Reinventing Public Education

How Contracting Can Transform America's Schools

Paul Hill, Lawrence C. Pierce, James W. Guthrie

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226336534
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A heated debate is raging over our nation's public schools and how they should be reformed, with proposals ranging from imposing national standards to replacing public educationaltogether with a voucher system for private schools. Combining decades of experience in education, the authors propose an innovative approach to solving the problems of our school system and find a middle ground between these extremes. Reinventing Public Education shows how contracting would radically change the way we operate our schools, while keeping them public and accessible to all, and making them better able to meet standards of achievement and equity. Using public funds, local school boards would select private providers to operate individual schools under formal contracts specifying the type and quality of instruction.In a hands-on, concrete fashion, the authors provide a thorough explanation of the pros and cons of school contracting and how it would work in practice. They show how contracting would free local school boards from operating schools so they can focus on improving educational policy; how it would allow parents to choose the best school for their children; and, finally, how it would ensure that schools are held accountable and academic standards are met.While retaining a strong public role in education, contracting enables schools to be more imaginative, adaptable, and suited to the needs of children and families. In presenting an alternative vision for America's schools, Reinventing Public Education is too important to be ignored.

PART I

THE CASE FOR CONTRACT SCHOOLS

ONE

Preserving Public Education

The Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, located in the heart of Los Angeles, California, now operates autonomously from the local school district and is in control of its entire budget. Under the leadership of Dr. Yvonne Chan, the school, made up of 99 percent Latino and African-American children, has seen dramatic improvement in student performance. Language arts scores have gone up from the 9th to the 39th percentile. Math scores have risen from the 14th to the 57th percentile. Attendance is now 99 percent and average class size has dropped from 31 to 26. Discipline referrals have dropped from 500 to 100 a year. The school serves 69 gifted students where before there were none. Dr. Chan and her staff of teachers have accomplished these results while saving $1 million out of a $4.6 million budget in the school’s first year. With these extra funds, the school has reduced class size, restored salary cuts, built new classrooms, installed computers, increased the number of instructional days, and contributed money to seventeen neighboring schools.

Today the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center is the exception in American public education. The purpose of this book is to propose a reform that will make it possible for all schools to have the control of funds and accountability for results that enabled Vaughn to improve so dramatically. This reform will eliminate the practice of controlling schools with politically created mandates and enable teachers and principals to concentrate on making their schools more effective. It will also enhance the range of public school options available to families and provide far higher levels of educational equality than now characterize much of American schooling.

The new arrangement we propose retains the best features of the current system and simultaneously enables schools to be more bold, imaginative, adaptable, and suited to the needs of the children and families. It can also make schools into good places for teachers to work, where teachers are treated as adults who take responsibility for children’s learning and are rewarded for results.

The strategy we propose is straightforward. It would replace the current system of detailed political and bureaucratic controls on school operations with a system of school-specific agreements that would define each school’s mission, guarantee of public funding, and grounds for accountability. These agreements would be similar to the agreements under which the best magnet and special-program schools now gain freedom to control their own programs and select only those staff members who fit the school’s instructional strategy. The difference is that the agreements we propose would be more explicit and reliable than the informal grants of permission that now permit a few schools to innovate and vary from the norm. These agreements would be formal contracts between two legally equal parties: the local school board, which would eliminate detailed controls on school expenditures, services, and hiring in order to allow every school to provide a focused and distinctive instructional program; and individual schools, which would enter binding legal commitments to provide specific programs of instruction, use public funds and assets responsibly, work to ensure success for all students, and produce agreed upon rates of student achievement.

Contracts of the kind sketched here can clarify the relationships between individual schools and public authorities, allowing schools to pursue their instructional missions free from the continual changes in policy and mandates that legislatures, courts, and local school boards inevitably create. Contracting would be a radical change in the way Americans operate public schools, yet it would preserve the public character of public education. Parents, students, and teachers would gain the advantages of choice but preserve their recourse to public officials if the schools do not serve them well. School board members would remain the politically accountable authorities responsible for ensuring that every child in a community had access to a quality education. School boards would no longer operate schools directly, but they would gain new powers and options to support truly innovative schools and to intervene to transform or replace weak and failing schools.

If all public schools were governed by the kinds of contracts we propose, a local school board would be party to many different agreements, one with each school. Each school’s agreement would specify the amount of public funds it would receive, the type of instructional program it would provide, and types and levels of student outcomes its managers agree to produce and be accountable for. A local school board’s contracts with failing schools or schools that did not attract students could be terminated. Boards could offer new contracts to groups or organizations that have run successful schools or that can assemble highly qualified staffs and show how they will provide a well-grounded instructional program.

The suggestions in this book have been tried and found promising in public service sectors other than K–12 education. A 1995 survey of 82 cities in 34 states showed that contracting for public services from private companies is common. All of these cities use private companies to provide food at public facilities. Sixty percent of the cities contract out rubbish collection, 40 percent contract for security and street maintenance, 35 percent use private companies to operate parking garages and provide tree-trimming services, and approximately 20 percent contract out health and medical services, street sweeping, and food for jails (The Economist, August 19–25, 1995, pp. 25–26). Public contracting strategies simply have not heretofore been applied widely to public education or in any systematic manner.

