it is hard to sum it up. two words, buy i

A visit to www.georgewbush.com in January of 2001 indicated that the newly elected President believes that the reform of K-12 public education is the number one issue that confronts the United States as it enters the 21st Century. As noted at his web site, the reforms that the President intends to pursue will be designed to: (1) achieve equality in performance of disadvantaged students, (2) promote excellence through the pursuit of measurable goals, (3) stop funding failures, (4) restore local control, (5) provide parents with greater information and options, and (6) ensure that every child can read. Readers of this journal, as well as most of the public, would not quibble with these desired goals. The difficulty, of course, is in choosing the appropriate public policy path to achieve them. Well, Mr. President (as well as state-based policymakers interested in public school reform), in your quest to find this path, I have just the book for you.

As part of Goals 2000, passed in 1994, the U.S. Congress declared that "all students can learn and achieve to high standards and must realize their full potential if the United States is to prosper." As a follow up to this declaration, a later appropriations bill called for a study of K-12 public school finance by the National Academy of Sciences. A committee on education finance was established (which consisted of the top education and economic researchers in the field) and the key question posed to them was "How can education finance systems be designed to ensure that all students achieve high levels of learning and that education funds are raised and used in the most efficient and effective manner possible?" The not so simple answers are in the committee's report.

Since the 1966 publication of the Coleman Report, researchers have continually reexamined the report's controversial finding that after controlling for socioeconomic factors, variation in school resources does little to explain differences in student achievement. After examining the over 30 years of research that has followed this report, the committee on education finance that authored this study argues that money can and must be made to matter if the United States is to improve achievement in public schools for all students. A theme that emerges early in this work, and continues throughout, is the concept of funding adequacy. Adequacy in public school finance focuses not on the equality of per-capita expenditure, but on the sufficiency of funding for desired outcomes. Though the committee admits that applying an adequacy standard to school finance is an art, they argue forcefully throughout their report that it is part of the policy path that will yield the public education outcomes desired by the U.S. Congress in 1994 and by the President in 2001.

But, also in tune with popular perceptions, much of the book is devoted to documenting that making money matter requires more than just adequate funding. Explored are the often-suggested reforms of investing in the capacity of the education system, altering incentives, and empowering parents and schools to ensure that performance matters when officials make decisions about the use of adequate public school funds. Unfortunately, like many observers, the committee concludes that the challenges facing schools with a large percentage of disadvantages are particularly troubling and research offers few answers about how to improve educational opportunities for these youngsters.

Making Money Matter is written in a manner that makes it accessible and interesting to both policymakers and seasoned researchers. In Part I, the book begins with a brief overview of the charge to the committee, the shifting expectations placed upon public schools in the last half-century, and the real diversity that characterizes the existing system of governance and finance for public education in the United States. Given this backdrop, the committee lists the three goals they settled upon as a basis for their study: (1) a higher level of achievement in a cost-efficient manner, (2) breaking the nexus between student background and achievement, (3) raising revenue fairly and efficiently.

To better craft policy strategies to reach these goals, Part II of the book looks at fairness and productivity in school finance. Equity is first examined in terms of the struggle to reduce per-pupil-spending disparities through the courts. Next, they devote a chapter to examining the recent shift toward adequacy as the more desired goal of school finance reform, the technical challenges of implementing it, and the lukewarm response that state finance systems have given it. This study then examines the body of evidence on what improves the academic achievement of students. Concise, but thorough literature reviews are offered on the findings of regression based input-output studies, effective educational practice studies, and the institutional perspective.

In Part III, the committee assembled by the National Academy of Sciences offers specific strategies to achieve each of the three goals identified earlier. Better than just proposing a grand vision of overall reform, the committee chooses to summarize many feasible strategies, sites the relevant academic evidence on their viability, and then offers consensus opinions on the "best" strategies to pursue. Researchers should be interested in these consensus opinions because of the insight they offer regarding what a renowned group of economists, education specialists, psychologists, lawyers, and administrators jointly evaluate as the policy relevant implications that flow from the extensive body of research on this topic. Policymakers should pay particular attention to the suggested strategies because the consensus that formed them would also assist in building the political coalitions necessary to implement them.

