Edison Schools Research Articles

Dumbing Down Teachers: Rethinking the Crisis of Public Education and the Demise of the Social State

In the United States and Europe, thousands of demonstrators have organized to protest government cutbacks and austerity measures being enacted upon the most vulnerable members of society. In the Un...

What was Old is New Again

Out with the In with the old. That seems a twisted way to think about the beginning of the school year, a time of change and openness to fresh ideas, but several events of the summer make such thoughts seem very fitting. With No Child Left Behind decisions somewhat dormant until a new administration takes over, it is possible, thankfully, to think about policy issues that ultimately are more important to schools and children. One event was the reported demise of the new. Sixteen years ago, Chris Whittle, a media entrepreneur out of Tennessee, launched Edison Schools, a network of for-profit, exemplary schools. He predicted that Edison would have 1,000 schools with one million students by 2010. The first years were promising and rode atop growing interest in the industry as a profitable place for investments. Edison invested heavily in developing software, professional training, and a core curriculum. According to Tom Toch of Education Sector, who has documented Edison Schools, the peak year was 2001 when its stock was worth $2 billion. But Edison stumbled badly and finally announced this summer that it would focus on software for managing schools and change its name to EdisonLearning. Edison began as a promise for a vast network of new schools that would stimulate change throughout public education. But the company had to adjust its priorities and settle on running existing schools for districts and then to just using its products for school management. The network has or will fade into oblivion. Toch's analysis attributes Edison's misfortunes to a number of factors. Its financing, though considerable at first, never was stable and came under scrutiny by federal officials. The company ran into intensive union-led opposition and learned that improving schools for low-income children could not be achieved through a bells-and-whistles strategy. My own limited observation of Edison Schools found obstacles outweighing the good. Low-income Edison-run schools in Hartford provided facilities better than anything children had ever known, but teacher union grievances and foot-dragging made instructional improvements impossible. At Chester-Upland, a poor district south of Philadelphia, the state created the barriers, turning over control of most of the schools to Edison but leaving responsibility for the teachers to the district. Edison's principals, hired to produce change, could not work successfully under those conditions. The real lesson from the Edison Schools, however, is that a lot of development resources, high technology, new leadership, and a more coherent curriculum are not enough to spur higher academic achievement among poor and minority children. Overall, Edison Schools did not perform any better than regular public schools. Old Is New This is why the second half of the equation--in with the old--fits so well as a counterpoint to the Edison experience. There is a growing acknowledgement of the limitations on public schools to turn around every underachieving child in the country and to provide each with well-rounded skills. This point was forcefully made in the manifesto, A Broader, Bolder Approach, issued by researchers and other educators this summer as a guide to setting education policy. The manifesto recognizes the centrality of formal schooling but also insists that out-of-school learning is critical to help students learn at high levels, as is physical, character, and social development. …

Assistance and Accountability in Externally Managed Schools: The Case of Edison Schools, Inc.

Edison Schools, Inc., is the largest and most visible among a growing number of Education Management Organizations that have entered into contracts to manage public schools, including both conventional and charter schools. Edison's approach to managing schools is comprehensive, and it distinguishes itself from most other school improvement strategies by simultaneously addressing both the resources and assistance provided to schools and the accountability systems under which school staff operate. In this article we explore the ways in which the assistance and resources provided by Edison (including diverse professional development opportunities, materials, technology, and other tools), as well as accountability mechanisms (such as monitoring and rewards), have translated into principal and teacher actions, and the factors that facilitated or constrained educators' efforts to implement the Edison design and improve teaching and learning. Drawing on data gathered from extensive interviews, observations, and document reviews collected during a four-year comprehensive study of Edison schools, we demonstrate how Edison intends to promote not only educators' capacity but also their motivation and opportunity to deliver high-quality instruction. We examine variation that occurs across schools as teachers and principals respond to these system-level efforts. In addition, we identify several important predictors of variation in implementation, including the strength of instructional leadership provided by the principal and the presence or absence of district-imposed constraints such as union contract rules.

