VALOR, WITHOUT RANCOR
By JOHN PODHORETZ
February 13, 2004 -- THE world is puzzling these days over the incomprehen sible tale of the young John Kerry -- a war hero who never stops invoking his own heroism and who felt no compunction about defaming hundreds of thousands of his fellow American troops by accusing them of committing horrible war crimes in Vietnam that never took place.
So it is beyond fortunate that just at this moment, the writer Harry Stein has come along to remind us there was (and there is) another way to come home from the horrors of battle -- a way that does not involve trashing your country and your compatriots, a way that involves looking to what is best in America and what is best in its people, in its traditions and in its soul.
Stein's wonderful book is called "The Girl Watchers Club," and there's really not been anything like it before. I guess you could call it "Tuesdays With Morrie" meets "Saving Private Ryan," except I wasn't really a fan of either. "The Girl Watchers Club" is moving, funny, powerful and instructive. As its subtitle promises, it teaches "lessons from the battlefields of life."
It's the true story of a group of men in their 70s and 80s who live in and around Monterey, Calif. -- all of them veterans of World War II, all of them changed forever either by the searing experience of battle or the wondrous experience of youthful involvement in a righteous communal cause.
They have been hanging out together for 50 years, and the book chronicles two years in their late lives as they struggle with astonishing good cheer against aging, ailing, family tragedies and death.
They are all very different -- Democrats and Republicans, Northerners and Southerners and Westerners.
Moe Turner, who is Stein's father-in-law, is a classic American eccentric who lives in Collier-Brothers-like overstuffed squalor. Boyd Huff is a quiet and gentle retired professor of history who makes a cheerful way through life despite having lost a son to a horrendous accident and another to schizophrenia. A modest fellow named Gene Cooper, who was instrumental in aiding in the technological development of television, expresses no bitterness that he received a check in 1950 large enough to buy a house with but not another penny for his labors.
What they all have in common is the war that forged them. They do not romanticize their experience in World War II -- they all gripe about what a pain it was to deal with the bureaucracy. And they have a tendency to downplay and push away the horrors to which they were witness.
Harry Handler may rib his buddies by saying that "every time I hear their [war] stories, they get more brave," but he only says it because it's not true. As for Handler himself, he was a 19-year-old second lieutenant in the Pacific theater who was forced to lead his men through the hellish battle to take the island of Okinawa. "Looking at that map was like reading your death warrant," he tells Stein.
Handler survived it. More than just survived, as Stein writes: "Handler is one of those men who will tell you that the war years were his making; that had he not served where and when he did, he'd likely never have acquired the fundamental seriousness of purpose that has shaped his life ever since."
Seriousness of purpose -- that's the real subject of Stein's book. These are men who learned to lead an ethical life. They were and are blessed with good marriages, and long marriages as well, to women from whom they would not cut and run when the going got tough.
The lives they have led since their war days sound ordinary -- building homes, raising children, going to work, playing golf, going to yard sales, retiring -- but in their ordinariness these men have achieved something very close to grace. They acknowledge that all the changes in American life since their youth have brought about great social progress, though they are all disgusted by the parlous state of the education system.
And yet they still possess what Stein calls "an abiding appreciation for the lost standards of the America in which they grew up. Yes, in many ways, some of incalculable importance, life in this country was far worse then. But in this vital way it was better: people didn't look for excuses and certainly weren't offered any; they expected a lot more of themselves."
John Podhoretz's new book is "Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane" (www.bush-country.com). E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
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Ex-Swedish Minister Won't Be Charged
ASSOCIATED PRESS
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Sweden's former migration minister will not face charges for calling President Bush "that damn old man from Texas," an investigator said Friday.
Jan O. Karlsson's comment during a press lunch in May 2003 was protected by free speech laws, Justice Chancellor Goeran Lambertz told the Swedish TT news agency.
The chancellor's office investigates complaints against government officials.
An unidentified person filed a complaint against Karlsson saying his statement was racist and demeaning to the U.S. government, TT reported.
Two days after the press lunch, Karlsson told The Associated Press he could not recall his exact words, but said he had expressed strong opinions about the U.S. policies on AIDS prevention and population control in developing countries.
Karlsson, who left the government in October, was often criticized in Swedish media for being too outspoken.