We propose an entire governance system that gives individual schools full control over key resources and staff, under agreements that specify each school’s instructional approach and expected student outcomes. Readers may wonder how our hopes for contracting square with the experience of Educational Alternatives, Inc. (EAI), a private firm that first won and then lost school management contracts with school boards in Baltimore and Hartford. The answer is that we are not proposing just any arrangement that goes under the name of contracting. EAI entered agreements under which they neither controlled resources and staff nor were accountable for strictly defined performance.¹ In Baltimore, EAI was forced to accept teachers assigned under union contract provisions and to persuade teachers who were members of a union that hated the very idea of EAI management of schools to learn and implement EAI’s instructional methods. EAI also accepted accountability provisions so vague that no one knew who would evaluate the schools, when, or by what standards. The result was that the first evaluations were done by EAI’s most aggressive critic, the American Federation of Teachers. Evaluation of EAI-managed schools’ performance subsequently became an exercise in polemic and counterpolemic. Subsequent evaluations conducted after termination of EAI’s Baltimore contract showed rapidly improving student achievement, but to this day no one can confidently say whether EAI students learned more or less than comparable Baltimore students.

The proposed contracting system requires comprehensive changes in the roles, missions, and legal authorities of all actors in public education, particularly school boards, teacher unions, and school staff. School boards now make detailed operational decisions affecting all schools and act as employers of school personnel. Teacher unions now act as sole-source labor contractors, who supply teachers to schools on the basis of general rules and teacher seniority rights rather than schools’ needs. Schools are now nodes in a larger bureaucracy; their instructional methods, equipment, and staffs are all chosen for them. Under the proposed contracting system, school boards would oversee a portfolio of diverse schools, each operated by a private group composed of teachers, parents, social-services providers, educational entrepreneurs, or combinations thereof. School boards would still be elected locally, but the fact that board members would not control jobs or details of school operations should attract a different sort of candidate—one more concerned with school quality and less with patronage or political opportunities. Schools, not district-wide school boards, would employ teachers, and unions would represent teachers in their relations with individual schools, not with entire school systems. Schools would be real organizations, not subordinate nodes in a larger bureaucracy, subject to constant tinkering from outside. They would be in charge of budgets, buildings, investment funds for staff development and other improvements in the instructional process, and responsible for performance.

Changes such as these could not be made overnight. Public officials would have to learn how to identify good providers and make sound contracts, and groups of educators and other professionals would have to form new organizations capable of operating whole schools. In many localities, contracting would start small, perhaps as an effort to provide new schools for neighborhoods and groups that the traditional public school system has served badly.

Principles Motivating Our Proposal

Throughout America, school boards, teachers, parents, and university faculty are collaborating on school projects intended to create exciting and effective learner-centered education. The Accelerated Schools Project, the Effective Schools Project, and the Coalition for Essential Schools all started at major universities and are examples of school reforms that are improving instruction. More recently, the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDCl, with the support of many leading corporations, has commissioned a number of innovative whole-school designs. There are also many high-performance independent and religious schools.

Regrettably, few public schools can take full advantage of these efforts. Schools that can fully implement a new instructional principle or theory are nearly always exceptions, somehow exempted from the rules and restrictions that govern the vast majority of public schools. Most have foundation grants, high-energy principals who can terrorize or work around the central office staff, or special support from businesses or foundations. Many draw on the resources of major universities, resources that are unavailable to the majority of public schools. Schools that gain great reputations are admired and publicized, but school systems seldom try to reproduce them. The annual spectacle of parents camping overnight, in lines, to enroll children in popular magnet schools exemplifies this problem. School systems can create good schools, but few see it as their job to duplicate successes or create for all schools the conditions that enable some to succeed.

Some argue that the reason schools seem impervious to change is the lack of agreement on what constitutes a good school. Differences do arise, for example, in debates between religious organizations and professional educators over issues such as prayer in schools, outcome-based education, and collaborative learning. For the most part, however, research and conversations with teachers and parents reveal a remarkable amount of agreement on the attributes of good schools. We believe, in other words, that there is a broad-based consensus about what it takes to provide high-quality education. The problem is that the current decision-making structure for public education makes it impossible to do what we need to do to have good public schools.

We have read many books and articles on successful schools and have asked hundreds of teachers, administrators, parents, and students about what kinds of schools they hope to have. While the words are often different, the underlying themes and principles are consistent:

• Schools should be focused on student learning. Schools should be organized around the needs of children. The question is, how would you organize a school if you wanted to enhance the learning of every student? Schools should be more personalized, encouraging long-term relationships between teachers and families. Schools should also be relatively small so that students and teachers get to know each other, and students and parents feel comfortable when they enter the school. Schools should be places where every student is known, and schools should do whatever is necessary to help every student learn.

