A permanent crisis?

Reporting on a talk I gave, the headline in La Opinion, Los Angeles' premier Spanish language newspaper, declared the city's school system en crisis permanente. No one wrote in to disagree.

Indeed, my co-authors and I used the words "permanent crisis" at the end of our book about the Los Angeles Unified School District. But the crisis in L.A. is not one of operational failure; indeed, the district appears to be making better test score gains than many of its urban and suburban counterparts in California.

Rather, LAUSD stands as a case-study example of dismembering an older institution of public education and an auditioning of interesting ideas about how a new institution might be organized.

Educators outside the city may ask what our study of Los Angeles, reported in "Learning from L.A.: Institutional Change in American Public Education" (Harvard Education Press, 2008), implies for other school districts in the state and nation. The answer is, "plenty."

A political crisis ensues when the normal actions of school board members, state legislators and educators fulfilling their regular duties do not appear to solve the problems set before them. In both common practice and textbook politics, people drop their partisan posturing and work together to solve a crisis. But in L.A., and in California in general, crisis declarations haven't worked.

Since 1983, when the federal government issued "A Nation at Risk," public education in general has been declared in crisis. California has seen scores of blue ribbon commissions--the last one sponsored by Gov. Schwarzenegger--summit meetings, foundation-sponsored reports and legislative conferences. Yet, the claim that public education is in crisis continues, and the same institutional dysfunctions that are apparent in central cities, like L.A., are also apparent in the suburbs.

In fact, much of the institution we inherited from the Progressive Era reformers of the early 20th Century has been discredited and abandoned. Particularly in urban districts like LAUSD, reforms effectively try out bits and pieces of new arrangements. The old institution was built around four ideas, all of which have been challenged:

* Apolitical governance. School board members are non-partisan and chosen from community leaders without obvious particular interests.

* Local control of finance and educational policy with loose oversight from the state.

* A professional hierarchy of educators that controlled school operations.

* A logic of confidence in which those outside the system were assured that those inside were up to the task.

Even today school board members run without party labels on the ballot, but in Los Angeles and many other locations, connection to political party and allegiances to business groups or teachers' unions and other organizations are obvious.

In reality, school governance never was apolitical. What big cities got, and some suburbs and smaller cities retain, was a kind of grassroots elite leadership: rule by the city's elders who largely echo mainstream views.

The political influence of interest groups

In the cities, and increasingly elsewhere, the myth of apolitical governance has been replaced by interest groups. The California Teachers Association is the largest of these, and its political influence has displaced the older network of superintendents as the dominant coalition in education politics.

Organized teachers, however, are far from the only interest group. Conservative Christian organizations have mobilized to support candidates in suburban areas, and liberal community action organizations have brought forth candidates in inner-ring suburbs. Special education parents lobby and litigate for a more expensive mix of services for their children. The result is highly pluralistic governance that can be contentious even in suburban communities.

For more than 70 years school districts operated under a bedrock belief of local control. The federal government was held at bay until the mid-1960s, when assistance for elementary and secondary education was attached to Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" legislation, the precursor to the No Child Left Behind Act.

In California, local control vanished with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which made the Legislature public education's paymaster. Since the 1980s, the impetus for reform has come from outside local districts: from federal and state officials, scores of foundations, think tanks and universities.

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The belief in local control was linked to a belief in a professionally dominated hierarchy. The trappings of professionalism clothed school administration, where specialized training and long service became the path to the superintendency.

Now, it has become fashionable to appoint non-educators as superintendents. Someone other than a career educator headed the schools in all of the cities profiled in our book, "The Transformation of Great American School Districts" (Harvard Education Press, 2008). In this way, central cities are distinct from suburbs and smaller towns, but both cities and smaller districts have started to resemble something much closer to network-style organizations than closed hierarchies.

Big cities throughout the country pushed by Republicans and Democrats alike --have been adopting what is known as a "diverse provider model" of education, involving a mixture of contracting out, charter schools and in-district innovations.

Philadelphia is thought of as the leading case example, but LAUSD provides a greater variety of schooling arrangements than any big city: more than 120 charters, 150 magnet schools, a nascent charter district, schools operated through a partnership with the mayor, and a large high school run by a charter management organization.

But the charter movement has also migrated to the suburbs, and in California it has taken on the trappings of an institution. The California Charter Schools Association engages in political advocacy and standards-setting for its members. Firms have sprung up to provide back-office functions, support and curriculum.

Control over curriculum development

However, the most significant break with the old education hierarchy comes with the breakdown of control over what had been the intellectual core of schooling. School districts used to pride themselves on creating a tailored if not unique curriculum, substantially shaped by their own curriculum experts and senior teachers. Of course, they bought textbooks and materials from publishers, and smaller districts often looked to larger ones for curriculum leadership.

But central cities and suburbs alike have largely abandoned curriculum development to the purchase of packages of instruction that include books, tests, staff development and external consulting support. At the same time they are much more subject to externally created evaluations. State testing mandates and the overlay of the federal No Child Left Behind Act are profoundly shaping schooling in districts of all sizes.

The early 20th Century Progressives brought forth what scholars later called a logic of confidence to school districts, their relations with the public and even their internal management. Pronouncements of confidence--"this is a good district or school"--pushed aside critical questions and voices. The logic of confidence was made possible by an allegiance to aptitude-based education, in which the job of the school was to educate children according their perceived ability, not to universal high standards. The famous Bell Curve became an expectation for student achievement as well as a social sorting device, and schools organized themselves around it.

Beginning in the 1960s with the civil rights movement, which made obvious the failure to educate African American students, and intensifying over the last two decades, public schools have become increasingly subject to a logic of consequences: a low-trust world in which only measurable outcomes count and in which there is an increasing search for someone to blame and penalize.

Now, dropping out of school or failure to achieve represents a system failure rather than an individual one. Although big cities typically fall near the bottom of school rankings tables, suburban and rural schools are not at all immune to the low-trust logic of external scrutiny.

The new institutional form

So, in each of these four dimensions, public education has moved away from its Progressive Era anchors. Why, then, given the historic criticism of the old institution's failings, isn't anyone applauding?

The answer is straightforward. The new institutional form has both an ugly face and a handsome one. The handsome, idealized face shows us participatory politics, a complex and functioning government at many levels, organizations built on a network model like much of the high tech world, and a goal of world-class standards for all students.

But real educators and educational critics see the all too apparent ugly face of the new institutional arrangements. Instead of working pluralism, we see narrow self-interest. Even those who talk of doing away with interest groups are really only advocating dampening the power of interest groups with which they disagree.

Business groups talk freely about measures to diminish the power of teachers' unions but turn a blind eye to the clout of the California Business Roundtable or anti-tax advocates. School districts laud parent participation, but not from those parents who ask embarrassing questions or who try to organize charter schools that the district does not support.

In the larger scheme of things, the problem with interest groups is not their existence, but their lack of productive behavior: the ways in which the narrowness of self-interest makes progress on a larger agenda difficult.

Historically, crises have brought on episodes of unitary or "big tent" politics, where the canvas is large enough to cover everyone in pursuit of common goals and big ideas. Commentators point to what was called the Party of California, in which Republicans and Democrats put aside petty disagreements in order to accomplish important tasks. But the memory of those days is dim, and California has not been successful in recreating an era of good feeling.

Instead of a working federation we see gridlock in which parts of the political system don't function together. Moving from local control to a system of shared power across levels of government requires a fundamental renegotiation of roles. Local school boards throughout the state have been largely without the power to raise revenue for 30 years, and much of what one thinks of as governance power has passed into other hands.

The state and federal governments set student achievement standards and provide the tests that measure them. The state approves the curriculum and provides a small list for school districts to choose from. The minimum number of hours and days for schooling is a function of state control, and a school district's expenditures are largely the subjects of collective bargaining.

Five public policy initiatives

The reality of political gridlock stayed in our minds when we finished our four-year historical study of LAUSD, and we asked ourselves whether or not there were public policy levers that could be pulled to move beyond the cycles of inventive and ambitious reform plans followed by disappointment. We suggested five initiatives, which have obvious implications beyond the boundaries of the district.

1. Pass legislation that would allow groups of LAUSD schools to operate autonomously but still under the governance umbrella of the district. Every reform plan offered up for the district in the last 40 years has sought to move decisions closer to the grassroots. The most common political suggestion is to break up LAUSD into several separate districts, each with its own board and administration.

However, my co-authors and I noted that most smaller school districts with similar student populations are not performing better, and the process of breaking up LAUSD would monopolize the political agenda and crowd out substantive reforms. Instead, we advocated a process of gradually creating networks of autonomous schools, allowing district-run schools much of the flexibility currently enjoyed by charters.

When seen along with existing and future charter schools, autonomous district schools would transform LAUSD into a network form of organization rather than a single hierarchy, giving it some of the flexibility associated with high technology firms and global manufacturing enterprises.

2. Send money directly to the schools through a weighted student formula model of funding. Any form of decentralization, including the autonomous networks we advocate, is possible only if principals and teachers at individual schools gain control over expenditures.

As UCLA professor William Ouchi has shown, there are good working models of weighted student formula funding, and a group of researchers headed by my Claremont Graduate University colleague Jacob Adams finished its multi-year finance study with the statement: "States will never educate all students to high standards unless they first fix the finance systems."

Resource consciousness, rather than rule-following consciousness, would fundamentally change school-level administration. Sending dollars to schools would also spur an investment in workable financial software that allows principals to guide their schools to decisions that are educationally sound and fiscally possible. Creating this system capacity is a substantial task for districts and the state, but it is a worthwhile investment that should attract foundation, university and business-sector support.

3. Create positive incentives. The existing system is chock-full of negative incentives and mandates at all levels. We send extra cash to failing schools and hardly notice those who have made improvements. We hold back diplomas from students who can't pass the high school exit exam but don't offer conspicuous rewards for achievement.

I would reverse that, starting with positive rewards for students, who are the real workers in this system. (How about sending a check to every student who successfully reclassifies from English Language Learner status, or offering college admission to sophomores who are on track to graduate with the right classes?)

Teachers need incentives, too, but merit pay for test scores is not at the top of my list because it is virtually impossible to administer objectively. Instead, I would take a hard look at modifying the existing salary schedule so teachers are paid for acquiring the skills schools need and for taking on added responsibility as their careers progress.

4. Transform teaching and learning. My in co-authors and I were struck by how much energy in education reform efforts was devoted to rearranging the relationships between adults and how little to changing teaching and learning. But during the same decades as educators and reformers launched big reform projects, youngsters all over the world changed the way they interacted with information.

The technology exists to break down the batch-processing mode of instruction that public schools have used for a century, and to offer students learning experiences that fit the pace and style in which they best achieve.

The technology also exists to transform schools into real learning organizations (where coming to work makes you smarter) and to provide real-time feedback about student progress. The technology exists to allow students to learn from their mistakes; to correct the "bugs" in their cognitive programs.

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The technology exists to expand the tradition of teacher networks and collaboratives so that they become part of how the education system improves itself.

Open sourcing (well underway in higher education) could allow the sharing of pedagogy and new cognitive tutor tools across borders of all kinds. Public policy ought to look beyond the current fiscal abyss, and use stimulus funds for system change rather than system maintenance.

5. Increase variety and choice within the system. Choice is not simply about marketizing schooling; it is one mechanism that allows public schools to experiment with different types of instruction. LAUSD and schools statewide stand to gain from the huge natural experiment with organizational structure and learning modalities represented by home schooling, charters, virtual academies, and the hundreds of "clinical trials" being undertaken by school districts.

Ignoring lessons of efforts at variety

As an institution, public education seems almost willful in ignoring the potential lessons of its efforts at variety. Rather than asking why an experiment worked and for whom it seemed to work, we resist that which is different and choose compliance and rule-following over careful learning from experimentation. Public policy should support learning from institutional variety through careful evaluation and feedback.

Regardless of what happens in Los Angeles, there are clear implications for other districts, including those in the green leafy suburbs that tend toward self-congratulation rather than introspection. Just as in the case of technology- which operating system will drive personal computers or which format will be used to record and play back movies--institutional change follows established pathways.

Changing the shape of public education

When collective bargaining was introduced in California public schools a generation ago, it was thought that only teachers in the big districts would unionize. When charter school legislation was introduced in the 1990s, it was thought that only parents in big cities would opt out of district schools. Both assumptions proved wrong.

So, the set of policy solutions that will flow from Los Angeles and other big cities will change the shape of public education in suburbs and small towns, too. There is a lot to be learned from L.A.

Charles Taylor Kerchner is a research professor at Claremont Graduate University. To read more about "Learning from L. A .," see www.mindworkers.com. For more about finance reform to support learning, see the comments of Jacob Adams at www.cgu.edu/pages/3468.ASP.