RAYMOND WOLTERS

WHY EDUCATION
REFORM FAILED

THE NATIONAL POLICY INSTITUTE

WHY EDUCATION
REFORM FAILED
RAYMOND WOLTERS
Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware

The National Policy Institute

Research & Analysis
August 28, 2015

In the years since

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954),

there have been many well-intentioned but unsuccessful efforts to close Americas
racial and ethnic gaps in academic achievement. At the time of Brown, 75 percent
to 85 percent of the nations Black students (and 75 percent of Latinos) scored
below the median for Whites on standardized academic tests. That has been
the case ever since. Despite extensive government intervention and numerous
educational reforms, the disparities remain. This persistent achievement gap
has become one of the most comprehensively documented facts in American
educational history.[1]
[1]

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 US 485 (1954); Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, No
Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003) 12 and passim.;
Thomas Sowell, Where Rhetoric Beats Reasoning, Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2004; Christopher
Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington: The Brookings
Institution, 1998).

2 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Closing the gapthat is, ending racial disparities through new educational
methods or public policieshas been a recurring political leitmotif for the past
half-century. It has been a ubiquitous and deeply contentious meme, which has
played a role in virtually every national election.
And yet so many reformers take up closing the gap as if for the first time. They
ignore the complex history of education reformers, which I have recounted in
my most recent book, The Long Crusade (2015), and the important lessons that
can be gleaned from what can only be considered a history of failures.[2]
Education is undoubtedly critical for sustaining and advancing any advanced
society. It is time for those who care about education to ask the difficult questions
that past reformers overlooked. The most important of which is whether racial
achievement gaps can be closed at all.

1.
School desegregation was the first in a series of interventions and reforms that
failed to close the gaps. Despite initial resistance in the South, by the end of the
1960s, the great majority of Americans accepted the desegregation that Brown
had mandated. In large part this acceptance occurred because both the Supreme
Court and the U. S. Congress made it clear that desegregation required only
that public schools should not discriminate racially. In several decisions between
1954 and 1968, the Supreme Court handed down rulings (and upheld lowercourt decisions) that forbade the exclusion of children from public schools
solely on the grounds of race. But the Supreme Court and the lower federal
courts did not insist that compulsory inclusion must begin. They held, rather,
that the proper remedy for compulsory separation was to end such separation.
[2]

Raymond Wolters, The Long Crusade (Arlington, VA: Washington Summit Publishers, 2015).

3 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

The courts did not demand that enrollments at individual schools should be
balanced to achieve approximately the same proportions that existed in a larger
region or state. Congress endorsed this approach in the Civil Rights Act of
1964, which defined desegregation both positively and negatively.
Desegregation means the assignment of students to public
schools and within such schools without regard to their race,
color, religion, or national origin, but desegregation shall not
mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to
overcome racial imbalance.[3]

In so ruling, the Supreme Court and Congress accepted an argument that

Thurgood Marshall and other attorneys presented for the NAACP. When
questioned during the oral arguments for Brown, these lawyers were emphatic
that they were not asking for affirmative relief.
The only thing that we ask for is that the state-imposed racial
segregation be taken off, and to leave the county school board
. . . to assign children on any reasonable basis they want to
assign them on. . . .
What we want from this Court is the striking down of race. . . .
Do not deny any child the right to go to the school of his choice
on the grounds of race or color within the normal limits of your
districting system. . . .
Do not assign them on the basis of race. . . .
If you have some other basis . . . any other basis, we have no
objection. But just do not put in race or color as a factor.[4]
[3]

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 US 485 (1954); Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka, 349 US 294 (1955); Cooper v. Aaron, 358 US 1 (1958); Brown v. Board of Education,
139 F. Supp (1955); Briggs v. Elliott, 132 F. Supp (1955); Evans v. Buchanan, 207 F. Supp 820
(1963); Public Law 88-352 (1964); Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1984), 134; Leon Friedman, ed., Argument: The Oral Argument Before the Supreme
Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952-1955 (New York: Chelsea House, 1949), 402.

[4]

Leon Friedman, Argument, 47, 375, 402.

4 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Civil-rights leaders said official separation of Black students grew out of

a belief that Negroes as a race were incapable of matching the educational
and civilizational standards of Whites. But Thurgood Marshall argued that
many individual Blacks had met those standards; therefore, general racial
segregation was too arbitrary and invidious to satisfy the requirement that
states must provide equal protection of the laws . . . in any public sphere.
Marshall said segregation branded the Negro with the mark of inferiority
and asserts that he is not fit to associate with white people. Marshall wrote,
Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state bound
to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any
public sphere. Marshall conceded, however, that states could discriminate
on the basis of individual qualities. When asked what should be done with
individual students, Marshall answered: Put the dumb colored children in
with the dumb white children, and put the smart colored children with the
smart white children.[5]
Since Marshall and the NAACP won the case, most people assumed that
the Brown Court had held that the Constitution prohibited the government
from discriminating by race. This impression was reinforced when the
Supreme Court, in Bolling v. Sharpe (decided the same day as Brown), held
that racial classifications were too arbitrary to satisfy the requirements of
the due-process clause. The impression was confirmed in 1955 when the
implementation order known as Brown II declared that Brown stood for
the fundamental principle that there should be no racial discrimination
in public education. And the impression was reaffirmed in numerous other
cases where the Supreme Court upheld lower-court rulings, such as one in
South Carolina, where circuit judge John J. Parker interpreted Brown to
[5]

Transcript of Oral Argument in Brown v. Board of Education, 9 December 1952, 7; Bolling v.

Sharpe, 347 US 497.

5 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

mean that, The Constitution . . . does not require integration. It merely

forbids discrimination.[6]
Many later problems would have been avoided if the Brown Court had merely
forbad racial discrimination. Legal scholars, however, have noted that the
Supreme Courts legal rationale in Brown was murky and inconsistent. On one
hand, Brown condemned racial discrimination by the government. On the
other, the Court looked with disfavor on the congregation of Blacks, even if this
association was not compelled by government authorities. The Brown Court
approvingly cited the social science of Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal, who
maintained that Black society was so emotional, provincial, and crime-ridden
as to be essentially pathological. The Court also endorsed a weak study and
misleading testimony by an American psychologist, Kenneth Clark, who told
the Justices that racial isolation damaged the confidence of Black youths and
depressed their ambitions and self-esteem. The Brown Court said the separation
of Black students generated a feeling of inferiority as to theirs status in the
community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be
undone. Brown approvingly repeated the conclusion of a Kansas court: that
Black schools tended to [retard] the educational and mental development of
Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they could receive in
racially integrated schools. Brown embraced what is sometimes called the harm
and benefit thesis. It held that racial congregation harmed Blacks and implied
that racial mixing would help African-Americans do better academically.[7]

[6]

Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 US 497; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 349 US 295 (1955); Briggs
v. Elliott, 132 F. Supp 776 (1955).

[7]

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 US 485 (1954), note 11; Gunnar Myrdal, An American
Dilemma (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944). 928-29; for a discussion (with citations) of
Kenneth B. Clarks research and courtroom testimony, see Raymond Wolters, Race and Education
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 23-33.

