Options and alternatives for education are somewhat few and far between. There is a fairly wide chasm between the traditional educational system and those charter schools, private schools, and for-profit facilities that are out there. The entire agenda of possible choices for education is one that has been tangentially discussed, but the literature on it is sparse and scattered.
A recent book edited by Frederick M. Hess presents a set of analyses and proposals by leading authorities in the field in an attempt to address some of the issues and concerns relative to educational entrepreneurship. There are of course, possibilities for school reform, but some of those avenues are fraught with peril, some are complex and byzantine and others, restrained by fiscal difficulties and cash flow.
In this book, published by Harvard Education Press, Hess has compiled some of the finest thinkers and prompted and encouraged them to address those cutting edge issues.
In this two part interview, he first discusses some of the issues and responds to questions about this area. In the second part of the interview, to be posted in about a week, he summarizes some of the chapters in an effort to motivate readers to delve deeply and to think seriously about some of these penetrating issues.
1.) Rick, you have recently edited a book entitled The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship: Possibilites for School Reform (Harvard Education Press, 2008). How did this book come about?
This book had its genesis in fall 2005 at an American Enterprise Institute research conference that I hosted on educational entrepreneurship. That gathering produced Educational Entrepreneurship: Realities, Challenges, Possibilities (Harvard Education Press, 2006), a volume that sought to introduce and examine key ideas that had received little sustained attention. In particular, that earlier effort explored how the notion of entrepreneurship applies to education, how entrepreneurship fits within the culture of K-12 schooling, just who these entrepreneurs are, the case for and against for-profit providers, and how public policy affects entrepreneurial activity.
That volume, and the subsequent discussion, suggested a dearth of understanding among policymakers, scholars, philanthropists, and practitioners about what it would take to spur socially desirable entrepreneurship in education at any substantial scale. For me, the starkest takeaway was how rarely educational discussions of reform or choice address the thorny questions of what it takes for entrepreneurial activity to thrive and deliver beneficial results. This new book takes a first stab at that charge; asking what it would take to nurture a more dynamic and quality-conscious educational industry.
2.) Your opening chapter addresses the issue of the "supply side of school reform." In your mind, what distinguishes the "supply side" from traditional efforts to reform school districts?
Broadly speaking, it can be useful to think of those seeking to reform K–12 education as falling into two general camps. One camp, those bent on working through familiar school systems, focus on "best practices" and "scientifically-based research" or retooling districts through professional development, curricula, and instructional leadership. A second camp is skeptical of district-based reform, preferring "parental choice" or "market competition." The great irony is that both camps suffer from a common shortcoming--excessive faith in prescience and a failure to foster the conditions that can yield breakthrough advances.
Supply-side reform, on the other hand, recognizes that vibrant markets require a stable and hospitable policy environment, investors identifying and nurturing promising ventures, networks of technical and logistical support, talented educators, and incentives that recognize and foster quality. This type of reform should increase the odds that ventures succeed and ensure a growing base of useful knowledge, rather than producing a series of one-hit-wonders. While doing so requires attention to rethinking rules and policies that govern everything from teacher licensure to charter schooling, it also entails addressing less frequently discussed challenges and opportunities, such as human and financial capital, barriers to entry, quality control, and research and development.
3.) You note that most would-be reformers have concentrated on promoting their particular remedies without recognizing how the larger K-12 ecosystem will ultimately decide the fate of their handiwork. What do you mean by this?
School reform takes place in an ecosystem, with webs of rules, relationships, and policies. These webs, the product of both public and private activity, of policy and statute as well as social networks and philanthropy, help determine the success of promising reforms and new ventures. This is especially the case when dealing with entrepreneurial efforts that take root outside the traditional frameworks of schools, districts, and state agencies. Still, most reform efforts, whether focused on improving familiar districts and schools or promoting choice-based solutions, have suffered from the tendency to regard this ecosystem as a given.
