U.S. Schools May Suffer From Too Many Reforms, Too Quickly

Is it getting better? Or do you feel the same?

Would it make it easier on you, now you got someone to blame?

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With apologies to the band U2 (for borrowing from their classic song “One”), those are the right questions to be asking about American education as the most sustained school reform effort since the Progressive era reaches its 20th anniversary.

The modern era of school reform traces to April 26, 1983, when Terrell Bell, President Reagan’s secretary of Education, released “A Nation at Risk,” an exhaustive study of the state of U.S. education from a blue-ribbon commission that included university presidents, a Nobel Prize winner and educators.

Despite the big names, the report was something of a stepchild in the Reagan administration. Bell wanted Reagan to authorize the study as a presidential commission; Reagan refused, so Bell had to appoint the commission himself. One of his goals was survival: convincing Reagan to renounce his 1980 campaign pledge to eliminate the Department of Education, which conservatives loathed.

Bell succeeded in that and much more. Diane Ravitch, a distinguished education historian, writes in a new book published by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution that the study became “the most important education reform document of the 20th century.” It mobilized governors, business leaders and local officials with its stark portrait of the failures in elementary and secondary education -- what the report memorably called “a rising tide of mediocrity.”

Even with intermittent hyperbole, the urgency of the report was refreshing and its critique indisputable. Too many students were graduating from too many schools with too few skills.

“Unlike most other such documents, which sank without a trace, A Nation at Risk ... [shaped] the terms of debate about schooling for a generation,” concluded Ravitch in the Hoover book, “Our Schools and Our Future: Are We Still at Risk?”

“A Nation at Risk” inspired not one but three distinct waves of reform, as education professor Susan H. Fuhrman notes in another new book on the report’s anniversary from Harvard University called “A Nation Reformed?”

First came the “excellence” movement, which focused on raising standards for students and teachers through such means as increasing course requirements for graduation and stiffening teacher certification laws.

When student performance remained disappointing, Fuhrman writes, states followed with a second wave of “restructuring” reforms aimed at devolving more authority from central bureaucracies to individual schools.

Disillusionment with the results of those changes in turn led to the “standards” movement that tried to fuse the first two waves. Like the initial excellence reforms, the standards movement established high expectations for students, which would be measured through standardized tests; but like the restructuring movement, it aimed to give schools flexibility in trying to meet those goals. In different ways that approach inspired the education reforms that President Clinton pursued and the plan President Bush pushed through Congress to mandate increased state testing in reading and math.

So after 20 years of reform, the U2 questions loom. Is it getting better? Or do we feel the same?

On this, the Harvard and Hoover reports differ only slightly. Looking at scores on state, national and international tests, at least some members of the Harvard team see slight improvements in the last two decades. The team from Hoover, a conservative think tank, sees only clouds: “No matter what instrument is used ... America’s schools are stagnating, showing little improvement since A Nation at Risk was written.”

Subtle differences also divide the two teams on the third U2 question: Who do we blame for this continuing disappointment? The Hoover authors have an unequivocal answer: teachers’ unions, which several of them accuse of blocking any reforms with teeth.

The Harvard team doesn’t have a single villain, but in the book’s most impassioned essay, educational consultant Jeff Howard also blames teachers -- in his eyes, not for impeding reform, but for lacking faith in the capacity of poor and low-income children to learn.

It’s impossible to dismiss either argument. Yet both appear too simplistic. Teachers’ unions often do resist changes in schools, especially those most favored by conservatives: vouchers to help pay private-school tuition and the use of private companies to run failing public schools. But those initiatives haven’t produced consistent gains in the places they’ve been carried out over teacher opposition.

And while low expectations are unquestionably a problem in inner-city schools, it’s naive to think high expectations alone can overcome problems of crime, poverty, chaotic families, inadequate school funding and aging facilities. Even faith can’t fashion bricks without straw.

After 20 years of reform, the simple answer is there is no simple answer to the problems of America’s schools. If anything, the search for a silver bullet -- a single unifying explanation for why students continue to struggle -- has become part of the problem. America’s schools may now suffer from too much reform, too many abrupt changes in direction that confuse students, teachers and parents.

In this era of permanent reform, a mismatch has developed between the time it takes to judge the effectiveness of any idea -- from vouchers to reduced class sizes -- and the limited time officials have to show results. Cities run through school superintendents the way George Steinbrenner used to turn over managers at the New York Yankees; the result is a constant reshuffling of priorities, plans and strategies.

Schools always need more: more accountability, more preschool programs, more teachers with top qualifications. But it may be that what they now need, above all, is less: less turnover at the top, less ideological polarization and less thrashing about in search of the next great solution. Amid all the reform ideas swirling 20 years after “A Nation at Risk,” maybe the most valuable would be to give the reforms already underway more time before changing course again.

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