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Ex-Halliburton Employees Tell of Overbilling
By Sue Pleming
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two ex-Halliburton employees told Democratic lawmakers that Vice President Dick Cheney's old energy company "routinely overcharged" for work it did for the U.S. military, the congressmen said on Thursday.
The Texas oil services giant, which is being examined by the military for possibly overcharging for services, has consistently denied allegations of overbilling.
The two ex-employees, who contacted U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who has been critical of Halliburton, worked for the Texas firm's procurement office in Kuwait. Waxman's office said the two quit for personal reasons.
Waxman and another Democrat, Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, wrote about the "whistle-blowers" in a letter to the Defense Contract Audit Agency, which is already looking into whether one of the company's subsidiaries overcharged for fuel it took into Iraq and for meals served to U.S. troops in the region.
Examples of wasteful spending given by the ex-employees ranged from leasing ordinary vehicles for $7,500 a month to seeking embroidered towels at a cost of $7.50 each when ordinary ones would have cost about a third of the price.
The DCAA confirmed it had received the letter. "The letter is under review. It would be premature to comment at this time," a spokeswoman said.
Halliburton unit Kellogg Brown and Root has a logistics contract with the U.S. military that has so far received more than $3.7 billion in business, mostly in Iraq. It also has contracts worth nearly $4 billion to rebuild Iraq's oil industry.
ONE IDENTIFIED
One of the employees, a field buyer identified as Henry Bunting, was to address a Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing on Friday about alleged Iraq contracting abuses. Bunting could not be reached for comment.
The other whistle-blower, a procurement supervisor, was not identified by name.
Halliburton said it provides a toll-free hotline where employees can report concerns about business practices and had no record of complaints by Bunting or even anonymous complaints matching his set of facts.
"If he was so concerned about this information, we question why he did not raise the issue by means made available to him in the of the Code of Business Conduct information that he acknowledged receiving," said company spokeswoman Cathy Gist, in an e-mailed statement.
Halliburton is the U.S. military's biggest contractor in Iraq and the Pentagon's seventh biggest contractor overall.
The letter said senior Halliburton officials frequently told the employees high prices charged by vendors were not a problem.
"One whistle-blower said that a Halliburton motto was: 'Don't worry about price. It's cost plus," said the letter, referring to the practice of charging for a service and then adding a percentage fee as profit.
Halliburton has come under scrutiny by a number of U.S. government departments during the 2004 election year, leading the company to accuse Democrats of political mudslinging because of the company's former ties to Cheney.
Authorities are looking into a range of issues, from allegedly paying kickbacks in Nigeria to whether the company broke U.S. laws by dealing with Iran via a foreign subsidiary.
The company denies wrongdoing, except in the case of one or two former employees who it said may have paid $6.3 million in kickbacks to a Kuwaiti subcontractor.
Copyright ? Reuters 2004. All rights reserved.

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Spanish Police Seize 10 Tons of Cocaine
ASSOCIATED PRESS
MADRID, Spain (AP) - Police seized about 10 tons of cocaine on a fishing boat off the Cape Verde Islands and arrested 13 people, authorities said Friday.
Spanish Civil Guards boarded the Belize-flagged boat about 1,000 miles from the island chain off the coast of West Africa, police said.
The cocaine was found wrapped in 215 parcels, each weighing about 55 pounds.
The crew of the "Lugo," all Colombians, were arrested. Six other six people - five Spanish men and a Dominican woman - also were arrested in connection with the seizure in Spain's northwestern region of Galicia, according to the police statement.

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Chinese Workers Detained After Clashes
By ELAINE KURTENBACH Associated Press Writer
SHANGHAI, China (AP) - Workers at a textile factory in central China were hospitalized and others detained following clashes with police over the planned sale of a state-owned factory to a Hong Kong investor, local officials said Friday.
The protests began Feb. 8 when as many as 2,000 workers and retirees from the Tieshu Textile Factory in Suizhou, a city in Hubei province, blocked a rail line, according to the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin.
It said a "violent confrontation" broke out when police attempted to disperse the crowd and prevent more workers from joining the protest.
At least one worker and two police were hospitalized with head injuries and as many as 20 workers were detained, the group said.
Local officials put the number of protesters at 1,000.
"The workers aren't satisfied with the compensation plan, and there are conflicts over the amount of money raised and the shares given to workers and management," said a senior official in the Suizhou city government, who said his surname was Yu.
"These can still be negotiated, and the government will try its best to make our people better off," Yu said.
Officials would not name the Hong Kong investor.
China has seen rising numbers of labor protests in recent years, with workers and retirees protesting unpaid wages, pensions and other benefits. In many cases, the workers charge that factory managers are selling off state assets for personal profit, denying them fair compensation.
Authorities have responded to such protests by satisfying some demands but also arresting and jailing organizers.
Yu denied that the plan to sell the company's assets amounted to corruption. He said provincial anti-graft officials had investigated and found no signs of malfeasance.
Like many other state-run factories struggling to stay afloat, the textile factory had been suspending production and restructuring over many months.
2004-02-13 18:37:14 GMT

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>> NYC WATCH...

