The discussion about the future of America's
public schools is beginning to make real progress.
This is not because new ideologies are appearing, but
because the old ideology of public education is being
broken down.
In 1983 the Nation at Risk report focused public
attention on the deteriorating levels of student
performance. Fairly quickly, and sensibly, the
education system decided not to be defensive about what
was so apparent. It conceded: we can do better.
Next came a powerful message from good friends of
public education that, if learning were to improve,
schooling would have to be changed, and radically
changed. In 1984, in their different ways, John
Goodlad's A Place Called School and Ted Sizer's
Horace's Compromise pressed this conclusion. Fairly
quickly this point, too, was conceded.
Then the teachers' organizations -- most notably
Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of
Teachers -- saw the opportunity to argue that in order
for schooling to change, the school district would have
to change. In 1985 the Carnegie Task Force on
Education and the Economy, with Shanker as a key
member, established "restructuring" as the key item on
the improvement agenda: more authority for the
individual school, professional status for teachers and
(less stressed, and less noticed) a real accountability
for student performance.
Now comes the further assertion -- most recently
and most forcefully from John Chubb and Terry Moe in
Politics, Markets and America's Schools -- that in
order for districts to change the larger system will
have to change: students should no longer be assigned
to schools, and schools should no longer be organized
as a monopoly public bureau under political control.
To this last analysis and proposal the people in
public education are responding in essentially
ideological terms. They do not want to look into the
system for the causes of the troubles in the schools.
For them it is enough simply to say that a "market"
would violate the theory of public education. They are
uninterested in a practical discussion about what might
help. If pressed, they point to the dangers of
competition. It is as if you had a group of people in
the North and fuel was low and a blizzard was coming
and you appealed for help, and what you got was a
lecture about the dangers of fire.
Steadily, however, the national discussion is
moving on; gradually thinking through the ideas of
choice and competition and their relation to public
education. There is a real problem in the schools.
There is an urgent need to improve. There is a
practical problem of how to get it done. So there is a
growing willingness to look at new ideas -- however
uncomfortable they may be to educators -- to see if
they might work.
In the background is the general sense of the
limitations of "command" systems, reinforced in the
past year by the events in eastern Europe. What has
really stimulated the current discussion, though, is
the dramatic turnaround in the public and political
attitude toward the idea of choice.
This was summarized in a report by the Gallup
organization in the September, 1990 Kappan magazine.
Over the past 10 years the proportion agreeing that
people should be able to choose the public school their
children attend has climbed from 12 percent to 62
percent. Support is higher among parents with children
in the public schools (65 percent). It is highest in
the big cities, but over 60 percent everywhere.
It is highest among people of average income
($20,000 to $40,000) and among people of average
education (high school graduates). Among people of
color 72 percent are in favor; 18 percent opposed.
Perhaps most striking: support varies directly with
age. Among persons over 50 it is 54 percent; among
those age 30 to 49, 63 percent; among those 18 to 29,
72 percent.
These numbers are apt to command respect among
people in political life. President Bush has begun to
use this issue to invade the Democratic heartland.
Education was the issue around which he convened the
governors in September 1989, and it was the topic for
the first public task force organized during the Bush
administration. The President has bypassed the
Congress, which could not enact choice if it wanted to
(and probably would not if it could). He has moved
directly to the states and to the people.
Yet the political response to the changing public
attitude appeared first in Minnesota, a liberal and
Democratic state with relatively good schools, where a
liberal and Democratic governor, Rudy Perpich, proposed
in 1985 that choice be opened up within the public
school sector. Five years later that program is fully
in operation in Minnesota, and has spread in some form
to Arkansas, Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska, and some other
states.
Growing support for choice is the public's
response to the failure of public education to put
children first. The education establishment has been
full of good intentions, and more than willing to spend
the public's money. But it has not been willing to
change itself in basic ways. Public education has
remained a system of big organizations -- big schools
in big buildings, with a traditional, top-down
organizational structure like the Army or the Postal
Service. No matter how unresponsive and ineffective
this way of organizing learning has become, the
prevailing ideology insists that local school districts
must retain their monopoly on providing public schools
to the children of the community.
It is time to say this: our system of public
education is a bad system. It is terribly inequitable.
It does not meet the nation's needs. It exploits
teachers' altruism. It hurts kids.
Citizens are now rebelling against this system in
one way or another; sometimes challenging the local
district directly but increasingly moving to the state
to get a different system more responsive to their
needs.
