One of the more worrisome trends in K–12 education is the achievement gap between black and white students in America, which has persisted for decades despite massive injections of money and resources. Federal per-pupil spending rose by an inflation-adjusted 375 percent between 1970 and 2010. School spending also grew steadily and dramatically at the state and local level, tripling between 1970 and 2005. Over the decades the government has prioritized poor children through programs such as Title I, which was created in 1965. “These federal streams accomplished precisely what was intended: helping equalize the funding of poor and affluent districts,” explained education writer Andy Smarick. “As of the 2004–5 school year, America’s highest-poverty districts had per student revenues virtually equivalent to the nation’s lowest-poverty districts.”1
Notwithstanding this increase in overall education spending—and dogged efforts to ensure that inner-city schools aren’t financially neglected—test scores in math, science, and reading have remained essentially flat for forty years. Moreover, significant racial disparities in outcomes continue. The learning gap between blacks and whites, as measured by national-average test scores, narrowed somewhat through most of the 1980s, but began to widen toward the end of that decade, and ultimately returned to where it had been in the late 1970s. In 2004, black 9-year-olds trailed their white peers in reading by roughly the same amount that they had twenty-five years earlier.2 Black 17-year-olds scored at the same level in reading and math as white 13-year-olds. And white 13-year-olds outperformed black 17-year-olds in science. In five out of seven categories—math, science, history, physics, and geography—a majority of blacks scored at the lowest level.3
On average, black fourth and eighth graders perform two full grade levels behind their white peers.4 Large urban school districts where a majority of children are black or Hispanic produce even worse results. A U.S. Department of Education report released in 2012 showed that 79 percent of eighth graders in Chicago public schools, which are 41 percent black and 44 percent Hispanic, could not read at grade level, and 80 percent could not perform grade-level math. Incredibly, those students were still better off than their peers in Detroit, where 7 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading and only 4 percent were proficient in math.5 Detroit public schools, which are 95 percent black, “had the lowest scores ever recorded in the 21-year history of the national math proficiency test” in 2009, reported the New York Times.6
The crisis is most pronounced among young black males, and even transcends socioeconomic status, asserted David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “On every measure of educational attainment, they [black boys] fare the worst; despite waves of reform, their situation has not changed appreciably in 30 years,” he wrote.
The gap between their performance and that of their peers is perceptible from the first day of kindergarten, and only widens thereafter. In the 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress—the massive, federally mandated report card on student performance, measured in grades 4, 8, and 12—the reading scores of African-American boys in eighth grade were barely higher than the scores of white girls in fourth grade. In math, 46% of African-American boys demonstrated “basic” or higher grade-level skills, compared with 82% of white boys. On the National Education Longitudinal Survey, 54% of 16-year-old African-American males scored below the 20th percentile, compared with 24% of white males and 42% of Hispanic males. Having well-educated parents did not close the gap: In 2006, 43% of black high-school seniors with at least one college-educated parent failed to demonstrate even basic reading comprehension, nearly twice the percentage of whites.7
A 2012 Schott Foundation for Public Education report noted that the black-white disparity in high-school graduation rates among males had narrowed by just three percentage points in the previous decade. “At this rate of progress,” said the report, “. . . it would take another 50 years to close the graduation gap between Black males and their White male counterparts.”8
These results are occurring despite the fact that the growth of the education workforce has far outpaced student enrollment. “Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides,” wrote Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute in 2012. “Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment.”9 Harvard professor Paul Peterson noted that since the 1960s, per-pupil spending in the United States has more than tripled after adjusting for inflation, while the number of pupils per teacher has fallen by a third.10
Racial disparities in educational achievement can have serious consequences. Not surprisingly, it impacts life outcomes when the typical black student is graduating from high school (if he graduates at all) with an eighth-grade education. In general, high-school dropouts are more likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs, become teenage parents, and live in poverty. Most of the nearly half-million black students who drop out of school each year will be unemployed by their midthirties, and six in ten of the males will spend time behind bars.11 As David Kirp noted, “among 16- to 24-year-old black men not enrolled in school, fewer than half have jobs; about a third are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole.”12 According to sociologists Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, much of the black-white earning disparity can be tied to the learning gap. Young adult black men who scored above the 50th percentile on standardized tests earned 96 percent as much as their white peers in 1993, they found. And “when we compare blacks and whites with the same twelfth grade test scores, blacks are more likely than whites to complete college” and thus dramatically increase their potential lifetime earnings, among other positive outcomes.13 As far back as the early 1980s, black couples who both were college educated earned more than their white peers.