THE UNION VS. THE KIDS
Fri Feb 13, 3:02 AM ET Add Op/Ed - New York Post
Randi Weingarten and the union she heads have essentially declared war on Mayor Bloomberg.
A United Federation of Teachers advertisement charges that the mayor is going in the "wrong direction" in current contract talks.
"The mayor and chancellor want to take away teachers' ability to do what they do best -- teach," says the ad.
Translation: Bloomberg wants change -- but we think things are just fine.
But things aren't just fine.
Far from it.
The mayor, who won nominal control over the schools two years ago, now seeks to win functional control -- which means wresting it from the UFT.
Ostensibly, there are a lot of seemingly mundane and bread-and-butter topics at issue: Bloomberg seeks a reduction in the number of unused sick days that can be cashed in by retirees; more work days; an exchange of productivity gains for salary hikes; bonuses for teachers working in low-performing schools, and the elimination of sabbaticals.
Weingarten called the offer a "sham."
Which it most certainly is not.
It is about meaningful control.
While other mayors have demanded similar concessions, this is the first mayor who has the statutory authority to integrate them into a coherent management structure.
The point is to give school managers operational command of the school workforce -- a radical notion in New York, to be sure, but necessary if the public schools are ever again to function properly.
Count on one thing, though: When Weingarten yelps, it's because her institutional ox stands to be gored. Everybody believes in tough school standards -- until they start to bite.
So never mind the ads: They are not about the kids.
At the same time, Bloomberg himself needs to be faithful to the reforms he has already made.
He promised "zero tolerance" on school violence.
But when a student who brought a 12-inch knife into his high school earlier this week is welcomed back to class the very next day, as happened this week -- well, what does that say about the new policy?
We'd rather that kids who bring weapons to school be bounced out -- all the way to Rikers Island, if necessary.
As it is the weapons-toters are supposed to be suspended and placed in one of the city's euphemistically named "second-opportunity" schools.
But this knife-wielding thug wasn't.
Why not?
Bloomberg needs to send a message -- that he's serious enough about school safety to fire whoever was responsible for this specific security breakdown.
No teacher can fairly be expected to teach in a climate of fear.
Similarly, no student can be expected to learn in such an environment either.
The upcoming contract negotiations are going to be very tough -- but they have the possibility of being some of the most significant in the city's history.
It's not simply about bargaining over union salary and benefits.
It's about whether New York's children are going to get a real opportunity to learn in the days ahead.
Both Mayor Bloomberg and Randi Weingarten understand what's at stake.
Now they need to rise to the challenge.

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>> "..."

On Unions and Education

by Deborah Meier
Despite popular impressions and dinner-table gossip, the problems of our schools, and above all of "school reform," are not the result of unions. I speak in part from personal experience over the past thirty-five years in New York City and Boston. The last big project I was involved with in New York, which required real courage on the part of all the major institutional powers, came to a screeching halt because everyone backed down except the teacher's union. We had asked for a "free zone"-constituting no more than 5 percent of New York's student population as an experiment in non-regulation (or at least vastly decreased regulation). The state, the city, and the Board of Education ended up backing away, but at no point did the United Federation of Teachers. Perhaps they would have if and when we really began to operate (except on matters of wages and working conditions) outside of the union contract. They weren't always enthusiastic supporters; they were skeptical from first to last and might have become more so if the idea had caught on. But that's speculation; in fact they never flinched. They saw the project, they said, as an experiment in providing a form of schooling that would produce better results for kids while also empowering classroom teachers.

My experience over the past five years in Boston is similar. The Pilot Schools project-involving at the start no more than 5 percent of Boston's students-was based on an agreement between the Boston Teachers Union and the Boston Public Schools to suspend all the regular contractual agreements as they applied to a dozen or so schools, provide a flexible per capita budget to each school, and allow freedom from other city-mandated requirements with regard to curriculum, scheduling, and staffing. Both the BTU and BPS soon lost their initial enthusiasm for the project-which they probably first saw as an answer to charter schools. But the BTU never went back on the original agreement. Small-scale quarrels between the pilots and the BPS, however, were and are constant as we negotiate each provision anew every year: Which budget item do we have control over and which do they? What voice do we have over state-provided "coaches"? Given the constraints of busing, what freedom do we actually have over scheduling? And so on. Because most of the daily issues relate to freedom from city, not union, rules it is hardly surprising that our frustration is usually focused on the "system." The major worry we hear from the union is whether these less constrained schools actually offer more power to classroom teachers rather than school principals. Both parties also worry that, under the label of autonomy, the Pilot Schools are choosier about which students they accept. Do they, for example, accept fewer troubled students? And both worry about what the consequences would be if the idea really spread-in terms of the impact on system-wide seniority, accountability, and so on.

These are legitimate issues. In a climate of high-stakes testing and increasing competition, many good reforms can turn into monsters. I'm disinclined of late even to call myself a school reformer. Too often it feels like deforming.

When I visited Houston, Texas, recently, I was alarmed at how many teachers came up to me to say that they couldn't speak out as I was doing and hold their jobs in Houston. There was a rule against speaking or writing against district policies. Georgia teachers, meeting with me at a summer institute in Massachusetts, literally whispered about their problems with testing. "Why are you whispering," I asked? "Because we could lose our jobs."
What do these two states have in common? Weak unions with no legal bargaining rights. So there is an eerie internal silence about issues of importance. Of course, the silence is not confined to Georgia and Texas. Even in a union stronghold like New York, much is not discussed that ought to be.

