President Bush spoke about improving education and reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, but his “blueprint for strengthening NCLB”—released by the White House in conjunction with the speech—includes two voucher schemes.

“President Bush has clearly decided to invite partisan bickering rather than bipartisan progress,” McElroy said. “Every minute spent debating a voucher proposal means less time for making needed changes to a law that has been long on promise and short on progress.”

In recent months, McElroy and other AFT leaders have met with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and other key administration officials on NCLB reauthorization. The AFT has stressed that the law needs to deliver on promised funding—but funding alone cannot rescue the law from serious flaws in the current language. The new law must stop misidentifying schools as failures under the current definition of adequate yearly progress (AYP), the union has told the White House, and it must include a more thoughtful approach when it comes to assessing English language learners and students with disabilities. School choice and private tutoring—the first line of corrective measures under the current law—have failed dismally when it comes to improving public education and are often counterproductive remedies in schools.

And the White House push for vouchers under NCLB borders on the outrageous, the AFT and other education groups maintain. The administration is asking Congress for a reauthorized NCLB that offers vouchers to students in grades 3-12 who attend schools that have gone into “restructuring” status for failing to meet AYP. Students in these schools would receive scholarships of roughly $4,000 on average to cover the cost of private schools or out-of-district schools; or they could receive vouchers of up to $3,000 for tutoring.

Instead of promoting vouchers, McElroy stressed, the president should be supporting “research-backed solutions for struggling schools and disadvantaged programs, and that additional funding will be proposed in support of real programs, not as a salve to avoid addressing the fundamental problems in the law.”

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he will approach the upcoming reauthorization not only as an opportunity for ending a “tin cup education budget” that asks schools to do more with less, but also as a chance for bipartisan action that helps schools succeed in boosting student proficiency and closing the achievement gap.

“Greater emphasis is needed on helping struggling schools turn around,” Kennedy recently told the National School Boards Association. “Our goal for schools needing improvements is new investments, not punitive policies.”

Independent researchers from the nonprofit RAND Corporation and Research for Action, a Philadelphia nonprofit research group, conducted an evaluation in Philadelphia. They examined performance at the 45 city schools that had been turned over to six different private managers, ranging from local nonprofits and universities to Edison Schools, the nation’s largest for-profit manager of public schools. (A seventh manager, Chancellor Beacon Academies, was fired for poor performance four years ago.) These groups receive additional per-pupil funding to run schools—this year the school district will spend $18.1 million on the private managers, bringing the total in extra funding spent on them in five years to $107.1 million. Yet their student achievement scores in the four years ending with the 2005-06 school year were no better than struggling public schools that have worked through the district to boost student achievement, the researchers conclude in their report, “State Takeover, School Restructuring, Private Management, and Student Achievement in Philadelphia.” These traditional schools also received extra funding, though not as much as the privately managed schools.

“Schools in Philadelphia have shown strong improvement that has been reflected widely across the district,” says report co-author Jolley Christman. “But our findings show the investment in private management of schools has not paid the expected dividends.

“I think the education community should look at this report as giving us some lessons about education management organizations. One of those lessons is that they don’t necessarily bring stronger assets, knowledge and capacity to the district,” Christman told the Philadelphia Daily News.

These lessons are reflected in a series of recommendations that the AFT is taking to Congress as it prepares to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act. When it comes to school intervention, the current law relies too much on unproven methods such as takeovers by private management companies and wholesale conversion to charter schools. The AFT is asking Congress for a reauthorized NCLB that promotes proven strategies such as reduced class size and intensive instruction in reading and math.

“State Takeover, School Restructuring, Private Management, and Student Achievement in Philadelphia” is available at www.rand.org.