Formula for a Successful School: Subsidiarity, Free Enterprise and Edupreneurship
Kevin Carey’s post at The Quick and the Ed clarifies what’s going on in education reform right now and how’s it’s changed since the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001. We’re in what Carey calls the “post-NCLB era of education reform.”
For one thing, today’s major players are different:
When I began working on education policy full-time in the early 2000’s, the center of gravity in education reform sat with the coalition of civil rights advocates, business leaders, and reform-minded governors of both parties who pushed NCLB through Congress in 2001. To find that same hum of ideas and influence today, you’d head straight for the annual New Schools Venture Fund Summit and its confluence of charter school operators, TFA alumni, urban reformers, philanthropies, and various related “edupreneurs.” It’s a different world with a different mindset, and this has real implications for public schools.
I’ll get to the New Schools Venture Fund in a minute. But first, here’s Carey again on why the reform shift occurred:
Why did this happen? First, because NCLB didn’t work very well. The federal government is good at distributing money. It can fund research, provide information, and set standards. It has a significant if limited capacity to prohibit people from doing bad things. But it is very difficult for the federal government to make state and local governments do good things they don’t want to do. And that’s where NCLB fell down. You cannot create a regulatory apparatus that mandates, via adherence to enforceable rules, the transformation of bad schools into good ones.
Carey’s right that government can’t make people do good things that they don’t want to do. Arguably, it’s not government’s job to make them do so, but in any event, government isn’t good at it. Refer to the Founding Fathers for the former and your local teachers-cheating-to-improve-test-scores scandal for the latter.
But businessmen (I’m still trying to figure out why so many educationists hate business, especially Big Business) and “edupreneurs” –entrepreneurial businessmen who are innovators in education– can and have made a difference at the local level, one school at a time.
Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin– the folks who started the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and Wendy Kopp, –founder and CEO of Teach for America (TFA)– are perhaps the most pointed-to examples of the new ed reformers.
It’s odd in a way that teachers’ unions are opposed to the work of these reformers, because what people like Feinberg and Levin and Kopp all stress is the crucial importance of the classroom teacher. That sounds pretty teacher-affirming to me.
Levin, for instance says:
People want to replicate parts of what we are doing, but it’s the totality of the efforts that make this work, and they all pale in comparison with the personal connection; if you just had great teachers, it would work.
Study after study– more than 40 years of studies– has shown that the most important in-school factor in student achievement is the teacher. And it’s easier for good teachers to do what they do best in a school that has a culture of achievement:
It is a crucial part of the founders’ mission to foster a culture in which these kinds of teachers can thrive. “We don’t have a monopoly on hardworking teachers,” says Feinberg. “All over the country there are teachers’ cars in the parking lot at 7 in the morning that are still there at 5 at night. But they are often working alone. At KIPP, all the cars are in the parking lot at 7, and they’re still there at 5.”
Another hotbed of ideas for education reform is the New Schools Venture. As their blog explains:
NewSchools Venture Fund is a venture philanthropy firm working to transform public education through powerful ideas and passionate entrepreneurs so that all children — especially those in underserved communities — have the opportunity to succeed.
The nifty little video from the New Schools Venture 2010 Summit –explaining where they’re coming from and where they’re headed– is here.
These reformers– and folks of their ilk– are the ones Carey refers to:
Enter New Schools, Teach for America, KIPP, and the rest. The civil rights advocates were reluctant to jump on board the charter school movement, because it smacked of right-wing voucherism and they were having a hard enough time managing the intra-liberal politics of opposing organized labor. This turned out to be a serious strategic error. While NCLB turned out to be sadly ineffective at turning bad schools into good ones, the best charter school people figured out how to create good and occasionally great schools from scratch.
Philanthropists and journalists began to visit these schools, which tended to be staffed by TFA corp members or people cut from a similar cloth. Education is complicated and people get frustrated by the seeming hopelessness and ambiguity of it all. The best charter schools had a galvanizing, clarifying effect. In a confusing world, people knew–knew–that here, at last, was something that worked. So they began to open their pocketbooks and their notebooks and inject financial and reputational resources into the new education organizations, valorizing their leaders as heroic figures in the struggle to help children learn.
It’s becoming harder for teachers’ unions to oppose charter schools, especially since they’re now approved by a Democrat, not a Republican, administration.
Teachers unions, meanwhile, also miscalculated on charters. They largely got away with opposing NCLB by positioning themselves against business interests and a Republican president. Fighting the heroic personae of the Dave Levins and Mike Feinbergs of the world was much harder, because it meant being against the great charter schools that people knew in their bones were making the world a better place. The parallel rise of mayoral reform efforts in heavily Democratic cities like New York and D.C. meant the unions had to engage simultaneously on two rhetorical and policy fronts. Over time, the mayoral control people and the New Schools people got to know one another and figured out that even if their respective approaches to education reform sat at opposite ends of the centralized / decentralized spectrum, they had many common convictions–and enemies. It was only a matter of time before, in the form of people like [D.C. school chancellor and one-time TFAer] Michelle Rhee, the two groups would converge.
All of this argues for the principle of subsidiarity. People who have good ideas for improving public education need not– and should not– wait around for the federal government to take action when they are capable of doing it themselves.
Carey continues:
The New Schools approach also had the great benefit of being an open system that invited new organizations and ideas into the fold. There’s a great deal of personal and intellectual cross-pollination among these organizations. Relatively low start-up costs and a flood of new philanthropic money from information-age rich people who prize exactly this way of thinking meant that dollars could be found to back ideas, energy and purpose.
The civil rights / business / gubernatorial model, by contrast, has roots in the morally-charged advocacy of the civil rights movement and operates through a combination of direct lobbying and high-level rhetorical suasion. A surplus of organizations, ideas, and people is actually a hindrance to the focused advocacy this approach requires. A certain respect for experience–and an expectation of toeing the party line–is assumed.
Carey notes that Education Secretary Arne Duncan is focusing on identifying and improving the worst-performing schools. This is different from NCLB’s improving-education-for-all-kids approach.
In his implementation of ARRA via Race to the Top, SIG, I3, etc., as well as in his “blueprint” for reauthorization of ESEA [the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was reauthorized in 2001 as NCLB], Duncan has shown little interest in continuing the project of federal accountability for every child nationwide. Instead, he has focused on identifying the worst schools in America and replacing them with better ones while injecting accountability and talent into the teaching profession. These are precisely the collective aims of the organizations that convene at the New Schools Summit every year. The Department of Education itself is full of high-level staffers whose way of thinking was formed in the New Schools culture.
It’s not all good news, though. As the federal government and the ed reformers focus their attention and resources on the lowest-performing schools, there’s a danger that the not-the-worst-but-merely-mediocre schools will be left behind.
At the same time, the short- and mid-term implication is little or no attention to students in roughly the 20th to the 70th percentile of school quality, however defined. Charter school networks are unevenly distributed geographically, and even the best can’t grow exponentially over a sustained period of time. Many state departments of education balked when they were legally required to improve the worst schools. How many are going make hard choices when they simply have the option of improving mediocre schools?
H/T: Flypaper