• Schools should be whole organizations and true communities. Schools should act like serious enterprises that have definite goals. Like business firms and goal-driven nonprofit organizations, schools exist because their is work to do what individuals alone cannot accomplish. Whether it is a Montessori school, a cooperative learning school, or a school organized around themes, it is important that everyone in the school be committed to its goals and one another. Parents, teachers, staff, and administrators should maintain a shared interest in the overall performance of the children and the school. In order to do this, the school must have control over key resources, especially for staff selection and rewards, and for investment in school improvements.

Schools, however, should be more than a businesslike organization. They should also be communities. Schools form a bridge between families and the larger society. They must serve both the interests of the parents and children in the school and the interests of the broader community. In order to do this schools should build bonds of trust between parents and teachers, teachers and students; and schools and their communities and trusting relationships can be sustained only if there are shared values.

• The school building should be the basic management unit. Teachers and building-level administrators should be in charge of their schools. Most decisions should be made at the school level. School staffs should have opportunities to learn what has worked elsewhere and have time to try out new ideas and to learn from failures. Teachers should be encouraged to work in teams to provide a total education—an education that ensures that every student in the school learns. When management is shifted to the school level, schools can be responsive to parents and truly put the education of children first.

• Schools should treat teachers as professionals. If teaching is to become a true profession, teachers have to be given much more responsibility in schools. Teachers should be considered a part of school management. They must have greater opportunities to collaborate with colleagues and have more say over the selection of other teachers in the school. If teaching is to become a profession and be attractive to able people, salaries paid to teachers have to be comparable with salaries in other professions. This might mean that teaching should become a full-time occupation (rather than a nine-month job). Most importantly, teacher compensation should be more closely tied to performance. Those who get better results, who offer rare or indispensable skills, and who work longer hours, should be rewarded for their efforts.

• Teachers, principals, and parents must have confidence that their school is equitably funded. The quality of a child’s education should not depend on the level of funding available to the school she attends. Today, we tolerate great resource disparities, even among schools in the same district, largely due to a district’s policies permitting senior teachers to cluster together in the “nicest” schools. All schools should start with comparable facilities and equal or near equal funding based upon the number of students enrolled in the school. At a minimum, schools should start out with comparable facilities and more or less equal operating funds based on the enrollment of the school.

• Schools should be open to parents and welcome their participation. Parents should be recognized as collaborators in a child’s education. They should also be able to learn in advance what different schools offer and what they demand of children and families. Having made a choice, parents feel some responsibility for ensuring that the family fulfills its part of the bargain; they also will have a framework of expectations on which to judge the school. Not all parents can spend great amounts of time in schools, but some can be invited to contribute to the real life of the school, serving as aides and assistants, taking attendance, supervising study sessions, monitoring the lunch room, supervising play activities, or helping with health screening. Some parents can provide individualized instruction in the uses of technology and foreign languages, or participate in career education programs. Parent participation can also be encouraged through community education activities at the school. Parental commitment through choice and presence in the school links school with home, and makes it an extension of the family rather than a remote institution or a rival.

• Schools should be organized to encourage high performance. In most school districts today it makes almost no difference if a school does well or if it does poorly. They are assigned the same number of students, receive the same budget, and are subject to the same rules regardless of performance. This must change. Highly effective teachers should be paid more than less effective teachers. School budgets should be tied to enrollment so that schools that gain reputations for results and attract more students can obtain more resources. High performance should be a criterion for the right to operate a school. Principals and teachers who fail to achieve high standards should be replaced by those who can.

• Schools should be given incentives to use resources efficiently. Just as there are few rewards for high performance, schools today have few reasons for being efficient. In fact, schools are likely to receive more resources if they are inefficient. Putting more students in special classes not only reduces class size but also increases allocations for special education teachers and supplies. Efficiency can be improved by giving school administrators and teachers control over the use of the school’s total budget. If schools could keep money saved by being efficient, they might explore less expensive staffing patterns, or ways of using technology that enable individual teachers to be more effective. If a school and teachers, for instance, could benefit from reducing sick leave and absenteeism, teachers would be less likely to take advantage of those benefits. Schools in the South have been able to recarpet schools with the savings from turning off air conditioners when classrooms were not in use.

In themselves these principles do not constitute a reform, but they establish the requirements that a successful reform must meet. They are extremely challenging, requiring large numbers of people to develop and use advanced skills and to expend intense effort. No system of governance can absolutely guarantee that we will have schools that meet all these requirements. The system of contracting we propose is only a framework for action, not a device that will automatically and without human effort meet these requirements. In the chapters that follow, however, we will show how a public education system based on contracting is a better match for these requirements than any other.

Why Such a Dramatic Reform Is Necessary

Most Americans want an excellent education for their children and are willing to spend time, energy, and money to achieve good results. Almost all of us have gone to some kind of school and know how a school operates. We also try to teach our own children and we have an intense interest in their personal success. Yet many Americans are frustrated and angry with public schools. They are not comfortable with what goes on in schools, are disappointed with the results schools are achieving, and feel that they have almost no voice and little control over the education their children receive. This is true of laypers...