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Allison left a comment on a previous post that’s been gnawing at me. It’s not that I disagree with her necessarily, but rather that she has uncovered (unintentionally or not) what I believe to be a great truth in education.
In response to a comment I made about building a private school model that relies on both tuition and community support, she writes:
Without intending to, she has just laid out the exact line of thinking of our current public school administrators.The value of using only tuition in a for profit model is that you can really be a private institution. Once you allow funding sources from other places like "the community", you've increased your stakeholders again, and you're back to the place where you aren't in control, because "the community" has its own ideas of what's an acceptable "education". If you're a for-profit private company, you have the most autonomy, and that's the best for implementing your ideas with the least number of stakeholders.. For-profit public companies have external shareholders to be beholden too, as well--that also poses problems.
Remember that, from an administrator’s point of view, their money doesn’t come from the public – it comes from the government. That’s who signs their checks. The last thing they want is support from the community, because it would come with strings, and they’d end up dealing with a long list of stakeholders. They’d lose their status as sole authority.
(And sure, they take some types of support, as long as it’s on their terms: unrestricted cash contributions from the PTA, parent volunteers to whom they can assign projects, and so on. But nothing that would require them to share or give up the helm.)
So, ironically, it turns out that our public schools are operating like private institutions: as autocracies with no one to answer to but themselves.
When I suggested the idea of a private school that made up for low tuitions with community support, I was interested in going in exactly the opposite direction: a school that thrived through the engagement of its supporters. Not just “only-on-my-terms” engagement, but stakeholders with a voice.
How would that be possible without creating conditions of chaos or drift? By doing what public education has failed to do: creating a set of firm guiding principles governing the mission of your school.
We haven’t had a national conversation about the purpose of public education in decades (if we ever did), and as a result we have no shared set of objectives to guide what a school should and should not do. But if we were to do that on an individual school level, at least for this hypothetical private school, I think it could work.
Imagine if we had a guiding statement like this:
At ????? Elementary School, we believe that our sole job is to help children build the academic foundation they need to excel in their school careers and, ultimately, as citizens and workers once they leave school. To this end, we believe the following:
- Children should be taught to mastery in reading, math, and writing
- Children should build their knowledge of the sciences to help them understand the world around them
- Children should understand the civic and political structures of the United States, and why we believe it is the best system in the world; they should also learn its history, including both its triumphs and its missteps
- We cannot know whether learning has occurred unless we assess students. Assessments are conducted regularly and are used to measure accomplishment and to guide future instruction
- Every child should meet high and objective standards set collaboratively with our stakeholders
- If a child has not learned, it means we have not taught. (with apologies to Zig Englemann)
(These are just for examples, btw – don’t get hung up on them :-))
If you lay out explicitly what you believe and what you strive to accomplish, you can say to your parents and your community members: This is a private institution; you do not have to participate. However, if you do, you have to understand that the guiding principles of this school will remain constant: they will not change, and it is this vision that you are buying into. Within this framework, which is set in stone, our stakeholders have a real voice in how we accomplish these ends, and we have boards set up that you can join, and that hold sway on the operations of this school.
If you do this – and make sure your boards make decisions on good data – you can have a public model of a private school.
What do you think – am I wrong about how public schools operate like private institutions? Am I wrong that a private school can be democratically run by its stakeholders?
7 comments:
parent involvement post & comments at eduwonk
I don't know the answer to this (!) and I'm veering off-topic a bit, but the institutions I'm interested at the moment are:
* parochial schools - probably Catholic schools in particular (not sure about this0
* Princeton Charter School in Princeton
* Morningside School in Seattle
As to public schools functioning like private institutions -- I once said to the chair of the math department, "You work for us. You work for the community."
Her answer: "I find that insulting."
That conversation was heated; I had made the point about teachers working for the community that pays their salaries in a sharp tone. I don't "blame" her for being angry, though I do blame her for the fact that the conversation was occurring in the first place, seeing as how the premise of the conversation was the fact that my child wasn't learning math and I was reteaching nearly all of the course content.
