Jay P. Greene's Blog

Peter Meyer at the Fordham Institute asked me to contribute a piece to his Board’s Eye View blog to address The BIG Questions on school governance.  Here is what I sent him:

Being against greater national control over education policy is not the same as being for local school districts.  I appreciate Peter Meyer for giving me the opportunity in this space to explain what I am for when it comes to school governance.

Fundamentally, I am for parental control over the education of their children, so I guess that I am for as little governance over education as we can manage.  In my ideal world, which I’ve tried to explain and justify at greater length in this book chapter, parents would be given as much money as is minimally necessary to fulfill their obligation to educate their children and would choose the location, manner, and content of that education.  Since education is just a subset of all of the activities in which parents engage to raise their children to be productive adults, we should defer to parents as much in how they educate their children as how they raise those children more generally.  As long as parents do not neglect or abuse their children, the government should have as little role in education as is possible.

But we don’t live in my ideal world and I have no expectation that we will.  All that I can hope for is that we will inch closer to my ideal rather than further away from it.  With that in mind, I favor governance arrangements that facilitate greater parental choice and control over education over those that would reduce parental choice and control.

So, I have no particular love for local school districts.  They just more closely approximate parental choice and control than does granting more power over education to the state or national governments.  It would be even better in my view to abolish school districts and have every school be like a charter school – a publicly regulated school of choice that would choose its own method and content of education and would have to attract willing families to generate the revenue to pay for it.  But I understand the idea of abolishing school districts and having every school operate as a charter school is only slightly less unrealistic than a virtually unregulated world of parental choice and control.

As unrealistic as making every school a charter school may be, we have been inching in that direction.  A little more than two decades ago we had no charter schools.  Today charter schools constitute nearly 5% of all public schools and educate about 3% of all students.  And the expansion of parental choice and control has been even greater when one considers the fully array of choices that have been introduced over the last two decades, including vouchers, tax credit funded scholarships, virtual schools, inter-district choice, magnet schools, etc…  My ideal world may be an unattainable fantasy, but my vision of gradual progress toward that ideal has been a fairly accurate description of the trends over the last few decades.

But there are some people, primarily edupundits located within the DC beltway, who have very different fantasies about ideal governance arrangements.  Rather than shifting arrangements directly toward greater parental choice and control, they dream about measures granting greater control to state and national authorities.  They rightly point out the defects of local school districts, but they wrongly see the solution in greater centralization of power rather than in the expansion of parental choice and control.

Their justifications for increasing the power of state and national authorities over education are more like empty political slogans than actual intellectual arguments based on principle.  For example, we’ll hear some say that a decentralized system of education cannot meet our needs in the 21^st century: “The system of schooling we have today is the legacy of the 19th century — and hopelessly outmoded in the 21st.”  Of course, representative democracy is also a legacy of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but that doesn’t mean we need to dispense with it to meet the challenges of our brave new 21^st century world.  Saying that the 21^st century demands certain skills or governance arrangements is just sloganeering and manipulating people to submit to a proposal, not a real argument.

Some attempt to justify greater centralization in education by saying that our current system is too uncoordinated, contradictory, duplicative, and confusing.  We need the greater coherence, planning, and order that more centralized control can offer.  Do you notice how the central authorities in these proposals are always imagined to be highly competent and benevolent?  They never entertain the very real possibility that the central authority might be coherent, well-planned, and orderly in pursuing something awful.  Those attracted to central planning in education may want to consider how well economic central planning has turned out.

Some attempt to justify granting more power to state and national authorities by looking overseas and claiming that the highest achieving countries have more centralized governance arrangements.  Let’s ignore for a moment that these are not accurate descriptions of how many high-achieving countries have structured their governance – Canada and Australia, for example, are high achieving and have decentralized governance arrangements.  The more fundamental problem is that the “best practices” movement of imitating some of the practices of others who are successful fails to consider what actually caused others to be successful.  Just imitating some of what they do is like the Cargo Cults found in Pacific Islands following WW II, where locals believed that if they built imitations of planes, runways, and control towers, the cargo and plentiful goods that had arrived during the war would return.  They didn’t understand that imitating the trappings of an airport doesn’t cause cargo to arrive any more than imitating the trappings of other countries’ governance arrangements will cause high achievement.

