GUEST COLUMN.
REFORMING PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION
By David Osborne, author or co-author of six books on public sector innovation, including the bestseller Reinventing Government, as well as the director of a new documentary, Turnaround: The Reinvention of New Orleans’ Public Education System.
People sometimes ask me why I switched my focus from “reinventing government” to education, as if those are two different things. I’m always tempted to remind them that the subtitle of Reinventing Government was How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector—and to add that the book jacket also said, “From Schoolhouse to Statehouse, City Hall to the Pentagon.”
Public education is at the heart of government. It has the most public employees. I have written about it in all my books about government, from Laboratories of Democracy and Reinventing Government to Banishing Bureaucracy and Reinventing America’s Schools.
I’ve also spent the last five years working on a documentary about the most far-reaching example of reinventing government I’ve ever seen—New Orleans’ education reforms, which turned the nation’s worst urban district into its fastest improving. Its’s called Turnaround: The Reinvention of New Orleans’ Public Education System; you can find it at Kinema.com.
In Reinventing Government, Ted Gaebler and I outlined ten principles we found emerging as a new model of governance for the Information Age. They were captured in our chapter titles: Catalytic Government: Steering Rather than Rowing; Community-Owned Government; Competitive Government; Mission-Driven Government; Results-Oriented Government; Customer-Driven Government; and so on.
New Orleans’ school district now embodies all ten of our principles, because all but one of its schools is a charter school--that is, a free, public school of choice that has significant autonomy of operation but is held accountable for its performance.
The city still has an elected school board, but its job is to steer, not row: to set policy and direction, to fund schools, and to address district-wide challenges as they arise. Those who run the charter schools—their boards and their school leaders—are in charge of educating the children.
By separating these two roles, New Orleans has ensured that the board has the time and energy to focus on steering, something few elected school boards do, because they are too busy operating schools. It has also given its board and superintendent the opportunity to choose the best school operators, replicate the strong ones, replace the weak ones, and encourage all of them to diversify their learning models to meet the community’s needs.
Each charter school or network of schools has a board, made up of community members. This roots the schools in their communities, getting hundreds of community members active in overseeing them, not just the seven elected to the school board. Those charter board members and their staffs “own” the schools, and we know that owners take better care of their assets than renters do.
By law, 98 percent of the money goes to the schools to control—a far higher percentage than in typical districts. The money follows the children to their school of choice, so each charter school is competing not only for its students but also for its funding. As we know from our market economy, competition forces institutions to improve and weeds out those that fail.
This also makes charter schools “customer-driven.” If parents don’t choose to send their children to the school, it will not have enough money to operate. Charter leaders are directly accountable to their customers: the children and their families. Those customers have lots of choices; in New Orleans, all families can choose the schools they prefer.
Like any monopoly, traditional school districts have gradually developed dense webs of rules to govern their many schools—and state and federal governments have piled on many more. Every time a problem develops new rules are added to prevent it from happening again.
There are rules about how money can be spent. There are rules about hiring, firing, promoting, and managing staff—and in unionized districts, those rules often run to hundreds of pages. There are thickets of rules governing the purchase of even the simplest things.
Charter schools are exempt from almost all these rules. Their principals and staffs are free to pursue their missions—to do whatever it takes to educate their students. If that means Saturday school, so be it. If it means struggling students need tutoring during school vacation breaks, so be it. Particularly with low-income students, this flexibility to do whatever it takes makes all the difference.
Charter schools are not only mission-driven and decentralized, they are accountable for results. Many urban public schools fail to educate their students year after year, with no consequences (for the adults). But a school’s charter spells out the results its leaders promise—test scores, graduation rates, attendance rates, and the like. In New Orleans, when a school falls short of these goals for several years running, it is replaced by a stronger operator.
When I wrote Reinventing Government, 35 years ago, I was convinced that school districts run according to these principles would vastly outperform traditional districts. New Orleans has proven the case. Washington D.C., where 48 percent of students are in charters, has been the second fastest improving urban district over the past 20 years. (DC’s leaders claim to be “the fastest improving,” but they do so using scores from NAEP tests that few students in New Orleans take.)
If all this is true, you might ask, why isn’t the New Orleans model spreading? For one simple reason: In many states the teachers’ unions are powerful interest groups, and they hate charters. The more charters there are, the fewer dues payments will come into the unions, because few charter schools choose to unionize.
Fortunately, the unions can’t block all change. Indianapolis, where 62 percent of students are already in charters or charter-like “innovation network schools,” just took a huge step, creating a mayor-appointed board that will handle buildings, transportation, and accountability for performance for both charter and district-operated schools.
And there are 25 school districts where more than 30 percent of students attend charters.
That’s really why I made the documentary: to show them what they could achieve if they continued down that path. I hope you will watch it and—if you like it—spread the word.
The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc
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