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What does the term greenfield schooling mean?

Greenfield schooling borrows a metaphor that is often used by builders when they're trying to develop new communities or new businesses. These folks use the term greenfield to refer to territory that is fresh and fertile, in which the ground is well prepared to handle what's coming in. The notion of greenfield schooling, then, is to try to shift the education sector toward a place that is more inviting and more fertile for people who are trying to solve important problems for kids.

In his Nobel prize acceptance speech in 1974, economist Friedrich von Hayek observed that one can approach public policy as either a "gardener" or an "engineer." Is the Obama administration's Race to the Top initiative taking a gardener approach or an engineer approach?

Von Hayek was suggesting that policymakers can approach the challenges that exist in the world as engineers, where they are trying to build sophisticated solutions that they execute from on high; or as gardeners, where the key is to create conditions-- to prepare the soil, to fertilize it, and to water it in a way that enables healthy, vibrant shoots to grow and develop of their own accord. Von Hayek's take was that it's difficult, and in many cases futile, for policymakers to operate as engineers because they simply don't have the degree of control or as much information as they need to design effective solutions--in the case of K-12 schooling in the United States, solutions that are going to work for 50 million kids scattered across 90,000 schools.

When we look at the 19 priorities under Race to the Top, a couple are clearly gardener-like. The most famous of these may be the push to have states remove caps on the creation of charter schools. Another gardener-like move is pushing states to remove laws that restrict the ability of school districts to link teacher and student data in state data systems.

The problem is that these are only two of the 19 priorities. Most of the rest involve the federal government laying out a framework for things that states are supposed to do. And much like No Child Left Behind compliance plans back in 2002 and 2003, there's a danger that the push will be less on creating room for people to solve problems and more on getting folks to provide assurances or sign up for whatever is in favor with those folks back in Washington.

What specific roles could the federal government play in encouraging innovation in the education system?

We have these large, institutionalized systems that have been doing business premised on the way they did business 50 years ago--in many cases, 100 or more years ago. The district infrastructures look the same. What we've done is add layer upon layer of new rules, regulations, and information technology systems, without ever reinventing the old. It's much like somebody who's trying to build a new, shiny, eco-friendly skyscraper before clearing away the rubble of the tenement building that has long stood in the same location.

Innovation is an opportunity for people to come in without any of these accumulated routines--to start fresh, taking advantage of the labor force that exists today and new patterns of behavior and new tools of communication and technology to solve problems. But the reality is, up and down school districts and states and the education system, it is very difficult for educators or providers from outside the schools who are trying to solve particular problems to get the resources they need.

So what the federal government could do is address the things that get in the way of these problem solvers. That involves striking away barriers to entry that are both formal, as in law, and informal, as in the way business is done.

You often use the termentrepreneurin the book, but it's not a word that we hear much in education. How should readers respond to this?

Sometimes folks are thrown by the term entrepreneur. They think it just means for-profits or folks coming from outside the K-12 world. But an entrepreneur can be anyone who has an idea for how to solve a problem better--and who wants to solve it in a lot of places in order to aid a lot of kids or educators.

What are the formal and informal barriers that hinder would-be entrepreneurs in education?

The formal and informal barriers in play are manifold, depending on the kind of problem one's trying to solve. One way to think about this is the typology I use in the book: school builders, people who want to build new schools; tool builders, people who want to provide tools that will aid systems or educators or parents; and talent providers, folks who want to recruit or train school leaders or educators.

One obvious formal barrier for talent providers is state licensure systems. If somebody retires from the University of California Berkeley or from the University of Michigan and has a PhD in physics but isn't licensed to teach K-12, and a local school has trouble filling an advanced placement physics slot, it can't even consider this person as a possible hire. This is a frustration that bedevils programs like Teach for America or the High Tech High Graduate School of Education in San Diego, which is the United States' only school of education based at a K-12 high school. These programs have to spend lots of time and money and sweat equity finding a way to either clear the state licensure system or partner with programs that are already approved by the state licensure system.

Another formal barrier is state charter school caps. If a state says it's going to grant only 100 charters and somebody who's already running 10 schools that are acknowledged to be terrific wants to apply for that 101st charter, it's a no-go. It's not question of school quality; it's not a question of whether the community wants that school. There's simply a law on the books that says sorry, we can't do that.

Informal barriers tend to be the product of the way we do business in K-12. A terrific example is offered by Tim Daly, who runs an outfit called the New Teacher Project. One of the things they do is help districts recruit teachers. They'll sit down with a district superintendent and a head of human resources (HR), and say, "We see that you've got long-term subs in a bunch of your 9-12 science and math classes at these schools. We will promise to fill them with folks who have at least a 3.3 grade point average, of whom x percentage are Latino or African-American. And you only pay us if we deliver, and it's going to cost you x dollars."