Lastly, some advocates of centralization argue that you actually need to centralize certain things in order to facilitate better decentralized control over other things.  They describe this approach as “tight-loose,” where the central authority assumes greater control over determining and regulating the goals of education and local authorities are then given greater flexibility over the means for meeting those goals.  Of course, ends and means are not so easily separated.  Ends often dictate or at least constrain the selection of means.  In addition, in what fantasy world would the central authority carefully limit its role to setting and regulating ends once it is given authority over an issue?  At least I recognize that my fantasy of parental choice and control is unrealistic.

 (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Arizona Republic put in a great story on A-F school grading on the front page above the fold today. Notice the role of double weighting the learning gains of the students in the bottom 25% in the formula. This year Arizona lawmakers closed loopholes to the 3rd grade retention law and provided new state funding for reading intervention. The expansion of the ESA program has been revised and again sits on Governor Brewer’s desk. With a signature, Arizona will have a major new choice program focusing on special needs students and children attending D/F graded districts and schools- a combination of Florida’s McKay and Opportunity Scholarship programs with some new 21st Century upgrades.

Arizona’s relative poverty is masked by a very large number of wealthy retirees who live here, often only part of the year. If we tried to spend like CT with its blessings of old money and hedge fund billionaires, we’d drive those retirees elsewhere and likely have little to show for it in terms of academic achievement. We also have a relatively challenging student demographic profile, with more low-income and ELL challenges than average. If we want to make progress, we are going to need to play Moneyball and embrace policies that increase the bang for our buck in the system.

Arizona embraced the parental choice strategy beginning in 1994 with a liberal charter school law, and followed that up with the tuition tax credit program. In the aggregate, these programs combined mostly to take the edge off of public school enrollment growth. For every child attending charter schools or using a tax credit scholarship, three new kids were pouring into the districts and the state continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on new district schools- even in very poor performing districts.

The charter school law succeeded in providing a number of very high quality schools and the tax credit programs helped Arizona’s private schools survive the creation of 500+ charters. The parental choice programs were vitally important for tens of thousands of families, but they alone were not at a scale to move the needle much on public school improvement. This was especially the case as policymakers botched other major areas of K-12 policy.

Arizona’s K-12 testing system, for instance, is in recovery from having devolved into a cruel joke on kids. Arizona had the nation’s biggest dummy down vis-a-vis the NAEP on our state AIMS test. The state fielded a deeply flawed version of the Terra Nova exam that curiously found Arizona students to be above the national average in every grade and subject every year, when we as a state had never exceeded a national average on any NAEP exam. Our policymakers put a stop to it. Worse still, we literally still have schools with giant banners out front in 9000 point font boasting of being a “PERFORMING SCHOOL” when in reality “Performing” was the second lowest label possible. The legislature passed a law this session to forbid the use of these deceptive labels going forward.

Things have changed substantially during the downturn. A housing bust was tailor-made to humble Arizona’s economy, and enrollment growth has slowed to a trickle. One silver lining in this very dark cloud is that some of the most successful Arizona charter school networks have executed/are executing ambitious plans to open new schools- real estate is cheaper, they have earned access to capital, and they are making their moves. This is very much for the good. State policymakers have made far-reaching reforms on not only transparency and parental choice, but in teacher evaluation and the curtailment of social promotion.

We’ve still got miles to go and challenges ahead, but Arizona is on the way to improved learning.

The folks at ChoiceMedia.TV have developed a new PBS series focused on education reform issues called “Reform School.”  You can see some clips of the pilot episode with yours truly here: