Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America's Public Schools

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books on education reform. Few are as important as this. Hanushek and Lindseth get to the bottom of the dysfunctional public school finance system and expose the damage that a quarter century of equity suits has brought about. The chapter on the consequences of equal protection law suits is particularly important. It is first class scholarship and makes a great new contribution to knowledge.

Hanusheck and Lindseth ask a very interesting question. Suppose you could go back in time to 1960 and offer educators the following deal: we will quadruple your per-capita, inflation-adjusted budget for education. We will also make sure that schools with large minority populations receive equal funding. But once we do this you will have to accept personal responsibility for the state of American schools. You may not continue to blame a lack of funds or other factors beyond your school. The authors speculate that educators would jump at the deal and I agree. Fifty years later the public has kept up their end of the bargain but educators have not taken responsibility for the dismal state of education. The central theme of this book is that the public has to make educators take responsibility. The teachers unions are too powerful of an entrenched special interest to budge. They offer numerous suggestions based around supplying public oversight. They defend No Child Left Behind. They show that states already had a trend towards providing oversight prior to the law, and those states which had real consequences for bad schools produced the best results. The early results of NCLB showed small improvements in school quality. They also criticize the movement towards smaller classes. They point out that support for small classes is largely based on the Tennessee STAR study and it was poorly designed. Hundreds of other studies on class size disagree. California has moved to smaller classes but education has not improved as a result. In fact, it may have gotten worse, at least for the poor. The movement towards smaller classes meant that schools had to hire extra teachers. Experienced teachers left inner-city schools for the suburbs. Moreover, even if you accept the research in favor of smaller classes it is perhaps the most inefficient use of educational dollars imaginable. Merit pay for teachers is a much better use of funds, but the teachers unions staunchly oppose it. They also oppose firing poor teachers (where else in education can you get lifetime tenure after three years?). Here they produce what I think is the most horrifying statistic in the book: the worst 5% of teachers only give their students two-thirds of a grade's worth of improvement each year. Simply firing these teachers would improve the United States education system to the point where it is comparable to Canada and Europe. The authors also point out that a running theme for nations with good educational systems is that they do not allow bad teachers to remain teaching for long. Readers might also like No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. It makes the case that blacks do poorly in education because of a culture that does not properly value education, and not a lack of resources. The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them is also good. It documents the need for a "back to basics" approach based on core knowledge.

The book Schoolhouses... is not an exercise in cheerleading for one of the many partisan agendas in the national debate over reforming and improving American public education. Instead, it is a dispassionate and widely inclusive assembly of fact and research, which informs that debate more fully by far than any of the numerous advocates who do carry an agenda. As a one-time senior educator and current worrier about the future of my grandchildren and their peers, I find this the most informative and specifically constructive book, or source of any kind, I have yet encountered. We have here facts from areas often overlooked but directly pertinent. "Fixing" our public education has been going on for several decades, so Hanushek and Lindseth are able to consider the results of policies set by political leaderships, by legislators and by judicial fiats. Lessons, both positive and negative, abound and are described. Despite the public flurry over the years, however, the authors lament the paucity of detailed data that reveal what is happening with the growth of each child's intellectual strengths in the classroom. The data that do exist are sufficient to show that all the efforts taken, funds spent, and angst over education have brought us little or no improvement. And the authors make a persuasive case for predicting the impact on our economy and its future growth. Meanwhile, as the US has flatlined the quality of our children's education and therefore their future for many decades, the majority of the industrialized world has passed us up. The evidence assembled by Hanushek and Lindseth points a clear route out of stagnation. By page 218, we are led to "Guiding Principles: Back to Basics", a set of actions based on knowing what happens in each classroom to each student. Every reviewer is obliged to include a telling quote. This is mine: after setting out their "Guiding Principles", the authors write "The proverbial Martian...presented with this list might say, `And you had to write a book about this?' Our answer: `Unfortunately, yes.' " The authors go on to say, "...the historic response has been `Yes, we see the logic in the arguments, but it really is hard.' Thus, it has been much easier to keep the general structure of current policy and finance and concentrate efforts on deepening and reinforcing existing incentives and operations. Easier, but mostly ineffective." Schoolhouses... should be open on the desk - not the shelf - of every individual who has a role in and seeks to improve any slice of American public education, small or large. Brad Hosmer

Puts to rest all the myths about how to fix K-12 public education in this country. He won't gain any friends among the teacher's unions and the under-achieveing teachers. If this was mandatory reading for the parents of young children, the crisis in public education would be solved.

This book is a very thoughtful and detailed analysis of the nation's school funding woes. In addition to offering a compelling critique of the manner in which educational dollars have been unthinkly pumped into the educational system (with scant attention to the return on investment), the authors lay out suggested reforms that could help us get more bang for our collective buck.