Free-Market School Reform

School Administrator, Feb, 1997 by Donna Harrington-Lueker

A School District's Entrepreneurism Raises Questions About Fairness, Funding, and the Best Place for Learning

When free-market advocates talk about reforming public education, their rhetoric champions competition, innovation, and challenging the Status quo.

In Uxbridge, Mass., a working-class New England mill town of 10,000 located about 40 miles southwest of Boston--that rhetoric has become reality. With dogged persistence and an unwillingness to take no for an answer, the tiny school district has turned the world of education on its head with dramatic--and often controversial--changes in the way it delivers. services to parents and children.

Its free-market innovations have even attracted the attention of leading players in school privatization. Early this winter, Alternative Public Schools, the Nashville, Tenn.-based firm that made headlines with its contract to manage a school in Wilkinsburg, Pa., hired Uxbridge Superintendent Michael Ronan to oversee its fledgling charter school initiative.

One reason for the interest: Uxbridge's reforms are the kind free-market advocates can only dream of. Despite spending $1,200 less per pupil than the statewide average of $5,948, Uxbridge has been quick to embrace change. When the Massachusetts legislature approved a controversial school-choice plan in March 1991, the 2,100-student district didn't waste time: One month after the governor signed the bill, Uxbridge became the first district in the state to agree to participate--a decision that brought the school system $1.4 million in revenues over the last five years. Working with members of the local teachers union, Uxbridge was also among the first districts in the state to lengthen the school day and year--a key provision of the Bay State's ambitious school reform initiative.

In the last five years, too, Uxbridge has given vouchers to the parents of children who are eligible for federal Title I funds, and it has agreed to reimburse nearly two dozen home-schooling families for up to $2,000 of their educational expenses. Both decisions have put the district and its maverick superintendent on a collision course with the Massachusetts Department of Education, which twice rejected Ronan's argument that the home-schooling families, who are part of the district's Schools Without Walls program, should be included in the district's enrollment count for the purposes of state aid.

Undaunted by the state's previous rulings, the enterprising district plans this year to expand the program and launch an on-line high school that will allow students to earn credit for courses they take via the Internet. And as part of a fledgling initiative to encourage teams of teachers to create and market their own schools-within-schools, the school system has introduced the potential powder keg of variable pay (see related story, page 20). Under this approach to compensation, teachers could receive salaries according to the number of students they serve or the kind of programs they provide, not on their seniority or their place on the salary schedule.

Entrepreneurial Acts

Behind Uxbridge's ambitious laundry list of reforms are a few key tenets: Competition is healthy, alternatives are good, and parental involvement is possible if schools are willing to change traditional structures.

Ronan, a 15-year veteran of the district and the chief architect of the school system's free-market reforms, insists on two other principles as well: School districts need to innovate continually, even when programs are going well. And because funding levels are unlikely to change in the years ahead, school districts must develop new programs without incurring additional costs.

"It's just too easy to go with the status quo," says Ronan, an unlikely revolutionary in khakis and tweed, whose bare-bones basement office shares a paper-thin wall with one of the district's preschool classes. Unless public schools change to meet new economic realities, he adds, they risk becoming "marginalized."

Rather than run that risk, Uxbridge has kept the needs of its working-class families clearly in focus. Many Uxbridge parents commute daily to service-industry jobs in Providence, R.I., Worcester, Mass., and Boston, so the district offers a comprehensive child-care program that runs from 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. year-round in the school system's Early Learning Center. A preschool program open to disabled youngsters and a half-day kindergarten program are housed in the same building, so children who attend either program can simply cross the hall to the child-care center when kindergarten or preschool class ends. "It's all part of our seamless approach to service," says Ronan.

Working parents also benefit from the district's use of flexible scheduling. Under this arrangement, which took two years to negotiate with the union, some social workers, nurses, and guidance counselors work from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. so they can be available for after-school or evening conferences with parents or students. Other employees have negotiated half-time job-sharing arrangements.