How-Business-and-Civic-Leaders-Can-Make-a-Big-Difference-in-Public-Education

These come from state and federal regulations that prohibit flexible use of money, union contract provisions that strip school leaders of authority and allow experienced teachers to avoi

How Business and Civic Leaders Can

Make a Big Difference

in Public Education

A CEOs for Cities Briefing Paper

by

Paul T Hill

Center on Reinventing Public Education

Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington

Prepared for

April 2004

This briefing paper was commissioned by CEOs for Cities to stimulate

discussion at the organization’s Spring 2004 national meeting to be held

on May 6 and 7, 2004 in Chicago Conclusions expressed herein are theopinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect an official policy or

position of CEOs for Cities or any of its members or sponsors.

Copyright 2004 Center on Reinventing Public Education and CEOs for

Cities All rights reserved.

Cover photograph courtesy of morgueFile.com.

Daniel J Evans School of Public Affairs University of Washington

Box 353055 Seattle, WA 98195-3055 206.685.2214

One Post Office Square

Suite 1600

Boston, MA 02109 617.451.5747www.ceosforcities.org

Prepared for

CEOs for Cities

A national, nonpartisan alliance of mayors, business executives, university

presidents and civic leaders that strengthens the economic

competitiveness of cities through an exchange and application of best practices, ideas, and

advocacy.

April 2004

Everybody who lives or works in

a big city has a stake in the

performance of the local public

school system Businesses and

cultural institutions suffer when

thousands of young school

graduates are unprepared to do

productive work or take a full

part in civic life

Despite nearly two decades of

well-publicized efforts, many

young people – a majority in

whole sectors of some big cities

– are unprepared Half of the

nation’s minority students do not

get a high school diploma On average, low-income and minority 12th graders still read and write at about the same level as middle class white 8th

graders In many cities, more than 30% of all poor minority students score below the 10th

percentile on national reading and math tests

The advantaged can run from these facts, but they can’t hide

Even families that can get their children into the more effective college prep schools still suffer,

as companies struggle to find

workers, highly skilled workers

resist moving to the city, and

property values stagnate

None of this is news to big city

school superintendents and

school board members They are

struggling to improve their

schools, but the tools at their

disposal are weak, and politics

disrupts strategy Districts celebrated for improvement can

be derided as frauds or failures only a few years later, and some districts can be saved, lost, saved, and lost again in rapid

succession (consider New York

City’s succession of chancellors

who went from being brilliant to hopeless in only a few

months, i.e Richard Green,

Joseph Fernandez, Rudy Crew,

Ramon Cortines, Richard Levy,

and surely at some point Joel

Klein)

The objective challenges of

educating large numbers of

children from destitute families,

including many foreign born, are

daunting enough But big city

districts also face man-made

constraints that make their jobs

even harder These come from

state and federal regulations

that prohibit flexible use of

money, union contract provisions

that strip school leaders of

authority and allow experienced

teachers to avoid the most

challenging schools, and control

of all important expenditure

decisions by a central district

bureaucracy

City school districts are further

harmed by a self-imposed

insulation from broader

community resources School

districts strive to be fully

integrated within, and to depend

as little as possible on expertise

from the outside They are willing to accept money, but on their own terms, and will take in-kind donations of services and goods as long as these do not affect the internal workings of schools This approach, derived from the “professionali-zation” movement of the early 20th

