Empowerment Is Incentive (Doretta Wilson)
Nevada residents concerned about their children’s education and how their tax dollars are spent might like to know more about how the “empowerment” project that Gov. Jim Gibbons is planning worked when it was implemented in one Canadian city.
The school choice concept is quite new and rare on the Canadian scene. School choice options that are available to more and more American parents are almost unheard of in most Canadian provinces. There are no large-scale public voucher programs. Partial, direct public funding for independent schools is limited and varies widely across the country. Alberta is the only province that allows charter schools.
About ten years ago, Edmonton, Alberta’s provincial capital, faced problems with student achievement and a disturbingly high dropout rate. Edmonton’s public school board realized it was rapidly losing students to independent schools and the newly approved charter schools. Parents were quickly voting with their feet. Many schools were faced with closure. One innovative educator decided to do something about it. Rather than throw up his hands to whine and lament, the school board superintendent displayed a refreshing attitude—“What if we behaved as if we weren’t a monopoly?”
The foundation of this revolutionary concept for public education is based on entrepreneurship, accountability and school choice. Schools faced with imminent closure were given the freedom to be more creative and offered new options to a public that demanded better. Many alternative-focus schools are now offered under the public umbrella ― everything from religious schools to sports schools, traditional model, single-gender, language-based, science, and more. Some excellent independent schools have since chosen to come under the public umbrella. To date, Edmonton offers about 40 different specialty-focused alternative schools in addition to its regular public schools.
Principals are like CEOs of their schools and all 199 of them report directly to the superintendent of the board. Only 10 percent of the school board budget remains at the board’s main offices. The rest, 90 percent, goes to school budgets. Principals control those budgets and are accountable for spending. They are also especially accountable for their students’ academic results. A strong focus on literacy and numeracy along with setting targets and standards to measure results was crucial for improvement. Public reporting of those results and how money is spent keeps schools on their toes and parents informed of school progress.
Finally, parents are given a “passport” to any school in the system. There is complete open enrollment. Well over half of Edmonton’s public school children do not attend their local school. When polled, the parents said they would never go back to the way it was before. They are sold on choice and are coming back to public education because it is improving. Academic achievement is up and the dropout rate is falling.
Nevada parents are fortunate to have such an opportunity. If not for the empowerment of parents through choice there would be no incentive for school improvement. Essentially bribing good teachers to work in bad schools without the accompanying improvement measures is not going to work in the long run. In Edmonton, difficult and struggling schools have become far more creative in finding ways to attract students and have been given a renewed sense of purpose. I dare say they have attracted and retained teachers as well. In this sense empowerment is incentive.
Doretta Wilson is executive director of the Society for Quality Education in Toronto, Ontario.
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To answer your question Frank, I give you the words of Angus McBeath, former superintendent of Edmonton Public Schools and the engineer of their reform efforts:
“How does the teachers union react? Their recently retired president proudly claims union paternity of the system. They struck in 1978, not over money, pensions and work practices, but over a sense of powerlessness over what was happening in their schools. They were part of the drive for more powerful schools and came to accept stringent accountability in return.” (taken from Public Schools Can Provide a Choice to Every Parent, by Angus McBeath – Mackinac Center for Public Policy website
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7923)
The point is when the professionals in the system are given stewardship along with the market factors that drive choice, that sense of powerlessness is not there. They CAN make the difference.
Ryan-I hope you can find someone who can respond to Frank’s excellent question about the union’s role.
Thanks.
Doug
Quoting from The Economist, Feb. 24, 2007, p. 33, “What chance co-operation?”, an article about G. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law:
“America has many excellent public schools, but many awful ones, too. The toughtest obstacle to improving the worst is the strident opposition of the teachers’ unions to meritocracy. In many states bad teachers are nearly impossible to sack. Pay and promotion are often by seniority. So the worst teachers linger for ever, while many talented people who might otherwise become teachers shun a profession where their talents will be neither recognized nor rewarded.”
This sounds so drearily familiar. How did Alberta overcome the problem?
F.