Even among the nation’s woeful traditional big-city school
districts, Detroit Public Schools is a particular abomination.
Between falling into
state receivership for the second time in the past 12 years,
facing $327 million in budget deficits for the next four years,
wrangling with scandals such as the travails of
literacy-bereft now-former school board president Otis Mathis
(who resigned last year after the district’s superintendent
complained that he had engaged in lewd acts during meetings),
and constant
news
about its failure to
educate its students, the Motor City district has secured its
place as the Superfund site of education.
So it wasn’t a surprise when Detroit’s state-appointed
czar, Robert Bobb, announced on March 12 that the district would
slash its deficit — and eliminate as much as $99 million in costs
from operating its bureaucracy — by getting rid of 29 percent of
the 142 dropout factories and failure mills. But instead of just
shutting down the 41 schools (as the district originally
planned to do) it would convert them into charter schools, handing
off instruction, curriculum, and operations to nonprofits, parents
groups, and others interested in running schools.
While Detroit’s move is certainly driven by cost-cutting,
the district is conceding to the reality that the school district
model — with its expensive central bureaucracy, woeful
inefficiency, and lengthy record of academic failure — no longer
works either for children or taxpayers. With states and districts
facing $260 billion in budget shortfalls over the next two years
(and $1.4 trillion in pension deficits and unfunded teacher
retirement liabilities in the long haul), charter-like ways of
operating schools have become more appealing than ever.
Just outside of Atlanta, the suburban Fulton County school
district is taking
advantage of a Georgia state law and beginning to convert
itself into a charter system. Under the contractual status, the
district would be free from traditional degree- and seniority-based
pay scales and be allowed to use such innovations as teacher
performance pay plans; in turn, school operations move from the
central bureaucracies to school-based councils run by adults,
teachers and principals. Six other school systems in the Peach
State have already converted into charter school systems, and
others will likely do follow suit.
In tiny Elkton, Oregon, a town better known as a hotspot
for bass-fishing than for school innovation, the one-school
district there has taken advantage of a state loophole and
fully converted itself into a charter. This has allowed the
district to attract students from nearby traditional school
systems, creating a form of competition that hadn’t previously
existed. In the three years since it converted to a charter,
Elkton’s enrollment increased by 54 percent. Eleven other rural
districts in the Beaver State have abandoned the traditional
district model in the past eight years; three more have already
applied to do so this year.
Then there is New Orleans, which has become the nation’s
model for school reform. Right after the devastation of Hurricane
Katrina in 2005, Louisiana state officials moved to take over 107
of the Crescent City’s failing public schools from the faltering
traditional school district and began aggressively launching new
charter schools. Since then, the traditional district model has
been all but abandoned, with both the state-controlled Recovery
School District and the old Orleans Parish system operating just 26
of the city’s 84 schools; charters account for 70 percent of all
New Orleans school enrollment. And even the schools under state
control have become de facto charters and, under a
plan approved
by the state in December, will remain so even after they return to
Orleans Parish oversight.
Certainly, traditional school districts still educate the
overwhelming majority of the nation’s students — and if the
National Education Association, the American Federation of
Teachers, and other defenders of traditional public education have
their say, it will remain that way. As in the private sector, the
advantages of size — including greater purchasing power — means
that there will always be some large school operators of some sort;
even big names within the charter school movement, such as KIPP
(which runs 99 schools throughout the nation), Aspire (30 schools
in California), and Green Dot Public Schools (17 in California and
New York), have enrollments as sizable as some mid-sized
traditional districts.
But with just 69 percent of the nation’s students ever
graduating from high school, big-city districts such as Cleveland
and Los Angeles failing to reach even those low graduation rates,
and one out of every three fourth-graders reading at levels of
functional illiteracy, any thought that big districts equals better
student achievement is clearly mistaken.
Size (and corresponding big-spending) doesn’t turn out to equal
efficiency or achievement either. Just 17 percent of the
top-spending districts in Florida were among the top third of
districts in student achievement, according to a report
released in January by the Center for American
Progress.
State laws that govern how school districts manage
spending and labor — including
collective bargaining rules that were at the heart of the
battles last month between unions and governors such as Wisconsin’s
Scott Walker — are part of the problem. Detroit, for example, must
negotiate with 10 different unions, including locals of the AFT,
the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees,
and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Decades of
dealmaking between districts, states and the NEA and AFT have also
saddled school systems with teacher pay plans — including
defined-benefit pensions and near-free healthcare — that have
become too expensive to bear; in Jersey City, N.J., for example,
the district there spent 184 percent more on teacher benefits in
2007-2008 than it did a decade earlier. These burdens, along with
federal regulations such as “supplement-not-supplant” (which
requires districts to essentially use Title 1 dollars to fund field
trips to prove that they aren’t shortchanging students instead of
programs that might actually improve their performance), add to
taxpayer burdens without improving graduation rates.
The other problem lies with the unwillingness of districts
to move to into the 21st century. The refusal to ditch antiquated
academic, financial, and management information systems — even as
the federal government has begun embracing the use of MySQL
databases and Drupal content management systems — and the failure
to use outsourcing as a way to wring out efficiencies are two
examples. Just 69 percent of school buses are kept in operation
throughout the school year, according to a 2010 study by Michael
Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools. The contracts
districts strike with NEA and AFT locals, along with the bloat in
central bureaucracies, also restrict the ability of school
principals to actually run schools. School budgets often run in the
millions — usually in the form of teacher salaries — yet the
average principal only controls $60,000 of it, according to
education policy analyst (and former Clinton administration honcho)
Andrew Rotherham.
But technological advancements offer opportunities to run
schools differently. Online learning, for example, offers schools a
chance to provide more students with good-to-great teachers —
especially in areas in which districts struggle to staff such as
math and science; it’s sensible especially given that even poor
kids have Internet access. As seen in Detroit, more districts (and
states) recognize that they need to adapt charter-like approaches
to running schools. New York City took an important (albeit costly)
step four years ago when it handed principals the authority to
remove laggard teachers from their classrooms.
But cutting down bureaucracies and handing over decisions
to schools can only be the start. The need to reform how the nation
recruits and train teachers — which, along with woeful reading
and math
curricula, is the main reason for the low quality of the nation’s
schools — remains paramount. While charter schools have had
greater success in improving student achievement than traditional
districts, the fact that they still draw from the same university
schools of education as traditional district counterparts still
means there are many runts in the proverbial litter.
While President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top effort has
helped force states to ditch laws that restrict the ability of
districts to subject teachers to private sector-style performance
management, the threat of future restrictions (and the ability of
the NEA and AFT to use their lobbying and campaign clout to stop
reforms) remains in place. And more districts will be forced to
embrace smaller bureaucracies (or out of business), once families
are given wider arrays of options through school choice and
parent trigger laws that can take schools out of district
control. The threat of parent power (along with pressure from
school reformers such as Green Dot founder Steve Barr) is why the
gargantuan Los Angeles Unified School District is spinning off 186
of its schools into private hands and will authorize 200 charter
schools by the 2011-2012 school year.
Given the woes of America’s schools and their high costs,
returning to the one-room schoolhouse would be better than bloated
school bureaucracies.