In 1988, neighborhood groups in Chicago, supported
by the business and civic community, went first to
Mayor Harold Washington and then to Springfield for a
law creating school-level boards, with parent
majorities and with the power to hire the principal.
When the Chicago district opposed that legislation the
coalition took on that opposition and beat it.
Most recently the political response has taken a
turn toward private schools. In Kansas City, after the
suburbs declined to open their schools, the federal
court has been now been asked to rule that only in the
private schools can the children get an integrated
education.
And now there is Polly Williams.
In Milwaukee the black community on the city's
North Side had been left by a "desegregation" order of
the federal court with about 20 all-black schools.
Representatives of the black community then asked the
district and the state for a separate district through
which they could run those schools themselves. They
were turned down. So in 1990 state Rep. Polly Williams
put through the legislature a bill opening the way for
their children to attend private schools at public
expense.
Here is a black woman, a former welfare mother, a
supporter of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, interested not in
ideology but simply in what works for her people,
telling the Republican governor (who favored the same
idea) to stay out of the way so she can pass the bill,
which she did.
Everyone senses the political implications. If
leadership with that kind of ability and credibility
begins to tap the public support for choice now
apparent in the polls, some very large things could
begin to change. Public education cannot easily resist
a Polly Williams. For the first time, it faces a
practical need to make a strategic move; to come up
with a positive proposal of its own on the issue of
system change.
So do the mostly Democratic elected officials in
the larger cities. With their preoccupation with the
traditional interest-group politics of education they
have essentially stood against the effort by the
residents of those cities -- their natural
constituency -- to secure what those people know they
need most if their children are to have any hope of
rising out of poverty: a good education. The decision
not to provide a good education -- not to challenge the
system in the interest of the kids -- could very soon
appear a profound political miscalculation.
Americans today face a practical question: how can
we use this powerful idea of choice to improve the
schools while retaining the essential purposes of
public education? The answer needs careful thought,
because some of the proposals that fly under the banner
of choice may not hold firmly to the ideas of the
common school, of equity and of public purpose.
In this coming discussion the key people will be
those not directly involved in public education. The
change that is coming calls into question the
fundamentals of the system; and the people who live in
that system will not take the lead in that.
This report proposes a strategy for revitalizing
public education by stimulating the creation of new
public schools. Under this approach, the states would
intervene strategically to introduce incentives for
school districts to change, by allowing families to
choose the schools their children attend and by
allowing someone other than the local district to start
an innovative public school. That will require that
the states withdraw from local school districts the
exclusive franchise for owning and operating public
schools. School choice alone won't change a closed
system; what's needed is to open the system to
enterprising people who want to start innovative new
schools.
The system proposed here is a competitive system,
on the theory of some Fabians in Britain that
"competition favors the survival of the helpful." But
it is also a public system. The schools will serve
public objectives and will be publicly accountable for
the public support they receive.
Before explaining the proposal, however, it is
important to examine the problems with the path the
education discussion is presently traveling.
People like to act directly. They see a problem
with schooling. They know the district owns the
schools. So they want to get the district to change
its schools. The business community has bought into
this notion of restructuring. State governments are
now being pressed to buy in as well.
It is an appealing idea: shifting more
responsibility from districts to "site-managed" or
"self-governing" schools, assessed and rewarded for
progress in improving what students know and are able
to do. Certainly, restructuring improves on the old
prescription of higher salaries, smaller classes and
better training.
The problem is that the districts aren't
responding nearly quickly enough. Nor are they likely
to, because they don't have to.
Restructuring is not without its successes. There
are important demonstrations in many schools. A number
of districts have restructuring contracts. In
Kentucky, the program will be tried statewide. All of
these efforts are widely reported. The media create
the impression of a changing system.
But change is more than getting words on paper, in
contract or in law. Change must get established. It
must last. And it must spread. Yet even in the most-
noted restructuring districts, the implementation is
proving -- as the superintendent in Rochester, New
York, Peter McWalters, said recently -- "damned hard."
In some districts the educators do not want to use all
the authority they are given. In others the changes
made may now be slipping away. The much-praised
restructuring in East Harlem has been in real jeopardy.
Strenuous efforts by its friends may save it. But how
many such defensive battles can be fought and won? For
how long?
There is also a problem of scale. This country
has 40 million kids and 2.2 million teachers in 84,000
schools in 15,000 districts. The problems are general,
and serious. The change has got to be systemic.
Restructuring is simply not moving fast enough for the
job that has to be done.
Restructuring is a vision. It lacks a strategy
for action.
