Comment by David L. Kirp
[Goals 2000 and the Standards Movement]
For more than thirty years, the idea of a national education strategy has been bruited by academics and public officials. Yet, while Washington has reshaped specific policy domains--the education of the handicapped is one example, racial discrimination another--no overall strategy has been adopted. Goals 2000, the major education initiative of the first Clinton administration, was meant to change that. [End Page 208]
Robert B. Schwartz and Marian A. Robinson conclude that this effort has been a real, albeit mixed, success. My reading of the evidence, including the material the paper presents, is more pessimistic. Strategy, even something akin to systemic reform, may exist in certain instances, and standards are a critical component of that strategy. But it is at the state, not the federal, level that the push for standards, as part of a larger vision of change, was initiated in the 1980s; and it is at the state, not the federal, level that the movement has blossomed.
The current federal undertaking has spawned too many diverse programs with too little coherence to be characterized as a strategy. Far from embodying the New Deal or the Great Society redux, Goals 2000 is simply another example of the varieties of state initiative-taking--what Louis Brandeis called the laboratories of democracy in action. The kindest reading of the Goals 2000 story is that Washington has been a cheerleader, occasionally a booster, in this effort. A less charitable view would treat the doings inside the Beltway as essentially irrelevant.
The idea of systemic reform, first put in place by Bill Honig in California and later fleshed out in a series of influential articles by Marshall S. Smith and Jennifer O'Day, represented a radical departure from the conventional education policy wisdom. The received view, developed by Charles E. Lindblom and Herbert Simon, among others, holds that change is almost invariably incremental in character: Policymakers do not optimize, they satisfy.46 By contrast, systemic reform is far more ambitious in its intention to align the various elements of education policy, including standards, curriculum, textbooks, assessment, and training. Implicit in this approach is the belief that to do good incrementally, as through the proliferation of categorical programs, might be the enemy of the (systemic) best. As well, the strategy for effecting systemic change has been drawn from the "reinventing government" school of thought.47 Good management practice, carried out by smart entrepreneurial professionals, is supposed to carry the day. Politics is conspicuously absent from this analysis.
In the design of real policies, however, politics is present in all its messiness--hence the jibe about the similarities between politics and sausage making. Although a goals and standards agenda was advanced during the Bush administration, it was never taken up in Congress. A window of opportunity opened briefly with the 1992 election of Bill Clinton.48 By the time that window had shut, Congress had authorized funds [End Page 209] for Goals 2000, $2 billion to date, to encourage state and district innovation. But the idea of a national policy was a nonstarter, as were national standards; even a voluntary national test conjured visions of Washington as schoolmaster.
What happened in the states and school districts following passage of the Goals 2000 legislation is far less readily summarized--inevitably so, given the design of the legislation. At the state level, where 25 percent of the money was allocated, federal aid sometimes contributed to reforms that were already being implemented. In those instances, Washington could claim credit (a favorite activity of politicians), but the federal aid amounted to no more than piling on.49 Elsewhere, Goals 2000 changed the rhetoric but not the behavior of state agencies. Only in a handful of states, those on the cusp of change, has the Goals 2000 money made a difference, and even those effects are hard to specify. The General Accounting Office report on the program does not make a convincing case.
At the district level, where the bulk of the money has been spent, the impact of the legislation is even harder to estimate. More than sixteen thousand school districts have received slices of the Goals 2000 pie, some getting as little as $25, and they have used it for an endless array of programs, from installation of new technology to restructuring. The proliferation of activities subsidized by Goals 2000 funds means that the program is really an umbrella under which seemingly any money-spending scheme can be situated. The response of the school districts has not been a random phenomenon. Districts' willingness to change policy direction is a key factor, as is their capacity to change. Hard-pressed urban school districts are, because of their disorganization, least able to take advantage of this potential opportunity to reinvent themselves, while smaller and more stable districts can extract the most from these marginal dollars. This is a familiar phenomenon in the implementation of any policy innovation--Chicago's school reforms, for instance, or Arizona's charter schools--that depends on a bottom-up strategy of change.50 Almost invariably, the best do better while the gap widens between best and worst. To them who have, more shall be given, as the Book of Matthew says; the more, the more, in contemporary argot.
Another important if familiar lesson from the Goals 2000 experience is that states and school districts are much better at redesigning organizations, [End Page 210] or at least organizational charts, than they are at setting standards. And they are much, much better at setting standards than at holding anyone--students, teachers, administrators--accountable for failing to meet those standards. Stories of reconstituted schools or school districts placed in state receivership make headlines because they are rarities. Changing practice in the high-visibility, high-stakes world of education is a lot harder than rearranging the proverbial deck chairs.
The ultimate goal of Goals 2000 is to boost academic performance. All the other changes, from better texts to reinvigorated teacher training, represent means to that end. But how could anyone even begin to measure the impact of such an amorphous program on student achievement? Why would anyone contemplate that Goals 2000 might be one of those unusual instances when the null hypothesis was shown to be wrong, when there was a discernible and sustained impact of government policy on student performance? In this context, the strategy of Goals 2000, described by New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan years ago and in a not dissimilar context as "feeding the sparrows by feeding the horses," is hardly promising. Goals 2000 has had no apparent impact on achievement, except perhaps in those states and school districts where the standardized tests drive everything in the academic life of the school.
Predicting the future is hazardous business. The best-case scenario looks like this: Prodded by parental and political pressure, states do a better job of setting meaningful standards of achievement; those standards are vetted by a national agency; and accountability for failure, on the part of both students and professionals, becomes more widely accepted. For all the high hopes surrounding Goals 2000, the federal role will remain marginal. The emerging policy is federal, not national, in character, with fifty flowers blooming in the garden of education. The Clinton administration has already moved on. Its 1999 education initiatives, including reducing class size and building new schools, have nothing to do with Goals 2000, while for his part, Vice President Al Gore seems fixated on Internet access--closing the "digital divide."
In short, the idea of incremental change, which systemic reform was meant to bury, turns out to be alive and thriving. Such changes, rather than the brave new world of systemic reform, represent the most likely legacy of education's nearly two-decades-long run on the national policy stage.51