6 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Pursuant to the original understanding of Brown, by the late 1960s, the great
majority of American public school students were being assigned on a racially
non-discriminatory basis. This was usually accomplished in one of two ways.
Either students were assigned to schools close to their homes or they were allowed
to attend whatever school they chose. By assigning students by neighborhood
rather than race or by allowing students to choose their school, school districts
satisfied the requirements of Brown and the Civil Rights Act. Students were no
longer being assigned on a racial basis. Yet neither policy achieved a racial mix in
school enrollments that approximated the demographic proportions in the larger
region. Enrollments in neighborhood schools turned out to be either mostly
White or mostly Black because most Whites and Blacks lived in neighborhoods
that were inhabited predominantly by people of their own race. Enrollments in
choice schools were also skewed because most students did not wish to attend a
school in which their race would be a minority.
Thus Blacks were liberated from the stigma of official separation. But, as it turned
out, mere desegregation did not narrow the racial gap in academic achievement.
On most standardized tests, almost 85 percent of the Black students continued
to score below the average White.

2.
Why did the academic achievement gap persist? In the late 1950s and early 1960s,
the most common explanation held that disproportionately Black schools were
inadequately funded. With this in mind, the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided one
million dollars for a survey of educational inequalities. According to Alexander
Mood, the director of the statistical center at the federal Office of Education,
it was assumed that the schools in the cores of cities and in the rural South are
inferior in terms of class size, teacher training, enrichment and remedial programs,

7 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

and per pupil expenditures. The research turned out to be so comprehensive and
of such high quality that it superseded all previous work on school desegregation.
Entitled Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966) and popularly known as the
Coleman report for its principal author, James S. Coleman, then a professor of
educational sociology at Johns Hopkins University, the study presented detailed
information on 4,000 schools and test results from 570,000 students and 60,000
teachers. The report was of especially high quality because Coleman was the
foremost mathematical sociologist of his age. His sophisticated statistical analysis
of the quantitative information was evident on page after page.[8]
The Coleman report reinforced two aspects of conventional thinking. It
showed that the familiar disparity in test scores was still in place. And it
showed that, as of 1966, the races were still disproportionately educated apart
from one another. Eighty percent of all White pupils in the first and twelfth
grades attended schools that were between 90 to 100 percent White; while
65 percent of all African-American first graders attended schools that were at
least 90 percent Black, and 48 percent of Black high school seniors attended
schools that were at least half Black.
In another respect, however, the data contradicted the conventional wisdom.
At the outset of the research, Coleman had predicted, the study will show the
difference in the quality of schools that the average Negro child and the average
white child are exposed to. Speaking to a reporter, Coleman had said:
You know yourself that the difference is going to be striking. And
even though everybody knows there is a lot of difference between
suburban and inner-city schools, once the statistics are there in
black and white, they will have more impact.

[8]

New York Times, 2 September 1965, 21; James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1966).

8 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Yet to Colemans surprise, when the data were assembled, they indicated that
by 1966 there was substantial equality in facilities and other measureable
resources at majority-Black and majority-White schools. Predominantly Black
and White schools had the same average number of teachers per pupil, similar
pay scales, and teachers with almost the same amount of formal education
and teaching experience. Put simply, by 1966, the nation had achieved the
traditional notion of equality of educational opportunity.[9]
And yet, on standardized tests the academic achievement gaps had hardly
budged. The average African-American student still scored below 85 percent of
White students. Put differently, at age six, the average Black lagged behind the
average White by one grade level, and by grade 12, the gap separating the racial
averages had increased to four grade levels. Coleman understood that the report
was tread[ing] on sensitive ground. The differences could lead to invidious
comparisons between groups and, even worse, might lend [support] to racist
arguments of genetic differences in intelligence. Nevertheless, Coleman decided
that it would be a mistake not to mention the gap in academic achievement.
It is precisely the avoidance of such sensitive areas that can perpetuate the
educational deficiencies.[10]

3.
To make his report more palatable, Coleman phrased a summary of the report
to emphasize a correlation that recommended racially balanced integration as
a reform that eventually might reduce the size of the academic achievement
[9]

Frederick Mosteller and Daniel P. Moynihan, On Equality of Educational Opportunity (New York:
Random House, 1972), 7-8; Raymond Wolters, Race and Education, 178; Christopher Jencks and
Meredith Phillips, The Black-White Test Score Gap, Chapter 1, accessed August 15, 2015, nytimes.com/
books/first/j/Jencks-gap.

[10]

Frederic Mosteller and Daniel P. Moynihan, On Equality of Educational Opportunity, 23; James S.
Coleman, Equality and Achievement in Education (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), 123.

9 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

gaps. As he pored over the statistics and test results, Coleman noted that
Black children who attended majority-White schools scored higher than
other Blacks. The difference was small, but Coleman also gave interviews
and filed legal depositions in which he touted the benefits that Black children
received when they were dispersed and educated in predominantly White
classrooms. This eventually became the most widely reported finding of the
Coleman report. One of the reports principal conclusions, the New York
Times stated, was that integration was by far the most important schoolrelated factor in improving the achievement of poor children.[11]
Colemans integrationist sociology assumed that the quality of a school depended
largely on its youth culture and that middle-class schools were better. Since
White was presumed to be synonymous with middle class and Black the
same as lower class, the purpose of integration was to create schools with
enough White students to shape the prevailing attitudes and a substantial number
of Black children to benefit from being exposed to peers who recognized the
importance of schoolwork. Coleman explained that the social composition of a
student body influenced academic achievement.
Sitting next to a child who is performing at a high level provides
a challenge to better performance. The psychological environment
may be less comfortable for a lower-class child . . . but he learns more.

According to Coleman, predominantly-Black schools were problematic because

Black students did not offer one another as much beneficial peer stimulation as
was available in mostly White schools. And this was important because, Coleman
said, the socioeconomic background of fellow students was more important than
the quality of teachers or the other resources that schools provided.[12]
[11]

New York Times, March 21, 1970, 15; March 28, 1995, B11,

[12]

James S. Coleman, Toward Open Schools, Public Interest, 9 (Fall 1967), 23.

10 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Eventually, the Supreme Court joined this chorus. In Green v. New Kent
County (1968) and in subsequent opinions of the early 1970s, the High Court
redefined desegregation to mean what Congress, in the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, said it did not meanthe assignment of students to public schools in
order to overcome racial imbalance. For the next 25 years, the Court held that
Brown, when illuminated by modern social science, required the assignment
of students by race to ensure that the mix of races at individual schools would
be approximately the same as the proportions that existed in the overall
school district (and sometimes in an even larger region). The constitutional
mandate was changed from prohibiting racial discrimination that separated the
races to requiring racial discrimination in order to achieve racial mixture.[13]

The constitutional mandate was changed from prohibiting

racial discrimination that separated the races to requiring
racial discrimination in order to achieve racial mixture.