Nevertheless, I understand that a heated exchange is heated.
However, when you have the chair of an entire department saying that she finds the notion that she serves the community that pays her wages "insulting," that is a serious problem.
I can easily imagine private schools accepting public money and continuing to function as good private schools.
I suppose it's time to introduce the concept of "relative autonomy," not that I'm the person to define the term.
"Relative autonomy" means that institutions possess cultures and practices that are relatively autonomous from economics & incentives, etc.
There's no reason in theory to assume that a private school accepting public funds won't maintain relative autonomy.
As for the community having its own ideas about education, these things aren't enforced. No one comes around to schools to check to see whether you're in compliance. My school is in compliance with laws it likes (character education) and out of compliance with laws it doesn't (shared decision making).
That is everywhere the case.
First, a few clarifications:
By this statement: Once you allow funding sources from other places like "the community", I was referring to "the community" as those people who ARE NOT the teachers, admins, parents, and students, but are those entities like: non profit institutions, local community boards, state and non state entities. You seem to be using the word differently-- to refer explicitly to the parents and students.
Moving on, I don't see where there's anything in your guiding statement that's "public". I don't know what you mean by "public model of a private school". This looked like the defn of a private model of a private school. You are saying that the private school's stakeholders aren't "everyone". Right--if it is everyone, how can you possibly keep a board to the guiding principles? They could simply vote to change them.
Public, in the corporate sense that I used in the original analogy, meant anyone can buy a share--and with enough shares, anyone can hold a voting stake. "Public" in the sense of most schools means something else--open to everyone, relying on state funds, etc. What do you use it to mean here?
Then you use the words "democratically run"--what does that have to do with public vs private entities? Of course private entities can be run "democratically"; public entities don't have to be. But so what? If every stakeholder gets a seat at the table, and all get a vote, that's "democratic". So what? How is the internal structure used for the stakeholders relevant to the issue of controlling the stakeholders in the first place?
But even in your private guiding principles, you still have a board. Every institution will have changes over time; drift usually refers to unintentional changes in culture, though, rather than intentional ones. The board changes mean the culture changes. That's why big boards are preferred for statism.
The idea that you can "make sure your boards make decisions on good data" is a big statement hidden in small words. Can you make sure of that? How?
I'd be interested in reading responses from people who created schools from scratch--how did you make it work? who were your stakeholders at the beginning? Did that change? What happened when they changed? etc. etc.
-- I can easily imagine private schools accepting public money and continuing to function as good private schools.
Well, this depends on your notions of relative autonomy. We could spend a hundred posts talking about how Title IX is a problem for education, how Title IX is being used to weaken science and math, etc. So it didn't make a difference immediately, but what is the long term effect?
I think I've mentioned before that I'm a high school math teacher...
Well, I certainly believe that I work for the public. Our entire department, including the chair, would agree.
I don't think I've ever heard a student or parent make that statement tho, probably because it's apparent in everything that we do. We are public servants and very proud of it!
I think what you may have been dealing with is a very ineffective administrative team that insulated the ineffective members of their staff.
1. Allison, you said The best for profit schools are on the very high end of the tuition line. Is that what hte market really wants? (at this post, http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2008/05/education-reform-battle-or-attrition.html)
Which for-profit schools are you referring to?
2. Some of the other questions I addressed in What is A Private School and Independent School Governance 101.
3. The Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE) has some excellent advice on starting a school from scratch. I found them very, very helpful, even though the school I was involved with (a start-up girls' middle school) was secular. There are a number of other resources on starting charter schools. Many of the organizations mentioned in What is A Private School have start-up resources for their members.
4. The Collegiate Way has two post on University-As-Factory, Taylorism and Fordism Redux and The Global War on Taylorism. The discussions there may help in our discussions of schools-as-factories (the scalable, for-profit model you seem to advocate). (Caveat: I haven't read either post very closely, so am not offering an unbridled endorsement.)