Supply-side reform approaches the challenges we face from the opposite direction. Rather than centering on isolated strategies to fix schools or promote choice, it focuses on making the ecosystem more hospitable to the emergence and expansion of effective problem-solvers. As we should recognize, such an approach requires attention to both public and private action, to the roles of money, talent, and knowledge. It focuses on creating conditions that enable problem-solvers and does not presume that elected officials, district leaders, professors, or funders can systematically identify and implement workable solutions.
4.) In your introduction to the book, you discuss the limits of "school turnarounds" in spurring dramatic improvement in K-12 schools. What do you see as their primary shortcoming?
While enthusiasts deem turnarounds a ready answer to the challenge of mediocre schools, it is far tougher to overhaul established organizations than many suggest. Indeed, the hope that we can systematically turn around most troubled schools is at odds with what we know about turnaround efforts in the corporate world. Arthur D. Little and McKinsey & Company, two leading consulting firms, have studied "Total Quality Management" at hundreds of companies and concluded that only about one-third achieved their hoped-for results. Scholars of "corporate reengineering" report a success rate for Fortune 1000 companies as low as 20 percent.
Ultimately, whether it is in schools or private firms, a successful turnaround requires transforming culture, expectations, and routines. That may not always be possible in organizations burdened by anachronistic contract provisions, rickety external support, and years of accrued administrative incompetence. Sometimes, the best bet is allowing a failing firm to go dark. This may require shutting down a school, moving out administrators, faculty, and curricula, and allowing an accomplished operator to start fresh. Meanwhile, new organizations--freed from a rigid mentality about how things should be done-can crop up, more easily take advantage of new opportunities, and more nimbly tackle looming challenges.
5.) You also address the limits of "school choice" in radically reworking the landscape of K-12 education. What do you see as the main challenge with this strategy?
If turnaround advocates place too much faith in upending sluggish institutions, choice-based reformers place too much faith in the presumption that simply permitting families to choose their child's school will foster a dynamic sector. School choice is no elixir. Indeed, advocates routinely forget that choice is only half of the supply-and-demand market equation.
Proposals that increase parental choice may boost demand but typically do not address the supply of quality options. The notion that charter school laws or voucher programs will inevitably spur the creation of good schools and programs is misleading. After all, we know that vacuums are not naturally or automatically filled by effective or virtuous actors.
Most proposals to promote school choice have done little to eliminate the hindrances posed by licensure requirements or state reporting systems and have paid limited attention to ensuring that choice systems are underpinned by efficient support services, effective quality control, or a stable political and regulatory environment. More optimistic accounts overlook the fact that the entrepreneurial education sector lacks the wealth of venture capital, human capital, internal quality control, and accompanying networks and infrastructure that characterize other dynamic sectors. Those counting on new schools to consistently deliver quality, on middling schools to improve on their own, and on lousy schools to get shut down have found the process much less automatic than they might have hoped.
6.) One of the ideas that you harp on is how policymakers and reformers need to create a landscape that is conducive to new problem-solvers in K-12 education. Why have school systems been unable to foster breakthrough improvements on their own?
This is not just an education problem, of course. It is hard to think of any sector in which dramatic gains have been the product of widespread improvement in quality across hundreds or thousands of distinct organizations. More typically, radical and disruptive improvement is the result of new entrants creating a product or formula that works for them and devising an organization and culture that provides for fidelity to the innovation at increasing scale. School districts struggle with asphyxiating bureaucracy, a culture of timidity and risk-aversion, restrictive regulations and collective bargaining agreements, and anachronistic technology and human resource setups.
This is why no generation of educational schools or providers should ever be regarded as the ultimate solution. The aim should not simply be to devise a new generation of best-practice providers but a dynamic sector in which this self-replenishing process becomes the norm. The bottom line is that, today, most schools, districts, textbook publishers, and colleges of education lack the tools, incentives, and personnel to survey the changing educational world and re-imagine themselves in a profoundly more effective fashion.