Few institutions welcome radical change. They
need a reason to change. Restructuring does not give
the school district a compelling reason to change. It
continues the traditional assumption that altruism is
an adequate motivational base for change. It expects
that boards, superintendents and teachers will do
things they find personally difficult and
institutionally unnecessary because these are important
for the country and good for kids.
Restructuring does not go to the heart of the
problem. It is trying to persuade districts to change,
while accepting as given the system of public education
that makes it hard for them to change.
This makes no basic sense. We need a new
approach. We need to find what makes it so hard to
change, and change that.
Almost certainly, what makes change so hard in
education is the districting of the system.
Education has boundaries. Each set of boundaries
creates an area in which there is one organization
teaching public school, to which the kids who live in
that area are assigned. Public education is organized
as a pattern of these territorial exclusive franchises.
Under this arrangement, the state leaves to the
district final decisions about improvement. Governors
and legislators like to talk as if they can improve the
schools. They can't. Legally schools do not exist:
districts exist. The state deals with districts, not
with schools. Only districts can change the schools.
Governors and legislatures can propose and promise,
plead and threaten. They can give money. They can
issue orders. Often the districts respond. But
whether they do or not in the end is up to them. If
the district does not do better the state does not send
in another organization that will. It accepts the pace
of improvement at which the district is able or willing
to move.
It does not matter how much students learn.
Within very broad limits the state assures the
districts their existence, their students, their
revenues, their security and virtually their annual
spending increases -- their material success --
independent of the level of student success.
Hence, it is no mystery why in public education
the cards are stacked against innovation. An
organization with an exclusive franchise is under
little pressure to change.
David K. Cohen, at Michigan State University, put
it gently when he wrote in 1986 that education contains
"weak incentives for the introduction of innovations
that would cause internal stress." Proposals for
radical change surely do cause internal stress. Change
disrupts settled routines, upsets people, causes
controversy. It threatens the real interests of
powerful organizations.
As they consider proposals for change, the
superintendent, board, principal, unions, and teachers
weigh the potential benefits to the kids against the
risk of creating "internal stress." They want to help
the kids. But upsetting people might cause
controversy. It might produce a grievance, lose an
election, cause a strike, or damage a career.
The risks are real. There is nothing
countervailing, nothing that requires kids' interests
to be put first, nothing very bad that will happen if
the decision is to say "no." As things stand, a "no"
is the end of the matter: the principal who wants to
change has nowhere else to go. The teacher has nowhere
else to go, and parents and students have nowhere else
to go. There is almost nothing anyone can change
without getting someone else's permission. Yet almost
everyone has the power to check everyone else.
Moreover, practically nothing depends on making
the improvements for which the public is pressing:
clear objectives, measurement of performance, new
technology or better learning methods. Unless
something quite unusual happens, the students and the
revenues will be there anyway. Good educators tell
their colleagues, "We have to change." But that is not
true in any real sense.
The kids get what altruism, courage and the random
appearance of exceptional individuals provide in the
way of improvement -- which is often a lot. But the
system puts them second. The system puts adults first.
As Albert Shanker told the Itasca Seminar in Minnesota
in 1988: "This is a system that can take its customers
for granted."
It is unproductive and unfair to put people under
incentives that are not aligned with the mission they
are supposed to perform. That leads to blaming the
people for failures that are the fault of the system.
Parents blame teachers and administrators. Educators
in response blame parents and kids. It is all wrong.
As Ted Sizer remarks near the end of Horace's
Compromise, "the people are better than the system."
Instead of blaming the people, we should fix the
system.
The system is not immutable: it was built by
policy; it can be changed by policy. But to change it
we will have to go beyond the district. "We can never
turn around enough districts," Frank Newman, president
of the Education Commission of the States, said in a
"Statehouse to Schoolhouse" discussion, "without
changing the incentives in the system."
Changing incentives means providing opportunities
and reasons for people to do in their own interest the
"stressful" things that change requires. Changing
incentives "in the system" means restructuring the
environment in which districts live. It means
withdrawing their exclusive franchise.
Only the state can do this, for districting is
created by state laws. The responsibility for action
rests with the legislatures, and with the governors
whose proposals begin the law-making process.
The state should not get into restructuring
directly. The state's job is not to run the schools,
but to provide a workable system for those who do. It
owes boards, teachers and administrators -- and the
public -- a system in which those who do change and
improve are supported and rewarded, and in which those
who do not are the ones put at risk. Yet everywhere in
this country the state is in default on that
obligation.
