Commitment beats cash in education

Nearly 15 years ago, Ronald Reagan's Education secretary, Terrell Bell, issued A Nation at Risk, a hard-hitting and pessimistic account of public education in America. Calling for higher standards and improved performance by our nation's schools, the Bell report unleashed a process of education reform that, in the 1980s, focused primarily on fixing the government schools that now provide the bulk of public education.

The approach: Greatly increased spending on education. The result: Not much to show for it, especially on the student-performance side. The real winners in the first phase of "education reform" were the educrats -- the administrators, counselors and other specialists who now heavily populate government school payrolls. This should not come as a surprise: In all monopolistic, bureaucratic systems, those who run the system are the only enduring winners.

With the job still undone -- and facing increasing voter discontent and taxpayer resistance -- there came a second decade of reform. Approach: To design working, "break-the-mold" schools to provide ideas, insights, inspiration and guidelines for parents, teachers and other groups at the state and local level who are committed to revitalizing public education in America.

The new reform movement focuses more on the wants and needs of education consumers, especially parents and students; new and different institutional arrangements, from charter schools to virtual schools and home schooling; alternative approaches to funding and increased participation by teachers, who were often left out of the reform process and left behind on payday. During this phase, lots of new things are beginning to happen and, most important, student performance in many of these alternative schools is beginning to improve.

On Thursday, a Hudson Institute conference at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs will review results from these more recent reform efforts. One advance paper by Chester Finn, Louann Bierlein and Bruno Manno provides a preliminary assessment of one of the most rapidly growing new approaches: charter schools, wherein the charter school promises better results in return for greater freedom.

Finn and his colleagues found many encouraging surprises. For example, opponents of chartering predicted that charter schools would "skim off" the most fortunate kids, leave the neediest behind and not do justice to minority and disabled kids. In fact, preliminary evidence shows the opposite: In six states with the most charter schools, minority youngsters comprise 40% of charter enrollments (17% black, 15% Hispanic, 5% Native American and 3% Asian) although the same minorities make up just 31% of the pupils overall.

Second, while charter schools have distinctive themes or approaches to education, there are no examples of "weird" or "far out" education philosophies or curricula.

Third, excellent teachers, including some of the best, are flocking to charter schools.

Fourth, parents are heavily involved and devote many hours a week of time and labor for homework supervision, fund-raising and other tasks required to make things work.

In the search for solutions to what is truly a continuing crisis in public education, there is growing evidence that new ideas and committed people beat money every time. What is needed are leaders and an electorate willing to let people take more personal responsibility for their lives -- and the lives of their children and their communities. That's the broader civic lesson that needs to be learned.