The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

  The particular obsessions of accountability school reform are neatly summed up in Ted Bell’s life story. There is a passionate belief in the power of public education—yes—but also a profound desire to test, to quantify, and to rationalize.

  Bell grew up in rural Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, in a house with eight siblings, a single mother, and no indoor plumbing. Like Lyndon Johnson, Bell attended public school and then enrolled in a state teachers college, Albion State Normal School, because it was the only higher education he could afford; he paid his tuition, $11.50 per term, with wages from a part-time job with the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program. At Albion, Bell was fascinated by a course he took on educational tests and measurements, which focused on IQ. This interest would get him into trouble: In the Marine Corps after graduation, Bell mouthed off that a commanding officer would rate as a “moron” on an IQ test. Bell’s head was shaved, he was stripped down to his underwear, and he spent three days in solitary confinement, subsisting on bread and water. Yet his interest in testing proved lifelong. As superintendent of the Weber County, Utah, public schools in the early 1960s, he instituted a merit pay plan in which teachers were offered the option to be paid based on how well they scored on the National Teacher Examination, as well as on how their students performed on standardized tests.*1 The program attracted virulent resistance from the Utah Education Association, which successfully lobbied the state legislature to withdraw its funding for the plan. Voters then rejected a ballot initiative to raise taxes to fund the program. Though merit pay had failed to gain political traction in Utah, the episode cemented Bell’s reputation as a reformer with free-market leanings—credibility he was able to exploit as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education.

  Because of his time working in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Bell understood Washington and knew from the get-go that the Democratic-controlled Congress would never eliminate the Department of Education or its major civil rights program, Title I, which provided federal funding to schools with large numbers of poor, minority, and handicapped students. What’s more, he personally supported those programs. So instead of wasting much effort on the quixotic campaign to close his own department, Bell began, in the spring of 1981, to circumvent Reagan’s inner circle and go straight to the media with messages about school improvement. He created an infamous wall chart inside the Department of Education, on which he ranked states according to their SAT scores, high school graduation rates, teacher salaries, and school funding levels. It was the first time—but by no means the last—Washington set states in educational competition with one another.*2 A press conference revealing the chart was packed to overflowing, though the results were predictable: States with little poverty and strong social supports, like Vermont and New Hampshire, ranked well. The Deep South scored poorly.

  Bell’s numbers-driven, get-tough approach brought to Washington a new flavor of centrist school reform that had emerged in state capitols during the 1970s. The violent confrontations over busing, collective bargaining, and community control had darkened the public’s view of teachers and schools, with polls showing that by 1980 only about a third of Americans felt confident in the nation’s education system, down from 59 percent in 1966, at the height of the Great Society. If everyone from the Black Power Left to the segregationist Right believed schools were failing, state policy makers, especially Democrats who supported greater school funding, knew they would have to justify education spending in terms of tough reform and results.

  The school reform efforts of the 1960s had not called for new standardized tests; instead the focus had been on teachers’ racial attitudes and classroom skills. That began to change. By the mid-1970s, thirty-three states had instituted testing programs to evaluate student achievement, often in an effort to help the public understand why education was a wise investment. If scores were low, school funding could be depicted as an emergency necessity. If scores improved, politicians could claim that their investments were working.

  The idea of linking students’ test scores to specific teachers was not yet in vogue. Instead, under the new reforms, teachers were subject to “competency based” evaluation. During the early 1970s, California, Texas, and New York passed laws requiring that all teacher education programs be organized around specific teaching “competencies,” and that working teachers be evaluated according to their skill in the classroom. The impact ranged from minimal to disastrous. In 1975 the National Institute of Education, a federal agency, hired Teacher Corps alumnus and future education journalist John Merrow to write a report on the competency movement. Merrow concluded it had little substance. Popular teacher competencies, such as the ability to ask students “higher-order questions,” were ill defined, vague to the point of meaninglessness. To appease lawmakers, many college education departments simply renamed traditional courses to feature competency lingo, while nothing changed in the curriculum. And in a time of antitax sentiment, competency laws were often unfunded mandates, with little or no money provided to actually implement new ways of training and evaluating teachers. California essentially prohibited the undergraduate education major in 1970. Prospective elementary school teachers there could choose any major and then spend a post-baccalaureate year student teaching while taking a few education classes. According to research from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a single year turned out not to be enough time to train teachers in the pedagogical skills needed for the broad range of subjects elementary teachers, especially, must tackle. Early-grades math instruction in particular was shortchanged in California, and students paid the price.

