From the WSJ Opinion Archives
OUTSIDE THE BOX
Class Consciousness
Michigan and Pennsylvania schools get Standard & Poor's audits.
One of the byproducts of wartime cooperation in Washington will be final agreement on the education bill with which George W. Bush began his presidency in January. Unfortunately pressure from the education establishment has weakened the bill. Vouchers for low-income students to escape failed schools are gone, annual student testing has been diluted, and Congress proposes to spend a lot more money for business as usual.
Meanwhile out in the real world--thanks to the power of the Internet, the foresight of Gov. John Engler and ex-Gov. Tom Ridge, and the analytical skills of the Standard & Poor's Co., which has been evaluating financial services and businesses for 60 years--parents in Michigan and Pennsylvania finally have the information they need to evaluate their school systems.
They can evaluate the educational quality of the school district their children attend compared with others in their state with similar student bodies, similar geographic characteristics and about the same level of funding. They can see the teacher-pupil ratio, class sizes, graduation rates and teacher salaries in the school district compared with others, and how the academic achievement of kids in their district compares with that children in other school districts.
The School Evaluation Services division of S&P has charted some 1,500 education and financial variables for each school district and compared them in a comprehensive analysis of each state's education system. Using six broad categories, including student results (test scores, attendance, graduation and drop-out rates), the learning environment (class and school sizes, staffing levels, technology), spending and financial environment, and demographic environment (family incomes, English proficiency, race), SES was able to examine every school district and see how well it is educating children and at what comparative cost. Click here to read the analyses.
Michigan paid $10 million over four years to have the evaluation done. The result, in the words of Ann Arbor school superintendent Rossi Ray-Taylor, is a portrait of her district, "warts and all." S&P describes each district's strengths and weaknesses and compares it to state averages and peer districts. That may be troublesome for principals and school districts, but for parents it is a godsend, for at last there is real-time, relevant data about how schools are performing and how well they are teaching children.
I went into the site, selected the Ann Arbor public schools and printed out a 15-page report on the district. I learned that overall the district achieves "well above average student results with spending that is among the highest in the state." Its students performed above average on the Michigan Education Assessment Program, or MEAP, tests and have moderately below average graduation rates. Tables show the percentage of students passing math, reading and other subjects in different grades.
Ann Arbor spends well above average per pupil and on teacher salaries and is "exceptionally above average" in administrative expenses per student. It spends $9,316 a student compared with the statewide average of $6,565, perhaps because it has a well above average $269,509 taxable property valuation per student. The average salary for central administrators has increased 177% in three years and is $109,901, almost the highest in the state.
A breakdown of MEAP test performance by disadvantaged students shows that the district's "achievement gap" between advantaged and economically disadvantaged students is 44 percentage points, compared with just 13 statewide. Black students in Ann Arbor schools show a much larger performance gap than black students in other districts, but Hispanic students' gap is about the same.
Ann Arbor dropout rates are average; the 19-to-1 ratio of students to teachers is slightly above average, and the proportion of students who receive free or reduced-price lunches (a measure of family income) is about half the state average.
The Pennsylvania SES site graphically illustrates the disastrous state of the Philadelphia school system. Only 35% of white and Asian students, about 10% of black and Hispanic students and 7% of low-income students test above the state median. These testing results provide new information to Philadelphia educators and will intensify the debate over an existing proposal for private management of Philadelphia schools. For as Mr. Ridge said in his farewell address to the Pennsylvania Legislature, "some people would prefer publicly operated schools that fail children to privately operated schools that serve them well."
For the first time, a nonpartisan company with considerable analytical skills and no connection to the education establishment has undertaken an objective analysis of school systems. Unfortunately the information is not broken down on a school-by-school basis, but SES is prepared to do that if a state wants the information.
Eight or nine years ago, when the Internet was just beginning its surge in growth, there were enthusiastic predictions that it would revolutionize the way the world works. Universal access to information would inform and enlighten new groups of people and thus change the balance of power, for in the words of former Citibank CEO Walter Wriston, "anything that gets information to people is threatening to existing power structures."
SES is beginning to change the balance of power in America's public-school systems, among our most insular bureaucratic structures. SES information will change the way parents perceive their schools, and that will change the way the schools work, and then one day, that will change the way the world works.
And if by chance you don't live in Michigan or Pennsylvania, you can help the process along by giving your governor a call and asking when your state is going to begin its SES evaluation.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears Wednesdays.