The public continues to associate more spending with better education results, and politicians continue to tell voters what they want to hear. But for a very long time the evidence demonstrated that spending more money on schools is not key to shrinking the achievement gap. The 1966 Coleman Report, named for sociologist James Coleman, who conducted the study, surveyed 645,000 students nationwide. At the time the Lyndon Johnson administration, most education experts, and Coleman himself all expected to find a strong relationship between money spent per student and academic achievement. Instead, Coleman found that spending per pupil was about the same in both black and white schools, and that learning didn’t increase based on such expenditures. “These results were acutely embarrassing to the Office of Education, the federal agency that sponsored the research,” wrote Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom in No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning.
. . . his findings suggested that spending more money per pupil, reducing class size, obtaining more teachers with master’s degrees and the like were not likely to improve student test scores significantly in public schools as they were constituted in 1965, when the data were collected. But that was a point too subtle to convey to the press and to Congress, and the Office of Education dealt with the problem by producing a summary of the Coleman report that ignored its most important and most unsettling results.14
Despite the fact that we now have nearly half a century of additional data that support these findings, politicians and the media continue to focus on spending more money, reducing class size, and hiring teachers with master’s degrees—all in the name of raising achievement and closing the learning gap. Why is that? Because even though such efforts don’t appear to be helping students very much, they do work to the benefit of the teachers’ unions that control public education in the United States. With apologies to Baudelaire, the greatest trick the teachers’ unions ever played was convincing enough people that their interests are perfectly aligned with those of schoolchildren. On the website of the United Auto Workers you will not find labor leaders posing for photos with people who have just bought Ford Fusions, because everyone knows that the UAW does not exist for the benefit of car customers. But on the website of the American Federation of Teachers cute kids are unavoidable, and even the union’s mission statement claims it prioritizes the needs of the children, rather than its members. “The American Federation of Teachers,” it reads, “is a union of professionals that champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities.”
The head of the AFT, this supposed champion for students and their families, is Randi Weingarten. “We want to improve public schools,” she once told me in an interview. “Ninety percent of the kids in the United States of America go to public schools, and it’s our responsibility to help them. I think every single child deserves a great education.” Weingarten told the New York Times that “there’s a much more important purpose here, which is the love of children.”15 Yet many of the policies that teachers’ unions promote show utter disregard for the needs of students in general and low-income minority students in particular—not because unions don’t care about kids, but because they care more about their members, notwithstanding the treacly rhetoric.
“The teachers unions have more influence over the public schools than any other group in American society,” according to Terry Moe, an education scholar at Stanford. “They influence schools from the bottom up, through collective bargaining activities that shape virtually every aspect of school organization. And they influence schools from the top down, through political activities that shape government policy.” Moe said the problem is not “that the unions are somehow bad or ill-intentioned. They aren’t. The problem is that when they simply do what all organizations do—pursue their own interests—they are inevitably led to do things that are not in the best interests of children.”16
The AFT and its larger sister organization, the National Education Association, have some 4.5 million dues-paying members and thousands of state and local affiliates. And it is on behalf of these members that unions fight to keep open the most violent and poorest-performing schools; block efforts to send the best teachers to the neediest students; insist that teachers be laid off based on seniority instead of performance; oppose teacher evaluation systems and merit pay structures that could ferret out bad teachers; back tenure rules that offer instructors lifetime sinecures after only a few years on the job; and make it nearly impossible to fire the system’s worst actors, from teachers who are chronically absent or incompetent to those who have criminal records. None of these positions make sense if your goal is to improve public education and help children learn. But they make perfect sense if the job security of adults is your main objective.
Teachers’ unions have done a masterful job of perpetuating an education establishment that prioritizes the needs of its members, even while these efforts leave black children—especially those from low-income families—demonstrably worse off. And unions have accomplished this feat primarily by making their organizations a major force in Democratic politics. Teachers’ unions are not just another special interest group, like the Sierra Club or Americans for Tax Reform. They are better understood as a liberal philanthropy. They use their billions in dues money to support everything from single-payer health care to D.C. statehood to gun control. They’ve given money to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative, Amnesty International, and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
“Often, the recipients of these outlays have at best a tangential education mission,” wrote the Wall Street Journal in a 2006 editorial on the National Education Association’s financial filings.
The Floridians For All Committee, a political action committee created by pro-labor Acorn to push for a minimum-wage hike, received $250,000 from the NEA last year. And the Fund to Protect Social Security received $400,000. In total, the NEA reports spending $25 million on “political activities and lobbying.”