It turned out, though, that Colemans sociological theorizing missed the mark.
The racial differences in test scores persisted when Black and White students
were mixed in proportionate numbers

4.
The persistence of the academic achievement gap prompted Coleman to
reconsider his research. When he had initially collected data in 1965, Coleman
later noted, nearly all the Black children attending integrated schools in the South
[13]

Green v. New Kent County, 391 US 430 (1968).

11 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

had been volunteers who had enrolled under freedom-of-choice plans, while
almost all integration in the North had occurred in neighborhood schools where
Blacks and Whites lived in the same vicinity. The desegregated Black students of
1965 were not representative of Blacks as a group. They were unusual, in that they
came disproportionately from middle-class families that considered education
important. They had either volunteered to attend mostly White schools or had
lived in mostly White neighborhoods. In 1978, Coleman admitted that it had
been wishful thinking to believe that other Black students would make similar
scores if they were integrated under mandatory court orders. Yet Coleman did
not have much to recant, for the improvement that he had noted in 1966 had
been quite small.[14]
In 1975, Coleman also came to recognize the significance of an important
demographic trend. After analyzing data from 20 large school districts,
Coleman concluded that court-ordered busing fostered resegregation by
increasing the incidence of White flight. Coleman reported that the more
Blacks enrolled in a school system, the more Whites left. Specifically, he found
that after a tipping point had been reached, an increase of five percent in the
average White childs Black classmates would cause an additional 10 percent
of White families to leave. Thus the nation faced an insoluble dilemma. There
would be no racially balanced integration without court-ordered busing, but
such busing had the overall effect of defeating integration. The official push
for school integration was offset by the actions of White families who moved
from areas where there was a large enrollment of Black students to areas where
there was less racial mixing.[15]
[14]

Lawrence Feinberg, Coleman Now Discounts Advantage of School Desegregation, Washington

Post, September 18, 1978, A1; National Observer, June 7, 1975, 1.

[15]

James S. Coleman, Recent Trends in School Integration: A Report to the American Educational
Research Association, Address at The American Education Research Association, April 2, 1975.

12 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

After documenting the extent of the flight, Coleman offered an explanation that
infuriated erstwhile allies in the civil-rights movement. He said that in the 1960s
he had mistakenly assumed that if middle-class students remained in the majority,
they would continue to set the tone for an integrated school. In that situation,
both white and black children would learn. As it happened, however, the
characteristics of the lower-class black classroom often took over and constituted
the values of the integrated school, even if middle-class students remained in the
majority. Middle-class parents then transferred their children to private schools or
moved to predominantly White suburbs. The problem, Coleman said, was the
degree of disorder and the degree to which schools . . . have failed to control lowerclass black children. It was quite understandable, Coleman said, for middleclass families not to want to send their children to schools where 90 percent of
the time is spent not on instruction but on discipline.[16]
Colemans report on on White flight riled integrationists. In 1966, we
cited you as proof that [integration] worked, NAACP attorney Charles
Morgan told Coleman in 1975. We dont cite you as proof any more.
Perhaps because Coleman had formerly been their ally, perhaps because
he had spoken candidly about the misbehavior of Black students, and
perhaps because of fear that Colemans comments on White flight would
spark additional criticism of racially balanced integration, the NAACPs
chief executive, Roy Wilkins, denounced Colemans traitorous defection.
The civil rights establishment went to work on the media. Ultimately,
Colemans earlier endorsement of activist integration became a meme in
popular discourse, whereas his mature reassessment was ignored. In 1966,
journalists lauded Colemans first report as firm evidence for busing and
generally treated Coleman himself as a giant in his field, a social scientist
with a progressive agenda. Then, after Colemans report on White flight,
[16]

National Observer, 7 June 1975, 1.

13 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

liberal thought leaders turned hostile, questioned [Colemans] findings,

and frequently quoted critics. [17]
One of these critics was Alfred McClung Lee, the president of the American
Sociological Association. Lee used his position to denounce Coleman at a press
conference and then asked the Ethics Committee of the association to censure
Coleman. Still later, Lee asked the general membership of the organization to
condemn Coleman (which never occurred). Coleman eventually confronted his
critics at a plenary session of the association, at which the walls were plastered
with posters bearing his name, Nazi swastikas, and various epithets. For some
time thereafter, Coleman suffered through what he called a tortured period of
intellectual isolation. We should not forget, he later wrote, how strong the
consensus was at that time among social scientists that bussing was an unalloyed
benefit, and a policy not to be questioned.[18]
Despite White flight, most civil-rights activists persisted with demands for
racially balanced Integration. In 1984, Jennifer Hochschild, then a professor
at Princeton, called for democracy to give way to liberalism. Since many
middle-class parents would not voluntarily send their children to racially
balanced schools, Hochschild urged courts to insist that they do so. Quoting
John Dewey, Hochschild maintained, What the best and wisest parent wants
for his child, that must the community want for all its children. If most
Americans would not choose to have racially balanced schools, they must
permit elites to make that choice for them. James Liebman, a Columbia
[17]

New York Times, December 12, 1975, 31; Thomas F. Pettigrew and Robert L. Green, School
Desegregation in Large Cities: A Critique of Colemans White Flight Thesis, Harvard Educational
Review, 46 (February 1976), 1-53; Diane Ravitch, The Coleman Reports and American Education,
in B. Sorenson Aage and Seymour Spilerman, eds., Social Theory and Social Policy: Essays in Honor of
James S. Coleman (Westport: Praeger, 1993), 129-41.

[18]

James S. Coleman, letters to the American Sociological Association, published in ASA Footnotes,
November 1976, 4; January 1989, 4-5

14 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

professor who worked on several school-integration cases for the NAACP,

explained that one goal was to withdraw control from parents and give
children a wider range of choices about the persons with whom they might
associate and the values they might adopt as they approach adulthood.
According to Liebman, a principal purpose of busing was to deny parents
the right to send their children to schools that would reinforce the personal
features and values those parents have chosen as their own. Liebman urged
the government to protect the autonomy of children from the tyranny of
parents. The state should make sure that children were exposed to a broader
range of value options than their parents could hope to provide. According
to Liebman, family life was too often marked by exclusiveness, suspicion
and jealousy as to those without. In 2006, 563 social scientists signed a
statement that assured the Supreme Court that racially balanced integration
improved the critical thinking skills and boosted the achievement levels
of African American students. [19]
By then, however, the Court recognized that this was wishful thinking. With polite
understatement, in 2007 Chief Justice John Roberts noted that social science had
evolved, and many leading scholars had expressed doubt about whether racial
diversity in schools in fact has a marked impact on test scores . . . or achieves
intangible socialization benefits. In a landmark decision, Parents Involved v.
Seattle (2007), the Court proceeded to end court-ordered busing with a ringing
declaration that Brown meant what it said: the Constitution required public
schools to assign pupils on a racially nondiscriminatory basis. History will
be heard, Chief Justice Roberts wrote. The way to stop discrimination on the
[19]

Jennifer Hochschild, The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 129, 124, 145, vii, 203; James S. Liebman, Desegregating
Politics: All-Out School Desegregation Explained, Columbia Law Review 90 (October 1990),
1639, 1650; Liebman, Implementing Brown in the Nineties, Virginia Law Review (April 1990)
365; Brief of 553 Social Scientists, Parents Involved v. Seattle, U.S. Supreme Court, 2006, 2755-56,
2767-68; Lewis Powell, dissenting in Keyes v. School District No 1, 413 US 189 (1973).

