3 Leaders on Education Reform, Continued

The second part of my conversation with Arne Duncan, Mitch Daniels and John Engler appears below. Mr. Duncan is the secretary of education; Mr. Daniels, Purdue University’s president, was previously governor of Indiana; Mr. Engler, a former governor of Michigan, is president of the Business Roundtable, the corporate lobbying group.

Mr. Duncan is a Democrat, of course, and Mr. Daniels and Mr. Engler are Republicans. But they all sympathize with many of the efforts of the so-called education reform movement. I asked them whether the country’s education system was really in crisis and what mistakes school reformers had made. The first part of our conversation - lightly edited, for brevity and clarity â€" appeared on Economix on Wednesday.

Leonhardt: Governor Engler, what do you think of the president’s early-childhood plan?

Charles V. Tines/Associated Press John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable

Engler: I think there’s evidence that it can help.  But I mean, we’ve got a system spending $650 billion, so I never looked at the next dollar in as being the critical dollar. I am for budget flexibility.

We’ve got schools in Detroit, one that’s run by a man named Doug Ross, who is extraordinary, and he is succeeding in an elementary school and getting kids reading and catching them up, and then getting them to go to college - not because he has a preschool program, which he doesn’t. I just want the results.

Leonhardt: Governor Daniels?

Danny Moloshok/Reuters Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University

Daniels: With caution, yes. I’d add a couple of things.  One is that my understanding of the clarity of this data is not quite as strong as Arne’s. Some of the experiments [showing positive results for early-childhood education] are ones that are doomed to succeed. I mean, if you pour enough money into a situation, it’s not really replicable, and you might be able to get the kind of results you want.

We’ve had an early-childhood program for a long, long time, and we spent a bushel of money.  It’s called Head Start.  And the record is not very impressive. Somebody ought to consider rotating those resources in a country that’s broke.  If we’re going to do early childhood, maybe we ought to just try to shift at least some of those dollars and see if we can get a better outcome.

Leonhardt: What lessons do you take from Head Start? What’s worked?  What hasn’t?

Neilson Barnard/Getty Images, for The New York Times Education Secretary Arne Duncan

Duncan: Like anything with that scale, like with charters, I think the results have been mixed.  Some places, I think it’s changed kids’ lives tremendously, and other places it hasn’t. Where Head Start is high quality, it makes a huge difference.  We did a session on early childhood in Minnesota, and two of our panelists - one was the state commissioner - were Head Start babies.  They remember their teachers; they remember what happened.  That really helped to change their lives.  So two of Minnesota’s leaders are products of Head Start.

What I would give Secretary Sebelius [of the Department of Health and Human Services] credit for is that for the first time ever, Head Start programs are starting to have to compete. It used to be an automatic renewal. Now, if you’re not getting results, you have compete. And if it’s not working, you’ll lose slots.

Leonhardt: Is that an argument that instead of expanding early childhood, we should save the money and focus on improving Head Start?

Duncan: No. I think you have to do both. We need to improve Head Start. But we need to dramatically expand full-day pre-K as well.

Engler: But then you need also to have a quality elementary school when you get there. Because if you go to Head Start and you fall off the end of the earth in an elementary school …

Duncan: Right. That’s not Head Start’s fault.

Leonhardt: The Common Core is something that many people, especially on the right, have deep, deep mistrust of. A fair number of people see it as almost un-American to say that states can’t decide what they want to have their children learning.  How would you each respond to those questions?

Daniels: These are standards. The curriculum is still up to the locals. That’s one of the myths that needs to be dispelled - that the curriculum is being seized and being taken over by a higher authority.

I used to have a saying about local control: you can’t stretch local control to the point of deciding that local failure is acceptable. We want some accountability.

With math, you get the answer right or you get it wrong.  And we ought to be able to do it at the same rate they can in Slovakia or Kazakhstan, or some of these other places.

Leonhardt: Or Poland, which has come way up in the educational rankings.

Engler: We’d love to be where the Scandinavian countries are.  We’ll never know where we are or how far we have to go until we have one common measuring stick.

Daniels: I always tell people if you go to a track meet and the high jump pit, one coach can teach the flop, and one can teach the barrel roll.  And if somebody wants to do the old-fashioned scissors, that’s fine too.  But we’re going to have one bar.  You don’t let everybody set the bar where they want.

The Common Core doesn’t seem to have made that mistake.  In fact, if it takes effect, what is very likely is that the results are first going to look terrible in a lot of states.  A lot of states have told themselves that they are doing just swell and are going to find out that it doesn’t look so good.  And that won’t be good news, but it’s essential to learn that.

I remind folks that the reason we don’t have national standards is conservatives don’t do national, and liberals don’t do standards.

Engler: You can’t have an American education system that produces graduates where some 30 percent or so aren’t qualified for military service.  You can’t have people holding diplomas yet having a lack of almost basic literacy skills.

Daniels: We’re talking in utilitarian terms, but it’s really more than that. It’s cruelty to pass a third grader to fourth grade if they can’t read. You’ve doomed them. It’s an act of cruelty to hand someone a diploma that they are not ready for - as life will apply the test that matters.

Duncan: I think the Tennessee example is pretty instructive.  My numbers won’t be exact, but Tennessee’s standards were saying that about 90 percent of their fourth graders were proficient in math. That feels pretty good.  Now they raised standards.  It went from 90 percent to 28 percent.  And achievement gaps that were already large doubled.

I think I want whatever any parent wants. I want to know the truth about my kid. One of the worst things that we did in this country for too long is that we told the kids and families who were playing by the rules, who were trying to do the right thing, that they were ready. They weren’t even close. They weren’t in the game.

The year after the Tennessee results came out, for all the stress and difficulty, Tennessee actually had the biggest one-year jump ever. So it’s interesting to me. We have folks worried about the decline in test scores. But are we going to keep lying to our kids? To lie to people and say they’re on a trajectory to be successful when they are not in the game - we devastated communities, we’ve devastated families, and it’s not fair. It’s not right.

Daniels: The system doesn’t want you to know. They don’t want anybody to know.

Duncan: It is not [only] an inner-city thing. You have suburban parents saying: “What happened? I thought my kid was doing great.” And so that creates some trepidation, some fears and anxiety.

Engler: I think we’ve got suburban districts, and everybody kind of thinks, to the secretary’s point here, “Well, we’re doing pretty good here.”  But if you really pulled it out and said, O.K., how do you stack up against the best school, their eyes would open.

Duncan: I just think this is a country with a fork in the road. We have to tell the truth.

For more on these topics, there is also a video of my interview with Mr. Duncan at The Times Center in New York last week.