The Case for Educational Entrepreneurship: Hard Truths about Risk, Reform, and Reinvention

Entrepreneurial ventures always carry risk of failure. But Mr. Hess believes that our education system is far more endangered by conventional approaches to school reform that have merely preserved status quo. TO AN unprecedented degree, this is era of educational entrepreneurship. Unconventional thinkers have waded into world of K-12 education, founded influential organizations, and upended conventions. They have developed new models for delivering instruction or recruiting teachers and have applied old-fashioned practices with inspired fidelity. While their efforts constitute a still-minuscule portion of schooling, they are responsible for many of most exciting developments in 21st-century education. Is this a good thing? What does it really mean? And what does it imply for policy and school improvement? Consider Wireless Generation, a New York-based firm that provides schools with diagnostic software. The system operates on handheld computers, allowing teachers to diagnose student needs and chart progress while circling their classrooms. Growing Stars is a California-based firm that provides tutoring for American stu * FREDERICKM. HESS, a former high school teacher and professor of education, is director of education policy studies at American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D. C. He is editor of Educational Entrepreneurship: Realities, Challenges, Possibilities (Harvard Education Press, 2006). E-mail: rhess@aei.org. dents using dozens of instructors based in Cochin, India. Able to hire educated Indians at a steep discount, Growing Stars and its competitors are charging Americans $20 an hour for personal tutoring, less than half of prevailing rate in much of U.S. Ventures such as these are among most discussed in contemporary school reform--many are also among most respected or most controversial. They include KIPP Academies, K12 Inc., Teach for America, Edison Schools, New Leaders for New Schools, Catapult Learning, Aspire Public Schools, and New Teacher Project. Entrepreneurship is a slippery notion. There is no universal agreement on how it should be defined. Jean-Baptiste Say, French economist, explained two centuries ago that the entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield. (1) Here, with due credit to Peter Drucker, author of seminal Innovation and Entrepreneurship, it may be most useful to think of educational entrepreneurship as a process of purposeful innovation aimed at improving productivity or quality. Rather than accept familiar arrangements as given, entrepreneurs question fundamental assumptions about what is possible. (2) This might mean harnessing a new innovation or employing overlooked and underused tools, ideas, or approaches. Some of today's most prominent ventures, like National Heritage Academies and KIPP Academies, are resolutely old-school in their program design, emphasizing high expectations, respect, and discipline. WHY ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS IMPORTANT IN EDUCATION Today, our schools confront challenges that our education system was not designed, and may not be equipped, to handle. Arrangements that may have worked passably well 50 years ago no longer suffice. Developed haphazardly over course of two centuries, status quo is unequal to requirements of contemporary citizenship, higher education, or employment. Decades of earnest efforts to reform public schools have shown remarkably little ability to substantively alter either routines or results, even when confronted with changing student demographics and needs. Tides of reform have rolled out and in and out again, with little attention paid to actually implementing new proposals or ensuring that schools and school systems are serious about them. A body of research, including my own volume Spinning Wheels, has critiqued endless reform initiatives that sweep over education. …