15 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. The Roberts Court
belatedly recognized points that Justice Lewis Powell had noted back in 1973;
that many parents regarded busing for racial balance as an interference with
the concept of community and with the liberty to direct the upbringing and
education of children under their control.[20]
Meanwhile, James Coleman somehow managed to survive the criticism of his
academic peers. His standing as a sociologist remained high, and eventually
he became the president of the American Sociological Association. Accepting
an award in 1988, Coleman acknowledged that recognition by ones fellow
researchers is one of the highest honors that can be bestowed. Yet he also recalled
that it had been difficult to withstand the criticism of peers, and he lamented
that others, including some of the most original and brilliant sociologists, had
been driven to the periphery or to adjacent disciplines because the implication
of their work runs counter to the current intellectual fashion. In the academic
world, Coleman noted, the threat posed by fellow faculty members is probably
greater than that posed by the usual villains. In academia, academic freedom
had been constricted less by external pressures, from either the Right or Left, and
more by fellow scholars who were predisposed against research that challenged
the conventional wisdom of the liberal mainstream.[21]

5.
After the demise of court-ordered busing for racial balance, egalitarian
reformers believed they had no choice but to experiment with other
school reforms. Despite desegregation, equalized funding, and busing for
[20]

Parents Involved v. Seattle, 127 S.Ct. (2007) 2755-56; Lewis Powell, dissenting in Keyes v. School
District No. l, 413 US (1973).

[21]

James S. Coleman, Sins of Sensitivity: A Quiet Threat to Academic Freedom, National Review, 43,
March 18, 1991, 28-32.

16 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

racial balance, the racial and ethnic achievement gaps remained almost
as large in the 21st century as they had been in 1950. And so reformers
continued to grapple with the problem. Most grouped around one or
the other of two familiar approaches: progressivism and traditionalism.

Despite desegregation, equalized funding, and busing for

racial balance, the racial and ethnic achievement gaps
remained almost as large in the 21st century as they had
been in 1950.

For several decades, Jonathan Kozol has been the nations best-selling education
writer and one of Americas most prominent progressives. Kozols 1967 book,
Death at an Early Age, enjoyed phenomenal success, with sales eventually
amounting to more than two million copies. If one judges by the number of
times a book is cited in judicial opinions, Kozols Savage Inequalities (1991) was
even more influential. Shame of the Nation (2005) completed a major trilogy of
works that presented three progressive recommendations for improving the
education of African-Americans.[22] One was a call for taxpayers to provide still
more money for inner-city schools. As has been noted, racial equality in school
funding had become a fait accompli by the time James Coleman conducted his
research in 1965-66, but in the 1980s and 1990s, Kozol and other progressive
reformers went to court and, in a series of what were called equity and
adequacy lawsuits, persuaded some judges to require additional funding in
[22]

Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in
the Boston Public Schools (New York: Bantam Books, 1968); Savage Inequalities: Children in Americans
Schools (New York: Crown, 1991); Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in
America (New York: Crown, 2005).

17 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

communities where the state constitution assured citizens that the state would
provide an adequate public education. As Kozol explained, Equity does not
mean equal funds for unequal needs.
If we budgeted education in accord with the real needs of
children . . . inner-city children . . . would be getting considerably
more than the suburbs and possibly even more than white rural
districts. . . .
If funds were allocated according to the real needs of children
. . . New York City would get $15,000 [per pupil] a year and
Great Neck [a prosperous suburb in Long Island] could get by
on $7,000.

Kozol believed that school reform required an increase in money transfer, and
he acknowledged, When wealthy districts indicate that they see the hand of
Robin Hood in this, they are clear sighted and correct.
In some communities, equalization was accomplished through the democratic
process, but in places where communities opposed the process, courts often
stepped in and ordered that spending in disproportionately Black schools
should exceed the average for a state. Even this compensatory spending,
however, did not reduce racial and ethnic achievement gaps. In Cambridge
Massachusetts, Hartford Connecticut, Camden New Jersey, and several other
cities, there was little improvement despite the extra expenditures. In Kansas
City, Missouri, where the expenditures for Black education were especially
generous, three times as large as the expenditure per pupil in some mostly
White school districts in the state, the average test scores of Black students
actually declined.[23]
[23]

Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, No Excuses, 165; Joshua M. Dunn, Complex Justice:
The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 1, 6, 13, 126
and passim.; James E. Ryan Schools, Race, and Money, Yale Law Journal 109 (1999); Ryan, Sheff,
Segregation, and School Finance Litigation, New York Law Review 74 (May 1999), 540, 538, 533.

18 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

The second arrow in Kozols quiver aimed for busing for racial balance, but, as
noted, the Supreme Court eventually ruled against this policy.
Kozols third remedy, however, was widely implemented. It called for teachers to
have more empathy for Black students, and for curriculum planners to design
less prescriptive courses of study. Thanks in large part to Kozols influence, for
more than a generation, teachers were taught to emphasize the importance of
caring for minority students and cultivating their self-esteem.[24]
The journalist Rita Kramer emphasized this point, after spending the academic
year 1988-89 visiting schools of education throughout the United States, sitting
in on classes, talking with faculty and students, and visiting the schools where
education students did their practice teaching. Kramer found that Kozols book
(along with the works of other like-minded education writers) permeated
the ed school world. At Columbia Teachers College, the professors talked
about things like feeling, warmth, [and] empathy more than . . . about skills,
training, discipline. At one education school after another, the emphasis was
on promoting the self-confidence of students, on inculcating positive selfimages, on encouraging respect for others from all cultural backgrounds. Rather
than stress the importance of transmitting academic knowledge, the schools of
education were training teachers to work with students in egalitarian ways,
respecting diversity and integrating everyone for the future of our country.[25]
Like most progressives, Kozol also called for a less prescriptive, more joyful
curriculum. Kozol acknowledged that Black and Hispanic students should
learn essential skills. But he strongly opposed the periodic testing of students
[24]

See Wolters, The Long Crusade, 15-71.

[25]

Rita Kramer, Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of Americas Teachers (New York: The Free Press,
1991), 8. For more on this point, see John I. Goodland, A Place Called School (New York: McGrawHill, 1984

19 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

in math and reading. He recognized the need for inner-city students to catch
up with their higher-performing peers. But he complained that standardized
testing led to teaching for the test and turned schools into places not of
learning but of robot-like memorization and military style discipline. It led to
teachers becoming drill sergeants and students examination soldiers. Kozol
said he would not have opposed an emphasis on testing if this approach actually
improved the students ability to read and compute. But, he said, this emphasis
did not work except for the lowest-scoring children in a class and, even then,
the gains that they achieve sustain themselves for only a brief period of time.
These are testing gains, not learning gains. According to Kozol, the gains were
an artifact of nonstop drilling for exams.
If the gains were real, they would have persisted into high school,
but only half the youths in many inner cities ever became highschool seniors and these students were, on average, still reading
and computing, at the level of the average white seventh-grader.