Century, needlessly limits reformoptions and children’s learning opportunities

Most big cities have large universities and sophisticated high-tech industries, yet their school systems often cannot offer all students high-quality mathematics and science instruction Universities, community colleges, museums, private schools, and training organizations all have expertise

in instruction, yet they are kept

at arms length Businesses have expertise in management,

performance monitoring, and finance that school systems need But many fear allowing thesnout of the private sector into the tent of public education So

public education does without

the help it needs

In general, public schools are

isolated from the forces that

bring improvement into other

sectors Money and students

can’t flow from less to more

successful schools Though

school districts are often ready

to try new things on a small

scale, there is no mechanism to

spread success: teachers and

administrators in other schools

are burdened by rules and have

little incentive to imitate

someone else Teachers and

principals whose successes win

publicity are more often

resented than imitated

Meanwhile superintendents and

school members are driven by

politics to look for improvement

in the wrong place; they strive to

mandate one sovereign solution

that will transform every school

in the same way, rather than to

create a marketplace of

competing ideas That’s why

districts that teach children who

speak 100 languages and come

to school at vastly different

levels of readiness to learn

nonetheless try to mandate use

of a single approach to reading

or math instruction

In this environment, what should

businesses and philanthropies

do? Should they continue to

work within the public education

system? Or should they concentrate on creating alternatives and applying pressure from outside?

Fortunately, in the real world thechoice is not so stark Businessesand philanthropies can and

should continue to support school districts But they must take care to avoid being co-opted

by those who would protect the system regardless of its failures

Eight years ago, the Brookings Institution set out to create options for city leaders – mayors,heads of cultural institutions, philanthropies, and businesses, and school board members and superintendents – who hoped to turn around failing big-city school systems We studied many cities that reputedly were making headway on their school performance problems, but the results to date are sobering.1

To this point in the cities we have studied2 virtually all major efforts to improve big city school

1 For more extensive discussions see Hill, Paul T., and Mary Beth

Celio, Fixing Urban Schools,

Washington DC, Brookings 1998, and Hill, Paul T., Christine

Campbell, and James Harvey, It

Takes A City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform, Washington

DC, Brookings 2000

systems, including mayoral and

state takeovers, have been

doomed by the same two deficits

that sank the school systems in

the first place.3 The first deficit

is in strategy No city has

thought through all the changes

that must take place before a

chronically low-performing

school system can come to

operate at a consistently high

standard The second deficit is in

implementation No city has

organized the political and

financial support necessary to

sustain a reform strategy over a

long time

On strategy, our book It Takes

A City (Brookings 2000)4 shows

that a reform strong enough to

move a big city school system

must have three parts:

2 We conducted formal studies

in Seattle, San Francisco, San

Antonio, Boston, Memphis, and

New York City, and also worked

with reformers in Cleveland,

Chicago, Houston, and Denver.

3 Possible exceptions are current

reform initiatives in Boston, where

progress is slow but ongoing, and in

Detroit, San Diego, and

Cleveland, where change

strategies are still taking shape.

4 Hill, Paul T., Christine

Campbell, and James Harvey, It

Takes A City: Getting Serious About

Urban School Reform, Washington

D.C., Brookings Institution Press,

2000

1 Incentives to reward good performance and sanction bad, including family and teacher choice that lets people and resources move from less- to more-successful providers of instruction;

2 Investments in capacity, so that new approaches can be tried and educators and parents are not starved of information and ideas, and can ask for and get help; and

3 School freedom of action, so that people with new ideas about how to use money, children’s and teachers’ time, and instructional methods canput them into practice, and also abandon their own practices in favor of better ones they see elsewhere

Taken together this is a framework for open and competitive experimentation, thekind of empirical approach to problem solving that works for hard problems like going to the moon or curing cancer But to date no city education system has used it all Most cities emphasize one factor –e.g

building school capacity by training teachers, providing strong performance incentives and school freedom of action.The box on the next page provides an example of a