For example, there is no doubt that (some) small and more autonomous schools in New York have become choosier in whom they take, in a setting in which "ability" (and social class and race) tracking has returned with a vengeance. Small schools of choice have often become a kind of parallel "private school-like" network, with the same kind of rank order between the most elite and the least. This was true long before "choice" existed, as neighborhood schools that reflected social class and ethnic differences performed the same function as ability tracking. Similar tendencies could soon affect Boston's citywide schools of choice movement (which originally was instituted as a court-approved response to racial segregation)-especially now that all racial and ethnic categories have been eliminated in the current anti-affirmative action climate.

And the focus on "results"-setting standards as the basis of graduation rather than piling up credits or seat time, presented so powerfully by Ted Sizer in Horace's Compromise and pioneered by schools such as the Central Park East Secondary School that I helped found in 1985-has taken an odd turn. It has too often been used to increase the power of centralized authorities, of both superintendents and principals, and even more ominously of state politicians, with "standards" turning into standardized tests. And then the tests are enforced by state and federal mandates with detailed rewards and punishments for those dotting and not dotting their "i"s appropriately. Indeed, it is often assumed that reform means allowing those at the top of the hierarchy to act decisively-that is, outside of formally bargained rules-in order to get better results. Or it means abandoning the public system entirely for that alternate system of decision making: the free-well, sort of free-market.

But the evidence is pretty clear that although unions are a force to be reckoned with, and by nature conservative, especially in defense of basic teacher protections, they have not been a powerful force in preventing school reforms sought by mayors, governors, and local business coalitions-even those that undermine traditional teacher rights. Yes, of course, opposition or foot-dragging by the American Federation of Teachers or National Education Association makes such reforms harder to enact in states where unions are strong. But it's unlikely that serious reforms can be effective if they are enacted from the top down, without the enthusiastic support of those who must implement them. This is hardly an idea requiring complicated sociological theories. When I was a member of my local school board twenty years ago, we received a petition from 99 percent of the staff of a local junior high expressing their lack of confidence in the principal. I told my colleagues on the board that we really had only two choices if our focus was on teaching and learning: we had to get rid of most of the staff or remove the principal. The case is similar when top-down reforms are resisted by teachers: you can get rid of the teachers or learn to negotiate the reforms.

Yes, most unions-including teachers' unions with their highly educated membership-have a tendency to take on some of the qualities of the management they are counterpoised to. They get caught in their own power plays; they over-react, become rigid, and more. This is especially true when the local union serves a large district in which personal ties are difficult to maintain. And then teachers begin to see their union much as they see the rest of the system-impersonal, capricious, and inflexible, another hurdle to get around. They appreciate the union when they are dealing with a particularly vexatious principal or even with vexatious colleagues; they value it when it comes time to negotiate wages and benefits and to fight back against changes made without due process. But on a day-to-day basis, the union is just one more bureaucracy that has little to do with their working lives. A call to the union office is often just as frustrating as a call "downtown."

In schools where collegiality is high, and principal and teachers work easily together, many teachers feel even more estranged from their union. Teachers in small, successful communal schools often don't make their voices heard within the union; the voices of those who need the protection of rules and regulations are loudest and most powerful-as they should be! But this natural tendency sways the union into a more hostile or skeptical stance toward innovative schools where teachers appear not to need its protection-or where the protection they need may be from city hall, state legislators, the federal government, or from the union itself.

These are issues that won't easily be solved; and reformers-especially those who believe real reform must bring working teachers into greater positions of power over their schools-cannot ignore them. The imposition of greater authoritarian and bureaucratic controls over teachers, in the name of even the best curriculum and pedagogy, won't begin to tackle the decisive intellectual failings of our schools. In fact, it will exacerbate them on every front. It will make teaching less and less attractive to those considering a career-above all where they are most needed, in urban and rural schools serving low-income children, but also in many other places where creative work is taking place that could excite a new generation of teachers. The new authoritarianism is defended in the name of the "underprivileged," in the name of "ordinary" kids, on the theory that truly creative, high quality teaching cannot be brought to scale-so that the vast majority of the least well-off American kids cannot hope for that. At best they must thrive on highly bureaucratized, centralized, scripted mediocrity.

This repeats an old, old story. Democracy is only for the affluent. Indeed, it's partially true, and unions need to acknowledge the partial truth. But it's not the whole truth. You cannot take ordinary underpaid teachers and ordinary underfunded schools and turn them around in the face of only grudging compliance from the staff. Maybe you can't do it even with generous funding. Teachers will resist reforms and will only "comply" under duress, unless they own the reforms and believe in them. Of course, they resist; it is an honorable response to arbitrary power. If teachers didn't resist each new fad, they'd be lobotomized.

