Hosted
by The Center for Education Reform
Hosted
by The Center for Education Reform
IF SCHOOLS HAVE NO REASON TO IMPROVE, THEY WON'T
By Ted Kolderie
Star Tribune, April 22, 1997
There's something fundamentally absurd about trying to push improvement into public education. Districts should be training people, adding technology, setting standards and measuring performance now, in their own interest and with their own resources. In a well-structured system, organizations find improvement necessary. If school districts don't find these things necessary, something is wrong with the system.
It's time to stop trying to "do improvement" - trading money for promises - and instead to reform the system in ways that make K-12 public education a self-improving system. Today it is an inert system. The late Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in Minnesota in 1988, "This is a system that can take its customers for granted." A system that can take its customers for granted will put its own interests first. And does.
Look, for example, at the way districts use money voted for poor kids. Title I money is spread over virtually all Minnesota districts, and within schools cannot any longer be targeted to poor kids. The districts took the $ 1.5 billion the state has provided for AFDC kids since 1971 and never sent it to the schools those kids attend. Nobody really knows what's happened with the $ 250 million paid for "desegregation." Schools with poor kids get less money, as senior teachers, who can choose where they work, move to other schools. Newlyhired minority teachers are the first cut when enrollment turns down.
Organizations behave the way they are structured and rewarded to behave. Districts know the reward-system pays off whether or not they change and improve and whether or not the students learn. Kids have to go to school. They go where they live. There's one organization offering public education. It's guaranteed its money per pupil. So it's assured its customers, its revenues, its jobs, its security - almost everything important to its material success. No reform can be effective that does not start with this failure in system design.
To make improvement necessary the state can simply open up more opportunities for teachers and others to create new and better public schools to which parents can send their children if they choose, taking their money with them.
In 1997 this means giving charter schools fairer financing, and not restricting their ability to buy into the good learning programs appearing around the country. And giving district schools the freedom to control their money, to select their teachers and to introduce programs that work. Minnesota is way too far behind in bringing in the Comer, Slavin, Sizer, Levin, Farkas, Edison, New American Schools and other models now appearing around the country.
Leaders in education know there is a system problem. They need to say so in public, as Shanker did at the Saturn school in St. Paul in May 1991: "We in education are not going to do the hard things needed to change the schools unless we have to. Unless there are consequences. Something has to be at stake. There is, in other fields: Your organization could fail. People in these fields dislike change too. But they have to do it. We in education don't. For us nothing is at stake. If our kids do brilliantly nothing good happens. If we don't push we can count on remaining popular with our colleagues. We do need something to happen that is truly revolutionary."
The Legislature and governor will need support for this reform. The opposition from district interests is intense. But now that student failure can no longer be concealed behind a refusal to measure and report performance and with the graduation rule on the way, it's time to get serious. If boards own and run the schools they will put adult interests first. The Legislature needs to start moving boards out of the school-operations business and into the student-learning business.
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Ted Kolderie, who lives in St. Paul, works in Minnesota and other states on strategies for improving public education.