School people are often cynical. They've been around long enough to know that every few years a new idea comes along that's supposed to cure all of our educational ills. They' re expected to run with each new remedy even before it has had a trial run or evaluation, and if they raise even a friendly concern or question about the new cure-all idea, they're called defenders of the status quo or worse. To add injury to insult, when the cure-all doesn't live up to its sales pitch (which it never does), it's the school people who are blamed and left to clean up the mess. It's little wonder, then, that the first reaction many school people have to a hot new idea is to find all the reasons why that idea can't and won't work.
Many school people look at public school choice, our latest cure-all, in just this way. They have lots of legitimate questions about choice and find their concerns being dismissed. They know that there's lots of irresponsible hype around choice, which tells them that choice is just another fad that will come and go without doing much good and perhaps even doing some harm.
This attitude is understandable but it's unfortunate. Our schools are in bad shape. Changes, big changes, are needed. Public school choice, by itself, is not the big change we need. But it may be that we can't get the big changes we need without choice.
Take the example of school-based management/shared decision making - one of the most positive recent developments in school reform. The idea is simple: Stop running schools like a centralized bureaucracy in which all orders come from above. Encourage individual schools to take initiative and think through what works or doesn't work for their students. Let them run themselves on the basis of these judgments instead of following uniform rules and regulations that no longer connect with real schools and children.
But in order for this to happen, local and state school boards will either have to repeal hundreds of regulations or be willing to grant individual schools exemptions from these regulations. Similarly, teacher unions will need to adopt procedures to allow the faculties of individual schools to modify or lift contractual rules that are hindering rather than helping their professional goals. This needs to be done because if all the current rules and regulations are kept in force, no school can break out of the bureaucratic lockstep, and school-based management/shared decision making will be just another empty public-relations phrase.
But will school management and unions be willing and able to do this? Probably not so long as students ( and teachers) are compelled to remain in their assigned schools. How, for example, would school authorities handle parent complaints? When schools are all subject to the same requirements and do things pretty much the same, the answer is easy. The school official tells the parent, "I'm sorry you don't like this particular policy or practice, but we decided that this way was the best for everybody. They're not doing anything different in your child's school. That's they way it's done in all our schools."
But what if that particular school system had adopted school-based management/shared decision making? What if the parent complained about something being done in her child's school that was different from what was being done elsewhere?
The school official might answer, "According to the best new management and educational thinking, it's best to have school decisions made by the people at the individual school level. No one really is sure of what gets kids to be successful, so each of our schools is looking for answers and trying different things."
What if the parent persists, "I don't like what they're trying in my child's school. And if all the schools are doing things differently, what right do you have to force my kid to go to a school that I don't like? As long as all the schools operated under the same rules and regulations, I didn't question you when you told me where my kid had to go. But if principals and teachers can now choose to do things in very different ways, why can't I, a parent, have a choice about which of these different schools I want for my child?" Why not indeed?
School people who view school-based management/shared decision making as their first real opportunity to make some real changes in their schools should be prepared to give parents their first real opportunity to choose their child's public school. We can't force parents to try something different and unproven for their children if they don't want to, even if we believe that the old way of doing things wasn't doing their children much good. We can't say school people should be allowed to exercise judgment and deny that to parents. And if we do, we shouldn't be surprised if school authorities call a halt to school change efforts the first time a parent complains.
By the same token, choice proponents have to stop talking as if choice, by itself, will cause schools to improve. It won't - unless schools have a real opportunity to redesign themselves. That opportunity means school-based management/shared decision making. This, in turn, means a mutual willingness on the part of school management and unions to get out of the business of telling people at the school level how and when to do things ( except when it comes to issues like health, safety, civil rights and student and employee exploitation).
State and local school boards should set goals, provide incentives and monitor progress. They should empower school-level professionals to invent much better ways of educating students and hold them accountable. Never again should we hear professionals say, "I think this would work, but they wouldn't let me do it." But the only way school boards will ever consider such bold moves is if they are politically shielded, if they can say to complaining parents, "We respect what they're doing in that school, but if you don't like it you can take your child to a different school."
There needs to be a marriage between public school choice and school-based management/shared decision making if either one of them is going to work.