In addition, reported the Journal, the NEA spent
another $65.5 million on “contributions, gifts and grants,” and many of the recipients listed under this category are also overtly politicized organizations: the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation ($40,000), the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute ($35,000), the Democratic Leadership Council ($25,000).17
But it’s not just the largesse—95 percent of which goes to Democrats—that makes the AFT and NEA so essential to liberal politics. Teachers’ unions are also party foot soldiers. They hand out flyers, knock on doors, work the phone banks, and ferry voters to the polls on Election Day. They typically send the most delegates to the Democratic National Convention every four years. A teachers’ union endorsement, or even its decision to remain neutral in a race, can often make or break an election. It would be difficult to find another group that can match this combination of money, power, and national reach.
However the real strength of the AFT, the NEA, and their affiliates lies in their ability to obstruct policies that threaten their control of public education. When the Obama administration decided to offer grants under its Race to the Top program to states that instituted certain education reforms, it requested that the states receive buy-ins from teachers’ unions before applying for the grant. Think about that. Nobody elects teachers’ unions to reform education; that’s why we elect politicians. Yet the “administration built the $4 billion Race to the Top contest in a way that rewarded applications crafted in consultation with labor leaders,” explained the Washington Post.
The announcement that Delaware had won about $100 million highlighted that all of the state’s teachers unions backed the plan for tougher teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. In second-place Tennessee, which won about $500 million, 93 percent of unions were on board.
By contrast, applications from Florida and Louisiana were considered innovative but fell short in part because they had less union support. The District’s bid, rated last among 16 finalists, was opposed by the local union.18
Unions insist that the differences in outcomes between black and white students mainly reflect income disparities, which are outside the control of teachers and schools. In fact, if the education establishment is to be believed, all of the problems within public education are caused by factors outside of public education. As Weingarten put it, “Jason, don’t talk to me about an achievement gap until we solve poverty in this country.” Yet there is overwhelming evidence that the underprivileged black children that traditional public schools have failed so miserably are not unteachable. There have long been schools willing and able to educate the hardest cases. But many (though not all) of these schools operate outside of the traditional public-school system, so teachers’ unions and their political allies work to undermine them. Again, what drives Weingarten and the politicians who carry her water is not racial animus. The simple fact is that unions have a stake in keeping kids in schools that they control, and politicians want to get elected, which is more difficult when you cross the teachers’ unions.
Between 1800 and 1835, most southern states passed legislation that made it a crime to teach enslaved children how to read and write. In 1860 only about 5 percent of slaves could read. Yet “before northern benevolent societies entered the South in 1862, before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and before Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedom and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) in 1865, slaves and free persons of color had already begun to make plans for the systematic instruction of their illiterates,” reported historian James Anderson. After the Civil War, wrote Harriett Beecher Stowe, “They rushed not to the grog-shop but to the schoolroom—they cried for the spelling-book as bread, and pleaded for teachers as a necessity of life.” Booker T. Washington, a former slave, wrote that “few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for an education. . . . It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.”
The postwar South was “extremely hostile to the idea of universal public education. The ex-slaves broke sharply with this position,” wrote Anderson. “Ex-slaves did much more than establish a tradition of education self-help that supported most of their schools. They also were the first among native southerners to wage a campaign for universal public education.”19 It did not take long for elite black schools to appear. In 1950, fewer than 10 percent of white men in the country over the age of 25 had completed four years of college. Yet between 1870 and 1955, most graduates of the District of Columbia’s Dunbar High School, the first public black high school in the United States, attended college. In 1899 Dunbar’s students outperformed their white peers on citywide tests. The education establishment wants to dismiss Dunbar as a fluke, but there have been too many other examples over the decades to take that rejection seriously.
Xavier University Prep, a Catholic school in New Orleans that has primarily educated blacks for nearly a century, was producing Dunbar-type results as far back as the 1950s and ’60s. Amyin Parker founded the Marcus Garvey School in South Central Los Angeles in 1975, the same year that Marva Collins opened the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago. Both schools sought out poor black children and proved skeptics like Weingarten wrong. University Park Campus School, which is located in the poorest section of Worcester, Massachusetts, and accepts only neighborhood kids, opened in 1997 with thirty-five seventh graders, four of whom couldn’t read. “Almost half of the entering students read at or below the third grade level and about a third were special needs students,” wrote David Whitman in Sweating the Small Stuff, a book about successful inner-city schools. “Yet three-and-a-half years later, in tenth grade, every one of those seventh graders not only passed the state’s demanding Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) English and math tests but managed to do so with high scores: more than 80 percent had proficient or advanced skills in both English and math.”20 By 2003 University Park was ranked thirty-fourth in the state (out of 332 high schools). Today some 95 percent of its students go to college, and almost all are the first in their families to do so. The people who are producing these results might take issue with Weingarten’s notion that poor minorities are destined to trail whites academically “until we solve poverty in this country.”
