit for some grade level, in some subject. It hasn’t been an across the board -- MR. WATTENBERG: You mean for sending underachieving kids to private school? MS. HANNAWAY: Private schools. But, I don’t think any of those small studies are a real test of a voucher policy, because the theory behind a voucher policy is that vouchers will, through the process of competition, improve public schools as well as private schools. MR. WATTENBERG: Right. So it’s always going to be very hard to measure. MS. HANNAWAY: All the studies so far have done is compared the performance in existing private schools with performance in existing public schools. MR. WATTENBERG: All right. Hold on for just a moment, I want to talk to viewers. We at Think Tank, as you know, depend on your feedback to make our program better. Please email us at thinktank@pbs.org. Now, what do Gore and Bush propose? MR. FINN: Well, if I were going to put it in a nutshell I’d say Gore proposes to try to do more of what Clinton has been proposing, and Bush wants to try to do for the whole country what he’s been doing in Texas. That’s how I sort of -- MR. WATTENBERG: Which is what? MR. FINN: Well, the Texas thing is easier, actually, to describe. Texas has probably got the country’s most ambitious and comprehensive set of standards and tests and accountability mechanisms, right down to the school and individual kid level. It’s kind of the ultimate test available in America so far of whether standards based reform with tests and accountability can work to boost achievement. And the early returns suggest that it’s been boosting achievement. It’s especially been boosting achievement for minority kids in Texas, who pretty much lead the country in terms of minority student achievement. And Bush believes he can do this for the whole country if he’s president. Now, that’s a mechanical uncertainty, given the president’s leverage. MR. WATTENBERG: Now, that statement is either true or a campaign speech, and maybe both. How do you all react to that? MS. HANNAWAY: It’s a campaign speech. I mean, I don’t think Bush has any plans to become the state superintendent, or the national superintendent of schools. MR. WATTENBERG: No, but he does have a Texas program that Checker described -- MS. HANNAWAY: The Texas program, but you can’t make that a national program, because the responsibility for education is constitutionally with each state. MR. WATTENBERG: He can encourage a model that he has worked with, through legislation and whatever. MS. HANNAWAY: Which is standards based reform, which is already in place. Almost every state in the country now is in the process of developing, or has developed standards and assessment systems that go with those standards, and an accountability system that goes with those assessments. MR. JENNINGS: What they do in campaigns is they concentrate on how they differ, not on how they agree. What is happening in this campaign is you have two major party candidates who are really in the same school of reform, which is that they both believe that you have to have higher education standards, you have to have accountability systems and you have to have consequences. They do have substantial differences, though. And I’ll give you a nutshell like Checker did. MR. WATTENBERG: Please. MR. JENNINGS: Nutshell is that Bush is far better than the past, the past two Republican candidates for president who only talked about vouchers, but Gore is far better for the future, because Gore is not only talking about accountability, in a way stricter accountability than Bush, but he’s also providing dollars and real assistance to help with serious problems in education, such as the lack of good teachers in the poorest schools, and the quality of the buildings that are available to kids. MR. FINN: That was a campaign speech. MR. WATTENBERG: I understand. Well, I’ll make the same comment that I made about you. It was a campaign speech, but was it true? MR. FINN: Partly, a little bit. MR. WATTENBERG: That’s about what they said of yours. MR. FINN: I want to first say where I think Jane made an overstatement that needs to be corrected. A lot of states do not have consequences yet in their standards based reform systems. The State of Ohio where I spent a lot of time, for example, nothing happens to a bad school, I mean nothing. The state tests will reveal its name, but nothing happens to the school, the principal, the teachers, or the kids. MR. WATTENBERG: Wasn’t the original idea the consequences would go upon the student, not upon the school? MR. FINN: I have come to believe when it comes to consequences that they really need to hit the grownups as well as the kids. I just don’t think it’s fair to make the kid repeat a grade, and let the teacher and principal who presided over his failure go completely untouched by that failure. I don’t think we can be oblivious to what happens to the school or to the adults. And it is the case that both Bush and Gore would do something to a failed school. They would either, as the technical term has it, reconstitute the school, in Gore’s case, or they would sort of let the customers leave, and take their money elsewhere, in Bush’s case. MR. JENNINGS: I agree with Checker that there shouldn’t be consequences for kids unless there’s consequences for adults. In fact, the consequences for adults should precede the consequences for kids, to make sure that adults set up the system correctly before a kid receives the consequences. If the kid isn’t taught the right subject matter by good teachers, how can you hold the kid accountable for not passing the test. So the system should be in alignment, as well as having consequences for kids. So I think there’s a lot of agreement among leaders on that. The ironical thing is that if you look at the polls, and you