Surface wounds: thus far, public schools have hardly noticed competition

Education Next, Summer, 2002 by Edward B. Fiske

Revolution at the Margins: The Impact of Competition on Urban School Systems

By Frederick M. Hess

Brookings Institution, 2002, $45.95; 268 pages.

As reviewed by Edward B. Fiske

For the most part, the language of economics has informed the public debate over school choice. Free-market economist Milton Friedman was the first to develop the concept of school vouchers, and some of the most enthusiastic supporters of charter schools and vouchers are businessmen who view the delivery of public education through the lens of their own experiences in creating and marketing goods and services. It is thus important to know that Frederick Hess is a political scientist, not an economist. What interests him is the way in which the political and organizational realities of urban schools influence their responses to competition and thus help determine how competition will affect the schools that more than 90 percent of students still attend.

The underlying agendas of choice advocates vary widely. Some view school choice as a social good in and of itself, while others may have indirect objectives, such as funneling public funds to religious schools or privatizing public education. Whatever their agendas, however, most supporters of school choice build their political case on the virtues of competition for public education as a whole. "Perhaps the most commonly advanced argument for school choice," writes Hess," is the notion that markets will force the nation's public schools to improve, particularly in those urban areas where improvement has proved so elusive." It is this argument--that a rising tide of choice and competition will raise all boats--that Hess explores in this thoughtful volume.

Hess offers a litany of ways in which school systems differ from private enterprises. Whereas a business can focus mainly on serving its customers, public schools serve a multiplicity of stakeholders, of which parents and students are only two. Also, Hess observes that educators tend to be driven by intrinsic motives, such as a "sense of calling," that lessen the ability of supervisors to force them into a competitive mode. Losing students is not always a threat to public school teachers and managers. In fact, it can be downright attractive when enrollments are rising or when choice relieves them of disgruntled parents or low-performing students. When competition becomes bothersome, it can be handled with political responses, such as running advertising campaigns or creating new high-profile programs, that scarcely relate to educational performance. Moreover, school systems tend to reward the following of rules and procedures, which makes life difficult for those with an entrepreneurial spirit. Finally, educa tion is an "unwieldy market good," where it is difficult to define quality--or even to know it when you see it.

This discussion is informed by Hess's case studies of three cities where the conflict of economic theory and political-organizational reality could be observed firsthand. He concedes that these case studies are not intended to be definitive, suggesting that they may be thought of as "theoretically directed journalism" rather than" conventional social-science scholarship."

Hess devotes two quite thorough chapters to describing the decade-long voucher experiment in Milwaukee. There, choice did not compel the school system to change its routines, but it did lead to a loosening of "bureaucratic procedures and organizational routines" that allowed some educational entrepreneurs to do their thing. Hess calls this the "pickax" response to choice--poking some holes in the system but not making any major changes.

Hess's second case study focuses on the five-year-old voucher plan in Cleveland, where he finds that the potential benefits of choice and competition were neutralized by multiple factors, including frequent changes in leadership, the state's move to take over the city's schools, the modest size of the vouchers (only $2,250), and the existence of strong unions. As a result, he concludes that school officials saw vouchers as "a largely symbolic threat" and felt no need to respond.

Finally, Hess examines the three-year-old Horizon scholarship program in the Edgewood Independent School District of San Antonio. The program offers privately financed scholarships to low-income Hispanic students to attend private schools. Edgewood shows, Hess writes, "how the districts may respond in ways that have little, if anything, to do with educational quality;' including a public-relations campaign, a management study, and the opening of an already planned Fine Arts Academy.

Hess uses these case studies to speculate on how choice might be introduced in ways that both respect the built-in political and organizational constraints of urban school districts and lead to school improvement. "The lesson is not that markets cannot drive more profound change in education," he writes, "but that such effects will require changing the institutional and organizational context of urban schooling.... In short, making competition work as intended will require much more than the simple introduction of market mechanisms:"