The intellectual need of the young, to become "critical thinkers," requires schools that dare tackle stuff worth being critical about; it requires teachers who have the authority and respect to model the critical stance in the company of their peers and to present truly controversial stuff to the young. But at present only the rich can afford such schools-largely in the private sector or in the more affluent suburbs.

Good thinking cannot be passed on to the young by uncritical and compliant teachers. But, some would argue, such qualities are a luxury for the poor-and open to abuse. Let the regular schools first prove themselves on the ABCs and then, someday, they too can get to "critical thinking." There's a certain logic to this, but it will not and cannot lead to high standards (although one can call any score on any test "high standard" or "proficient" if one has the power to do so).

The kind of workplace collaboration required by the graduates of our schools cannot be taught in schools focused only on rote learning or test prep or remediation. It cannot be learned where young people do not see adults serving as models of higher order thinking, but instead only experience adults struggling to follow the script or high-powered test preppers who zero in on what's really important: test scores, test scores, and test scores. We cannot tell kids that what counts is the quality of their language, their ability to think on their feet, to be reliable and responsible, to care about their community, to stand up and be counted, and to work well with others, if none of these in fact "count." In this setting, it is unlikely that children will learn what it takes-or even what it means-to be an effective member of a thoughtful adult society. And surely such schools cannot teach what collaboration, solidarity, and community mean when adults are mostly busy complying.

So, both union and management need to figure out how reform might be enacted with the collaboration of teachers, in a way that provides them with appropriate power over major and minor decisions. It may take longer to see such reforms take hold, but going faster in the wrong direction is no advantage at all! Here is what unions are best at doing-giving those closest to the action a voice, giving them respect and dignity. This is at the heart not only of teacher unions but of all unions everywhere.

Even industrial unions have found increased work-site voice important to the material success of auto plants (for example, the Saturn and Toyota plants), but the argument for its centrality when it comes to schools is far more powerful. It may not matter to the automobile whether it was produced by willing or unwilling workers (although the evidence suggests its users will notice the difference). But students are not automobiles, and the active intelligence of their teachers is central to the development of their own intelligence.

Oddly enough, quality control may matter more to auto-makers than to school-makers these days. Imagine if we were told that we can't afford to worry about whether the cars that come off the assembly line "work"-as we are told about the reforms we know are needed to make schools work. Small schools have proven effective, but they are too expensive, we're told. Not true if one counts the cost per graduate: in fact, they are cheaper if we count that way, at least in our urban communities.

Teachers can help Americans understand what works and doesn't work in our schools. Opinion polls confirm that they are still the most trusted group of public authorities in the country-ranking above mayors, governors, corporate CEOs, doctors, lawyers-and even principals! But when they join together to express their opinions, suddenly they turn into an "interest group" (unlike the Business Roundtable?). Yes, there have been occasions (rare, in fact) when teacher unions acted in ways that did not earn, or deserve, public trust-but compared to what and whom? To the corporate community?

When all is said and done, there's another reason why we need to worry about the public's perception of unions (and our own too). Not only are strong teacher unions critical to the success of teaching and learning, they are critical to the survival of the conditions needed to support teaching and learning. They are critical to the success of the mission of public schools in a democracy: to produce citizens who can effectively rule.

Although there are many folks out there who have a stake in good public schools, the only organized and experienced allies, committed over time and with the necessary expertise and resources, are the teachers' unions. Parents come and go, and given the incredibly busy lives of the women who once led parents' organizations (especially in those communities where the need is greatest), sustaining their political power is almost impossible. They have been effectively weakened-even more than teachers-and are rarely represented on state or national task forces, think tanks, or school boards.

Politically, the parents of the children who are least well served by our schools are precisely the ones who have the least political leverage. They are less likely to be citizens, let alone voters; they are rarely people with the time or skill to make themselves heard. The foundations that try to represent their views are also constrained when it comes to political lobbying, and those on the liberal end are less likely these days to be ideological allies of unions and teachers. So the weakening of union power quickly translates, locally and nationally, into less support for the least well-served students, above all, the urban or rural poor. There may be loud cries for higher test scores, but there will be little concern about the fairness of our school system so long as those most directly affected by its unfairness are politically impotent. It is easier to pass off half-truths to a politically active public that has no direct exposure to how the other half lives-that doesn't, in fact, include the other half!

But it is also important to say that the larger inequities that affect poor children-that depress their test scores and always have-are not directly related to schools. The achievement gap in schools is as nothing compared to the resources gap out of school.

And in correcting such inequities, strong unions-not just teacher unions-are the primary and steady vehicle; they are the only substantial counterpoint to the power of organized greed. In a society in which the income differential is steadily widening, the clamor about decreasing the academic gaps-even if the focus were not solely on standardized test scores-won't be serious until there is an organized and "interested" power bloc whose members stand to gain, in the here and now, from greater equity.