Frequently the superintendent will say, "Well, that sounds pretty good," but the head of HR will say, "This is crazy because their costs are way out of line. It only costs us $85 a head to fill those teaching slots with subs."

At this point, the New Teacher Project says two things. One, you've got long-term subs in those classrooms-- you haven't actually filled those jobs, so in that sense, the point is moot. And two, the reason the head of HR thinks it only costs $85 is because that's how much they spend on brochures and sending HR staff to recruiting fairs. That doesn't take into account any of the salary or benefits or other costs associated with HR staff.There's no reason that districts have to do their recruitment in-house in this fashion. So the real comparison cost of internal versus external HR is a question of (1) What quality of recruits are you getting? and (2) How much does it actually cost to run a recruiting operation in one way versus the other? But because of the way we count inputs in education, because of the way that we assume that staff is not going anywhere, we tend to have a very limited view as to what constitutes a permissible or appropriate hiring strategy. A failure by state or district leaders to aggressively seek out more cost-effective opportunities is a real hurdle for those who've cooked up solutions that boost productivity or efficiency.

What do you say to those who might worry that greenfield schooling is a recipe for inequity--that increasing the role of the private nonprofits or for-profits in schooling is a de facto retreat from public schooling?

I'd say a couple of things. One, I see massive inequities in U.S. schooling today. Affluent suburbs are able to do a reasonable job operating schools with the tools they have at hand. They get the teachers they need to make current school models work. They have two-parent households in which children come to school with a number of advantages. So trying to play by the same old rules will, in many ways, maintain the inequities that we see out there today.

Second, public education is not a form of delivery; public education is a function that we, as a nation, are committed to providing to our kids. If we can provide that education more effectively, especially to the kids who are the worst off, that is entirely consistent with the ethos of public education.

I think greenfield has the opportunity to help combat inequities because it is going to create an opportunity to leverage expertise and talent and tools in those places where they're most needed. The greenfield premise doesn't imagine that we should go around razing districts or schools or taking resources, willy-nilly, away from current operations and just handing them over to anybody. What it suggests is a mindset in which we're focused on creating opportunities for problem solvers to solve problems.

Say that a teacher has devised a powerful way to teach 8th grade algebra, or to help English language learners master the language more rapidly, or to run a creative writing program in grade 5. The way we do business right now, when people hear about this enough, folks might start flying in from another district to eyeball this program so they can fly home and try to imitate it. A teacher would typically also be told, "That's neat! Why don't you go start a charter school?" Well, I've got no confidence that that teacher wants to start a charter school or that observers are going to learn enough to faithfully, consistently replicate her efforts, or that we want her to spend her time finding a facility or assembling a faculty.

But another way to think about this--the greenfield way--is to say, What would it look like to give that 5th grade teacher with that creative writing program the opportunity and the resources to handpick some other teachers in that system and train those teachers to use the same approach? What would it look like to make it possible for this teacher to deliver this kind of program with handpicked trainees, in a faithful fashion, to schools and districts across the land?

The question is, How do we create opportunities in today's system for this teacher to do more good for more kids?

What's worth preserving about traditional public education?

A lot. One of the huge advantages that the United States as a nation enjoys is that we have invested trillions of dollars in capital stock--the schools that we've built, the technologies, the educators. And we've spent $600 billion a year providing this. The result is an enormous and enviable array of schools, of services, of systems for tracking student performance, for managing school district needs. We have 1,300-plus teacher preparation programs; we have an enormity of physical resources.

The downside of all of this is that we have a large investment in the way things have traditionally been done. We have colleges of education that in many cases are a century or more old, that can trace their roots to 19th-century normal schools. We have school districts that have literally dozens of data systems, one stacked upon the other, going back in some cases a half century.

Most strikingly, we have ways of hiring, staffing, training, and providing professional development to teachers that don't necessarily reflect the modern labor force. These practices are more reflective of a time when the default profession for college-educated women was teaching, so we didn't need to worry much about competing for talent or about the notion that people might only stay a short period of time. The problem is that by not rethinking these things, but by simply spending another $600 billion a year on these systems, we wind up getting a whole lot less bang for the buck then we might.

I'm hoping that, rather than have debates about whether we like or don't like public education, we can use the greenfield mind-set to make that system of education more agile and nimble and flexible so that it can develop in a way that's going to serve our kids into the 21st century.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at AEI.

Photo Credit: iStockphoto/Sharon Dominick