Lemon Aides?

In July 1998, Maria Santistevan, a Title I classroom aide in Pueblo, Colorado, a working-class city of 100,000, opened her local newspaper one day and got a shock. This hardworking, energetic grandmother and president of the local chapter of the Colorado Classified Employees Association learned she had just been laid off.

The paper reported that, the day before, the school board had voted to prohibit schools from using classroom aides in their Title I programs, which are federally financed efforts to improve the achievement of disadvantaged schoolchildren. The district had decided to replace its 51 aides with six master-teachers and "literacy leaders"—educators who had undergone extensive training in the schools' newly adopted reading and math programs. It didn't matter that Santistevan, then 56, was a dedicated employee with deep ties to the community—she had begun her career as a Title I aide in the district in 1971—or that she was well-loved by her charges. Too many students in Pueblo's Title I schools had crashed and burned in a statewide test administered in 1996. And in spite of revamped curricula introduced to combat this crisis, school officials did not see enough improvement in students' basic skills. "We were spending a lot of money and resources and not getting a lot of returns," school board member Jack Rink recalls. "We realized we needed to make some fundamental changes and hard decisions."

It was bitter medicine, indeed—but just what the researchers ordered. Since the creation of Title I during the Johnson administration, nearly every study of the program has challenged the effectiveness of aides such as Santistevan. Those same reports have stressed that schools should hire teachers who are highly trained in research-proven methods...