Examples of a few of the suggested strategies to emerge from this book are that investing in the capacity of teachers is necessary and will be more effective if it is combined with a change in incentives that make performance count; charter schools and vouchers, rather than interdistrict or intradistrict choice programs, are the options most worthy of exploring for poor-performing city schools; and increasing adequacy and fairness in public school finance will require a greater revenue raising role for states and the federal government. On an optimistic note, the book concludes that most of the current challenges in public education can be met if the wealth of knowledge produced in this area is drawn upon. My hope is the appropriate people know of this valuable book and do exactly that.

As review of New Zealand's important public school choice program, the Fiske-Ladd book is a must-read, and indeed a "cautionary tale." Unfortunately, Fiske and Ladd squandered an opportunity to make an even larger contribution to discussions of public school choice by imagining that competition arises when families can choose which government-owned and operated facility to enroll their children in. They spin their facts into an imaginary tale even though their thorough research and meticulous reporting makes it quite clear that none of the conditions that prevail in a market exist in New Zealand's school system. There are no prices or profits. Unpopular schools are not closed or reconstituted into clones of the over-crowded, popular schools. The government won't expand or duplicate popular schools while unpopular schools have unused capacity. Instead the New Zealand central government has reacted to the waiting lists at some of the popular schools by re-imposing attendance areas on a limited basis. It means they force some families to enroll their children in a school they had hoped to escape. Again, unlike a market, parents' enrollment choices are not the only determinant of each school's share of government funding. That further mutes the limited rivalry for students possible within a government-controlled system. New Zealand schools cannot differentiate themselves to nearly the extent that independently owned schools would do in a true market system. The central government mandates a core curriculum, and political pressures limit remaining opportunities to specialize. The effects of public school choice we are supposed to be cautious about are not the result of competition, but, instead, are the result of its absence. Sadly, the Fiske-Ladd mistake of imagining the presence of competition and market forces where they do not exist is a common assualt on the integrity of the public debate of K-12 reform options. Editorials in the Wall Street Journal and Education Week have already mistakenly cited the Fiske-Ladd book to bolster a claim that competition has limited benefits and noteworthy costs. That may be so, but the Fiske-Ladd findings are not evidence for the effects of anything but the effects of open enrollment within a government education monopoly.

Few issues in public education are guaranteed to provoke the kind of emotional response as vouchers. Yet despite the fervent arguments made by both sides in the debate, no hard evidence was available to judge the validity of their claims. That has all changed with the publication of "When Schools Compete" by Edward B. Fiske and Helen F. Ladd.
The authors present a probing and comprehensive report of New Zealand's experiment with vouchers, which stands as the definitive study of the subject. It's a compelling story, with far-reaching implications for this country. Fiske and Ladd make the events that took place in that faraway land come alive through a combination of exhaustive research and brisk writing.
In the early 1990s, New Zealand granted all public schools complete operational autonomy and abolished attendance zones. Parents were free to choose any school, including parochial schools. Vouchers followed students to their school of choice. In one fell swoop, the government created the kind of educational free marketplace that supporters assert will improve schools.
What happened,however,was contrary to expectations. The best schools quickly filled up. Hard-to-teach students, disproportionately poor and minority, were turned away and were effectively forced to return to their schools of origin. These schools became significantly more polarized along ethnic and socioeconomic lines than before. Realizing that its grand experiment was not working, New Zealand began to pull back in the late 1990s. The country is still trying to recover from the fiasco it created.
While New Zealand is not the U.S., it shares many values, customs and traditions, including a common language. Moreover, it has a sizable number of minorities in the form of Maoris and Pacific Islanders, many of whom live in the inner cities.
Fiske and Ladd's groundbreaking book should be required reading for everyone interested in education. Given the emotional issues involved, however, that isn't likely to happen. The losers in all of this,unfortunately, will be those students most in need.

Walt Gardner
Los Angeles CA

Walt Gardner, who taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District, writes often on education.