Accountability Is Key in Clinton’s School Agenda

By using his State of the Union address to outline his plan for creating “21st century schools,” President Clinton demonstrated in a high-profile way that accountability is the new force shaping American public education.

Like governors and superintendents across the country, Clinton wants school districts to get tough on low-performing campuses, stop hiring undertrained teachers and issue detailed school report cards. He gave added momentum to the accountability movement by proposing to use $17 billion in federal education spending as a lever to push those policies.

Most federal money is given to schools that serve low-income and minority children to offset the educational disadvantages of poverty. If states don’t hold these schools accountable for improved academic achievement, they could lose federal dollars.

The aim, Clinton said, is to close the “achievement gap” between children of poverty and children of comfort, a gap that has been widening in the 1990s despite the billions spent to address the problem.

Clinton administration officials said the results-oriented stance represents a sea change in federal education policy that will, “for the first time, [hold] school districts and states accountable for progress and [reward] them for results.”

That tough talk has raised fears in some quarters that the federal government is seeking to usurp control of education, which is jealously guarded by the states and local communities.

Rep. William F. Goodling (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, applauded the policies outlined by Clinton but cautioned that the federal government shouldn’t try to expand its role in education.

“Everything he’s talking about is Republican apple pie and motherhood,” Goodling said. “We oppose social promotion; we want to have the best teachers in the classroom you can possibly have.”

Even if Congress approves the president’s plan, Goodling said, he doubts the administration’s goals for sweeping change can be achieved. That’s because the federal government provides only about 8% of the total amount spent on public education nationally. In California, for example, $3.5 billion of the $38 billion spent on education comes from the federal government.

Most States Not Yet Ready for Program

If the administration’s past performance is any indication, it will be reluctant to come down hard on states even if they don’t adopt the president’s agenda. Indeed, the administration has been criticized by some education and civil rights groups for failing to enforce several key accountability measures that were approved by Congress five years ago as part of the $8-billion Title I program, the largest federal education program.

Kati Haycock, executive director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based education advocacy group, said some states already have moved quickly toward the goals that Clinton laid out. But most states, including California, have yet to establish benchmarks for student performance or create tests and an accountability system based on those standards.

She said federal education officials in the past “could have insisted on those things, but they didn’t.”

Mike Smith, acting deputy secretary of Education, acknowledged that low-performing schools are making slow progress. “We’re trying to accelerate this a little bit.”

He said the administration will first try to apply political pressure by criticizing a state publicly. If that doesn’t work, the state might lose the money that covers the cost of administering the federal program.

“We’re not going to come down with a hammer, but we want them to think about what really good practice is and build on the research on these things,” he said.

Under existing federal law, states are supposed to hold all students--including those who are poor and who do not speak English--to the same standards. The states also are supposed to identify low-performing schools and help them improve.

In his plan, Clinton wants states to pass laws that would allow schools that don’t improve to be closed or “reconstituted,” a process that involves getting rid of the entire staff and starting over. California last year identified about 850 schools in which 60% or more of the students were scoring below grade level; 400 of those schools are in the Los Angeles Unified School District. State education officials said they are forming teams to assist those schools and are requiring the schools to write improvement plans. Clinton wants to spend $200 million on such programs.

Margaret Jones, LAUSD director of specially funded programs, said the district is beginning to work with those schools on professional development and other strategies. But she said the district’s efforts have been slowed by the state’s failure to adopt standards for student performance.

One difficulty facing schools in California is a growing shortage of qualified teachers. California schools now employ about 30,000 teachers who are not fully trained. The bulk of them are in Los Angeles.

Clinton wants all states within five years to end the practice of employing teachers who have not completed their training. But growing enrollments and retirements mean that California needs to hire 260,000 new teachers in the next decade.

To help fill that demand, the state on Friday will launch an unprecedented $2-million television advertising campaign to recruit new teachers. In addition, the state is about to begin recruiting teachers from out of state.

Still, meeting the Clinton administration’s goal is going to be difficult, said Bob Salley, who is in charge of teacher certification for the California Commission on Teaching Credentials. “I think it’s folly to think that we’ll ever eliminate emergency permits, but we’ll certainly be able to reduce the numbers substantially.”

Calling for an End to Social Promotion

Another plank in Clinton’s education platform calls for an end to social promotion, the practice of promoting students to the next grade regardless of how little they’ve learned. To help make sure students are prepared to go on, the administration is proposing to spend $600 million, up from $200 million this year, for after-school and summer programs.

Albert Arnold, principal of Santa Monica Elementary School in East Hollywood, said he welcomes many of the president’s ideas. But he said the school’s crowded campus--which was built for 300 students but now serves 1,300 in year-round sessions--would make it difficult to offer additional tutoring.

Still, Arnold said, he is in favor of holding schools such as his accountable for their performance.

“We seem to be in an era when the public wants accountability, and I think they deserve it,” he said.