The exclusive franchise means the district can
keep students in and can keep other school-teaching
organizations out. To withdraw it the state would have
to make it possible for some other public organization
to sponsor the public school in the area, and would let
students enroll in those schools if they chose.
Choice and new public schools would go to the
heart of the problem. No district would have to do
anything. But none could any longer take its students
for granted. If the district schools did not improve,
other and better schools might appear. Suddenly, a
decision not to change and improve would no longer be
without practical consequences.
These twin ideas -- choice and new public
schools -- face a formidable challenge. They will have
to get enacted, which obviously will not be easy. And,
first, they will have to be put in workable form. The
prospects for enactment will depend partly on the skill
of the design -- on whether the ideas of choice and new
public schools can be made to serve the purposes of
public education.
What follows is an effort to suggest a practical
program that could be enacted. It will deal first with
the idea of transferring the attendance decision from
the system to the student; then with the issues
involved in letting "someone else" offer a public
school.
1) Extending School Choice
The discussion of choice has to begin with the
fact that choice exists today.
Every state has had a choice plan since the Pierce
decision in 1925. It is a simple plan: kids can go to
any schools, anywhere -- private or public -- if their
parents can pay the tuition or the cost of moving their
place of residence. It is in use: lots of people
choose. It works. It is inequitable: it discriminates
against the poor. A family with a lot of money has a
lot of choice. A family with little money has little
choice.
What some state legislatures are doing is
extending choice, using public resources to offset the
inequalities of the private market. It can reasonably
be called a liberal thing to do.
Not every choice plan does that well. Choice is a
design question. Everyone discussing choice has to
decide: (a) What students will be eligible? (b) What
schools will be eligible? and (c) Under what rules will
they come together? What "choice" means depends on how
you answer those questions. And how you answer those
questions depends on what you want to accomplish.
Choice, like any other instrument, is neither good nor
bad itself. Everything depends on what you want to do.
You can use choice to create an elitist, segregated
system, or to create a much more equitable system than
the one that exists today.
The state that has answered these questions most
fully -- Minnesota -- improved the equity of the
system, as it decriminalized the student's decision to
enroll in a district in which she or he does not live.
Minnesota made choice available to all kids enrolled in
public schools. It established a set of controls on
choice: for racial balance, against selectivity, etc.
But choice alone is not enough. In a discussion
recently at the National Governors Association, David
Hornbeck, formerly the chief state school officer in
Pennsylvania and in Maryland, noted that in the last 30
years large numbers of families have exercised their
power to choose by leaving the central cities -- yet
their action did not improve the schools of those
districts. Precisely. There was choice, but still the
exclusive franchise; still no opportunity for anyone
else to offer a public school in that area.
Choice makes an alternative legally and
financially accessible but -- so long as the exclusive
franchise remains -- not practically available. The
other organization the student wants to attend is
always in some other place. So choice becomes an
argument about who has to travel and about who should
pay the cost of travel.
For choice to work -- to help the student and to
stimulate the district to change -- the state will have
to provide both choice and choices: different schools
for kids to choose among where they live. It is like
the epoxy kit you buy at the store: neither tube has an
effect alone. The dynamics appear only when the two
are mixed. In education, the dynamics will appear only
when choice and innovation mix.
2)nbsp; Beyond Choice to New Public Schools
What shape might new schools take? People both
inside and outside public education tend to share a
conviction that new schools should have some of the
characteristics of private schools -- the autonomy, the
smaller size, the freedom to innovate -- along with an
appropriate accountability for the public resources
they receive. The problem, not surprisingly, is in
translating that into workable specifics.
From within the system the principal proposal has
been for "school-site management." The idea is that
districts themselves will voluntarily create autonomous
schools, delegating resources and holding schools
accountable for results. It is a key part of the
restructuring idea.
From outside the system come calls to use existing
private schools, put under some (usually minimal)
public supervision. These schools exist in most
communities, their costs are low, many (especially the
Catholic schools) now enroll a substantial number of
minority (and non-Catholic) children and many need
students. Both John Coons and Steve Sugarman, in their
"California Scholarship Initiative" and Chubb and Moe,
in their plan, would draw in these schools. The new
program in Milwaukee allows students to use publicly
funded vouchers to attend private schools that offer
non-sectarian instruction.