High Stakes for Edison: A Rejoinder to John Chubb

In this rejoinder to Mr. Chubb, Mr. Campbell argues that Edison offers feel-good measures without really solving any of the problems of schools in poverty. Defending his original argument, Campbell cites a RAND study that questions the results Chubb claims. ********** WE CAN do one of two things about closing the educational achievement gap between the haves and the have-nots in this country: we can choose to ameliorate the conditions that lead directly to low achievement, or we can treat the symptoms of these conditions. Edison Schools, Inc., is a manifestation of the latter approach. Instead of focusing on the real sources of the achievement gap, it turns our attention to the most superficial forms of teaching and learning: feel-good measures that ease the symptoms and make the pain, and the calls for substantive reforms, go away. Treating primarily the symptoms of this social disease represents a business opportunity for companies like Edison. The rationale seems unimpeachable: do well by doing good. That is, make a lot of money for you and your investors while doing something noble for the less fortunate among us. But if we were to seriously engage in ameliorating the conditions that lead directly to low achievement, we would be taking away this business opportunity. There would be no business plan for companies like Edison, because the target market would not exist. The simple fact is that, without suffering, companies like Edison would not only go out of business, they would never have gone into business in the first place. With Edison, then, we must deal with the moral question that arises when we consider the economics of suffering. But doesn't something have to be done? And the first response to such a question is another question: not by Edison, then by John Chubb would argue that at least Edison is doing something to help. And even if this help is not perfect, supporters of Edison's efforts would argue that it's better than nothing. But I wonder: Is it better than nothing? Imagine if we construed the question If not by Edison, then by whom? as a real question, rather than a rhetorical one. Then we're left asking: What are we to do? And who is responsible for doing it? I do not blame Edison Schools, Inc., or Chubb for seeking to make a profit from low-income minority children. It is my sincere belief that neither Chubb nor Edison CEO and founder Chris Whittle nor anyone else in the Edison corporation has consciously set out to profit at the expense of poor children. Indeed, I take them at their word: they want to help these children. But the critical questions are these: What does this kind of help look like? What are the consequences of this kind of help? And does this form of help serve to make other problems worse? As Kenneth Salt-man observes so powerfully in his book The Edison Schools, it may be that Edison schools work. But the question of what they work at doing has largely gone unexamined. As I argued in my original article, Edison, Inc., and other companies like it are symptoms of a broader social phenomenon that looks to for-profit corporations for answers to today's most vexing educational challenges. I refer to this broader phenomenon as a disease for two reasons: 1) it is indicative of a pathological approach to educating low-income minority children, and 2) it is indicative of the discomfort (dis-ease) that surrounds the problem of educating these children. Though Chubb and I clearly disagree on a number of things, we just as clearly agree that these are desperate times for America's neediest children. And as we all know, in desperate times, people are more likely to do desperate things. Edison, Inc., is one such desperate thing. It is hardly surprising that Chubb, the chief education officer of Edison Schools, Inc., vigorously defends his employer. Indeed, he is one of the founders of the Edison enterprise. …

Confluence is a Cure: A Reply to ‘Edison is the Symptom, NCLB is the Disease’

Mr. Chubb challenges Mr. Campbell's impressions of Confluence Academy. He suggests that Mr. Campbell didn't spend enough time in the school to gain an accurate picture, and he refutes the specific charges leveled against Confluence and the Edison Schools model. ********** ON THE morning of 15 June 2006, as I drove through the dilapidated neighborhoods of north St. Louis, I was depressed by the signs of hopelessness all around--houses boarded up, adults apparently unemployed idling on door stoops, kids on corners with seemingly nothing to do. All of this is a sadly familiar sight in urban America and one that I see all too often working in urban schools throughout the United States. My mood brightened, however, as I approached Confluence Academy. Children were running, cheering, and laughing as they competed in relay races and played kickball on the Old North campus of Confluence. I couldn't help but think it a shame that the children I had just passed on street corners couldn't be doing the same things: the regular public schools of St. Louis had closed for the summer. Confluence, a public charter school, had elected to provide a school year of 200 days--four weeks longer than the local norm--and not send children home for the summer until the end of June. The kids at Confluence, disadvantaged like the other children in this tough urban neighborhood, have more days to learn and fewer days, in otherwise long and often unstimulating summers, to forget. As chief education officer of Edison Schools, the educational management organization that provides Confluence its education program and supports its operations, I visit all of our schools annually--roughly 100 in nearly 20 states. I observe classrooms, meet with leadership teams, offer guidance to principals and local Edison support teams, and almost always learn something about how Edison can be a more effective partner. I have had the privilege of working with nearly 200 schools since Edison began its school partnership program in 1995, and I can say with assurance that the best ideas for providing kids a great education come from the teachers, administrators, and community leaders who work with kids every day. Before joining Edison as one of its founders in 1992, I had been a full-time education scholar, first at Stanford University and then at the Brookings Institution. I knew what scientific research had to say about what most affects school performance and student achievement. While I continue my scholarly work part time, I have come to understand that it is a strong mixture of practical experience and scientific discipline that makes for the most successful reforms of education. (1) I had visited Confluence in October of 2005. I was particularly interested in the Old North campus. It had expanded from grades K-4 in 2003 to K-7 in 2005 and had just moved into its newly renovated upper-elementary and middle school wing. Many new students had to be assimilated into the existing student population, and many new teachers had to get comfortable with the program and routines of the school. During my October visit I had been satisfied that the school was handling its expansion effectively, though lots of improvement would still be necessary. But as I approached Old North in June 2006 I was not only planning to assess progress, I was looking to take stock more fundamentally. I had just been sent the scathing evaluation of Old North by Peter Campbell--a critique that portrayed the school as an exploitative environment, a veritable plantation subjugating poor minority children through mind-numbing, compliance-inducing drills. In all my years of scholarly debate--and I have been involved in many heated ones--I had never encountered such vicious charges. The charges are false. THE FACTS As I entered the Old North school in mid-June, I was struck immediately by the richness and optimism of the learning environment. …