ask the people what they think should happen, if you ask about standards based reform, there is not necessarily a majority for that. I think what the candidates are doing -- MR. WATTENBERG: In public opinion polls people do not approve of setting standards and making kids hit the targets? MS. HANNAWAY: Not if it’s my kids is the way people usually think of that. MR. JENNINGS: There was a Gallup poll that was just released two weeks ago that asked people, do you agree that the most effective reform should be a good teacher, standards based reform, or parental choice of school. About 17 percent each chose parental choice of school, or raising standards, most people chose having a good teacher. Now, these are not -- MR. WATTENBERG: Those are not mutually exclusive. MR. JENNINGS: That’s right. They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. If you’re going to have higher standards you have to have better teachers. MR. WATTENBERG: Hold on one minute. I’m going to make Jane president for a moment. MS. HANNAWAY: Okay. MR. FINN: This will be progress. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, we could do a whole lot worse. Madam President, what should we do? MS. HANNAWAY: Well, a couple of things. One thing we haven’t talked about yet, and one thing that Gore is proposing, which I think is a good idea, is universal preschool. I think there is an increased amount of research showing that what happens to kids when they’re young has long term consequences, and I think that would be a big boon to productivity in American education. The second thing, and this may be a little bit self-serving, Ben -- MR. WATTENBERG: You would hire you, you would hire the Urban Institute to do a study, right? MS. HANNAWAY: The other thing I would do is invest -- exactly, invest much more heavily in research and demonstration programs. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, Mr. President Finn, what would you do on the first day of office? MR. FINN: Let’s first recognize that, as you said early on, presidents don’t run schools, and the federal government -- MR. WATTENBERG: We’re in a presidential election year, you may have noticed. So what’s why we’re -- MR. FINN: You’ve put me ahead to January 20th, and I’m going to try to reinstall a sense of realism about what you should expect from Washington, which is not that we’re going to run your schools for you folks. The thing that gripes me, and this is really something I’d lay at Bill Clinton’s doorstep is the implication that if there’s an education problem Washington will solve it for you. I really think that’s dangerous, and that we need to disabuse people of that view. We also need to recognize that virtually all the major federal elementary, secondary programs, limited though they may be in effect, are up for re-authorization in the next Congress. So the president is going to have to have somebody, maybe the Secretary of Education, ready with a whole set of concrete proposals. MR. WATTENBERG: So there is an opportunity, just mechanically, to do something when you take office? MR. FINN: Yes, there is. MR. WATTENBERG: All right. President Jennings, now you’re going to take office, what are you going to do? MR. JENNINGS: Have I succeeded these other two? MR. WATTENBERG: No, this is a little exercise we play. We’ve stopped impeachment in this scenario. So that it’s an alternative scenario. MR. JENNINGS: Well, the first thing I would do would be anything I could to ensure that there was a good teacher in front of every classroom. I’d move heaven and earth to do that, because when it comes down to it, if you don’t have a good teacher, you’re not going to have the students ready to learn. MR. WATTENBERG: Would that include testing of teachers already in the classroom? MR. JENNINGS: Yes, it would be testing of new teachers, testing of the present teachers. MR. WATTENBERG: Now, Vice President Gore, that’s not what he says, he’s for testing new teachers. MR. JENNINGS: He’s also for peer review of current teachers. MR. WATTENBERG: With consequences? MR. JENNINGS: And he proposes that if somebody receives money for a higher teachers salary, they have to have a system to remove teachers who are not good teachers. Now wait, I haven’t finished my program. MR. WATTENBERG: I just wanted to get verification from the other side. Is that correct? MR. JENNINGS: Pretty much. MR. WATTENBERG: It is. Okay. Great. MR. JENNINGS: The second thing, kids aren’t going to learn unless they’re motivated and unless their parents are motivated. The main factor in whether a kid learns is the motivation that a parent gives to that kid, how a parent shapes that kid. And I fault these presidential candidates, I know they’re looking for adult votes, but they should be telling parents that you’re responsible for how well your kid is going to learn. Therefore, if you don’t set aside time for your kid to learn at night, to take homework, if you don’t look at grades, if you don’t work with your kid, you don’t tell them the importance of schooling, those kids aren’t going to be motivated. And they’re talking about all these programs, and they’re not talking about motivation. MR. WATTENBERG: Now, that too was a campaign speech, but one in which I think all of us would agree and 90 percent of the American people would agree, that the parents have got to get on the stick. Thank you very much, Jane Hannaway, Checker Finn, and President Jack Jennings. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email. An address will appear on the screen momentarily. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank. This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Donner Canadian Foundation. (End of program.) Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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