  Teachers’ reputations continued to suffer, with much of the new moral panic focused on teachers’ own test scores. In 1980, “Why Teachers Can’t Teach,” a piece in the Texas Monthly, won the prestigious National Magazine Award for Public Service.*3 The exposé, by Gene Lyons, revealed that public school teachers in urban Houston and Dallas scored lower on standardized tests than did the average suburban sixteen-year-old. Lyons visited President Johnson’s alma mater, Southwest Texas State University at San Marcos, and reported that students enrolled in teacher education classes there were functionally illiterate. Teacher credentialing was “a hoax and an educational disgrace,” he concluded, blaming the misapplication of John Dewey’s ideas: an overemphasis on student-centered pedagogy at the expense of subject matter training in history, literature, math, and science. As an aside, Lyons mentioned that teachers’ low pay might be preventing more academically talented students from pursuing the profession in the first place.

  As secretary of education, Ted Bell sought to amplify the Lyons critique. In 1982 he appointed an eighteen-member National Commission on Excellence in Education, which included college presidents, scholars, business leaders, school board members, a retired governor, several principals, and one public school teacher. Bell hoped the commission would produce a sort of Marshall Plan for school reform—an inspirational call that would unite the media and public behind efforts to improve education, forcing President Reagan to embrace a more centrist agenda. Bell was not disappointed. The commission ignored the president’s directions for them—“Bring God back into the classroom,” Reagan told the members at one meeting, and “leave the primary responsibility for education to parents”—and instead produced the succinct and readable A Nation at Risk. The report’s unforgettable introduction artfully deployed the militant language of the Cold War in service of school reform:

  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. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.… We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

  The report went on to depict a “rising tide of mediocrity”: a twenty-year decline in SAT scores, electives like cooking and drivers ed considered acceptable substitutes for physics and calculus (at the so-called “shopping mall high school”), and
Japanese and German public school graduates who were able to engineer more desirable cars and better machine tools, kneecapping the U.S. economy. American teachers were dullards drawn from the “bottom quarter” of high school and college graduating classes, and they were especially deficient in math and science.

  To improve teacher quality, the commission recommended higher base salaries, merit pay to reward effective teachers, and stricter teacher evaluation systems that made it more difficult to earn and keep tenure. Most of the European and Asian nations that built high-prestige teaching professions after World War II required prospective teachers to spend several years training for the classroom. A Nation at Risk made a different suggestion, in line with the American tradition of missionary teaching: to allow career changers and young college grads who had not studied education to quickly obtain “alternative” teaching credentials.

  Better teachers were just one of four priorities the commission identified. The others were raising expectations for students and adding rigor to the high school curriculum, lengthening the school day by one hour and the school year by forty days, and encouraging the federal government to play a larger role in setting the national education agenda and funding it. But the report was released into a political climate of budget-cutting fervor—federal aid for poor children’s education was cut by 16 percent in Reagan’s first term—and a culture war. There was little enthusiasm in Congress for providing the massive influx of funding needed to extend learning time, the costliest proposal in A Nation at Risk. The idea of more rigorous, universal curriculum standards was also a nonstarter; the American Right had long demonstrated an overactive paranoia about supposedly liberal national attempts to influence the curriculum of local schools—a paranoia Reagan fully shared as a former anticommunist activist. Consequently, despite A Nation at Risk’s broad set of recommendations, policy makers focused increasingly on teachers alone: their training, demographic traits, and how they were evaluated and paid.

  The teaching establishment—unions and teachers colleges—was divided in its response to the report. At the American Federation of Teachers, most high-level staffers were reluctant to support any initiative of a presidential administration that wanted to cut school funding and provide vouchers to parochial schools. But Al Shanker, who had become AFT president in 1974, bucked his advisers—and his counterpart at the National Education Association—to embrace the core message of A Nation at Risk, that American schools were failing. “I like the phrase ‘a nation at risk’ because those words put education on the same par as national defense,” he told his members. This was a bold position, in stark contrast to how most unionists felt about the report; in the words of Dennis Van Roekel of the NEA, who at the time led the state teachers union in Arizona and later served as NEA president, “I took it as a personal insult.”

  Even Shanker didn’t like the commission’s policy prescriptions—especially merit pay for select teachers or the idea of a longer school day. On pay, unions believed that if they resisted differentiation based on competence, grade level, or subject taught, the higher salaries needed to attract and retain better teachers would be paid to all teachers. Shanker didn’t support extended work hours, but rather the opposite: His union had called for a four-day teaching week, with aides taking over on Fridays in grades one through eight and high school students using the time to work on research projects. (Teachers would use the fifth day to plan lessons and grade papers.) Nevertheless, Shanker’s credibility as a militant labor leader, one who had gone to jail for leading strikes, allowed him, throughout the 1980s, to promote a number of innovative policy solutions to the problems outlined in A Nation at Risk—proposals that earned him growing credibility with accountability reformers and reversed the impression that the AFT was the intransigent union while the NEA was the “professional” one.

