When President Bush and the 50 governors meet in Charlottesville, Va., this week, I hope they'll resist the temptation to turn the education summit into a bully pulpit for airing numerous specific solutions to the numerous specific problems that ail our schools.
Some of these proposals would be good, some not so good. If you follow school reform, you can pretty much guess what they'd be -- public school choice, merit pay, anti-dropout and drug-education programs, early childhood education, a longer school day (and year), the professionalization of teaching and so forth. But no single answer will make our education system work as it should because next week will bring new problems that require new answers. So instead of looking from the heights to suggest specific reform for the 100,000 schools down below, people meeting at the summit should take advantage of their perspective to consider a larger question I mentioned last week.
The president, the governors -- and the rest of us -- should not be asking, "What programs will work this year or next year?" but "What can we do to make schools ever responsive to change? How can we build a system of self-renewal into our schools?" No institution ever solves its problems once and for all or figures out the best way to operate. There is no "final analysis." Situations change, new problems come up, methods that seemed rock solid and unassailable can no longer be relied on. And every new problem is the result of a previous solution.
The response of bureaucracy to change - and most public schools are bureaucratic institutions -- is to make new rules to cover the new situation or tack on some new program with new people to administer them - while leaving the basic structure untouched, of course. This technique can bring about minor improvements, but it can't deal with the effects of major change.
Successful companies deal with change by changing -- by re-examining what they are doing and reshaping it to new circumstances. If they do it right, they may strike it rich, but if they fail, they go out of business. When we met recently, former Labor Secretary William Brock called this kind of selfrenewal in the face of change the imperative for American public education. And he explained what it meant with two examples of situations where American companies had to make basic changes in the way they were doing business -- or die. The energy crisis was the first.
Thousands and thousands of U.S. businesses were dependent on a ready supply of cheap energy. So when the price of energy sharply increased and the very availability of energy was threatened, manufacturers had to come up with answers to some difficult questions: What kind of machinery would be more energy-efficient? Where could they locate or relocate to economize on energy? They had to rethink almost everything they did because that rapid change in the price and availability of energy changed the world for them.
A decade later, Secretary Brock pointed out, another challenge changed the rules of the same. The dollar became very strong in world financial markets, and other currencies went down. As a result, our goods were very expensive for people in other countries. Companies that depended on selling products abroad were under tremendous pressure to find ways of producing and delivering their products for less money. The response to this situation - by successful companies -- was leaner management, better methods of production and a whole series of moves, some painful, that changed the way businesses operate.
This system of self-examination and self-renewal does not wait for times of crisis to kick in. Successful businesses are constantly on the lookout for new ways of doing things. Is there a new technology on the way? A new material? New ways of advertising and promoting products? They scan their environment to make sure they're not going to get beaten out by competitors; their survival depends on their ability to see what changes need to be made and to make them, even if they hurt.
How might we set up mechanisms that will make schools responsive to change and able to renew themselves? Competition is the spur in the business world and success the reward. So, with schools, we must find mechanisms to ensure that improving student achievement brings great rewards and continuing failure to do so brings punishment. Creating such mechanisms for our schools will require flexibility and experimentation. We don't yet know what will move people over periods of time and encourage them to make tough decisions. But the last thing American schools need is some one-sizefits-all education policy that might work today but close out possibilities for change tomorrow.
A similar point about the sources of self-renewal was made by Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese dissident, a little over a decade ago, when Chairman Mao had just left office and the current Chinese government had taken over. The new government decided to solve the problems of China by modernizing manufacturing and agriculture -- in fact they planned "four modernizations" of various sectors of the society. Wei Jingsheng countered by proposing a "fifth modernization," democracy. He saw democracy as a system of self-criticism, adjustment and renewal, and without it, he believed, the other four would never succeed.
Our founding fathers understood that point, too. And that makes Thomas Jefferson's rotunda at the University of Virginia a particularly fitting place for the president and the governors to discuss how to give our schools the power of self-renewal shared by other institutions in our society.