The balance of power in contemporary America is way off, and threatens to get worse, not better. Redressing this imbalance-with the social power of numbers versus resources-has been one of the central functions of trade unions since their inception. They have been the dependable ally of the least advantaged for a hundred years when it comes to issues of wages, safety, health care, retirement, subsidized housing, public transportation, and on and on. Even on issues of racial equality, the unions, although often mirroring the racism of the larger society, have been allies in political fights to expand civil rights for at least half a century. And on issues more removed from everyday working life-issues of civil liberties, prison reform, abortion rights-unions have historically been the allies of reformers. In the current climate, the tenuous and fragile balance that has existed since the New Deal has been decisively shifted, if not altogether shattered. Until it is restored, it isn't just good schooling, but the good life for vast numbers of our fellow citizens that is in jeopardy.

Thus, there are still many reasons why teachers and parents, and their friends and relatives, need to be the allies of their local teacher unions, even on those days when the unions make foolish mistakes, act with the same short-range self-interest as their opponents, and so on. The kind of support that is needed is not uncritical; it is not a matter of falling into line behind union leaders. But first and foremost, it means putting to rest the inaccurate idea that unions are to blame for the difficulties of school reform. Reforms are not always good, and change is not always in the interest of better learning. Healthy resistance is sometimes what we most need, side by side with thoughtful proposals for change-and this is what we will sorely miss if teachers' unions are defeated by the relentless hostility of their many opponents.

Deborah Meier founded the Central Park East schools in New York City and the Mission Hill School in Boston. She is author of The Power of Their Ideas, Will Standards Save Public Education?, and In Schools We Trust.


? 2004 Foundation for Study of Independent Ideas, Inc

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NBER Reporter: Research Summary Winter 2004

The Economics of Education

Steven D. Levitt(1)


In recent years, I have written a number of papers related to the economics of education. This research agenda has three distinct strands. One set of papers analyzes the impact of school choice on student outcomes. A second line of research investigates teacher and administrator cheating on standardized tests, and explores how such behavior responds to the introduction of high-stakes testing. Third, I have examined Black-White test score differentials and the role that the educational system may play in contributing to those differences. I discuss these three sets of papers in turn.

The Impact of Public School Choice on Student Outcomes

In recent years, school choice has become an increasingly prominent feature of primary and secondary school education. With the passage of new federal legislation (No Child Left Behind), there is little doubt that the trend will continue. School choice comes in a variety of flavors. Vouchers and charter schools are two types of school choice which have received a great deal of both academic and media attention. A third type of school choice, open enrollment, is actually far more prevalent than either vouchers or charter schools. Under open enrollment, students within a public school district are able to attend schools other than their neighborhood school, including specially designated magnet schools. As of 1996, open enrollment was available in more than one in every seven school districts nationally, and in more than a third of large districts. Moreover, No Child Left Behind mandates that students in underperforming schools be provided the option to attend other schools in the district.

Along with co-authors Julie B. Cullen and Brian Jacob, I have written two papers that analyze the impact of open enrollment policies on student outcomes in the Chicago Public Schools (ChiPS). ChiPS represents an excellent laboratory for studying the impact of open enrollment. Chicago has been among the most aggressive cities in implementing this form of school choice, with more than half of the students in the system presently opting out of their neighborhood schools. Thus it may provide a window into what the future holds for other districts that are moving in the same direction. The Chicago data are also exceptionally rich, including not only detailed administrative records on attainment and test scores, but also attitudinal surveys administered periodically to students.

The first of these papers(2) starts with the observation that students who opt out of their local school to take advantage of open enrollment are 7.6 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than peers who are observationally equivalent in eighth grade -- off of a baseline graduation rate of 50 percent. This increment to graduation is the same order of magnitude as the gap between students at Catholic and non-Catholic schools in previous studies.

There are several competing explanations for why students who opt out of their assigned school outperform those who stay behind. Higher graduation rates among those who opt out may be the result of these students attending better schools or finding a school that better matches their preferences. In either of these cases, the increased graduation rates represent the true benefits of open enrollment. There are, however, scenarios in which the students who take advantage of school choice outperform students who do not, but the differences in outcomes do not actually reflect real benefits of open enrollment. Higher graduation rates among those who opt out may be spurious if those who opt out are better on unobserved dimensions (for example, student motivation, parental involvement). In other words, the students who opt out may have systematically done better than other students, even if they had not left their assigned schools. Also, it is possible that the graduation gap is attributable not to the students who opt out doing better, but rather to the students who remain behind doing worse, since they have less able and motivated peers.