7.) But isn't there already a robust supply of dynamic education providers? Aren't organizations like Teach For America and the KIPP Academies already fulfilling the roles that you talk about--and at a substantial scale?
To be sure, the promising work of bold ventures like the KIPP Academies, Green Dot Public Schools, High Tech High, Citizen Schools, the National Heritage Academies, Teach For America, New Leaders for New Schools, and The New Teacher Project have drawn notice. Yet even these marquee efforts have been hindered by difficulties raising funds, finding talent, and securing operational support, as well as unreliable quality control and an inadequate commitment to research and development. Moreover, such honor rolls can be deceptive. Because observers tend to focus on the handfuls of thriving ventures in one or two dozen districts where they have an active presence, they give the impression that education already boasts a robust supply of dynamic organizations tackling stubborn problems.
The reality is that the scope of existing activity pales beside the larger American education enterprise. The 57 schools operated by KIPP, the 4,800 teachers recruited each year by The New Teacher Project, and the 150 principals produced annually by New Leaders for New Schools are dwarfed by a national education system that encompasses 15,000 school districts, 90,000 schools, 50 million students, three million teachers, and more than $500 billion in annual spending. In any given year, it is a safe bet that competitors in industries like breakfast cereal and television programming are investing more heavily in new ideas and product development than the entire K–12 sector.
8.) There seems to be four main trends or issues in this realm. These are financial capital, human capital, reducing barriers to entry, and tackling research and development and those nasty quality control issues. Could you briefly address each of these issues, perhaps without stepping on the toes of your collaborators and colleagues?
Some environments are more hospitable to a robust supply side than others, and in K-12 schooling, it is in our power to terraform accordingly. Creating a vibrant market is not simply a matter of eliminating regulations; markets depend critically financial capital, human capital, reducing barriers to entry, spurring research and development, and developing sensible quality control--but we're unlikely to see effective markets emerge absent these struts. The book is stuffed with discussion of these issues, but I'll just a couple of illustrations here.
When it comes to human capital, the labor market has changed radically in the past forty years, yet school systems still rely on hiring, staffing, training, and compensation models that were designed for a mid-20th century labor force. Creating a dynamic sector requires looking to sectors that have rethought their approach to finding, coaching, and keeping talent. When it comes to funding, the U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year on K-12 schooling, but 80-85% of that is tied up in salaries and benefits, and most of the rest in facilities and services, leaving only scraps to fund new problem-solvers or grow promising new ventures. Similarly, it is fair to say that there is nothing approaching a meaningful R&D presence in today's K-12 sector--a shortcoming aggravated by a lack of federal investment in basic research. For instance, while Congress invests more than $25 billion a year in the National Institutes of Health, it funds IES at just 1/100th of that level.
9.) You talk a lot about "deregulating smart" when it comes to K-12 education. Can you give an example of where we've either done this right or wrong in other sectors?
Domestic airline deregulation in the late 1970s illustrates the complexities of cultivating a dynamic marketplace where bureaucracy and regulation once ruled. After the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the emergence of new supply was constrained by the fact that major airports could only handle so many takeoffs and landings per hour. Moreover, exclusive gate leases that airlines had previously been awarded remained in effect after deregulation. When attempting to sublet these exclusive gates, newer carriers found themselves paying higher prices and restricted to off-peak times.
The bottom-line was that policies and arrangements that may have been innocuous in an earlier era served to restrict the size, nature, and extent of the supply-side response to deregulation. Moreover, despite nominal federal deregulation, airlines still confronted state regulations, interest group pressures, and constraining contracts. Meanwhile, flight availability and performance suffered due to an air traffic control system plagued by bottlenecks like dated technology, limited runway capacity, and federal regulations governing pricing and work rules.
The lesson is that those skeptical of capacity building cannot simply embrace choice or competition but must understand that a robust supply side begins with careful attention to market design.
Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at AEI.