These days it is mostly charter schools that are closing the achievement gap, which is one reason why they are so popular with black people. Charter schools are tuition-free public schools run by independent organizations outside the control of the local school board. Polls have shown that charter supporters outnumber detractors two to one, and blacks who favor charters outnumber opponents by four to one. But that is less important to the education establishment than the fact that most charters aren’t organized. These schools have thus earned the wrath of teachers’ unions, who do everything in their power to shut them down, or at least stunt their growth. As far as the AFT and NEA are concerned, what determines whether a school reform is good or bad is not its impact on students, but its impact on adults.
Not long after my interview with Randi Weingarten I found myself listening to a speech by Geoffrey Canada, a charter-school operator in Harlem. “People are upset because I believe that these poor kids in Harlem, who have every social ill you can imagine,” can still learn, said Canada. “Name one, we’ve got it. Gangs? Yes, we’ve got it. Substance abuse? Got that too. Single [parent] families? Yes, we’ve got all of that. Parents who don’t care? Yes, we’ve got all of that. But my kids are going to go to college. And it doesn’t matter what the issues are.” Where Weingarten is making excuses, Canada is accepting responsibility. Is it any wonder that poor parents, given the opportunity, are fleeing Weingarten’s schools for Canada’s?
Eva Moskowitz is a former New York City councilwoman who now runs the Success Academy Charter Schools, a network of twenty-two schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx serving some 6,700 children. I first met Moskowitz in 2003 when she was still a member of the city council. She headed its education committee, and decided to hold four days of hearings on what she described as the “indefensible” teachers’-union contracts that govern K–12 education in New York. My editor suggested that I interview her and sit in on the hearings. The local union, headed by Weingarten at the time, tried to stop the hearings, even though the city council had no power to change any work rules. Since Moskowitz wouldn’t back down, however, the union made it clear to its members that they shouldn’t cooperate. “I reached out to dozens and dozens [of teachers and principals] to talk about work rules and ask them about their ability to do their job,” Moskowitz told me. People were willing to talk to her privately, but she found that requests to testify at the hearing were met with disbelief. The responses ranged from “Are you kidding?” to “I’m not that brave” to “I might be blacklisted.” The upshot was that most of those who did appear at the hearings had their voices disguised and their names withheld. It was like watching a mob trial. My editorial was titled “Witness Protection for Teachers.”21
Two years later Moskowitz would leave the city council and, in 2006, open her first school, Success Academy Harlem I, with 165 kindergarten and first-grade pupils. Within a few years the students—almost all black and Hispanic kids from low-income families—were outperforming not only their peers in traditional public schools but also white students in posh suburbs. Success Academy Harlem I, which selects students by lottery, shares a building with PS 149, one of the city’s better traditional public schools. Both schools serve kids from the same racial and economic background in classes that have approximately the same number of students (the charter school’s class sizes are slightly larger). But the similarities end there. In 2009, 29 percent of students at PS 149 were performing at grade level in reading and 34 percent were at grade level in math. At Harlem 1—literally across the hall—the corresponding figures were 86 percent and 94 percent.22 Ninety-seven percent of Harlem I’s students passed the state exam that year, ranking it in the top one percent of all New York state public schools. Naturally these results, and her efforts to open more schools to better serve more of the city’s disadvantaged kids, made Eva Moskowitz a major enemy of the New York City’s education establishment.
Democracy Prep is another charter-school network that excels at teaching disadvantaged kids. It too opened its doors in Harlem in 2006 and also shared building space with a traditional public school. The results were even more shocking. “We both opened with six grades and about one hundred kids, though we had more special-ed children and English language learners,” Seth Andrew, Democracy Prep’s founder, once told me. “After two years in the same building with the same kids on the same floor, this school was the lowest-performing school in Harlem and we were the highest-performing school in Harlem.”
Moskowitz and Andrew like to talk about test scores. So do other high-performing charter-school operators, such as David Levin and Mike Feinberg of KIPP and Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone. That’s understandable, given their ability to improve outcomes among groups that many traditional public schools have given up on. But charter-school parents also appreciate the safer learning environment. The father of an eighth grader at Democracy Prep told me that he had pulled his son out of the district school two years earlier because of regular bullying that once left the boy hospitalized. “I just happened to get a flyer about Democracy Prep soon after that,” he told me. “We entered the admissions lottery and got accepted. I didn’t know anything about charters. I was just looking for an escape.” He said that students at Democracy Prep are told to cross the street before walking past the district school down the block “to avoid, literally, raining textbooks—books being throw out of the school at them. That’s the school my son is zoned for. If he wasn’t in Democracy Prep, that’s the school he’d be in—the school with the book throwers!”
