The Teacher Wars (28 page)

In response to a 1971 Supreme Court ruling, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district had developed a desegregation plan that paired kindergarten through third-grade schools in majority-white neighborhoods with fourth-grade through sixth-grade schools in majority-black neighborhoods. Each cohort of children was bused for half of their elementary school career, and no school in the district could be more than 50 percent black. What Reagan's speechwriters did not realize was that the plan was popular and academically effective. Students of all races demonstrated steady test score gains in Charlotte after desegregation. A greater proportion of the district's financial resources and experienced teachers moved to schools in low-income neighborhoods, which gained powerful advocates in the parents of middle-class and white children bused in from more affluent areas. The day after Reagan's comments, the
Charlotte Observer
editorialized that the district's integration program was, in fact, the region's “proudest achievement.”

It was an achievement the Reagan administration actively worked to undermine. Early leaders in the teacher accountability movement were often simultaneously engaged in efforts to defund and delegitimize desegregation.
In 1980, under President Carter, the Department of Justice filed twenty-two school desegregation suits. The following year, under President Reagan, it pursued just ten desegregation cases.
In 1984 Secretary Bell spent $1 million of his discretionary budget to
seed fifty-one new teacher merit pay plans across the country, even as the Reagan administration denied tens of millions of dollars of previously promised funding to school districts, such as Chicago's, which were struggling to implement desegregation orders.
Bell was even on the record in support of a federal law or constitutional amendment to forbid busing as an integration strategy.

In 1981 Reagan had appointed Robert Potter, a onetime anti-busing activist, to the U.S. District Court in western North Carolina.
In September 1999, Potter ruled in favor of a Charlotte father who sued the school district to end busing, arguing that it discriminated against his biracial daughter, who was white and Latina. What happened next was tragic.
According to research from the labor economist C. Kirabo Jackson, as Charlotte schools reverted to the demographics of their surrounding neighborhoods between 2002 and 2005, schools that became predominantly black suffered a loss of high-quality teachers as measured by growth in students' test scores, teachers' years of experience, and scores on teacher certification tests. Though black teachers were more likely than white teachers to remain in majority-black schools, those black teachers who left had been more effective than those who remained—especially at increasing the achievement of black students. Jackson estimated that this shift in the distribution of effective teachers could explain up to 7.5 percent of the achievement gap between black and white children in Charlotte.
The movement of experienced teachers away from high-poverty schools has often been cited as proof of white teachers' racist attitudes. And while discrimination certainly accounts for some of the movement, the fact is that many effective nonwhite teachers, too, seem to prefer working in integrated or middle-class settings. Part of the explanation is that high-poverty, minority-majority schools are more likely to experience administrative turnover and inept management, which erode teacher job satisfaction over the long term.

There is a wealth of other evidence that integration can boost student achievement.
A second study of Charlotte, from economists Stephen Billings, David Deming, and Jonah Rockoff, found that between 2002, when schools resegregated, and 2011 the math achievement gap between the races widened. Young minority males
assigned to Charlotte schools that experienced an influx of nonwhite students were more likely to be arrested and imprisoned than their demographically identical neighbors who remained in more integrated schools.
In a separate paper, Byron Lutz of the Federal Reserve demonstrated that the end of court-ordered busing in northern school districts led to an increase in black high school dropout rates. (Interestingly, dropout rates did not change in southern districts that were released from busing orders. This could be because northern districts interpreted desegregation orders more faithfully than southern ones did, so the impact of lifting the court orders was more severe. Or it could be because some southern cities, like Nashville and Charlotte, pledged to accompany desegregation by increased investment in majority-black schools.)

One of the most compelling studies of the relationship between school integration and student achievement was conducted by Heather Schwartz of the Century Foundation. She examined Montgomery County, Maryland, where a lottery determines in which public housing development a low-income family lives. The children of families living in public housing within integrated school zones—where poor, typically nonwhite children were less than half of the student body at their schools—experienced an additional 8 points of math gains and 4 points of reading gains on 100-point tests, compared to demographically identical peers placed by lottery in schools where the vast majority of students were poor.
In 1980 American school integration reached its height, with 37 percent of black children nationwide attending majority-white schools. After Reagan's intervention, that progress eroded. By 2000, just 28 percent of black children were in majority-white schools, and 40 percent of black and Latino students attended deeply segregated schools, where 90 to 100 percent of the student body was poor and nonwhite.

The teacher accountability agenda that has emerged over the last two decades—stricter evaluation systems, merit pay, the weakening of teacher tenure, and the creation of alternative pathways into the classroom, like Teach for America—is often talked about as a sort of next step in school reform, because integration failed. In her 2011 book
A Chance to Make History
, TFA founder Wendy Kopp wrote, “
In the sixties and seventies we committed to desegregate schools
in order to ensure that all of our nation's children have access to an equal education. Unfortunately, though, poor and minority students continued to lag academically.”
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The conclusion that desegregation did not work is not fair, though—because the United States did not, in fact, commit to integration. In 1974 the Supreme Court ruled in
Milliken v. Bradley
that majority-white northern school districts had no responsibility to cooperate with inner-city schools toward the goal of integration, even in regions where affluent all-white school districts were just a few minutes away from urban neighborhoods ravaged by poverty. Desegregation was never widely implemented outside the South, and where it was implemented, as in Charlotte or Montgomery County, it often succeeded in raising student achievement to a similar or greater degree than did later teacher accountability reforms. Today there is still a demand for integrated schools. In cities like Boston and Hartford, tens of thousands of parents have their children on waitlists to be bused to higher-quality suburban schools. From Brooklyn to Atlanta to Los Angeles, a small group of socioeconomically diverse charter schools has proven enormously popular with families. So it is unfortunate that these two strains of American education reform, integration and teacher accountability, rarely work in tandem.