When people said that direct instruction and test preparation were working, Kozol
told one reporter, they were telling a terrible lie to the parents of poor children.[26]
Kozol came in for criticism when he opposed standardized testing. Thus Whitney
Tilson, a hedge-fund manager and a leader of a group called Democrats for
Education Reform, asked,
Doesnt Kozol realize that while [standardized testing] may have
some warts and needs to be tweaked, its the best thing thats ever
happened to disadvantaged children? For the first time, school
systems can no longer sweep these children under the rug and
are FINALLY being measured, which is the first requirement of
accountability. . . .

[26]

Jonathan Kozol, quoted by Dudley Barlow, Resources for Educators, Education Digest 72 (November
2007); Kozol, quoted by Richard Halicks, School Resegregation, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (18
September 2005).

20 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Its precisely BECAUSE kids who havent had many advantages

are so far behind that testing is NECESSARY. Without testing,
how is anyone to know how far behind they are? [Without testing]
how can a hue and cry be raised, how can we get extra help for
these kids?[27]

After noting that Kozols books were still widely read in ed schools and by
activist teachers, another critic, journalist Sol Stern, opined that, to the degree
teachers subscribed to Kozols progressive views, they would limit the life
chances of inner-city children.[28]
Despite criticism, from about 1960 to 2000, most school reform gap closers
stuck to the playbook of progressive education. While acknowledging that
inner-city students needed to learn essential skills, most progressives strongly
opposed the testing that was supposed to help weak students catch up with
their higher performing peers. Instead, progressives stressed the need for schools
that exuded informality and warmth, camaraderie and playfulness. In addition,
because testing and grouping students by ability had the effect of resegregating
pupils, with Whites disproportionately being assigned to more advanced classes,
progressives insisted that the full range of students should be placed in the same
classroom. When the resulting mix included students who were reading or
computing at markedly different levels, teachers discovered that they could no
longer teach the class as a whole. Progressives then recommended that teachers
adjust to heterogeneous classes by using new methods that were recommended
as especially appropriate for integrated classroomsmethods such as peer
tutoring and cooperative learning. Progressives urged schools to turn away
from teacher-centered instruction and to embrace student-centered learning.
[27]

Whitney Tilson, My Critique of Jonathan Kozol, Whitney Tilsons School Reform Blog, March 2,
2007, accessed August 15, 2015, http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007/03/my-critique-of-jonathankozol.html.

[28]

Sol Stern, Savage Exaggerations, Education Next, 6 (Summer 2006), 6.

21 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Teachers were encouraged to eschew the role of master or mistress of ceremonies

and instead become facilitators of discovery projects that allowed individual
students to explore and to learn on their own. The ideal instructor was no longer
a sage on the stage but a guide on the side.[29]

6.
Inevitably, there was a backlash when, as with the previous reforms, progressive
approaches failed to close the racial and ethnic achievement gaps. The backlash
initially manifested itself in demands for direct instruction and a standard curriculum.

Arthur Jensen, a University of California psychologist best

known for his research on intelligence (IQ), was one of the
most prominent scholars who emphasized the importance
of direct instruction.

Arthur Jensen, a University of California psychologist best known for his research
on intelligence (IQ), was one of the most prominent scholars who emphasized
the importance of direct instruction. Writing in the Harvard Educational Review
in 1969, Jensen reported that wherever they have been tried . . . compensatory
education programs had failed to close the racial achievement gap. But Jensen
also insisted, All the basic scholastic skills can be learned by children with
normal learning ability. He further speculated that non-Asian minority children
were lagging because their schools were using progressive approaches that stressed
the importance of understanding and conceptual learning. Jensen said that
[29]

Abigail Thernstrom, Lessons Not Learned, Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2005; Wolters, The
Long Crusade, 15-81.

22 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

a disproportionate number of Black students were not advancing because their

teachers were using methods that were at odds with the genetic and cultural
heritage of African-Americans. According to Jensen, children with low IQs and
children who were disadvantaged in terms of cultural background or
socioeconomic circumstances had different . . . modes of learning.
If diversity of mental abilities, as of most other human
characteristics, is a basic fact of nature . . . it seems a reasonable
conclusion that schools and society must provide a range and
diversity of educational methods. . . . The ideal of equality of
educational opportunity should not be interpreted as uniformity
of . . . instructional techniques. . . . Diversity rather than uniformity
of approaches . . . would seem to be the key to making education
rewarding for children of different patterns of ability.[30]

Without acknowledging indebtedness to Jensen, several influential school

reformers picked up on this theme. One was Robert Slavin, a Johns Hopkins
psychologist who established a widely-adopted program called Success For
All (SFA). In some ways, Slavin was a progressive. But when it came to the
best method for teaching reading, Slavin rejected the conventional wisdom
of progressive education. For decades, educators had debated whether it was
better to present information and teach skills directly or to allow children to
discover them on their own. Most progressives preferred non-directive, studentcentered teaching methods that allowed children to learn at their own pace, with
teachers acting as facilitators, as guides rather than as authoritative instructors.
Progressives stressed the importance of exposing students to interesting stories,
saying that if the students interests were engaged they would become enthusiastic
about school and would automatically learn how to read. Progressives opposed
memorization and drill, which they said would stifle students budding interests
and cause them to emotionally reject school. Traditionalists, on the other hand,
[30]

Arthur R. Jensen, How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? Harvard Educational
Review, 3 (June 1969), 116-117.

23 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

emphasized the importance of phonics and the need for students to sound
out words by memorizing the sounds of letters and combinations of letters.
Traditionalists, in addition, accused progressives of having a romantic view of
learning, one that was imbued with love and hope but, sadly, left many children
uncomprehending, without the ability to read.[31]
In 1986 Baltimores superintendent of schools asked Slavin to design a program
for disadvantaged elementary school students. Slavin then reviewed the literature
on reading and discovered that a gulf separated the conventional wisdom of
progressives from that of researchers. Progressivism was the fashion in most
schools of education, but Slavin reported that the best research was crystal clear
that phonics was more effective. Study after study found that children who
struggled in reading had to be taught a phonetic, systematic strategy for unlocking
the reading code. Some children admittedly learned to read without phonics,
but Slavin concluded that no group of children had been harmed by phonics,
whereas a large group of children was harmed by the lack of phonics.[32]
So it was also, Slavin concluded, with other subjects. If disadvantaged students
were to learn, they had to be taught systematically. To this end, Slavins SFA
provided teachers with highly scripted lesson plans that prescribed what to do
during almost every minute of a class period. One headline in the New York Times
described SFA as Teaching By the Book; another in the Wall Street Journal
declared, Now Johnny Can Read if Teacher Just Keeps Doing What Hes Told.
Many progressives were appalled. Highly scripted lessons dont just handcuff
teachers, complained education writer Alfie Kohn. They cheat students . . .
by substituting a diet of isolated skills for the thoughtful exploration of ideas.
Creativity is being stifled, declared education professor Bob Nathanson, who
[31]

For more on Robert Slavin and Success for All, see Raymond Wolters, The Long Crusade, 213-239.

