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Winner of the 2005 Prize for Distinguished Scholarship
TERRY MOE-GODFATHER OF SCHOOL CHOICE
By his own admission, Terry Moe is the accidental advocate. During all of his years as an Air Force brat at a string of public schools, and throughout his first decade as a political scientist, Moe didn't have a hint that one day he would become the modern-day intellectual godfather of the voucher movement.
As a young professor at Michigan State and later at Stanford and the Hoover Institution, Moe specialized in the eye-glazing study of bureaucracy and organization theory. He fashioned himself both an economic conservative and a social liberal who favored gun control and abortion rights. Yet Moe had never been politically active and sometimes didn't bother to vote. "I hadn't written anything that would identify me as someone who was sympathetic to conservative causes," he says.
The political scientist's placid sojourn in academe's groves ended abruptly in 1990 when his path breaking study, Politics, Markets & America's Schools, co-authored with John Chubb, was published. For nearly seven years, during stints at the Brookings Institution, the two scholars had analyzed the results of a 1982 survey of teachers and school administrators to determine how the organization of public schools affected their performance. An obvious yet little-noticed story jumped out of the data: Private schools were organized quite differently than public ones-and performed better.
The very fact that public schools were democratically controlled by interest groups-school boards, teacher unions, state superintendents, and federal officials-meant that they lost autonomy and became entangled in unproductive politics and bureaucracy. The message of the Moe-Chubb book, to use the vernacular of the 1960s, was that the problem with the system was the system. Only by introducing choice and competition through reforms like tuition vouchers could public schools be re-oriented toward boosting student achievement.
The response of the education establishment came fast and furious. Voucher critics such as Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers and Wisconsin professor John Witte denounced Moe and Chubb as intellectual charlatans. Others claimed their book promoted Satanism and schools of astrology, and encouraged schools to offer parents free trips to Disney World. But Moe and Chubb's meticulous analysis withstood the assault. In fact, their book has arguably become, in the words of Harvard's William Howell and Paul Peterson, "the single most influential political analysis of American schools ever written." When the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Cleveland's voucher program for disadvantaged kids in the 2002 Zelman case, it, too, cited the Moe-Chubb volume. Brookings senior fellow Tom Loveless says their analysis is now "considered a classic."
Moe has since gone on to do groundbreaking analyses of public attitudes toward school vouchers. His research shows that legislative initiatives, rather than ballot referenda, are best suited to promoting vouchers, which should initially be targeted to disadvantaged students. Without Moe's careful analysis, the intellectual case for school choice would be less secure. His celebrated book with Chubb, says Brookings' Tom Loveless, "unleashed a national movement in support of vouchers that is still rippling today."
Winners of the 2005 Prize for Valor
MARION JOSEPH-THE PAUL REVERE OF THE READING WARS
In June 2000, a reader of the Los Angeles Times wrote in to complain about a flattering article and interview with education reformer Marion Joseph. "Let me get this straight," the woman from Newport Beach stated sarcastically. "One woman, a grandmother with no formal background in education, yet with an extensive network of contacts in Sacramento, is changing how California and the nation teach reading. Is that right?" Who, the reader demanded to know, "elected Joseph?"
Who indeed. The little old lady from north of Pasadena has been hailed by Sacramento Bee columnist Peter Schrag as "the Paul Revere of the Reading Wars" and "the state's, and perhaps the nation's, most powerful individual force for education reform." Luminaries in the ed wars and seasoned education reporters alike say that Joseph turned the tide in reading instruction from whole-language back to phonics in California-and thus altered the way reading is taught nationwide. True, no one elected Joseph the patron of phonics. But her relentless, research-based advocacy-for which the retired grandma didn't earn a dime-is still a sterling example of what a citizen-activist and lone individual can accomplish in reforming U.S. schools.
When Joseph retired in 1982 after working for 12 years as a top aide to state superintendent Wilson Riles, she planned to putter among her herbs and roses and take part in local environmental causes. Then, one day in 1989, her daughter asked if Joseph could attend an open house at her grandson's school. Isaac, a first-grader, was a bright boy who was having trouble learning to read. At the school, Joseph listened to a young teacher deliver a baffling talk about the state's new approach to teaching reading. A few months later, when Joseph accompanied her daughter on a visit with Isaac's teacher, they learned that the little boy was to be given a difficult reading anthology-yet the teacher was not teaching him to read or sound out the strange words he would encounter.
The public schools' indifference to her grandson's struggle started Joseph on a fact-finding odyssey that led to her crusade for phonics. Yet when she began, Joseph "knew nothing about reading-I had worked on all these policy and structural issues." She was, moreover, an unlikely advocate for a traditional, back-to-basics pedagogy. Joseph was nothing if not an unreconstructed liberal. An only child, she had grown up listening to her parents rail against social injustice, racism and poverty.
When Joseph started asking whether other children were having problems learning to read, she discovered that public schools had changed. The new ethos was all about nurturing "self-esteem" and "constructivism"-the belief that children should construct knowledge from their experience, rather than acquire it by being taught basic skills.
