Beyond choice to new public schools.

Withdrawing the Exclusive Franchise in Public Education

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.

Since it was rekindled by the 1983 Nation at Risk report, the national debate over education reform has advanced in progressively more radical stages. First came the traditional calls for more school spending, higher standards, and better teachers. Then came more novel proposals for school restructuring -- greater autonomy for individual schools, professional status for teachers, and real accountability for student performance.

Today, the idea of school choice has taken center stage. Its purpose is to foster competition by permitting families to choose the school their children attend, rather than simply being assigned one by the local district. 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. However, 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. Yet the potential of school choice as a catalyst of fundamental change is limited today in two important respects. First, allowing families more choice within the existing school system will be meaningless if that system offers only low-quality schools. Second, allowing choice between existing public and private schools may simply provide an incentive to abandon, rather than improve, the public education system.

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.

Americans now face a practical question: how can we use the powerful idea of choice to improve our schools while retaining the essential purposes of public education? This article proposes a simple yet radical answer: allowing enterprising people -- including teachers and other educators -- to start innovative public schools. In order to create new public schools, and ultimately a new system of public education, the states would simply withdraw the local districts' exclusive franchise to own and operate public schools. 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: allowing families to choose the schools their children attend and allowing someone other than the local district to provide schools under contract to a public agency.

Growing public support for a radically transformed school system stems from 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, organized in a traditional, top-down way 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. Instead of blaming people -- we need to fix the system. It is time to organize public education in America on a new basis. The concept proposed in this article is designed to introduce the dynamics of choice, competition and innovation into America's public school system, while at the same time ensuring that new schools serve broad public purposes. It rests on the following key conclusions:

* That school restructuring -- "site-based management" or "self-governing schools" -- has limited potential. It provides no incentives for systemic change. Although inspired leadership has transformed some schools, fundamental improvement in public education will not come one school at a time.

* That the school district's exclusive monopoly on public education is the heart of the problem. This is what makes local school boards more responsive to the interests of the adults in the education system -- administrators and teachers -- than to children, who are compelled by law to attend school. According to Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, our school system "takes its customers for granted."

* That the states are the critical actors in revitalizing public education, because only they can withdraw the districts' exclusive franchise. Until that is done, districts will have no real incentive to change -- and will face no real penalty for failing to change.

* That a competitive school system can best be achieved if a variety of public agencies are free to charter new schools: existing districts, colleges, local governments, the states, and perhaps even the federal government.

Lastly, this paper looks beyond creating new public schools to an even more radical reform option -- divestiture, or allowing the districts to get out of running and operating public schools altogether. Divestiture would also establish a contract relationship between the local school board and the schools it presently owns.

The local school board today is caught in a fundamental conflict of interests. 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 a producer of educational goods tends to dominate. Almost inevitably the board spends more of its worrying about its staff (who can leave) than about its students (who cannot).

In a divestiture, the school administration would be split off into one or more groups that would operate the schools on contract to the local board. The issues that now clog a school board's agenda would thus become matters to be decided by the operating organizations: personnel questions, schedules, salaries and promotion, books, and supplies. To the board would be left key policy decisions about objectives, outcomes, and revenues. In short, divestiture would get elected school boards out of the business of owning and running schools, but they would continue to exercise a policy-setting and oversight role by virtue of their ability to decide which schools would qualify for public funding. Withdrawing the exclusive franchise would take away from teachers as well 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 states make this change, they should in fairness offset the risk it creates for teachers with some opportunity for reward.

That reward could be the opportunity for the teachers to own and run the new schools. This would give them the opportunity to grow in professional responsibility and to increase their incomes. The public wants more accountability; educators now refuse to accept it. The idea of teacher ownership might break this impasse. Teachers might soon find that the more accountable they are, the more autonomous they are.

Withdrawing the exclusive franchise and divestiture would threaten the existing system. Resistance will be fierce. No district will want new schools appearing in its territory. It will argue that if new and different schools are necessary, it should be the organization to start them.

Yet there are reasons for optimism about fundamental change in America's school system. 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.

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. 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 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.

Fourth is the possibility that thoughtful people inside education ill 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.

Fifth, 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.

Finally, there is spreading public awareness of the consequences of not getting it right this time. Roughly 20 million children went through high school during the seven years since the Risk report. It would be a national tragedy if after another 20 million had cycled through, educators and political leaders had to confess that once again they had not got it right.