Kerry Should Listen to His Own Advice on Education Reform

The best counsel John F. Kerry has received about education during the presidential campaign came last fall from one of the party’s strongest voices for school reform during the 1990s.

“It bothers me,” the reformer wrote, “that some Democrats have resisted the idea of making educational outcomes -- the skills and knowledge our kids obtain from the educational system -- as important as educational inputs -- the adequate funding, the good facilities and the higher teacher pay we all want.”

That sound advice came from Kerry in the campaign book he published last fall, “A Call to Service.” Too bad Kerry the presidential candidate has almost completely ignored Kerry the education critic.

After voting for President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, Kerry, during his race to the nomination, joined the mob of Democrats condemning the education reform law.

Pressured by rival Howard Dean’s denunciations of the act and the unwavering opposition from groups representing teachers and school administrators, Kerry retreated from his book’s powerful demand for accountability.

Instead, he reversed himself to insist that schools be judged not only on outputs -- their success in improving student performance -- but inputs as well, such as whether teachers and students show up regularly.

Kerry and other skeptics point to some legitimate problems in No Child Left Behind. But many education reformers worry that the changes he’s demanding will do more to hide problems in the schools than to fix them. Put another way: His proposed revisions mostly favor the adults working in the school system over students and their parents.

Kerry’s most important proposal would change the way the law assesses schools. Now, schools must test every student in reading and math annually from third through eighth grade. Schools must show improvement every year for every group of students -- not just white or middle-class kids, but minority and low-income children as well. Schools that don’t meet that standard are labeled as needing improvement, which triggers an escalating series of reforms.

During the Democratic primaries, Kerry echoed the teachers unions in deriding this system as “punitive” and “arbitrary.” Rather than judging schools on whether they improve student proficiency in reading and math, he said, they should also be measured by other indicators, like graduation rates, teacher attendance and parental satisfaction.

Kerry’s clear intent is to loosen the standard so that fewer schools are identified as needing improvement, even if student test scores fail to rise. It’s easy to see why teachers and administrators worried about their public image like that idea. It’s more difficult to see how it helps parents or children.

The demand for loosening the accountability standard is based largely on the myth, now embraced by Kerry, that the law punishes schools designated as needing improvement.

In fact, schools face no changes until they have failed to raise student performance for at least two consecutive years. Even then, they are only required to develop an improvement plan and, more important, to allow parents to transfer their children to other public schools. If the school fails to improve student performance for three consecutive years, it must provide low-income parents stipends to obtain extra tutoring for their kids, often from respected providers like Sylvan Learning Center.

In other words, when students don’t make progress, the law initially demands that schools offer parents more options -- the chance to switch schools or receive extra tutoring. “These are not things that parents will tell you are punitive -- they are benefits,” said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Education Trust, a group that advocates for low-income children.

Relatively few parents are using the transfer option, partly because districts haven’t advertised it well and partly because most families prefer to keep their children close to home.

But a recent survey found that in 46 of the nation’s largest school districts, more than 133,000 students already were receiving supplemental tutoring because of the law. Fewer children would receive those services if Kerry succeeded in allowing more schools to avoid the “needing improvement” label.

Kerry and other critics are on stronger ground in complaining that the law may eventually designate so many schools as failing that states won’t be able to focus on those that need help most.

Under the law, schools that persistently fail to improve student test scores eventually face mandates for corrective action. Those begin after four years with options such as redesigning the curriculum, and can end after six years with a state takeover.

Schools face those requirements if just a single group of students fails to show steady improvement in reading or math. It might help to revise the law so that the most severe restructuring requirements are imposed only on schools with widespread breakdowns, such as multiple groups of students that fail to improve.

In the meantime, Kerry and Bush should focus on making the law work better for parents and children, not just teachers and administrators. Washington could pressure local districts to improve their woeful performance in alerting parents to the new tutoring and transfer options. The federal government could make tutoring, the more popular option, available in faltering schools earlier than school transfer.

And with surveys showing that struggling schools are receiving too little help from the states, Washington should be demanding that local administrators provide more assistance before the law’s toughest consequences kick in.

But retreating from accountability, as Kerry recognized not long ago, will only reduce the pressure on schools to lift all children. That truly would be punitive -- for the predominantly minority and low-income kids the school system has left behind for too long.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times’ Web site at www.latimes.com/brownstein.