Let’s look at schools as businesses. You need a business economist’s point of view to understand how and why some of the latest premises to reform schools have appeared.
Education Next’s April 2009 interview “Many Schools Are Still Inadequate-now what?” featured the Hoover Institution’s Eric Hanushek who has done a lot of writing on education reform, lawyer Alfred Lindseth, and Michael Rebell from Teacher’s College at Columbia whose focus is on court decisions that have affected education change. The focus of the article was on Lindseth and Hanushek’s book about the funding-student achievement puzzle and Rebell’s concerns with aspects of reform advocated in the proposal.
Most teachers and administrators, both local and state, already agree on several reforms outlined in the article:
- give local schools flexibility to determine a model to meet high standards
- establish reasonable funding based on needs of the particular school and school district (including local tax payer ability to authorize bonds or establish education foundations to upgrade school financial support)
- best of the reforms, commit to evaluate school and program effectiveness using continuous improvement models such as “cycle of inquiry”-originating from business models of improvement
Sounds good.
Difficulties arise in the evidence to support other aspects of the proposal since all must be interlocked to achieve reform, according to Lindseth and Hanushek.
The two issues that stand out are the plan for performance-based pay, a business oriented policy, and the plan to increase the choice for vouchers and charter schools, seen as sanctions against schools or districts where students haven’t achieved designated levels of proficiency.
Pay-for-performance: Mr. Hanushek is strongly against limits on spending and regulations for the use of funds provided by state and federal sources. Further, he wants to do away with contractual obligations, mainly negotiated with unions.
Then, teachers would be rewarded for success in, for example, improving student achievement, bonuses for teaching in hard-to-staff schools, higher pay for taking on subjects with teacher shortages. These are all “value-added” factors used to determine the teachers’ salary or bonus for the year. (Exact procedures for setting up this plan were not part of the article.)
Vouchers and charter schools: Not only would schools and teachers be rewarded, but well-articulated and decisive consequences would be imposed on schools not meeting the goals. Liberal distribution of vouchers and transfers to charter schools are the sanctions advocated. If a public school is deemed unsatisfactory, it is unclear how to guarantee that a student’s voucher or charter school choice would be suitable. How to fund this change is not described in the article.
Enter Michael Rebell from Teacher’s College who does not agree with the data and statistics used as evidence for the Lindseth and Hanushek book. He says, and many who might read the article (or book) would say, that testing outcomes, pay-for-performance, rewards and sanctions, vouchers and charter schools have been studied for a long time with mixed results.
Readers may also agree the reform proposal is based on unproven business models that may, but haven’t yet, shown great results. The move to privatization of education may be an economist’s preference, but has not yet shown to improve the academic proficiency for the vast number of students needing help. For example, is California with more than 6 million students going to privatize every school and turn each student into a perfect product?
Rebell supports standards-based reform, but maintains it is a state education policy goal, supported by ideas from business world economists, researchers in the legal and university community, and especially teacher leaders.
Finally, perhaps the book, but not the article, describes how to resolve the funding problems due to the heterogeneity of students and regions in the United States that underlie the challenges for the education world.