Her worship: cities look for a savior to transform their school systems, but lasting reform takes a sustained, community-wide effort - Forum

Education Next, Winter, 2001 by Paul T. Hill

Everything else should be left to groups of parents, teachers, community leaders, or contractors who hold charters to run individual schools. Districts should also be forced to abandon their monopolies on providing books, materials, food, transportation, and teacher training and allow schools to choose among suppliers. There are economies of scale in providing many things schools need, from finding teachers and developing new ways to use technology to keeping accounts and finding insurance. However, school districts are seldom the best organizations to capture these economies. If school districts offer resources and services that other entities can also provide, they should compete for schools' business.

Limited Oversight

How a community oversees its schools is very important. But it is not clear that mayors, elected school boards, or private firms have any inherent advantages. Everything depends on how over sight is accomplished and for what purpose. Shifting oversight responsibility from one entity to another--say, from elected school boards to mayors--opens the possibility that things will be done differently. But no entity is likely to run schools well unless its role is well defined and it has incentives to support schools, not control them.

Today Americans are paying too much for school district oversight and getting too little for it. Of course, it is important to ensure that public money is not being squandered. But our efforts to maintain strict control over the use of school money are, in the end, tragically wasteful. In big cities the waste will continue as long as schools are dominated by political decision-making bodies, central management systems, and labor contracts.

This is not a call for mayoral dictatorships or for contracting our entire school systems to private firms. No matter who is in charge, schools need incentives to be demanding about whom they will hire so that the men and women who teach students are competent. Schools need to live and die on the basis of performance so that adults have incentives to demand high performance of themselves and to work together productively. Families need freedom to choose and the options from which to choose.

States and localities with low-performing school districts inevitably consider putting somebody else in charge. Dramatic events like disbanding school boards and transferring power to new entities can create hope. But everything depends on how schools are overseen, not who does the overseeing.

Playing T. Boone Pickens

State or mayoral takeovers of grossly mismanaged school districts have
become public policy's version of a 1980s-style leveraged buyout.
Between 1988 and 2000, 40 school districts had at least a portion of
their operations taken out of their hands.

Type of mayoral or
state takeover          Number

Comprehensive               15
Financial only              15
Financial & managerial       4
Academic & financial         4
Academic only                1
Academic & managerial        1
Total                       40

SOURCE: Ken Wong and Francis Shen, paper presented at the 2001 meeting
of the American Political Science Association.