A growing crisis of literacy and learning lies before us. Congress could best help by undoing educationally harmful categorical programs. These include Title I, the $7 billion per year program for poor and low achieving students for which taxpayers paid more than $100 billion over the past 25 years. They also include special and bilingual education for psychologically handicapped and limited-English-proficient students. Study after study has shown that on average these programs do not help students' learning or literacy. They have even harmed some children for whom they are intended. They created, moreover, an expansive bureaucracy and hosts of special pleaders at the federal, state, and local levels who raise costs and diminish the general effectiveness of American schools.
     The U.S. Department of Education left unfulfilled its duty to inform the public and Congress of the true state of schools in respect to their most important purpose-learning. We must turn to recent reports of the developed world's premier statistical agency-the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. These reports reveal that during the school years, U.S. students make the least progress in the essential literacy skill of reading as well as in mathematics and science achievement. Yet, with the exception of Switzerland, the U.S. spent more per elementary and secondary student than any other OECD country. Thus, the world's most productive country has the least productive schools. Why?
     A dozen years after National Commission for Excellence in Education, which first pointed it out to the public, the U.S. still has the shortest school year in the industrialized world. Our schools, moreover, lack standards of learning and clear lines of responsibility for their attainment. They require little of their students and employ ineffective teaching methods. Federal categorical programs contribute to these productivity problems and create others. The programs are strongly influenced by teacher unions and other education lobbying groups to advance their interests rather than those of students, taxpayers, and the nation. They create red tape and huge bureaucracies that make U.S. administrative costs twice the average of other OECD countries. They obfuscate accountability for learning results. Imperious, detailed rules and regulations make it difficult for state and local educational authorities to bring about constructive changes. They distract educators from their clients-students, both categorical and non-categorical.
     Categorical programs also require inefficient educational methods such as "transitional bilingual education." This means teaching students in their native language, which denies them the very experience they most need, practice in English. Such programs, moreover, have perverse incentives that make them grow in size, cost, and ineffectiveness. The more students classified as "limited-English-proficient," the more categorical money flows to a school. The same is true for "special education" students, most of whom are spuriously classified as psychologically handicapped (such as "learning disabled" or "mildly mentally retarded"). Since the federal funds pay for teaching and administrative posts, it is like paying doctors to keep their patients sick. Bilingual and special education categorical programs thus create conflicts of interests between educators' jobs and their students' success.
     Much research shows that federal special education classifications are scientifically unreliable. They stigmatize students and segregate them from others. Placing students in special and bilingual programs gives them an excuse not to learn, and they rarely escape. Though such programs can cost two or three times that of regular education, their students are often worse off.
     Categorical program regulations, moreover, assume that the federal government knows better than citizens and state and local educators about their preferences, their students' needs and which educational methods work best. Yet, a quarter century of research revealing failure of categorical programs shows these are false assumptions. What is to be done?
     The best course would be to end the categorical programs altogether. Research shows that during their long history, they seldom worked. They clearly have done considerable harm at great public expense, and they violate the American heritage of state and local control of schools. Allowing states and communities to design and run their own programs would best suit local preferences and make them less subject to special interests. Proposals for locally raised funds for such programs would undergo grass-roots scrutiny (unlike federal monies that some think come from everyone else's pockets). Making termination unlikely, however, are the teacher unions and other education lobbying groups. They are among the largest, richest, and most sophisticated in the U.S.
     One possible course would treat federal categorical monies as general education subsidies. Since local people best know local conditions and preferences, federal per-capita block grants might be given to states for distribution. Like welfare reform, this would avoid bureaucracy caused by federal regulations and allow states and localities to experiment, evaluate various approaches, and to learn from one another.
     The Congress, however, might best lead the nation in solving the school productivity problem by decentralizing decision making--not to an unproductive education establishment--but to citizens. Indeed, the biggest problem with the categorical programs is that they subsidize the status quo and the interests of providers rather than customers-parents and students. Free markets, on the other hand, provide the greatest amount of innovation, efficiency, and consumer satisfaction the world has known. They are precisely what our schools require. A growing number of studies show that competition and choice benefit educational consumers. Increasingly favorable to the idea are citizens, especially poor parents in big cities whose children are most often ill served by categorical programs.
     The hope has been that the benefits of federal funds would trickle down through administrative hierarchies and providers to benefit their customers. Consider, for example, the Chapter 1/Title I program for poor children. The most direct way to remedy their educational disadvantage is to give money-not to bureaucrats and special interests-but to families in the form of grants or vouchers. With these, they could purchase educational services from a variety public schools and private providers.
     This would have an immediate "consumer sovereignty" effect of putting the customer rather than the producer in charge. It would provide incentives and rewards for success now missing from federal programs and public schools since educators would have to compete for students. Instead of being pulled out of their regular classes for categorical services during the day, deserving students would have the benefit of regular classes plus supplementary evening, Saturday, and summer programs unburdened by the usual inefficiency of public schools and special interests.
     Such redesigned categorical programs would allow their parents to make their own choices among competing providers. Aside from ensuring safety and civil rights protections, regulations could be minimal. Program funds could be free of the rules that suffocate many public schools; money could be concentrated less on administrative overhead and more on learning. Markets would compensate educational service providers according to their capacity to attract and maintain student enrollments decided by parents. Given the learning crisis, my hope is that Congress will neither continue nor modify categorical programs but undo them. Short of this, Congress might best leave control of such programs to state and local school boards-better
     yet to parents.

Note: This testimony summarizes a 47-page paper commissioned by the Brookings Institution and shared with Committee staff.

Herbert J. Walberg
Research Professor of Education and Psychology
University of Illinois at Chicago
1040 West Harrison Street
Chicago, IL 60607