Following her visits to Isaac's school, Joseph started working the phone and heard from teachers, parents, and legislative aides and bureaucrats that whole-language wasn't working. Shortly thereafter, she listened to Reid Lyon on a local NPR program. Lyon, the head of the development and behavior branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, cited research showing that children need to learn phonics to read. Joseph pulled off to the side of the road, found a pay phone, and called Lyon to request copies of the studies.
After Joseph read the damning research, she made copies for lawmakers and Sacramento education officials. "I'd carry the research studies around," she recalls, "and I'd say, 'I didn't write this paper. You read it. You decide what to take away from it.'" Her critique seemed doubly persuasive to lawmakers when the 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the reading scores of California students had not only fallen but were now the worst in the nation, surpassing only Guam's.
In 1995, the legislature passed-without a single dissenting vote-two bills that mandated the use of phonics in reading instruction and set up a commission to create comprehensive academic standards. Two years later, Joseph was appointed by GOP governor Pete Wilson to the California Board of Education, where she helped oversee the development of rigorous standards.
Joseph's success was bitterly resented by the ed school professoriate, by professional associations for reading and early childhood education, by state and local bureaucrats, and by Latino activists who were pressing for more bilingual education. "It wasn't the Democratic politicians that went after me," says Joseph. "It was the soft liberal wing of the education establishment." But despite the vilification, Joseph and her fellow phonics advocates ultimately won the reading wars. The California Department of Education no longer preaches the gospel of whole language instruction, and that movement has been seriously undermined by the lack of any independent scientific research documenting its methods' benefits. "There is no question that we have stemmed the tide," Joseph concedes. Still, Joseph, now 78, isn't satisfied. Her next goal is to improve the quality of teaching in California. "We have the poorest-prepared teachers continuing to teach the neediest kids here-the struggle continues," says Joseph. "You can never stop."
JOHN BRANDL-UNORTHODOX DEMOCRAT
In his hometown of St. Cloud, Minnesota, no one had much in the way of worldly possessions-or so it appeared to John Brandl and his childhood friends. Brandl's father, a brakeman for the railroad, earned a modest wage, yet somehow managed to keep food on the table for all six of his children. The truth was that just about everyone in St. Cloud back in the 1940's seemed to survive on the margins of poverty-and thus all seemed equal. To be a Brandl was to be a "deep-down Democrat." The Catholic schools that young John attended only reinforced his sense of the value of social equality and the importance of a community that nurtures its young.
Yet in his Benedictine education, John Brandl learned that competition, and not just community, was a value to be treasured as well. His two mentors, high school debate teacher Sister Annerose Wokurka and economics professor Fr. Martin Schirber, pushed him to think independently and to strive to excel. Father Schirber was an unusual man of God-a monk with a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. Nearly half a century later, Brandl can still recall Father Schirber expounding on the benefits of free markets.
Like fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey before him, John Brandl went on to a distinguished career as a professor-politician and liberal Democrat. After earning his own Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, Brandl served a total of 12 years in the Minnesota House of Representatives and the Minnesota Senate before becoming dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. But unlike many Democrats, Brandl was willing to rethink party orthodoxy. He showed that liberals, too, can favor educational choice. Brandl never lost sight of the importance of community and public-spiritedness. But he also remembers and prizes the creative potential of markets to reshape bureaucracy and improve the K-12 school system.
Brandl supported vouchers at some risk to his political career. Shortly after introducing the bill, he recalls being "taken aside by the black leadership in Minneapolis, who mournfully said to me, 'don't do this.'" Former friends and allies in the teachers union turned frosty, too. "People don't slash tires out here," says Brandl. "But for the next several elections, the teacher unions didn't endorse me, and it's not easy to run as a Democrat without their endorsement. Democratic lawmakers who support vouchers often have to find another line of work."
Although Brandl's voucher bill failed, it helped kick-start a flurry of laws that dramatically expanded school choice for Minnesota children. In quick succession, Minnesota enacted programs that enabled 11th and 12th graders to enroll in college courses for credit at state expense and established K-12 open enrollment, allowing students to attend public schools outside their districts. Brandl helped sponsor both bills. Shortly after he left the state Senate in 1990 to return to the Humphrey Institute, the legislature enacted the nation's first charter law, paving the way for America's first charter school in 1992. In the mid-1990s, Professor Brandl returned to the choice wars, testifying on behalf of GOP governor Arne Carlson's controversial legislation to create a refundable K-12 education tax credit for low-income families. The credit, worth up to $1,000 a child or $2,000 for a family, has served as a kind of mini-voucher that reimburses parents for money spent on books, tutors, and after-school programs.
Taken together, Minnesota's legislative initiatives have begun to erode the public school monopoly. The state currently has about 835,000 public school students. But last year, 56,000 low-income families took advantage of the tax credit; 30,000 students opted for open enrollment; nearly 16,000 were home-schooled; 12,000 enrolled in charter schools; and 7,000 11th and 12th graders took college courses for credit. In Minnesota, choice is still not the norm. Yet it's no longer a quixotic dream either-thanks in no small measure to the labors of a lifelong liberal Democrat.