Our results suggest that, with the exception of career academies (that is, vocational schools that focus on practical skills), the benefits of school choice to students who opt out are illusory. There are three primary pieces of evidence supporting this claim. First, in a survey administered in eighth grade that asks students a wide range of questions about their expectations for the future, past educational record, and parental involvement, the responses are strongly correlated with both the likelihood of graduation and with the decision to opt out. This suggests that students who opt out would be expected to do better, even if they had to remain in their local school. The second piece of evidence is that students who live in areas with many nearby schools on average should derive the greatest benefit from the availability of school choice, because distance to nearby schools is a strong predictor of the likelihood that a student will opt out of the assigned school. Empirically, we find that easy access to a career academy is associated with substantial increases in graduation likelihood, but the same is not true for other types of schools, including high-achieving schools. Finally, when we compare student outcomes within a given school (in most schools in ChiPS some students are assigned and some opt in), we find that those opting in do the same as those assigned at career academies, but do much better at other schools. Since all students at a school experience similar peers and teacher quality, the fact that those opting in far outperform those assigned to the school reinforces the idea that those who opt in are systematically better than observationally similar students who make other schooling choices and would outperform them regardless, except at career academies.

Our second paper on this topic(3) exploits the fact that school choice causes desirable schools in ChiPS to be oversubscribed, and many of these schools use randomized lotteries to determine which students gain admission. We analyze data from 194 separate lotteries held to gain access to high school. One drawback of the data is that we only observe student outcomes if they enroll in ChiPS. To the extent that there is selective attrition, the inferences drawn from a simple comparison of outcomes of lottery winners and losers will be misleading. Relative to past studies (for example, the Milwaukee voucher experiment), however, attrition rates are low, with over 90 percent of the students remaining in ChiPS.

Empirically, we find that those students who win the lotteries attend what appear to be substantially better high schools -- for example, schools with higher achievement levels and graduation rates and lower levels of poverty. Nonetheless, consistent with our first paper discussed earlier, we find little evidence that attending these sought-after programs provides any benefit on a wide variety of traditional achievement measures, including standardized test scores, attendance rates, course-taking patterns, credit accumulation, or grades. We do, however, find evidence that attendance at such schools may improve non-traditional outcome measures, such as self-reported enjoyment of school, availability of computers, expectations for college attendance, and arrest rates. This suggests that schools may be influencing children in a variety of ways not generally captured by test scores. To the extent that these non-traditional measures help to predict life outcomes such as college attendance, labor market attachment, wages, and criminal involvement, an exclusive focus on test scores will be misleading.

An important caveat to interpreting the results of both of these papers is that we are only able to evaluate how access to a particular school affects educational outcomes for a student, holding constant the existence of a school choice program. We cannot estimate the overall impact of introducing a system of school choice, which might induce changes in residential location choice or in overall school quality due to increased competition.

Teacher Cheating

High-stakes testing, like school choice, has become an increasingly prominent feature of the educational landscape. Every state in the country, except Iowa, currently administers state-wide assessment tests to students in elementary and secondary school. Federal legislation requires states to test students annually in third through eighth grade and to judge the performance of schools based on student achievement scores.

The debate over high-stakes testing traditionally has pitted proponents arguing that such tests increase incentives for learning and hold schools accountable for their students' performance against opponents who argue that the emphasis on testing will lead teachers to substitute away from teaching other skills or topics not directly tested on the exam. Along with Brian Jacob, I have written two papers that explore a very different concern regarding high-stakes testing -- cheating on the part of teachers and administrators. As incentives for high test scores increase, unscrupulous teachers may be more likely to engage in a range of illicit activities, such as changing student responses on answer sheets, or filling in the blanks when a student fails to complete a section. Our work in this area represents the first systematic attempt to identify empirically the overall prevalence of teacher cheating and to analyze the factors that predict cheating.

To address these questions, we once again turn to data from the Chicago Public Schools, for which we have the question-by-question answers given by every student in grades 3-7 taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) over an eight year period. In the first paper,(4) we develop and test an algorithm for detecting cheating. Our approach uses two types of cheating indicators: unexpected test score fluctuations and unusual patterns of answers for students within a classroom. Teacher cheating increases the likelihood that students in a classroom will experience large, unexpected increases in test scores one year, followed by very small test score gains (or even declines) the following year. Teacher cheating, especially if done in an unsophisticated manner, is also likely to leave tell-tale signs in the form of blocks of identical answers, unusual patterns of correlations across student answers within the classroom, or unusual response patterns within a student's exam (for example, a student who answers a number of very difficult questions correctly while missing many simple questions).

Empirically, we find evidence of cheating in approximately 4 to 5 percent of the classes in our sample. For two reasons, this estimate is likely to be a lower bound on the true incidence of cheating. First, we focus only on the most egregious type of cheating, where teachers systematically alter student test forms. There are other more subtle ways in which teachers can cheat, such as providing extra time to students, that our algorithm is unlikely to detect. Second, even when test forms are altered, our approach is only partially successful in detecting illicit behavior. We then demonstrate that the prevalence of cheating responds to relatively minor changes in teacher incentives. The importance of standardized tests in the ChiPS increased substantially with a change in leadership in 1996. Schools that scored low on reading tests were placed on probation and faced the threat of reconstitution. Following the introduction of this policy, the prevalence of cheating rose sharply in classrooms with large numbers of low-achieving students. In contrast, schools with average or higher-achieving students, which were at low risk for probation, showed no increase in cheating.

