Hanushek and Lindseth's New Book: Purporting to
Have All the Answers
Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth, who in a previous
publication declared that state court judges in educational
adequacy cases “harm our children,” have
just published a new book, Schoolhouses, Courthouses
and Statehouses (Princeton University Press, 2009),
that claims to solve “the funding-achievement
puzzle in America’s public schools.” Hanushek
is an education economist who has appeared as a witness
for the defense in more than a dozen education finance
litigations. Lindseth is an attorney who has represented
state defendants in a number of education adequacy litigations.
Most of the new volume depends on the same the “slash
and burn” tactics of their past writings by exaggerating
the extent to which expenditures for public education
have increased in recent decades, dismissing the significance
of the detailed cost studies that most states now use
in budget analyses, and accusing plaintiff litigators
of “almost always oppos[ing] significant changes
in the way education funds are spent.”
The most extreme statements in the book are contained
in the chapter entitled “The Effectiveness of
Judicial Remedies,” which purports to document
the extent to which student achievement has improved
in the four states that they have concluded have had
“significant” court-ordered remedies in
place the longest, namely Kentucky, New Jersey, Wyoming,
and Massachusetts. Focusing their analysis exclusively
on certain student scores on the National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP), they conclude that in
three out of four of these states “ while court-ordered
dollars have brought a host of services and facilities
for schools……these appear not to have generally
brought the improved student performance so long sought
and so urgently needed.” ( p.170.)
The authors do concede that students in Massachusetts
are first in the nation in terms of NAEP scores, but
they point out that the performance of the small percentage
of black students in the Bay State, although remaining
at levels above the national average, has not been as
impressive as that of whites and Hispanics. (That, of
course, is why plaintiffs in the recent Hancock
case argued that additional remedial action by the
state courts to focus on laggard school districts with
high percentages of black students was necessary.)
Although this short review is not the place to analyze
in depth the numerous methodological flaws in Hanushek
and Lindseth’s analysis of the outcomes of the
adequacy litigations -- my colleague Bruce Baker and
I do intend to undertake such an analysis in a future
work -- suffice it to say for present purposes that
the NAEP scores they focus on do not correspond in most
and that they ignore the fact that in some instances
legislatures cut funding below reasonable adequacy levels
so that gains that might have been expected to flow
from adequacy orders were not forthcoming. Furthermore,
since NAEP scores are reported on a statewide basis,
their use in a state like New Jersey where the court
orders covered only a subset of the state’s students
(i.e., students in 32 poor urban school districts) makes
no sense; in other words, that overall scores of black
students in New Jersey roughly matched the increases
for black students nationwide tells us nothing since
half of the black students in New Jersey are in non-Abbott
districts that did not reap any funding benefits from
the litigation (and, in fact, these students may have
been significantly deprived of needed resources precisely
because their districts were not covered by the court
decree).
Recent, more fine-tuned data for New Jersey, provided
by Margaret E. Goertz, a University of Pennsylvania,
indicate that from 1999 to 2007, substantial gains were
made in the Abbott districts, which were the
focus of the judicial remedies; for example, in 4th-grade
mathematics, the achievement gaps between the Abbott
districts and the rest of the state were reduced by
more than a third.. Similarly, Kentucky, which was near
the bottom of the national rankings in virtually all
performance indices before its 1989 court decision,
now ranks above the national averages in reading and
science and almost at the national average in math.
The sensationalist allegations advanced by Hanushek
and Lindseth in the first part of the book seem geared
to clearing the brush to establish in the remainder
of the book the inevitability of their proposal to cure
all of the nation’s educational ills -- “a
performance based funding system.” Announced with
much fanfare, the key elements of this supposedly innovative
solution turn out to be the same potpourri of business-model
and privatization practices -- test-score-based accountability,
performance pay and other rewards and sanctions for
teachers and administrators, widespread availability
of charter schools and vouchers -- that these authors
and others of their political persuasion have been touting
for years. Studies of each of these reforms have produced
no strong empirical basis for dramatically expanding
their use. But Hanushek and Lindseth have an answer
to this criticism: “All of these components interlock,”
they say, and they must be implemented as an “integrated
system.” (p. 219).
The key elements of the Hanushek/ Lindseth solution
met strong public and political resistance in the past,
and there is little likelihood that their “integrated,”
single best system approach will be adopted in the current
political climate, which has turned against unregulated
market-oriented solutions to social problems. The book,
therefore, is not likely to have much impact on the
educational reform debates of the Obama era.
Ironically, however, despite their rejection of the
value of court orders in past education adequacy cases,
Hanushek and Lindseth, unlike many of the doctrinaire
critics of “judicial activism,” do acknowledge
that courts can advance educational policy by “1)
educating legislators on all of the problems that need
to be addressed and 2) providing them with specific
data needed to get appropriate remedial measures enacted”
(p. 282). Hanushek and Lindseth also acknowledge that
“School funding policies must recognize the underlying
heterogeneity of students and their educational challenges
and ensure that all schools have the means to succeed”
(p. 218). In short, these authors could contribute more
to a conversation on how to provide meaningful educational
opportunities to our nation’s schoolchildren by
further developing constructive notions on how courts
can work more effectively with legislatures and state
education departments in identifying resource needs
and implementing judicial remedies in educational adequacy
cases than by distorting the evidence on what courts
have achieved in these cases in the past.
-- Michael A. Rebell
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