The New Landscape of Educational Privatization in the Era of NCLB

PRIVATIZATION is a buzz word in education circles. It covers a broad range of activities, initiatives, programs, and policies, including charter schools, vouchers, and the contracting out of services and management. Educational privatization has a long history in the United States. (1) In the past two decades, much media and scholarly attention has been devoted to the educational management industry. Educational management organizations (EMOs) are comprehensive in nature and include companies that manage entire school systems or entire schools. These firms typically assume full responsibility for all aspects of school operations, including administration, teacher training, and such noninstructional functions as building maintenance, food service, and clerical support. Edison Schools, the brainchild of entrepreneur Chris Whittle, is perhaps the best known of the EMOs. However, educational privatization has implications for public schooling far beyond what is evident in the efforts of today's EMOs. The next chapter of educational privatization is being written by firms of a different kind, which have tended to receive much less attention from researchers and the press but cannot be ignored. These are the specialty-service providers. (2) Specialty-service providers contract to fulfill specific educational functions. Their products and services range from software for tabulating and reporting test scores to the design of instructional materials. In contrast to other forms of privatization, such as vouchers, school districts maintain direct control over funds paid to specialty-service providers and, in theory, control the use of those funds through the design of requests for proposals and the establishment of contracts. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is just the most recent effort in a decades-long national movement to give the private sector a larger role in school reform. However, NCLB is distinctive in that it requires, not simply permits, some local school systems to contract with private providers for services. Across the U.S., test publishers, software companies, and research firms are swarming to take advantage of the revenues made available by NCLB. Such well-established firms as ETS have been joined by a newer breed of providers whose product design and marketing strategies have been informed by the Internet. These later firms have names such as PowerSchool, Brainade, and Orion's Mind. Many begin as start-ups and then, once they demonstrate their profitability, are acquired by conglomerates such as publishing houses. Like their counterparts among the EMOs, the firms gaining prominence under the new educational privatization are drawing on political networks, new technologies, venture capital, and government revenues to become major suppliers of services to school systems. Among the accountability measures faced by schools that fail to meet NCLB's specified goals is the requirement that they offer students the chance to receive after-school remedial instruction from private service providers. It is more than a little ironic that, while NCLB puts real teeth into its accountability policies for schools and districts, it offers little guidance or meaningful sanctions for strengthening the accountability of private firms that are increasingly responsible for providing such tutoring. To analyze the role of NCLB as a driver of current developments in the K-12 education market, we examined market-trend data from the education industry and from annual reports (1997-2004) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by publicly traded key suppliers. (3) We identified four dominant domains of contracting with specialty-service providers in the K-12 education sector: test development and preparation, data management and reporting, remedial services, and content-specific programming. In investigating these four domains, we collected data on the roles of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations. …

School Commercialism and the Fate of Public Schooling: What’s “Good” for America?

n 1952 General Motors president Charles Erwin Wilson famously pronounced, What's good for the country is good for General Motors, and what's good for General Motors is good for the country. This outright equation of commercial institutions with national identity, of corporate good with the American good, is the central dynamic explored in both Alex Molnar's School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity (2005) and Kenneth J. Saltman's The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (2005). However, two major changes have occurred since Wilson's assertion a half-century ago: Many corporations have grown to unprecedented size, the largest overshadowing the economies of most nations (Lodge & Wilson, 2006); and, as these books demonstrate, the trend has spread from car making to education.