Both of these proposals are flawed. Most
districts are unwilling to delegate meaningful control
to their schools. Where site-management has happened,
as in Chicago and in Britain, it was imposed by the
state. Thus far, the private school option has not
proved practical, not so much because these schools
teach religion (it is easy enough to design a non-
sectarian program) as because no one has yet been able
to solve the dilemma of autonomy and public
accountability. Moreover, no less than their public
counterparts, private schools are often highly
traditional in their approach to learning.
One problem with these approaches is that they use
existing schools. A third approach would be to create
new schools which operate under contract to some public
entity. Only new schools can stimulate the widespread
innovation that public education needs. It is common
in other parts of our public sector to use a non-
governmental organization to accomplish a public
purpose: all kinds of programs, including Medicare, are
built on what Charles Schultze of the Brookings
Institution has called "the public use of the private
interest." It has simply been outside the givens of
public education.
This is where we now might break through. We must
grapple with several practical questions: For what
would the school be accountable? To whom would it be
accountable? Could it select its students? Could it
"top up" the public payment with fees? What rules
would apply?
Chubb and Moe are firm that new schools must be
autonomous. "Any group that applies to the state and
meets these minimal criteria (relating to graduation,
health and safety, and teacher-certification) must then
be chartered as a public school and granted the right
to accept students and receive public money." The
school's accountability must be only "downward", to its
parent/student community, and it must be able to admit
as many or as few students as it wants, based on
whatever criteria its organizers think relevant.
Schools must also be free to exercise their own
informal judgment about individual applicants.
That is dramatically different from many people's
(most important, many legislators') definition of a
public school. However, it is possible to design a
system a little closer to the traditional definition
that might have a greater chance of enactment. Such a
system would define public education not in terms of
how schools are administered, but in terms of the
public purposes they are designed to serve.
3)nbsp; A New Public School System
What follows is an outline for a new public school
system that operates through contracts rather than
vouchers. Such an arrangement would provide public
accountability, since a public body would set the
objectives and monitor performance, as well as
autonomy, since new schools would be independent
entities, would be responsible for results, and would
have some choice about the public body with which they
wanted to work.
1.
Be open to a wide variety of organizing
groups. New schools could be formed by educators --
administrators or teachers -- or by groups of parents.
Other options include social-service agencies or
private groups in the learning business.
2.
Designate more than one chartering body. It
would make sense to open this up to whatever public
organizations are authorized to run schools today.
This would include the local district, which might
approve such a school either within or outside its own
boundaries. It would also include colleges and
universities. Some once ran K-12 schools, and could
again. It might also include other governmental units.
Most states have a "joint powers" law. Some let two
governmental units do together what either one is
allowed to do separately. This means a city, a county,
a housing authority, a public zoo or museum could
through agreement with a district acquire the authority
to sponsor a school.
States should also be able to charter schools.
The legislature might create schools directly -- as
some have, for the arts or for math and science. Or it
might give the state board of education general
authority to approve new schools proposed by others; or
it might set up a new agency for the purpose.
The federal government might also start new public
schools. In the 1930s the New Deal built TVA as a
yardstick by which to measure electric utilities. It
built the "Greenbelt" towns as a model for community
planning. It might do the same now for schools. And
might well begin in the District of Columbia; Congress
being in effect the state legislature for the District.
3.
Let the school take whatever legal form it
wants. The organizers might choose to operate as a
public corporation, a non-profit, a professional
association, or a co-operative.
4.
Have the school be accountable in two ways: to
its approving authority (the state or some other public
body) through the contract; and to its families,
through choice. This would be a big improvement over
what exists today: no performance contract and no
choice. The contract relationship forces
accountability in ways that the employment relationship
does not. It requires the public body to know what it
wants. It frees the contractor to decide how the job
is to be done. It forces an evaluation and therefore
measurement. And it provides consequences: a contract
can be terminated for cause, or simply not be renewed.
5.
Give all applicants an equal chance of being
admitted. Such a policy would differ significantly
from the Chubb-Moe approach, under which the school
would choose its students. Yet it would still let the
school limit its size, and even specialize in some
subject, by age-level, or in kids with some particular
characteristics. The state could also target the
opportunity to create new public schools, say to big
cities, or to districts it has declared bankrupt, or to
kids not doing well.
6.
Make sure good information is available. Some
people have more skills at organization, and greater
financial resources, than others. The state would
equalize this capacity. There should be some help both
to groups in forming these schools and getting approval
and to families in finding these schools once formed.
7.
