Avoiding The Education Reform Trap

In the battle over the future of national education policy, a dangerous dichotomy has developed between those labeling themselves as “reformers” and those being defined as defenders of the status quo. Like most simplistic approaches to complex problems, it reflects more about power and politics than it does about solutions.

After years of frustration with the relative competitiveness of America's high school graduates as measured by results on international tests, and with seemingly endlessly rising costs of K-12 schooling, a decade ago a new set of forces entered the field of public education. Buoyed by the success of the free market model of competition, deregulation and privatization, and fearing the effect of poorly educated workers on their long-run global competitiveness, many business leaders began to take up the cause of public education. Predictably, the approach they turned to was the one they knew – and the one that had served them well – and so began the application of the lessons of the marketplace to public schools.

The approach pressed by business leaders began to creep into every aspect of the debate about elementary and high school education. Instead of seeing schools as core assets of communities, anchoring families and neighborhoods, schools were redefined as franchises, competing for students across whole cities and districts. Instead of assuming families look for their local schools to give their children the same hand up the received, parents and kids were to be viewed as consumers of education products, choosing among various brands through vouchers or public school choice models. Instead of understanding principals as the lead teachers in schools, focusing on improving the quality of instruction, they were to be considered managers, motivated by annual cash rewards. Instead of teachers being thought of as public servants dedicating themselves to children, they were seen as production line managers, to be incentivized for every change in the standardized test scores of their charges. And instead of education being recognized as a process that is an essential element of the human condition, it became a product, measured by computerized tests on an annual -- and eventually quarterly -- basis so teacher pay can be modeled on the same bonus structure used in financial services.

Advocates of this model, taking as many tools as possible from the business environment and applying it to public education, labeled themselves school “reformers,” blocked from bringing the extraordinary performance of US capitalism to our schools by a tired and defensive status quo led by antediluvian teacher unions and rag-tag Sixties-style parents' groups. They redefined the barriers to excellence in education as the very same constraints on the free market they battled successfully for their businesses: the evils of regulation, unionization, and bureaucracy.

The great enabler of much of this was the federal No Child Left Behind program, a classic bait-and-switch if ever there was one that promised to supply significant new resources to schools in exchange for more honest reporting on the performance of poor and minority children. We got the reporting part – in fact, the constant application of crude and easily manipulated standardized tests became the hallmark of the legislation – but the support for the schools failing to help kids in need was nowhere to be found. Middle class children continued to get more resources despite less need, and poor children got narrower curricula, driven by endless test-prep, so they could perform better on dumbed-down assessments.

It is ironic that at just the moment when the results of unbridled marketplace forces – as evidenced in newspaper headlines and unemployment office queues – are being questioned across the board, advocates of applying this model to public education are still ascendant. Styling themselves as reformers, in fact they are merely using the same familiar tools that dragged us into the current financial collapse in one field mostly immune from them. Yet they persist, and their voices dominate the debate. Why?

The most benign reason is simply that it's hard to beat something with nothing. While the failings of education are in fact widely exaggerated, there is no question serious issues of equity and performance exist, and the marketplace model offers an easy and familiar road map for change. Until there is a comparably simple alternative reform model, the worshipers of the invisible hand will be the loudest and easiest to hear. It is incumbent on educators across the nation to develop research-based instructional strategies that can credibly offer to address these gaps in what we give our kids.

America's long history of success with its free market. Despite the periodic need for correction of the excesses of inadequately regulated capitalism, as we are seeing today, in general the US has achieved great wealth and power through its marketplace, and adherence to this model is understandably deeply ingrained in our culture. It worked for fast food and cell phones, why won’t it work for classrooms and teachers?

More cynically, there is reason to believe that when business leaders decide to become engaged in classic public functions, there is always an ulterior motive. In some respects, they are open about their goals: an uneducated workforce is a non-competitive workforce which in turn means, eventually, an unprofitable one. In this respect, leaders of our commercial sector are acting rationally, if self-interestedly, something their model of the world would surely teach us to expect.  But we should always be wary of driving education solely to create a workforce that meets the needs of today’s businesses – there is no surer path to economic decay that building for the marketplace of the moment. A broadly educated workforce is our greatest asset in a rapidly changing global economy.

But finally, there is a darker side to the marketplace perspective on schools.  K-12 education in America is a $600 billion effort today, and while some elements of it are already in private hands (transportation and textbooks, for example), the vast bulk of these dollars are spent in the public sector.  It does not take attendance at too many "education reform" conferences to realize how much energy is now being devoted to creating what might euphemistically be called entrepreneurial opportunity in our schools. It starts simply, with development of costly new technological innovations, followed soon after by well-packaged curriculum tools that are supported by major investors, and inevitably the process leads to chains of for-profit charter schools.  Along the way, pesky barriers like teachers unions and state education department regulations are to be evaded or even done away with, so the energy of the marketplace can save public education (the way it has saved, say, banking) and make a few dollars for the business community along the way. The results can be enthralling for investors. As one stock tout sheet wrote just a few weeks ago, “What's an education system without profiteers? No education system at all!”

None of this is to say there are not lessons for public education to be learned from the private sector (just as the inverse is true). Good data is better than bad data for helping to correct bad practices, weeding out very poor performers helps makes all teachers better, and parents should be treated with the respect reserved for customers rather than as passive victims of bureaucracy.  But in the end, improving public education, especially for those receiving the worst of it today, will require both hard work in developing new instructional tools and more resources to reflect the greater challenges some kids face.

As the new Secretary of Education takes office, let's hope he does not fall into the simplistic trap of “reformers” versus “status quo defenders,” and doesn't get tricked the way so many of his colleagues have been into believing the tools of the marketplace blindly applied can improve our schools, but rather remains focused on what really matters creating a more effective and just system for building an educated citizenry.