Liberals who claim to care so much about underprivileged blacks not only relegate them to the worst performing schools, but also the most violent schools. The Obama administration has chastised schools for disciplining black kids at higher rates than white kids, as if racial parity in disciplinary outcomes is more important than safety. Such thinking also assumes that the suspensions reflect racial animus rather than simply which kids are acting out. But if statistical outcomes prove discrimination, what explains the fact that Asians are disciplined at lower rates than whites? Are the schools also anti-white? Liberals do no favors for blacks kids who are in school to learn by sympathizing with black kids who are in school to make trouble.
Charter-school opponents insist that the schools’ superior results come from turning away kids who are more difficult to teach. “Union critics of charter schools and their supporters have repeatedly asserted that schools like Harlem Success ‘skim’ from the community’s most intelligent students and committed families, or that they teach fewer learning-challenged or impoverished students and fewer students who are English-language learners” wrote journalist Steven Brill. “None of the actual data supports this.”23
The best charter studies are those that use randomized experiments, which nullify self-selection bias by only comparing the kids who attend charters with those who entered the lottery but didn’t win a spot. These studies, conducted by Stanford University’s Caroline Hoxby, Harvard University’s Thomas Kane, and the Rand Corporation, among others, have found that charter students score significantly higher on math and reading tests and are much more likely to graduate from high school and attend college.24 A Hoxby study of New York City found that the typical charter-school student, who tends to be black and poor, is closing the achievement gap not only with his white urban peers but also with children in wealthy New York suburbs like Scarsdale. “On average,” Hoxby concluded, “a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.”25
When Ron Zimmer of Vanderbilt University and Cassandra Guarino of Indiana University looked at data from “an anonymous major urban school district to examine whether we see exit patterns consistent with the claim that charter schools are more likely to push out low-achieving students than traditional public schools,” they found “no empirical evidence to support the notion of push-out.” If anything, wrote the authors, what they found “suggests that low-performing students are more likely to transfer out of a [traditional public school] than a charter school.”26
When Marcus Winters of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, looked at the special-education enrollment discrepancy between charter and traditional public schools, he found no evidence of charter-school bias against kids with disabilities. Instead, he found that children with special needs were less likely to apply to charter schools, and that traditional public schools were more likely to classify children as special-needs cases.
The gap in special education rates between charter and traditional public schools grows considerably as students progress from kindergarten through third grade. A large part (80 percent) of the growth in this gap over time is that charter schools are less likely than district schools to classify students as in need of special education services and more likely to declassify them. . . . the results do not suggest that charter schools are refusing to admit or are pushing out students with special needs. In fact, more students with previously identified disabilities enter charter schools than exit them as they progress through elementary grade levels.27
Other research provides clues as to why traditional schools are more likely than charters to classify a student as learning-disabled. A 2002 paper by Jay Greene and Greg Forster found that “33 states and the District of Columbia had ‘bounty’ funding systems, which create financial incentives to place children in special education.” Greene and Forster also discovered “a statistically significant positive relationship between bounty funding systems and growth in special education enrollment.”28
Of course, what allows charter schools to be so effective is their ability to operate outside of union rules that put the well-being of teachers ahead of students. “The Harlem Success teachers’ contract drives home the idea that the school is about the children, not the grown-ups,” wrote Steven Brill.
It is one page, allows them to be fired at will, and defines their responsibilities no more specifically than that they must help the school achieve its mission. . . . The union contract in place on the public school side of the building is 167 pages. Most of it is about job protection and what teachers can and cannot be asked to do during the 6 hours and 57.5 minutes (8:30 to about 3:25, with 50 minutes off for lunch) of their 179-day work year.29
Union leaders sometimes claim that they welcome charter schools, and that may be true to the extent that they can organize them. But their actions more often than not betray an antipathy for school choice. Unions in New York first tried to prevent the state from passing a charter law. When that failed, they focused on making the law as weak as possible, primarily by capping the number of such schools that could exist. Even after charter schools in the state had demonstrated their ability to educate low-income minorities, the teachers’ unions didn’t give up their fight.
In 2009 New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein announced that they were closing two persistently failing public schools in Harlem and replacing them with high-performing charters. Randi Weingarten went to war. “The schools Weingarten aimed to keep open were PS 194 and 241, notorious low performers that had both received Ds on their district report cards and, of course, were operated by members of Weingarten’s union,” wrote Terry Moe.
