Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Revamp School Management

When we think about schools and making changes as schools because, for some reason the schools are not producing results, we as a society have become locked into a group think. Policy makers and pundits offer the same solutions, over and over again--namely three things: more money, charter schools or vouchers. But each of these ideas is predicated upon one thing, that the management of the schools, or at least the model of management, is sound. In a word--hogwash.

In Sunday's Washington Post, Andy Smarick wrote a peice called "Failing Schools, Dragging Feet." (unfortunately, I cannot find a link on the WaPo website, if you do, please send it to me). Smarick is a member of the Maryland Governor's Commission on Quality Education and a member of the KIPP Harbor Academy charter school in Annapolis. Correctly noting that many of the problems schools in the state of Maryland were identified 10 years ago but no substantive changes have occured, Smarick argues for a rewrite of the state's two year old charter school law because in Prince George's County and Balitmore City, the two districts with the most failing schools, the local school boards are outright hostile to charter schools. Smarick argues for an expansion of the law.

At the same time, Smarick argues that the state should undertake an expanded voucher program for low income families wtih children in a chronically failing school.

The annoying thing is that these ideas are not new. What needs to be addressed, particularly in Prince George's County and Balitmore City as well as many school districts across the country is the assumption that the current method of managing schools is effective. Clearly it is not.

In the Outlook Section, a article appeared about Finland society and social democracy. One key section of the article dealt with the emphasis the country places on education. The teachers superbly trained.

The key to reform, Aho and others believed, was teacher training. Teaching had always been a high-status profession in Finland, but now it would become even more prestigious. (Today there are 10 applicants for every place in the universities that train teachers.) Teachers would be required to complete master's degrees, six years of preparation that combined education courses with substantive work in subject areas.

But, in my opinion, the reasons why Finnish schools succeed is not that their teachers are better trained, but that their schools are locally administered. "Teachers and headmasters were given the authority to write curricula, choose textbooks and allocate resources." Thus, the direct providers of education, the teachers and principals are directly accountable to the consumers-- the parents and children.

One of the reasons for the push for charter schools is that the school's management is directly accountable to the parents of their students. There is no middle man, no higher chain of authority. The failure of the charter school model as currently formulated is not in school management, but can be found in the fact that charters are dependent upon the granting of a charter by the school board who is competing against the charter! Talk about a conflict of interest. If a charter is granted, the school board loses that much authority and power--something most bodies are relucatant to cede to anyone.

A logical step would be to remove all local school boards and make the managment of schools directly the responsiblity of principals and a board of directors composed of parents of children in that school. Such a model has proven successful in New Zealand.

We need to re-think not only how we provide education to our children but we also need to rethink the governmental structure in place to manage the education of our children. The system is bloated with administration. Between Congress, the state legislatures, the governors and executive agencies (both federal and state), local governments, local school boards, local school bureaucracy and the actual school administration, there are so many levels of government that it is hard to find anyone who is directly responsible for our children's education after the teacher. Giving control of schools to parents and school administrators draws a straight line of accountiblity and the buck stops somewhere.

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