Since 1980 the federal government has done almost nothing to encourage local school districts to create racially and socioeconomically mixed schools, even as billions of dollars are sent to states and districts that agree to tie teacher pay and evaluation to student test scores and to open new charter schools, most of which are as racially and socioeconomically homogeneous as the schools the civil rights crusaders fought to reform.

When “education governor” Bill Clinton became president,
he sought to push the standards and accountability movement further and faster. Through two pieces of 1994 legislation, the Improving
America's Schools Act and Goals 2000, Washington required states to adopt new curriculum standards and tests in order to receive Title I money. Clinton hoped to address one of Title I's long-standing flaws: that states and school districts lacked the expertise to create high-quality curricular materials. He tried to establish a National Education Standards and Improvement Council where researchers would use best practices to develop standards, textbooks, and tests that states and local schools could choose to adopt. But in 1995 the GOP-controlled Congress withdrew support for the program, and it never launched. By the late 1990s, education reformers who had applauded
A Nation at Risk
were hugely frustrated at the continued lack of oversight of failing schools. States had new tests, but if scores remained low year after year, there were no consequences.

One of those frustrated reformers was
Kati Haycock. She began her career in the 1970s, managing affirmative action programs and student outreach for the University of California system. That experience led her to conclude that college was too late to close achievement gaps between white and minority children, and that the real work was in K—12 school reform. In 1990 Haycock quit her job as executive vice president of the Children's Defense Fund, a civil rights organization whose motto was “Leave no child behind.” Her new project, the Education Trust, became a totally new kind of progressive advocacy group, one that unapologetically used test scores—long considered suspicious on the Left—to argue that education, especially better teachers, could effectively fight poverty.

The Education Trust distributed massive data books ranking states on many indicators of educational quality, to spread the word to the media that public schools were in dire trouble: In many districts half of all black and Latino kids were dropping out of high school, and throughout the nation the achievement gap between black and white children was growing. What was the Education Trust's theory as to why? In later years Haycock would talk more explicitly about removing bad tenured teachers from the classroom. But in the 1990s her focus was on many of the factors that accountability hawks today downplay: inequalities in funding, pre-service teacher qualifications (like scores on certification exams), and years of teaching experience. In 1990 the average middle-class, predominantly
white school spent nearly $1,400 more per pupil than the typical low-income school. In New York City's high-poverty public schools at the time, a third of all teachers had failed their licensing exam at least once, compared to one in twenty teachers in the rest of the state. Eighty-six percent of science teachers in majority-white schools were certified to teach science, compared to 54 percent in majority-minority schools. Poor children were twice as likely “to serve as training fodder for inexperienced teachers,” the Education Trust reported.
Another issue was the teachers unions' treasured class-size laws, which in states like California and Florida led to a burst in the hiring of underqualified teachers, without lowering class sizes to the very low number—sixteen students—that research showed actually benefits young children.

Haycock, who is white, often painted a grim picture of incompetent urban teachers with woefully low expectations for students, such as one who told eleventh graders to “
color a poster” about
To Kill a Mockingbird
instead of writing an essay. In 1992 she characterized teacher's assistants paid through Title 1, the Great Society program, as “
semiliterate aides who repeatedly mispronounce words,” thus miseducating poor students of color.

Haycock warned fellow liberals that if they did not begin holding teachers and schools accountable, the public education system would be decimated by demands for private school vouchers. “
The polls among black folk around vouchers versus public education are an indication that you cannot continue screwing a whole bunch of people and have them not catch you at it and decide that the game is so rigged that they may not continue to play,” she said in 1998. She was equally harsh on the legacy of the community control movement, the last major left-of-center effort to insist on better teachers for poor children's schools. “Twenty or 30 years ago, people really did believe that black or Hispanic kids needed something different—voodoo education, multicultural, whatever. What I think is so clear now is that what they need is the same thing white kids need, the same thing suburban kids need. It's high-quality education with high expectations from teachers who know their stuff. There's no mystery about this and there's no reason we can't supply it to all our kids.”

Haycock often cited Texas as a state that was making positive
strides. After
A Nation at Risk
, Texas created a statewide accountability system in which schools that failed to raise test scores could be denied funding. Sure enough, test scores rose, improvement heralded as the “Texas Miracle.” When George W. Bush spoke during his presidential campaign about using a similar approach to allocate Title I funding nationwide, Haycock was enthusiastic, telling reporter Joan Walsh of
Salon
in 1999 that the Clinton White House and Democrats in general had become too timid on school reform, scared to focus on the needs of poor children over middle-class children. “
Bush's message on education gives me more hope that something might happen for poor kids than what I'm hearing elsewhere,” Haycock said.

When Bush entered the White House after a divisive election, he knew bipartisan support would be key to passing a school accountability bill—and that the Education Trust could help provide a progressive imprimatur. His administration riffed off the slogan of the Children's Defense Fund, Haycock's old employer, in naming its signature education proposal: No Child Left Behind. Bush introduced the law in 2001 with the beautiful promise of freeing poor nonwhite children from “the soft bigotry of low expectations”—the problem Kati Haycock had been talking about for over a decade. In a fit of irrational optimism, Congress declared that by 2014, 100 percent of American children—including poor children and those who were not native English speakers—would be “proficient” in reading and math, as measured by new state standardized tests to be given every year in grades 3 through 8, and at least once in high school.