Parents, voting with their feet, were avoiding these two schools in droves. PS 194 had space for 628 students, but enrolled only 288. PS 241 had space for 1,007 students, but enrolled only 310. Most parents clearly did not want their kids in those schools. The district’s plan was to replace them with new charters run by Harlem Success, whose existing, nearby charters had achieved spectacular academic results. Parent desperately wanted to get their kids into these Harlem Success schools: the previous year, some 6,000 students applied for just 500 available seats.30
The teachers’ unions filed a lawsuit to keep children in Harlem’s failing schools. This scenario has played out across the country, from New York to Philadelphia to Chicago to Sacramento. After numerous interventions—more money, new curriculum, staff changes—reformers move to close persistently failing schools, and unions fight to keep them open. Again, if your goal is to do what is best for children, you steer them to schools that succeed. But if you are the teachers’ unions and believe that the primary purpose of public schools is to employ your members, then you keep children trapped in the schools where your members work, and you fight to keep those schools open regardless of their quality. After all, bad teachers in bad schools still pay dues.
An even more effective reform for the urban poor that unions fight tooth and nail is the school voucher program, which allows parents to send their children to schools entirely outside the reach of the AFT and NEA. There is no disputing the fact that poor black kids who attend religious or nonsectarian institutions via vouchers perform better than their peers in traditional public schools. But that hasn’t stopped liberal opposition. President Obama speaks often about the importance of staying in school, and has even urged states to raise the dropout age. At the same time he has repeatedly tried to shut down a voucher program in Washington, D.C., that serves poor minorities and produces significantly higher graduation rates than both D.C. public schools and the national average.
“President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address that teenagers be compelled to remain in school until they turn 18 or graduate,” wrote Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas in 2012. “Who needs such Big-Brother-like compulsion? When the government provides more students with access to private schools through vouchers the kids stay in school willingly.” Wolf is the U.S. Department of Education’s independent evaluator of the D.C. voucher program. In 2009 the nation’s fifty largest cities had an average high-school graduation rate of 53 percent.31 But in a study published the next year, Wolf found that the D.C. voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91 percent, versus 56 percent for D.C. public schools and 70 percent for students who entered the lottery for a voucher but didn’t win one. At a Senate hearing about the voucher program, officially known as the Opportunity Scholarship Program, Wolf testified that “we can be more than 99 percent confident that access to school choice through the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and not mere statistical noise, was the reason why OSP students graduated at these higher rates.”32
Nor is Washington, D.C., the only place where access to vouchers has improved the likelihood that a minority will finish twelfth grade. A study of Milwaukee’s older and larger voucher program showed a 94 percent graduation rate among students who stayed in the program throughout high school, versus a 75 percent graduation rate for their peers in the city’s public schools. Not that the argument for vouchers rests entirely on high-school graduation rates. Voucher recipients have better test scores, and a 2013 study found that vouchers boosted college enrollment for blacks by 24 percent.33 Moreover, it’s less expensive to educate children using vouchers (and charter schools), which is a boon to taxpayers. And the competition from voucher programs can push traditional public schools to improve. Thus school choice indirectly benefits even those kids who don’t exercise it. Education scholar Greg Forster has surveyed the large and growing body of empirical voucher studies, and summarized the key findings this way:
• Twelve empirical studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the “gold standard” of social science. Of these, 11 find that choice improves student outcomes—six that all students benefit and five that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found a negative impact.
• Twenty-three empirical studies (including all methods) have examined school choice’s impact on academic outcomes in public schools. Of these, 22 find that choice improves public schools and one finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found that choice harms public schools.
• Six empirical studies have examined school choice’s fiscal impact on taxpayers. All six find that school choice saves money for taxpayers. No empirical study has found a negative fiscal impact.
• Eight empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools. Of these, seven find that school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools. One finds no net effect on segregation from school choice. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.34
When he ran for president in 2008 and was asked about school vouchers, Obama said that if he were presented with evidence that they improve outcomes, he would “not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . you do what works for the kids.” In fact, his administration has ignored scholars like Forster to placate teachers’ unions, and has even sat on evidence of voucher success.35 In 2013 the Justice Department sued to block a school-choice program in Louisiana that provides vouchers to poor kids to attend private institutions. Some 90 percent of the voucher recipients are black, and 86 percent of them formerly attended schools that received a D or F grade from the state. No matter. Justice argued that allowing children to leave these awful schools could make the public-school system less white in composition and hamper school desegregation efforts. Got that? To the Obama administration, the racial balance of a school is more important than whether anyone is learning.