From Education Next, Brand-Name Charters:
[snip]
That rate of expansion is rare in today’s charter school world. Beginning in the late 1990s, for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) like New York City-based Edison Schools began expanding at what Steven F. Wilson, author of Learning on the Job, called a “dizzying pace.” Edison, founded by publishing millionaire Christopher Whittle in 1992, grew to 51 schools in just four years; Advantage, which Wilson started in 1997, was managing 16 charter schools within two years. But even that pace was not fast enough, and only a handful of EMOs became profitable before their capital ran out and they had to close some of the schools they had just opened. Edison spent a disastrous two years as a public company and now operates 31 charter schools and provides management services to 54 district schools. Advantage was merged into Mosaica, which runs 35 charter schools in eight states and the District of Columbia.
The great majority of charter schools are single institutions, founded by local education reformers. According to “Quantity Counts: The Growth of Charter School Management Organizations,” published in August 2007 by the National Charter School Research Project (NCSRP) at the University of Washington in Seattle, of the 3,600 charter schools, which served over 1 million students in the 2006–07 school year, only 9 percent were operated or managed by a nonprofit charter management organization (CMO) or for-profit EMO. According to the NCSRP, the country now has 24 EMOs and about 30 CMOs. Most of these organizations are controlled from a central office and are growing slowly because their headquarters staff can only manage the complicated task of opening schools one at a time. “Those who thought that proven models could be rapidly scaled up have concluded that they underestimated the difficulty of creating substantially better schools from scratch,” the NCSRP report explains. The entire charter school movement, once hailed as a vehicle for transforming education, serves less than 3 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren, less than the percentage who are schooled at home.
[snip]
Even centrally managed CMOs, though, come in different flavors. Mike Ronan, CEO of Lighthouse Academies in Framingham, Massachusetts, says he has tight control over his organization’s 11 schools. “I’m literally in every school at least once a month,” Ronan says. “I sit on all our boards and I like visiting with our school leaders.” Lighthouse schools all look alike, with bright blue and yellow walls; use the same educational resources; and share a culture that Chrissy Hart, 29, a former KIPP teacher who is now principal of the Lighthouse Intermediate School in Gary, Indiana, calls “arts-infused, warm, and lightly responsive.” Procedures for tasks like paying bills and ordering supplies are spelled out in operations manuals. Hart and her fellow principals can hire and fire teachers, but if student scores start slipping, Ronan and his corporate staff will replace the principal and keep the school.
New Haven–based Achievement First, with 12 charter academies in central Brooklyn and the state of Connecticut, and 3 more opening this year, can be characterized as providing “central support,” says CEO Doug McCurry. “Our model is evolving. We don’t see it as a cookie-cutter thing, but we do have common benchmarks, a common scope, and an emerging set of best practices. We provide a robust back office to take the heavy lifting—budget, initial teacher recruiting and screening, curriculum development, and operations—off our principals so they can focus on academics.”
Uncommon Schools, with a home office in Manhattan, follows yet a different corporate model, with its nine schools arranged in five geographic networks in New York and New Jersey, plus two “associate” schools in Boston that participate in professional development activities but are not managed by the CMO. CEO Norman Atkins says that each network has its own managing director and that the configuration will enable Uncommon Schools to grow “reasonably” to 30 schools in the next few years.
Such reasonable growth is supported by the NewSchools Venture Fund in San Francisco, which announced in 2007 that it would focus its current wave of funding on Achievement First, Lighthouse Academies, Uncommon Schools, and a handful of other centrally managed CMOs that are growing within specific geographic areas. CMOs that are replicating their original schools in targeted cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Oakland—provide a consistent design and are “opening slowly, to make sure they get each one right,” says Julie Peterson, communications director for the fund.
lots more to chew over in that article.
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