Keep the new school clear of traditional
requirements. Civil rights, student rights, and health
and safety must be assured. Beyond that, the
legislature should resist the impulse to load up the
new school with all the traditional requirements. The
idea is, after all, to produce a different school; not
a replica of the school that exists today. The
traditional school will remain, for people who want
that option. So will the traditional private school.
8.
Establish some defense against, say, a Robert
Mapplethorpe School. The state cannot allow any group
to receive public money simply by declaring itself a
school. It may not be possible to control this with
criteria. It may be simpler to require an applicant-
group to win the approval of, or to be sponsored by, a
public body which the state can trust to make a common-
sense judgment.
9.
Set the accountability in terms of student
performance. Schools relieved of the need to meet
"input" requirements should accept responsibility for
outcomes. The state might write new performance
standards. Or it might adopt the solution worked out
by Minnesota for its home school controversy: a student
in a new school would have to meet whatever standards
the board is willing to impose on the regular-school
students in the district where he or she lives. Or the
school might be held simply to whatever outcomes it had
itself said it would meet.
10.
Let the school lease space, wherever it can.
It might approach the district about an existing
building. A district might be required to lease space
on reasonable terms, if space is available.
Alternatively, the school would set up in space it
leased in the community.
11.
Pay full cost and give the school its money
in a lump. Precisely how the money-mechanism will work
will depend on how the state pays for education today.
Most states have a "foundation" program. This means
each district every year pays a uniform percentage of
its wealth toward the cost of education; and, whatever
this raises in dollars, the state pays the difference
between that local effort and some dollar-amount --
hopefully the full cost of educating a child for a
year.
In simpler though less familiar terms: in a
foundation-aid system the local district pays in full
for the education of as many kids as its local effort
will cover, and the state pays in full for the
education of all who remain. In such a foundation
system the marginal kid is state-paid; so when a
student moves the state would deduct the full
foundation amount (not just the "state aid portion")
from what it pays the resident district, and send that
amount to the new school or to the other public body
sponsoring the school.
States without foundation programs could perhaps
require the resident district to transfer its revenue
directly to the new school. Some states might need to
enact a foundation program. A state might want to give
a new school slightly less than what a district spends.
Or it might decide to pay more for the education of
less-advantaged kids.
12.
Let the school organize itself in whatever
way it wants. The whole point is to leave to the
school decisions about the use of time, the method of
instruction and the roles of the teachers and
administrators.
13.
Let the district schools have the same
opportunity. They deserve the chance to compete on an
equal footing. Providing in law a standard plan for
chartering schools that would be available both to new
and to existing schools would open up a far more
effective route to "site-management" than exists today.
At the moment, a district seeking the freedom to make
its own decisions must try to negotiate a delegation of
authority from an often-unwilling district. Districts
do sometimes become jealous of successful schools, and
try to close or change them. Those innovative but
controversial schools would be in a much stronger
position vis-a-vis the district central office if they
knew they had the option to withdraw and to be
sponsored by some other district, by a public
university, or by the state.
The gradual development of a new public school
system, through the opportunity for people to start new
schools and the opportunity for students to choose
among them, will force the school board to rethink its
role. More and more students will be educated
"outside" the district; geographically or
organizationally. Little by little the state might
take over the policy role: setting the objectives,
raising the revenue and evaluating the performance.
At the moment school boards are resisting the new
ideas. Board members oppose choice in almost the same
proportion as the public supports it. The school board
is a troubled institution, struggling -- less and less
successfully -- to maintain some control over education
policy against the pressure from state regulations on
the one side and from its employees, in the bargaining
process, on the other. Their defense -- in response to
Chubb and Moe -- has been to lecture their critics
about the role of school boards in American democracy.
It might be better for the boards to make a
decisive move: to secure their role in policy not by
trying to enlarge but by abandoning their ownership of
the schools. In short, they might divest themselves of
school operations.
There is a real case for divestiture. The school
board today is caught in a fundamental conflict of
interest. It is trying to represent the parents and
the public, to whom it promises the best possible
education for the kids. But it also sits as the board
of the only teaching-business in town. This is a self-
dealing arrangement, in which the board's role as
producer tends to dominate. Almost inevitably the
board spends more of its time worrying about its staff
(who can leave) than about its students (who cannot).
In a divestiture, school administration would be
split off into a separate entity, essentially on
contract to the board. In a district of significant
size it might be divided into two or more operating
groups, each with its contract to the board.
Divestiture would clarify the board's role
dramatically. The issues that now clog up the board's
agenda would become matters to be decided by the
operating organization: personnel, schedules, books,
supplies. The board would have to think about
objectives, about outcomes, about revenues and about
which organizations it wanted to have teach the kids.