Even if the administration’s claim that school choice “frustrates and impedes the desegregation process” had merit, you might still question the logic of trying to help black people by consigning their children to the worst schools. But the claim is questionable at best, according to evidence that voucher opponents willfully ignore. Politico reported that
Louisiana hired Boston University political science Professor Christine Rossell to analyze the effect of vouchers in 34 districts in the state under desegregation orders. Rossell found that in all but four of the districts—some of which are majority white, some majority black and some more evenly split—vouchers improved or had no effect on racial imbalance. And in the districts where racial imbalance worsened, the effects were “miniscule.”36
A separate study out of the University of Arkansas also undermined the notion that school choice reduces integration. “The evidence suggests that use of private school vouchers by low-income students actually has positive effects on racial integration,” wrote Anna Egalite and Jonathan Mills.
Among the subset of students for whom data are available, we find that transfers made possible by the school-choice program overwhelmingly improve integration in the public schools that students leave (the sending schools), bringing the racial composition of the schools closer to that of the broader communities in which they are located.37
Voucher opponents say they want to fix the public schools to help all kids, not just those lucky enough to get a voucher. But that’s an argument for expanding, rather than limiting, school choice. And while the president and others urge poor people to sit tight until those bad schools are fixed, they themselves typically show no such patience. Obama sent his own children to private schools both before and after he became president. Bill Clinton, another anti-voucher president, also shielded his daughter from Washington’s public schools. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, one of the fiercest opponents of the D.C. voucher program, chose private schools for his children. Even the late Ted Kennedy, considered Congress’s greatest defender of public education for decades, “never found a public school good enough for his own children,” wrote Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute. Kennedy’s opposition to school choice had nothing to do with whether children were better off. Rather, it was “good politics,” said Stern.
Most of the five million government employees who work in public education are organized into highly effective unions, which support candidates like Kennedy and policies he favors, such as national health insurance and affirmative action. With support from Kennedy and others, the unions have built a Berlin Wall that protects the public education system from competition and prevents poor children from leaving bad schools.38
In education circles, public high schools that graduate 60 percent or fewer of their students on time are referred to as “dropout factories.” In 2011 more than one and a half million children in the United States attended such schools, and one in four of them was black.39 And most of the black kids who graduate have the reading and math skills of an eighth grader. Among the institutions with an acute appreciation of this sad state of affairs are the nation’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which are much more likely than non-HBCUs to be faced with college freshmen who aren’t college ready. Some black colleges are doing better than others, but a large majority are struggling, and on balance these schools have seen declining enrollments and low graduation rates for decades. One assessment of eighty-five of the nation’s 105 black colleges found that between 2010 and 2012, nearly a third saw their enrollment decline by 10 percent or more.40
The reasons vary. Most of these schools were founded after the Civil War, when white institutions refused to accept blacks. Today, of course, that’s no longer the case. More than 90 percent of blacks who attend college choose a non-HBCU school, and with good reason. In 2006 the six-year graduation rate at HBCUs was 37 percent, or 20 percentage points below the national average, and 8 percentage points below the average of black students at other colleges. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 2012 that only four HBCUs in its survey had graduation rates above 50 percent, and at nearly half of the black colleges the graduation rate was 33 percent or less.41 A 2010 survey of colleges with the worst graduation rates by Washington Monthly magazine and Education Sector, a think tank, had black schools in the first and second place and in eight of the top twenty-four spots.
Unlike in the past, HBCU graduates today on average are worse off economically, according to a 2010 paper by Roland Fryer of Harvard and Michael Greenstone of MIT.
In the 1970s, HBCU matriculation was associated with higher wages and an increased probability of graduation, relative to attending a [non-HBCU school]. By the 1990s, however, there is a substantial wage penalty. Overall, there is a 20 percent decline in the relative wages of HBCU graduates over just two decades.42
They concluded that black colleges
may have provided unique educational services for blacks in the 1970s. However by the 1990s, this advantage seems to have disappeared on many dimensions and, by some measures, HBCU attendance appears to retard black progress.43
Black colleges traditionally have been heavily reliant on federal subsidies to stay afloat. Very few are capable of large capital campaigns or have substantial endowments. More than 80 percent of HBCUs get at least half of their revenue from the government. And as with K–12 education, taxpayer dollars continue to be thrown at failing schools in the name of helping blacks. In 2010 President Obama pledged to invest another $850 million in these institutions over the next decade. Some supporters of HBCUs play down their academic record and emphasize their history of educating so many consequential black professionals—including many of the civil rights leaders who helped end segregation. Others circle the wagons and are quick to dismiss any criticism of black schools as illegitimate or racially motivated. But these arguments ultimately put institutional preservation ahead of the needs of black students. The relevant issue is whether these institutions still have a role to play in black education. And the reality is that a few might, but most clearly don’t—at least not as they are currently constituted.