The commercial transformation of public education

This essay reviews the history of school commercialization in the USA and the forms that it has taken over time, with particular attention paid to research measuring the scope and variety of commercialization trends in US public schools. The implications of commercialization activities such as those that promote the consumption of nutritionally deficient foods and beverages are explored. The argument is made that the values inherent in the consumerist ideology used to support school privatization conflict with the democratic values on which public education has been historically based. Edison Schools is discussed as a model of the for‐profit management of public schools and emerging forms of school commercialization are considered. Finally, the role of free trade agreements in promoting school commercialism and privatization is described.

Which Bets Paid Off? Early Findings on the Impact of Private Management and K‐8 Conversion Reforms on the Achievement of Philadelphia Students

AbstractThis article reports initial findings from a study of middle grades educational reforms in Philadelphia. We use multilevel change models to analyze the impact on student mathematics achievement of privatization through the use of educational management organizations (EMOs), taking account of the structural reforms (creation of new K‐8 schools to replace selected middle schools) occurring simultaneously within the district. Overall, the longitudinal mathematics achievement gains for students in EMO‐managed schools were not larger than those for students in schools managed by the district. Non‐Edison EMO schools actually performed worse than district‐managed schools. With the exception of one older K‐8 school in one cohort, Edison schools did not significantly outperform district‐managed counterparts. Students in long‐established K‐8 schools generally outgained students in middle schools, but gains were not as large in newly‐established K‐8 schools. Across all types of schools, the second cohort of students obtained greater gains than did the first.

The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education

The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education

An Ammunition Dump?

WHEN EDUCATORS open their Fibber McGee's closets of past reforms, a pile of silver bullets will spill out onto the floor. For at least the past 20 years, the sense of public confidence in public education has been fed by an arsenal of such quick, often creative, but largely unsubstantiated remedies for turning schools and kids around. And the pile became much larger this fall. The highest-caliber bullet of all--the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act--landed on top of the pile. But it was not the only presumed salvation of the public schools to lose some of its luster recently. Collecting data about these failed silver bullets can often tell us more than we've known before. The first National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report on reading and math scores that fairly reflects changes under NCLB showed essentially that, so far, this silver bullet is pretty much of a dud. Reading scores were flat, and math scores were up only a bit. Despite statements by the Bush Administration that sought to put a happy face on the findings, the NAEP data showed that progress had been better before NCLB became law than it has been since it was enacted. The data also indicate something that few pundits seem willing to acknowledge. Since the passage of NCLB, about four years ago, changes in the demographics of the student population have accelerated, and schools all over the country are feeling the impact of more English-language learners than ever before. It is to the schools' credit that NAEP reading scores--in the early grades, at least --did not go down. Moreover, the very slight improvement in math scores could be attributed partially to the fact that math test items in the early grades, and even to some extent on the eighth-grade tests, do not require advanced reading skills. (Another possible explanatory factor is that the efforts of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics have given us some semblance of national math standards and that these standards have been in various stages of implementation for more than 15 years.) The NAEP data also underscore the accident-of-birth unfairness built into state accountability systems. The erratic performance of students on state measures of achievement, compared to their performance on NAEP, demonstrates that students in some states are being held accountable for much higher levels of performance than students in other states. And no state has made much progress, as revealed in the NAEP scores. Some 20 states claim to have made progress on their own eighth-grade reading assessments between 2003 and 2005, but only three showed any progress at even the basic level on NAEP. And, according to the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, only eight of 25 states that did announce progress on their own fourth-grade reading tests had more than one-third as much progress at the basic level on NAEP. As might be expected, proponents and opponents of charter schools took the very same data and came up with different analyses. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found them to be making more progress than other schools; the American Federation of Teachers found them to be making less, even after accounting for student-level racial/economic variables. Another silver bullet to land atop the pile of spent ones is the grandiose array of promises made by Edison Schools, Inc. In the immortal tradition of Edward R. Murrow's series You Are There, I was there when Tennessee entrepreneur Chris Whittle announced that he would launch a network of at least 100 new schools that would rival public schools in terms of technology and student achievement. …