[32]

Robert Slavin, interview with Hedrick Smith (PBS: Hedrick Smith Productions, September 2005).

24 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

opposed programs that focused too narrowly on the basics and treated teachers
like robots. A trained monkey could do [SFA], said Janice Ault, the president
of the North Sacramento Education Association.[33]
Many school administrators nevertheless defended SFA. Some critics . . .
will say, Oh my God, youre lobotomizing teachers, said Paul Vallas, who at
different times headed the public school systems in Chicago, Philadelphia, and
New Orleans. No. What were saying is, What every successful corporation
is doing, what the military is doing, is giving teachers a model of quality
instruction and curriculum. Instead of everyone trying to figure out their
own way in the classroom, which is the way schools used to work, explained
Judith Rizzo, the deputy chancellor for instruction in New York City, new
teachers in particular need a very clearly defined program. Several federal
judges agreed. When handing down decisions in the equity and adequacy
lawsuits mentioned above, one judge after another ordered entire statesNew
Jersey, Texas, and othersto adopt the SFA program. And in 2010, when the
Department of Education chose just four groups from among 1,600 applicants
in the competition for scale up awards worth $50 million each, Success for All
was one of the four. SFA received these endorsements because many judges and
government bureaucrats believed that Robert Slavins direct instruction program
was doing better than rival approaches when it came to teaching elementary
school students.[34]
When it came to the importance of having a standard curriculum, however, E. D.
Hirsch received even more publicity than Robert Slavin. A professor of English
at the University of Virginia and the author of a best-selling book, Cultural
[33]

New York Times, May 23, 2001, May 29, 2001; Wall Street Journal, July 19, 1999; Sarah Colt,
Scripted Lessons, appendix to Robert Slavin, interview with Hedrick Smith.

[34]

New York Times, November 26, 1999, May 23, 2001; Michele McNeil, Applicants Win Grants,
Education Week, August 4, 2010).

25 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Literacy (1987), Hirsch emphasized the importance of what he called core

knowledge. He noted that most cultures focused on basic acculturation until
youths reached an age of about thirteen. At that age Catholics were confirmed,
Jews bar or bat mitzvahed, and tribal boys and girls underwent the rites of
passage into the tribe.[35]
Similarly, according to Hirsch, familiarity with certain information was
also taken for granted in Americas upper spheres, where those who lacked
core knowledge did not seem to belong. That was the way things were, and
Hirsch wanted to make sure that students from disadvantaged backgrounds
had the opportunity to learn what was expected and needed to get ahead.
Thus, as Hirsch saw it, the job of elementary and junior high schools was to
transmit the basic information needed to thrive in a society, which in practice
meant the transmission to children of the specific information shared by the
adults. Upper-class White youths often picked up the requisite information
automatically, because they lived in families that were disproportionately
well-to-do and intact. But Black and Latino youths, and many working- and
middle-class Whites as well, were less likely to acquire the core knowledge
because their family lives were disproportionately disadvantaged, disorganized,
or parochial. To address this situation, Hirsch established a Core Knowledge
Foundation that produced a packaged plan that specified how teachers and
students should spend about 50 percent of their time. By 2010 some 1,184
schools used all or part of what was called the Core Knowledge Curriculum. The
curriculum focused on the elementary grades and emphasized the importance
of giving students the basic knowledge that was needed as a foundation for
more advanced learning.[36]
[35]

E. D. Hirsch, Core Literacy (Boston: Houghton Miflin Company, 1987), 18, 30, xiii, xvi.

[36]

For more on Hirsch, see Raymond Wolters, The Long Crusade, 241-279.

26 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Progressives criticized Hirschs approach, but Hirsch returned fire. According to

Hirsch, it was a tragic paradox that the Brown decision which desegregated our
schools was handed down in 1954, shortly before progressive educators finally
succeeded in abolishing the emphasis on traditional academic content in the early
grades. As Hirsch saw it, during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, children were being
integrated into schools where the traditional lore necessary to communication
and full participation in our society were very inconsistently taught.
In the wake of the Brown decision, at the very moment of our
highest hopes for social justice, the victory of progressivism over
academic content had already foreclosed the chance that school
integration would equalize achievement and enhance social
justice.

Progressives dominated American public education, and they precipitated a

social misfortune.[37]
During the 1970s and 1980s, when busing for racial balance was in vogue,
and when direct instruction and traditional curricula were regaining popularity,
there was some progress in narrowing the racial achievement gap. But it is
hard to know why. Some observers credited busing for the trend. But critics
of that policy noted that the trend in academic achievement was similar for
all Black students, regardless of whether they were attending schools that were
mostly White or entirely Black. Since the test scores of Black students in racially
concentrated inner-city schools improved as much as those of Blacks who were
attending integrated schools, sociologist David Armor wrote, school integration
was unlikely to have contributed significantly to national black achievement
gains. Critics also noted that when SFA was used, the gains were limited to
students in the early grades of elementary school. Meanwhile, students in Core
[37]

E. D. Hirsch, Why Core Knowledge Promotes Social Justice, Common Knowledge, 12 (1999);
Hirsch, The Making of Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 20009), 138; Hirsch, Not So
Grand a Strategy, Education Next 68 (Spring 2003).

27 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

Knowledge schools did well on standardized tests, but these students were not a
representative sample, for they were disproportionately the children of parents
who cared about education. In any case, during the 1990s the racial gap widened
again and, as had been the case with the achievement gains, the retrogression
occurred among both integrated and concentrated Black students. In 2000 the
racial achievement gap was almost as wide as it had been in 1950.[38]

7.
Despite repeated failures, school reformers did not give up. During the 1990s
and into the 21st century yet more reform movements came to the fore. One
of the most celebrated was Teach for America (TFA), an organization that
was established by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp. TFA was organized
around the idea that the racial and ethnic achievement gaps could be closed
if the nations public schools recruited more teachers who had high grades,
high IQs, high SAT scores, and a fervent commitment to racial uplift.

TFA was organized around the idea that the racial and ethnic
achievement gaps could be closed if the nations public schools
recruited more teachers who had high grades, high IQs, high
SAT scores, and a fervent commitment to racial uplift.

TFA maintained that the test scores of poor Black and Latino students could be
improved substantially, but only if their teachers went beyond presenting
[38]

David J. Armor, Forced Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 96; Richard L. Venezky,
An Alternative Perspective on Success for All, Advances in Educational Policy, 4 (1995).