Our second paper on this topic(5) reports on the results of an unusual policy implementation of our cheating detection tools. We were invited by ChiPS to design and implement auditing and retesting procedures implementing our methods. Using that cheating detection algorithm, we selected roughly 120 classrooms to be retested on the Spring 2002 ITBS. The classrooms retested include not only cases suspected of cheating, but also classrooms that had achieved large gains but were not suspected of cheating, as well as a randomly selected control group. As a consequence, the implementation also allowed a prospective test of the validity of the tools we developed in our first paper on the subject.

The results of the retesting provided strong support for the effectiveness of the cheating detection algorithm. Classrooms suspected of cheating experienced large declines in test scores (on average about one grade equivalent, although in some cases the fall in mean classroom test scores was over three grade equivalents) when retested under controlled conditions. In contrast, classrooms not suspected of cheating a priori maintained virtually all of their gains on the retest. As a consequence of these audits and subsequent investigations, disciplinary action was brought against a substantial number of teachers, test administrators, and principals.

Black-White Test Score Gaps Early in Life and the Contribution of Schools

The Black-White test score gap is a robust empirical regularity. A simple comparison of mean test scores typically finds Black students scoring roughly one standard deviation below White students on standardized tests. Even after controlling for a wide range of covariates including family structure, socioeconomic status, measures of school quality, and neighborhood characteristics, a substantial racial gap in test scores persists.

In a paper joint with Roland Fryer,(6) I revisit this topic with a newly collected data set, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). The survey covers a sample of more than 20,000 children entering kindergarten in the fall of 1998. The original sample of students has subsequently been re-interviewed in the spring of kindergarten and first grade.

The results we obtain using these new data are informative and in some cases quite surprising. As in previous datasets, we observe substantial racial differences in test scores in the raw data: Black kindergartners score on average .64 standard deviations worse than Whites. In stark contrast to earlier studies (including those looking at kindergartners), however, after controlling for a small number of other observable characteristics (children's age, child's birth weight, a socio-economic status measure, WIC participation, mother's age at first birth, and number of children's books in the home), we essentially eliminate the Black-White test score gap in math and reading for students entering kindergarten. While there are numerous possible explanations for why our results differ so sharply from earlier research, we conclude that real gains by recent cohorts of Blacks are likely to be an important part of the explanation.

Despite the fact that we see no difference in initial test scores for observationally equivalent Black and White children when they enter kindergarten, their paths diverge once they are in school. Between the beginning of kindergarten and the end of first grade, Black students lose .20 standard deviations (approximately .10 standard deviation each year) relative to White students with similar characteristics. The leading explanation for the worse trajectory of Black students in our sample is that they attend lower quality schools. When we compare the change in test scores over time for Blacks and Whites attending the same school, Black students lose only a third as much ground as they do relative to Whites in the overall sample. This result suggests that differences in quality across schools attended by Whites and Blacks is likely to be an important part of the story. Interestingly, along "traditional" dimensions of school quality (class size, teacher education, computer-to-student ratio, and so on), Blacks and Whites attend schools that are similar. On a wide range of "non-standard" school inputs (for example, gang problems in school, percent of students on free lunch, amount of loitering in front of school by non-students, amount of litter around the school, whether or not students need hall passes, and PTA funding), Blacks do appear to be attending much worse schools. Other explanations for the divergence in Black-White test scores, such as a greater "summer setback" for Blacks when school is not in session, or discrimination by teachers against Blacks, find no support in our data.

1. Levitt is a Research Associate in the NBER's Programs on Public Economics, Law and Economics, Children, and Education. He is also a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.

2. J. B. Cullen, B. Jacob, and S. D. Levitt, "The Impact of School Choice on Student Outcomes: An Analysis of the Chicago Public Schools," NBER Working Paper No. 7888, September 2000, forthcoming in Journal of Public Economics.

3. J. B. Cullen, B. Jacob, and S. D. Levitt, "The Effect of School Choice on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries," forthcoming as an NBER Working Paper.

4. B. Jacob and S. D. Levitt, "Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating," NBER Working Paper No. 9413, January 2003, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117 (August 2003), pp. 843-77.

5. B. Jacob and S. D. Levitt, "Catching Cheating Teachers: The Results of an Unusual Experiment in Implementing Theory," NBER Working Paper No. 9414, January 2003, and Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, 2003.

6. R. Fryer and S. D. Levitt, "Understanding the Black-White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School," NBER Working Paper No. 8975, June 2002, forthcoming in Review of Economics and Statistics.
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