re-community-wide strategy with all

these elements In It Takes a

City we call it the Community

Partnerships strategy5 It is

totally compatible with the ideas

outlined in System Change Goes

to School, a white paper

prepared by Curtis Johnson and

Neal Peirce for CEOs for Cities

This strategy creates new

incentives, by putting all schools,

no matter who operates them,

into a competitive environment

It creates new capacities by

introducing new school

providers of all sorts and

allowing people with good ideas

to try them out It creates

freedom of action by allowing

school operators to use time,

money, labor, and technology in

new ways

Cities relying on superintendents to propose

action will not get a strategy as bold as this

Superintendents are people who have come

up through “the system,” and though hope

for school improvement they shrink from

pressing reform ideas that would roil

central office staff, unions, and other

5 It Takes A City proposes two

more modest but less promising

strategies, one based on radical

centralization under a strong

executive and another a

comprehensive system of school

contracting, contained within the

geographic and financial

boundaries of existing school

districts

entrenched interests Most such superintendents are also itinerants who do not understand the politics of the cities in which they work, and are thus unable to marshal grassroots support for reforms

Civic and philanthropic leadership is needed to formulate and keep a reform strategy as bold as the Community Partnerships approach Key roles for this leadership include formulating a reform strategy, organizing political and financial support for it, and creating institutions outside the control of the public school system to sustain reform

On implementation, It Takes a

City concludes no strategy is

self-executing Big-city reforms face a tough array of

implementation problems An initiative that threatens no one will change little and cannot make a substantial difference in schools Yet superintendents andschool board majorities are easily swept aside by small, organized groups, often led by teachers who dislike the changesproposed The inside-the-system relationships of school board, teachers union, and school superintendent are too enmeshed in conflict to allow formulation of a profound reformstrategy, and too unstable to allow one to survive

Once it is clear that fundamentalreform is necessary, the mayor

or other senior local leaders – the ones who normally organize major civic projects like

applications for the Olympics or responses to major threats to thecity’s economic well-being – must take responsibility for strategy-building

Community Partnerships is a strategy that does not

respect the traditional boundaries between assets owned by the public school bureaucracy and other institutions, public and private

It offers a no-holds-barred approach to the question, “How can this community use all its assets to provide the best education for all ourchildren?”

A new community authority – one with jurisdiction over an existing school district or a wider geographic area – would oversee the

supply of educational opportunities for all children It could license many entities to provide K-12 instruction, including conventional public school systems, charter schools, private contractor whether for- or non-profit, and unconventional options such as colleges, universities, libraries, church-supported systems willing to operate under First Amendment constraints, and dispersed “cyber schools.” The only schools excluded would be those that could not be

licensed, did not want to be considered part of a public system, or will not accept the public per-pupil expenditure as full payment of tuition Parents would have choices among all forms of schools

The new community authority would control all funds for public education and would write checks to schools based on their

enrollments It could enter master contracts with local public

systems, but it would also be free to license other providers to servechildren in the same areas Public school boards would receive per pupil amounts for all children served by their school, but nothing extra Public school boards could then run their own schools or contract with independent providers for them Because their

schools would compete with other schools run under very different auspices, public school boards would have strong incentives to eliminate unnecessary overhead costs and put as much money into the schools, and on instruction, as possible

The new authority could hold back a small amount of money to incubate new schools and encourage development of new options for poorly served groups or neighborhoods Public school boards, with their broad portfolios of schools and economies of scale, would presumably have an advantage over smaller providers when it came

to meeting new needs

A small leadership group,

including at least one highly

credible minority church or civic

leader, should meet quietly to

create a menu of fundamental

reform options such as the three

suggested above They should

commit to one overarching

strategy, but discipline their

selection by the knowledge that

any workable strategy must have

definite and strong

arrangements to create

school-level performance incentives,

capacity building, and freedom

of action This group should then

recruit others to the idea: they

should never engage in

open-ended consultation with the

implied promise that the reform

strategy will take account of

every interest in the school

district and community

Every community embarking on

a serious reform strategy needs

this kind of long-lasting civic

reform oversight group to

provide principled guidance and

high-level political leadership

Necessary functions that can be

performed only by a dedicated

group of senior civic leaders

include:

 Mobilizing electoral support

for the reform design

 Making sure reform strategies

 Supporting the reform at the state capitol

 Counseling school system leaders and buttressing those who get into trouble for

pursuing the reform

 Making sure successes are recognized and failures lead

to improvements in strategy and tactics

 Helping build a parent constituency for reform

Anyone interested in learning more about how these tasks can

be done should look in the Appendix

School districts neglect activitiesthat are necessary for powerful and long-lasting reform The day-to-day imperatives facing school boards, the need to pay teachers,keep schools operating and

support the central office, lead school districts to neglect or avoid many activities essential tolong-term improvement.6

6 In a series of confidential interviews conducted by the authors with school

superintendents and chief financial officers, most said that efforts to improve instruction were

constrained by the fact that funds

Small symbolic reforms do

happen if school systems are left

to themselves, but deep and

lasting ones don’t School

districts reject change in much

the same way that the human

body fights transplants Just as

hospitals administer medicines

and powerful agents to suppress

the body’s natural immune

system, so too schools need

independent institutions to help

maintain the environment for

reform and provide support at

critical moments These

institutions should be friendly to

the public schools and

sympathetic to their aims, but

separate from them

School districts are built to

sustain existing schools, not

create alternatives to them They

are built to employ a fixed group

of teachers and administrators

on a lifetime commitment basis,

rather than to search

continuously for the best people

who can possibly be attracted to

work in the schools

When school districts were

developed nobody ever

considered that they would

perform badly or that

public-spirited citizens would conclude

they needed to create

are all tied up in salaries for

incumbent teachers and compliance

with mandates from courts and the

federal and state governments

alternatives No one saw a risk

in creating a monopoly that was unable to adapt to change But that’s what we have Districts inhibit change from inside via rules and rigid control of funds, and they discourage competition from outside – for example by giving facilities to the schools they operate while competitors are required to find their own buildings and pay rent

Taken together these attributes

of school districts discourage innovation, experimentation, andreallocation of resources from less to more effective activities Philanthropic investments of several kinds can either create and competition that might survive against the district monopoly These include:

 Starting good new schools

 New sources of teachers and principals

 Insurance to manage the risks

of high special education costs

 A way of providing school facilities for schools that cannot be housed in district-owned buildings

The remaining sections discuss these investment opportunities

in detail

Starting New Schools

In most big cities no one, neither

the government nor the private

sector, is prepared to create

large numbers of new schools

School districts typically prefer

to rework or enlarge existing

schools This makes sense in

purely economic terms It

spreads the fixed costs of having

a school principal, grounds,

heating plant, and so on across

more students However, it has

grave educational costs Schools

become more complex and

impersonal Schools that must

serve many different needs

become holding companies for

diverse programs and factions of

parents and teachers The school

can take little responsibility for

the character or quality of a

student’s instructional

experience; everything depends

on chance encounters with

particular teachers

In contrast, new schools can be

built around a purpose and a

specific approach to instruction

This becomes the reason why

teachers and families decide to

join in They need to be small

Smaller schools, with more

intimate contact among faculty,

less formal organization, and

more personalization for

students, are much less likely to

lose track of students In big

cities especially, large schools

are high-risk environments while

small ones are much more

benign That is why the Gates

and Carnegie Foundations have sponsored efforts to reduce the size of high schools, both by breaking existing schools into multiple smaller units and by creating new small schools from scratch

However, it is not easy to start a good school, even a small one New charter schools

demonstrate the difficulty of starting a school that works well

on its first day Many charter schools go through a one- or two-year shakedown during which teachers and parents gradually learn to work together.Dissident groups of teachers, parents, administrators, or boardmembers soon separate from theschool

Difficulties with start-up have stimulated the creation of school

incubators in a few localities

These incubators invest in the development of new schools before they open by giving administrators and teachers a time and place to work together and to receive expert help and advice in advance of actually opening their school

Public school systems have seldom taken responsibility for helping new schools get off the ground, and it is unlikely that they will do so Existing

incubators, in Massachusetts,

Washington State, and