28 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

information clearly and also were especially bright people who invested students
with the proper goals and attitudes.[39]
With substantial backing from corporate donors, TFA preached this message so
effectively that by 2010, about 12 percent of all Ivy League graduates applied
to serve a two-year stint with TFA. In terms of closing the achievement gaps,
however, the overall results were disappointing. Millions of dollars were allocated
for studies that compared the test scores of students who were taught by TFA
recruits and the test scores of students taught by regular teachers. The results were
ambiguous. Some studies reported that the TFAs students did a little better, and
some studies reported the opposite. In either case, the differences were small.
In a 2009 speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, Wendy Kopp
acknowledged, If you look at the data on the aggregate level, the achievement
gap has not closed at all in the last twenty years.[40]
One TFA spin-off, however, enjoyed considerable success. Founded by TFA
alumni Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP)
emphasized the importance of a traditional curriculum, a longer school day, and
preparation for standardized tests. KIPP also developed an innovative system
of rewards and punishments that simultaneously fostered a positive attitude
toward school work and an understanding that bad behavior would not be
tolerated. KIPPs students regularly scored above the level registered by other
students with similar racial and socio-economic backgrounds, although this still
left some disparity between the achievement of KIPPs students and the national
averages for White and Asian students.

[39]
[40]

For more on Teach for America, see Wolters, The Long Crusade, 283-330.
Wendy Kopp, A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesnt in Providing an Excellent
Education for All (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), 6; Kopp, quoted by Dana Goldstein, Does
Teach for America Work? TheDailyBeast, January 25, 2011, accessed August 15, 2015, http://www.
thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/25/wendy-kopp-on-her-new-book-and-teach-for-americasrecord.html.

29 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

The KIPP academies, however, were not typical schools. Feinberg and Levin
understood that a few disruptive students could destroy the education of all
the other children in a class. Therefore, the KIPP academies were open only
to students who observed KIPPs strict disciplinary policies. And there was
more. To attend a KIPP academy, students had to accept a longer school day
and year, and their parents had to agree to check their childrens homework
every night and to make sure that their children followed the KIPP dress code.
By 2013, KIPP enrolled about 50,000 students in 141 schools, almost all of
which were elementary or middle schools. It was not likely that KIPP would be
brought to a much larger scale, but KIPP did offer a superior education for the
students it enrolled. Some of the success, however, should be attributed to the
unrepresentative nature of KIPPs students and parents.[41]
When TFA began, Wendy Kopp said underachieving minority students
would do better if they had outstanding teachers. KIPP did the same. Then,
during the first decade of the 21st century, the emphasis in school reform
shifted. Instead of praising special teachers, reformers increasingly attributed
the achievement gaps to schools that were bad because bad teachers unions
supposedly made it difficult for schools to fire bad teachers. In time, the bad
unions, bad teachers, bad schools idea (what pundit Steve Sailer called the
Three Bads Theory) became the conventional wisdom among an influential
group of school reformers who believed that choice and accountability
could close the gaps. In some quarters, these reformers were called corporate
reformers, because much of their work was subsidized by billionaire boys
such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Jack Welch.[42]

[41]

For more on KIPP, see Jay Mathews, Work Hard, Be Nice (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2009) and
Wolters, The Long Crusade, 334-364.

[42]

Steve Sailer, Guggenheims Waiting for Superman is Shoddy Filmmaking at Best, Takis Magazine,
September 27, 2010, accessed August 15, 2015, http://takimag.com/article/guggenheims_waiting_
for_superman_is_shoddy_filmmaking_at_best2/print. For more on corporate reform, see Wolters,
The Long Crusade, 355-511.

30 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

By choice, the corporate reformers meant increasing the number of publicly

funded charter schools that would provide able and industrious students with
an alternative to regular neighborhood public schools. By accountability, they
meant using standardized tests to measure the achievement of students and
also for rating and paying teachers according to how well their students did on
standardized tests. As explained in one report from the Brookings Institution,
teachers should be rewarded or punished according the value they added
to their students. Instead of increasing the salaries of teachers as they gained
seniority or earned advanced degreeswhich was the policy in most school
districtscorporate reformers and some academic reformers proposed a twostep program. First, they would create data systems that could track the teachers.
Then, they would dismiss teachers whose students scored in the bottom 25
percent on standardized tests. They would keep only those teachers who could
demonstrate success on the job by increasing the scores their students made on
standardized tests. In this way, schools supposedly would have a staff of great
teachers because all the bad teachers would be gone. This approach came to be
known as the value-added model (VAM) for assessing teachers.[43]
In its Race to the Top Program, the administration of President Barack Obama
used federal funding to promote the VAM method. But the teachers unions were
opposed, as were many students and parents who complained about excessive
testing and a loss of local control over education. Some skeptics even questioned
the motives of the reformers. They said that well-to-do philanthropists had
embraced VAM because, as Bill Gates once explained, VAM tacitly challenged
the myth that we have to solve poverty before we improve education. . . .
Its more the other way around: Improving education is the best way to solve
poverty. VAMs critics interpreted this to mean that corporate reformers thought
[43]

Steve Sailer, Guggenheims Waiting for Superman is Shoddy Filmmaking at Best; Robert Gordon,
Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger, Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job
(Washington: The Brookings Institution, 2006).

31 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

there was no need for higher taxes to allow more spending for education. For
VAM reformers, firing bad teachers was the key to closing the racial and ethnic
achievement gaps. VAM reformers had no fixed opinions about the curriculum
or teaching methods, but they recommended bonuses for teachers whose Black
and Latino students performed well on standardized tests. And they insisted
that many other teachers, those whose students continued to lag on the tests,
should be fired.[44]
Some school superintendents did their best to implement the philosophy of the
VAM model. One of these reformers, Whitney Tilson, candidly explained the
rationale. According to Tilson, every study shows that teacher quality matters
far more than anything else when it comes to student learning and achievement.
The key factor responsible for racial and ethnic achievement gaps was that
most poor kids are forced to attend mediocre to catastrophically bad schools and
are taught by way too many mediocre to catastrophically bad teachers. The
problem is not too many bad kids, its too many bad schools. The solution is to
fire bad teachers.[45]
At first the evidence from the 2009 Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA) seemed to support an indictment of Americas schools. In
this international comparison, the average scores of American students were in
the middle rangebehind the scores registered in Northeast Asia and Western
Europe but ahead of the scores in most of the rest of the world. MSNBC
reported that students in the United States were trailing behind their peers in
a pack of higher performing nations. . . . Out of 34 countries assessed, the U.S.
[44]

Bill Gates, quoted by Steven Brill, Class Warfare (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 348; Gates,
quoted in Wilmington News Journal , July 29, 2011.

[45]

Whitney Tilson, Improve education, fire bad teachers, Whitney Tilsons School Reform Blog, March
29, 2010, accessed August 15, 2015, http://edreform.blogspot.com/2010/03/improve-educationfire-bad-teachers.html.

32 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, 25th in math. And school reformers
then spread an alarm. Chester Finn characterized the release of the PISA scores
in 2010 as another Sputnik moment. Sixty-three years [ago] . . . Sputnik
caused an earthquake in American education by giving us reason to believe
that the Soviet Union had surpassed us. And now PISA allegedly showed
that other nations were bent on surpassing us . . . in education. President
Obama concurred, saying, Our generations Sputnik moment is back.[46]

President Obama concurred, saying, Our generations

Sputnik moment is back.