Each of the operating groups would operate
district-wide. This would give parents in every
neighborhood two or more different organizations to
choose among. Two or more groups might even set up
school in a single building.
People in a number of cities are looking for a way
to break up the big school bureaucracies. In Illinois,
for example, Senate Republicans in 1988 proposed
breaking up the big Chicago district into about 20
smaller districts. The plan that passed that year
created a board for each of the roughly 600 schools,
under the city-wide board. The reform coalition is
working hard to make that decentralization succeed; so
far successfully. The concern is that what can be
decentralized can be recentralized.
Divestiture is different. In Chicago the city-
wide board would have remained, for policy decisions,
and there might have been four operating groups, each
contracted to operate about 150 schools, each with a
presence in every neighborhood. Divestiture would have
provided decentralization and choice at the same time.
Withdrawing the exclusive franchise would take
away from teachers, as from districts, the security of
the traditional arrangement. This is necessary:
educators should not be able to take their customers
for granted. But as the state makes this change it
should in fairness offset the risk it creates for
educators with some opportunity for reward.
That reward could be the opportunity for the
educators -- specifically, for the teachers -- to own
the schools. This would give them the opportunity to
grow in professional responsibility and perhaps to
increase their personal income.
The school is not the building, of course.
Someone else would likely own the building. The school
is the people, and the instructional program. A group
of educators might own a single school, or several
schools. Or it might own a program or department --
math, language, science, or music -- which might
operate at several sites.
That option is not available today. If you want
to be a teacher you have to be an employee. If you are
an imaginative, aggressive teacher with good ideas for
improving education; and if you have the desire and the
ability to build an organization around those ideas,
public education has no place for you.
The idea of owning the school is bound to be
attractive. Nationally the K-12 system is a $200-
billion-a-year enterprise. It is a guaranteed market.
The customers are required by law to use the service,
and there is universal third-party coverage, financed
by taxes. New schools with a prospect of doing better
should be welcome: the public wants improvement, the
kids are disaffected, the employees are frustrated and
leaving.
There is also great potential to do better -- to
try new ways to get kids more engaged in learning, and
to cut expensive overhead. The costs of entry are low.
All that has been missing is the opportunity to get in:
some public organization authorized and willing to say
"yes" to educators who have a better idea, and the
prospect that the teachers could get the benefits of
their idea if it works.
Educators who want to own their group, school or
program would receive the per-student cost for the
total enrolled. They would be accountable for results,
and they would have to persuade their students to come
and to stay. But they could keep either for use in the
program or as personal income what they did not need to
spend. The employment option would remain for
educators who prefer to be employed, as many will.
Unions would serve both employee-teachers and
owner-teachers. They would bargain only for the
former: teachers who own their organization would
obviously set their compensation themselves. But
unions could have the owner-teachers as dues-paying
"associate" members, and provide other services they
require. The concept of associate membership has
recently appeared within the AFL-CIO. Its author is
Albert Shanker.
Withdrawing the exclusive franchise and
divestiture would threaten the system. The decision
would have to be made in the legislature. The
education organizations would probably resist. They
are powerful politically.
But perhaps the conventional -- the realist --
opinion is wrong. The fundamentals for sweeping change
are in place: improvement is necessary, restructured
schools are necessary for improvement, and districts
need incentives, to produce restructured schools.
Things that are necessary eventually tend to happen.
We are beginning to understand, and accept, that
the problem is not people and not money, but is in the
structure of the system itself. And it is becoming
clear how we might work through that structural
problem.
The public wants accountability; educators now
refuse to accept it. Many teachers argue they are
responsible only for their professional practice, not
for what students learn. They will not agree to
measurement if it involves published comparisons of
performance. They will not agree to sanctions for poor
performance. The concept of accountability in the
current restructuring discussion is essentially that if
you do well, you get more money; if you do badly, you
get more training.
People are receptive to the idea of teachers
having professional status, and autonomy is of course
the essence of professional status. ("Tell me what you
want. Don't tell me how to do it. I know how to do
it.") But governors, legislators, school boards,
parents, taxpayers and citizens are not likely to give
up control. They are not likely to turn over the
decisions about the instructional program while still
allowing teachers to keep the protection both of
tenured employment and of union contract. That does
not pass the accountability test.
The idea of teacher-ownership might break this
impasse. It would give teachers a reason to accept
accountability. That in turn would give the public a
reason to grant the autonomy. Teachers might soon
find, as some other professionals have, that the more
accountable they are the more autonomous they are.