  Peer review was one Shanker-endorsed innovation. In 1981 the AFT local in Toledo, Ohio, negotiated a contract that called for skilled veteran teachers to observe the classrooms of novices and underperforming tenured teachers, and then to either coach them to improve or approve their terminations. At the time, national surveys of teachers showed that the majority hated the idea and saw it as undermining solidarity. But Shanker thought it was an important step toward making teaching more like medicine or law, professions that regulated and policed themselves. What’s more, peer review addressed the American teaching profession’s key deficiency: Teachers never watched one another work. For most teachers, many of whom had never student-taught, the only time they witnessed teaching practice firsthand was when they were students themselves, many years in the past.

  Another new idea Shanker promoted was the “charter school,” a concept he borrowed from Germany. Shanker envisioned charters as unionized, teacher-run schools freed from state or district mandates in order to experiment with new ideas. Some Republican education reformers initially hated the concept, which they saw as a union attempt to exempt certain teachers and schools from state standards. Their perspective changed quickly, however, once reformers from across party lines realized that charter school laws could be crafted in ways that made it possible to open nonunion public schools, or even allow public schools to be managed by for-profit companies. The first charters opened in Minnesota in 1992, and just a year later Shanker was calling charter schools an anti-union “gimmick” and worrying that “hucksters” would use the charter movement to divert public funding away from students and teachers and toward private profit.

  While Shanker selectively embraced A Nation at Risk, professors of education turned out to be the report’s harshest critics. Their perspective is summed up in David Berliner and Bruce Biddle’s 1995 call to arms, The Manufactured Crisis, which argued that American education was in fine shape, contrary to the report’s core assumptions, and that where it was weak, it was the fault of regressive policies, such as those that produced gaps in teacher pay between rich and poor school districts. The authors pointed out that SAT scores had declined in large part because a more diverse group of students was taking the exam, including poor children, who never would have dreamt of applying to college in the years before World War II. They acknowledged that American teachers were less academically distinguished than their counterparts abroad. But that was not because of deficiencies in the teacher certification process, they wrote, but because American teachers were paid less than other white-collar workers. In Japan the average teacher earned as much as the average engineer; in the United States, teachers earned only 60 percent as much as engineers.

  Jay Sommer had his own critiques of the new reform push. Sommer was a national “teacher of the year” who taught foreign languages at New Rochelle High School in New York, and the only working teacher on the commission that produced A Nation at Risk. He believed the main problem with teaching in America was that school districts invested almost nothing in improving their employees’ skills. “Basically, no teacher wants to fail,” Sommer told Fred Hechinger, the eminent education columnist at The New York Times. “If they are failing, it’s because they get no supervision, no direction, no leadership.”

  In the long term, A Nation at Risk prevailed over its critics. The report, quite smartly, differed from other national drives for school reform in that it focused on raising standards for all children, not just poor children. That helped it appeal to business leaders and middle-class parents, who were attracted to the dramatic portrait of educational complacency in the face of unrelenting international competition. Magazines aped the report’s style and assumptions. “It’s like Pearl Harbor,” Fortune declared. “The Japanese have invaded and the U.S. has been caught short. Not on guns and tanks and battleships—those are yesterday’s weapons—but on mental might. In a high-tech age where nations increasingly compete on brainpower, American schools are producing an army of illiterates.”

  State policy makers, especially a new generation of “education governors” such as Lamar Alexander in Tennessee, Bill Clinton in Arkansas, and, later, George W.
Bush in Texas and his brother Jeb in Florida, were eager to claim they had followed the advice of A Nation at Risk. Two-thirds of the states launched new student testing programs, and thirty began requiring teachers to pass pre-service exams. Twenty states created fast-track alternative pathways into the classroom, which allowed college graduates who hadn’t studied education to quickly become teachers. Twenty-four states claimed to have implemented some sort of “career ladder” rewarding teachers with merit pay, but by the end of the decade, almost all of those ladders had collapsed, weighed down by low budgets and lack of teacher buy-in. Since the rhetoric and policy prescriptions of A Nation at Risk have proven so enduring—the very same assumptions and ideals underlie No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core, and almost every other contemporary reform effort to improve teaching—it is crucial to look at why, exactly, the first generation of accountability-driven national teacher reform failed.

  By 1988, just five years after A Nation at Risk debuted, The New York Times declared: “Merit pay for teachers is beginning to look like a flawed idea whose time has gone.… In retrospect, the rise and fall of merit pay were probably inevitable.”

  Indeed. Even at the time A Nation at Risk was published there was already compelling evidence that merit pay plans across the country had been overhyped—evidence ignored by reformers, like Ted Bell, who were eager to propose low-cost solutions to educational underperformance. Several nationwide studies of merit pay programs instituted between the 1930s and 1970s found that the majority failed within six years and faced similar barriers to effectiveness: excessive administrative paperwork, low funding, disagreements about how to judge good teaching, and strong opposition from teachers themselves.