But this point of view came under attack when statisticians disaggregated the test
scores. In turned out that, when the PISA scores were broken down by race and
ethnicity, and when American students were compared with students in the
countries from which the Americans ancestors came, Asian-Americans outperformed
the students in all Asian nations; White Americans did better than students from
all 37 predominantly White nations (except Finland); U.S. Hispanics scored higher
than the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the
PISA tests; and Black Americans outperformed the only Black country that
participated, Trinidad and Tobago, and probably would have outscored any subSaharan African country if any had participated in the PISA testing.[47]

[46]

[47]

Christine Armario, Wake-up Call: U.S. Students Trail Global Leaders, MSNBC.com, December
7, 2010; Chester Finn, A Sputnik Moment for U.S. Education, Wall Street Journal, December 8,
2010; Barack Obama, quoted by Sam Dillon, Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators, New
York Times, December 7, 2010.
For more on the PISA tests, see Wolters, The Long Crusade, 428-437.

33 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

The results of the PISA testing precipitated a schism in the ranks of the corporate
reformers. Some continued to say that all would be well if bad teachers were
weeded out and good teachers were rewarded with extra pay. But thanks to PISA,
others sensed that American teachers and schools were not doing a bad job. This,
however, did not lead reformers to give up on their cause; instead, many came to
think that the problem with school reforms was that they came too late to make
much difference. Persistent reformers emphasized a point that skeptics had long
noted: that at the age of 5 or 6, when most students began kindergarten or first
grade, the average Black student already scored below 85 percent of the Whites,
and the proportion of the African-Americans scoring below the White median
hardly budged over the course of the next 12 years. Taking this into account,
some reformers ceased blaming teachers and instead shifted their emphasis to
early childhood education and to reforming the quality of parenting in Black
and Hispanic families. They said Black and Hispanic children were victims of
dysfunctional family environments. They said ethnic and racial achievement
gaps could be closed if reformers could teach non-Asian minority parents how to
interact with their 2-, 3-, and 4-year- olds. This, indeed, has become the prevailing
wisdom among reformers as of this writing (summer 2015). One observer, Robert
Weissberg, likened this new emphasis on early childhood education to what he
called the gamblers fallacy; this is the phenomenon that some gamblers, after
having repeatedly lost on wagers, mistakenly believe they are due for a success
that will wipe out all previous losses. So it seems with desperate gap closers.
Despite the failure of so many previous school reforms, they refuse to concede the
futility of their enterprise. Instead, they say that racial and ethnic achievement gaps
will be closed if Black and Latino children are liberated from their dysfunctional
family environments.[48]
[48]

For more on this, see Wolters, The Long Crusade, 437-467; Paul Tough, How Children Succeed
(Boston: Houghton Miflin, 2012); and Wolters, The Return of the Inadequate Black Mother,
American Renaissance, November 21, 2014, accessed August 15, 2015, http://www.amren.com/
features/2014/11/the-return-of-the-inadequate-black-mother/.

34 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

8.
Questions arise. Why do most reformers persist despite so many failures? Why
do they continue to devise one nostrum after another? Why have they ignored
the importance of IQ? Why do they persist in the face of Darwinian theory and
biological and genetic evidence that points to the inevitability of achievement
gaps? For many years after publication of Origin of the Species (1859), increasing
numbers of educated Europeans and Americans believed that racial differences
were the result of evolutionary adaptations; that mankind separated into several
parts in the distant past, with one part inhabiting the ancestral homeland in subSaharan Africa and other groups crossing into Southwest Asia and then separating
again and again until there were human populations living in reproductive
isolation from one another in almost all regions of the world. This continued
for hundreds of generations and, over time, there were numerous adaptations to
differing climates and conditions. Opinions differed as to the full extent of these
adaptations, but no one doubted that they went beyond changes in skin color.
They include differences in musculature and brain size and different sequences
in genes that influence behavior, intelligence, and personality. Earlier generations
understood that nature was not stupid. They knew that different groups had
developed different aptitudes that were suited to their respective environments.
Yet this traditional wisdom was forgotten when the civil-rights movement
transformed America. By the time this writer attended college in the 1950s,
most social scientists affirmed that culture was more influential than
genes or race in determining the behavior of individuals or groups; that
opportunities were more important than biology. In the 1950s and 1960s,
after Brown v. Board of Education and after the Civil Rights Act, culturists
became dominant in shaping public policy, while biologians were consigned
to laboratories, where they were expected to work on discrete problems but
not to probe into biological explanations of human differences. In 1956, one

35 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

of my favorite professors at the University of California, Kenneth M. Stampp,

summed up the then-prevailing view in memorable language: Negroes
are after all only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.
Professor Stampp and most other professors of his time subscribed to what is
now called The Doctrine of Zero Group Differences (DZGD). This is the idea
that all important aptitudes are distributed equally among all large groups
of people, and the complementary idea that if a sizeable group is under- or
over-represented in any important way, the disparity is not due to inherent
traits but to discrimination or privilege, or perhaps to the accidents of history,
climate, geography, or culture. Since the 1950s, the great majority of scholars
in the relevant fields have either maintained silence or have openly rejected
the idea that Darwinian evolution endowed different groups with different
distributions of aptitude and ability. Instead, they have demanded an end to
policies that have a disparate negative impact on non-White groups.
History is rife with false beliefs that are deeply held despite strong evidence to the
contrary. Sometimes false beliefs are held even if they are at odds with common
sense. My father, who fought in the First World War, and my paternal grandfather,
who farmed virgin land in Kansas, were not disciples of Charles Darwin. But
they believed that racial differences were obvious and consequential. They
disapproved of bigots and told me to treat everyone respectfully. But they also
knew there was a difference between equality of opportunity for individuals and
equality of results for groups. They sensed something that has become ever more
apparent with the passage of time: that the different races of mankind inherently
differ statistically in the distribution of certain traits. My own generation was
taught the opposite; that any statistical differences are the result of privilege,
discrimination, or lack of opportunity. But what about my grandchildren and
their progeny? What will they think? Its hard to know. My hope is that they will
become acquainted with modern research in the social and genetic sciences. If

36 | RAYMOND WOLTERSWHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED

they do, they will understand that social reform that attempts to usurp human
nature will inevitably fail. They will understand why one reform after another
has failed to close the racial and ethnic gaps in academic achievement. They
will understand that the United States of my time was in the grip of what John
Derbyshire has called a collective delusion. And when they understand all
that, the opinions of my grandchildren and great grandchildren will resemble
those of my father and grandfather more closely than those that have prevailed
in the United States since the 1950s.

RAYMOND WOLTERS
is the Thomas Muncy Keith Professor of History Emeritus at the
University of Delaware. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri,
in 1938 and educated at St. Francis
High School near Pasadena, California, at Stanford University,
and at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1965, he joined
the faculty of the Department of History at the University
of Delaware, where he taught American history for 49 years.
Wolters is the author of seven books that deal with various aspects
of American race relations: Negroes and the Great Depression
(1970), The New Negro on Campus (1975), The Burden of Brown
(1984), Right Turn (1996), Du Bois and His Rivals (2002), and
Race and Education, 1954-2007 (2009). He has also published
essays, articles, and reviews of more than one hundred volumes.