“The glory years are long gone,” wrote Bill Maxwell, who both attended and taught at an HBCU.
Now only 1 in 5 black students earn bachelor’s degrees from historically black schools, which have increasingly become dependent upon marginal students from poor families. Two-thirds of HBCU students receive federally funded Pell Grants, aimed at families earning less than $40,000 annually. More than half of the students receive those grants at every HBCU except at 13 of the best schools, such as Spelman, Howard and Morehouse.
Maxwell also described his teaching stint at Stillman, a small black college in Alabama:
Studies show schools with a high number of Pell recipients tend to have low admission standards, and the reasons for their low graduation rates are well-documented. Most low-income students have parents who did not attend college, which often signals that their homes have few books or other reading materials. Many of the students never develop a love of learning, and they tend to perform poorly in class and on standardized tests.
The statistics reflect my experience as a professor between 2004 and 2006 at Stillman, which had fewer than 1,000 students. Most of my students would not study, regularly turn in their homework on time or read the assigned material. I walked grumbling students to the bookstore to try to force them to buy their required textbooks.
These students lacked the intellectual vigor taken for granted on traditional campuses. They did not know what or whom to respect. For many, the rappers Bow Wow and 50 Cent were at least as important to black achievement as the late Ralph Bunche, the first black to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and Zora Neale Hurston, the great novelist.
In time, I realized that my standards were too high for the quality of student I had to teach. Most simply were not prepared for college-level work, and I was not professionally trained for the intense remediation they needed and deserved. . . .
It does not help that too many black colleges have serious management issues. The media has regularly reported academic, financial or administrative problems at schools such as Morris Brown in Georgia, Lemoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Grambling State in Louisiana, Edward Waters in Jacksonville and Florida A&M in Tallahassee.
The numbers for many historically black colleges are not encouraging. Declining enrollments, loose admission standards and low graduation rates produce ever-tighter budgets, less reliable alumni networks and grimmer futures.44
Maxwell argued that “some schools are so academically inferior and so poorly serving their students they should be shut down,” while other schools need to make some “hard choices” and rethink their mission. Cynthia Tucker, a former columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, agreed, writing:
There is no good reason to maintain separate-but-equal public facilities in close proximity. Today, vestiges of that outdated system remain in the form of colleges that are publicly funded and virtually all-black, frozen in place by inertia, political timidity and confusion about the mission of public institutions. Institutions supported by taxpayers should be diverse, educating men and women of all colors and creeds. There is no longer good reason for public colleges that are all-white or all-black.45
There are any number of reforms that might help struggling HBCUs meet today’s challenges. Schools too small to continue independently could be consolidated to save money. Outside agencies, including for-profit entities, could be tapped to provide better management. Other HBCUs could be converted to community colleges that focus on remedial courses to compensate for the inferior K-12 schooling that so many black children continue to receive. These are the kinds of changes that would make HBCUs more relevant to the actual needs of black people today. And to their credit, some HBCU presidents have spoken out about the need for reform. In most cases, however, their criticism has not been well received. In 2009 word leaked that Jackson State University President Ronald Mason wanted to merge his school with two other Mississippi HBCUs. Trustees and alumni pushed back hard, and “black legislators exploded at the proposal.” A short time later Mason was no longer president of Jackson State.46
In the past, celebrated graduates of these institutions weren’t afraid to view them critically. In his biography of Thurgood Marshall, an HBCU alum, Juan Williams wrote that in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown decision the future Supreme Court justice spoke openly about how desegregation would impact black colleges. “What’s going to happen to the ‘Negro college’?” Marshall said in speeches at the time. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. It’s going to cheerfully drop the word ‘Negro.’” Marshall, wrote Williams, “cautioned that if these schools did not quickly measure up to the white schools, they could die off.”47
Defenders of underperforming black colleges offer the same excuses as defenders of underperforming elementary and secondary schools. It’s the students, not the schools, they insist. Yet other schools are managing to educate kids from the same backgrounds. Defending schools that are doing an awful job of teaching blacks doesn’t help blacks. Black colleges certainly can be defended on school-choice grounds. If some kids perform better in an HBCU environment, or a single-sex environment, or a religious environment, there’s no reason in theory why those options should not be available. But that’s not an argument for sustaining black schools at all costs. Bad schools, including bad black schools, ought to reform, or close.