Perhaps most hopeful is the way the decisions are
now moving beyond the community of education
professionals, into the hands of general political
officials who are able and willing to think outside the
system's givens. It is also very important for the
power of the presidency to be oriented now not toward
the Congress, which does not have the power to change
the structure of public education, but toward the
states, which do.
Resistance will be fierce. No district will want
new schools appearing in its territory. The district
will be anxious to preserve its exclusive franchise.
It will argue that if new and different schools are
necessary it should be the organization to start them.
The district's ability and willingness to start
new schools is bound to be limited, however, by its
desire not to threaten the other schools it owns. A
district fears new schools; even its own. Its interest
is entirely in restructuring existing schools. "Help
all schools" will be the cry. The result would be what
it is today: selected demonstrations, and waiting lists
-- always the visible evidence of a reluctance to let
change cause internal stress.
Governors and legislators will need to see that
their interest is different than the district's
interest. The state cannot let its options be limited
to actions that begin with "re": restructuring,
revitalizing, reforming and retraining old institutions
is the slowest way to change. There must also be a way
to create new, different, and better schools.
There are some other reasons to be optimistic.
First is the success of the choice legislation.
That was outside the "givens," but it happened. The
key was to take an idea previously associated with the
private sector and apply it to the public sector.
People always knew they could choose a school: they
just assumed it had to be a private school. Similarly,
educators have always known they could start a school:
they just assumed it had to be a private school. The
state made it possible to choose a public school; the
state can make it possible to start a public school.
Second is the willingness now of some leaders in
public education to think about incentives. Progress
here is recent, and tentative, for incentives remain
controversial. Some see them as rewarding people for
doing what they ought to be doing anyway. Some warn
about unintended side-effects. Some think there can be
"up-side" incentives but never "down-side" incentives:
good things for schools that do change but nothing bad
for those that do not.
Still, the willingness now to discuss incentives
at all suggests a recognition that appeals to altruism
will not be enough. The talk, however, has been about
incentives for schools and teachers. The need is to
create incentives for districts.
Third is the growing sophistication of business
leaders. Business is still ambivalent. Many chief
executives still shrink from confrontation. Some still
hope major change will result from "partnerships."
Many still think the discussion today is about how to
structure an organization rather than about how to
structure an industry.
But many business leaders are impatient now with
"feel good" partnerships. More sense that state action
is the key. The Business Roundtable now has a CEO
assigned to every governor. In some states the CEOs
are willing to contemplate radical action despite the
certainty of conflict: Chicago may have been a
watershed for business.
Fourth is the possibility that thoughtful people
inside education will find the change in their own
interest. They will not save public education by not
changing it. A bad system will not attract good
people. The pressure could grow to let kids go to the
non-public schools at public expense. The legislation
this year in Wisconsin, for Milwaukee, was a straw in
the wind.
Fifth is the awareness of the consequences of not
getting it right this time. Something like 20 million
kids went through high school during the seven years
after the Risk report. It would be a serious
problem -- for educators and for the political
leadership -- to have to confess, after another 20
million had cycled through, that once again the adults
had not got it right.
Finally, there is something to be said for state
action that confines itself to a single, radical
stroke: introducing the dynamics for change, with the
schools left free to introduce the changes themselves
in their own way, over time. The public is ready, the
Gallup survey for the Kappan reported in 1989, for
radical change.
It is popular today to put down strategies like
this. "There are no silver bullets," some people like
to say when they want to steer you toward conventional
action.
But sometimes it is possible to do a single thing
that will change everything else for good. Technology
sometimes does it; as the satellite forced the
restructuring of the telephone industry. Business
actions sometimes do it; as the money-market fund set
in motion a chain of events that is restructuring the
financial industry. Public policy can sometimes do it.
Surely that is what it means to "be strategic."
The effort to change schooling needs to be strategic.
At the moment it has mainly an idea of what a district
and school should look like, passing for a strategy
about how to get there. That vision, and exhortation,
is not enough.
The state cannot "do" improvement. The state must
do things that will cause improvement. Incentives are
best: better than mandates, better than money. The
state should remove from the district its ability to
take its students for granted, by making it possible
for new and different public schools to appear, where
the kids live and which kids can choose. The district
then will find improvement necessary, in its own
interest.
All efforts to improve public education will fail
unless the district finds improvement necessary. We
are not serious about improvement if we do not withdraw
the exclusive franchise in public education.