Saltman, K. J. (2005). The Edison schools: Corporate schooling and the assault on public education. New York and London: Routledge.

Saltman, K. J. (2005). The Edison schools: Corporate schooling and the assault on public education. New York and London: Routledge.

Checking up on Charters

CAN YOU remember when single piece of educational research led to full-page ad in the New York Times? Me neither. But that is what happened in August 2004. A chronicle follows. It would be kind to say that the U.S. Department of Education was dawdling in its analysis of the data on charter schools that were collected by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). ED collected the data with the regular NAEP assessment in 2003 and placed the regular data on its website in the fall of 2003. American Federation of Teachers found the charter school data, though, and analyzed them. New York Times reported the AFT's findings in front-page story on 17 August 2004. Charter schools did not come off well when compared to regular public schools, even when the analysis controlled for family income and location. There were no ethnic differences between the student populations of the regular public schools and the charters, but the white/minority achievement gap was large in charters it was in regular public schools. To say that the appearance of this article caused the Right to go ballistic is to practice understatement. August 18 saw an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled Dog Eats AFT's Homework, by Harvard's William Howell, Paul Peterson, and Martin West. Secretary of Education Rod Paige inveigled the Times to do another article and allow him to defend charters. Newsday's editorial page said that the jury was still out on charters. op-ed page of the Chicago Tribune said that the AFT's findings were as new lava lamp, revelatory an old sock, and significant belch (thereby indicating need for remedial simile instruction). editorial in the Times claimed that the findings were bad news for No Child Left Behind because the low performance of charters meant that it made no sense for chronically failing public schools to convert to charter status. On August 19, the Rev. Floyd Flake defended charters in New York Times op-ed. (In its credit line, the Times failed to point out that Flake is the president of the Charter Schools Division of Edison Schools, Inc.) In his New York Post op-ed, Defaming Charters, Chester Finn, Jr., labeled the analysis a mischief-bearing grenade, hand delivered by the charter-hating American Federation of Teachers. (Historical note: the Washington Times once called Finn himself bomb-thrower.) Finn's piece overlooked the fact that, without longtime AFT President Albert Shanker's backing of charters, there probably wouldn't be any. Shanker later became disillusioned and saw charters frivolous and divisive. Also on August 19, Jay Greene, Manhattan Institute fellow, published an op-ed in the New York Sun; the Center for Education Reform's Jeanne Allen appeared on NPR's Tavis Smiley Show; and ED's Nina Shokraii Rees showed up on The News- Hour with Jim Lehrer. But about that ad. It appeared on August 25, its $125,000 cost borne by Allen and her Center for Education Reform. ad, signed by 31 professors, scolded the AFT for its analysis and the New York Times for reporting the story. ad said, in part, The study in question does not meet current professional research It then described the standards that the AFT and the Times had violated. There is nothing wrong with those standards except that they constitute massive exercise in hypocrisy, because many of the signatories violate them regularly. signatories guilty of such violations include Paul Peterson and his group at Harvard; Caroline Hoxby, whose work was sharply criticized by Laurence Mishel in American Prospect; Howard Fuller, propagandist whose work does not approach being research; and Jay Greene, all of whose seven extant working papers from the Manhattan Institute violate one or more of the listed standards. ad appeared few weeks later in Education Week, minus two signers who told me they didn't know what they were getting into. …

A Tale of Two Cities: School Privatization in Philadelphia and Chester

In August 2001, the state‐run Control Board for the Chester‐Upland School District awarded control of nine of their 10 schools to Edison Schools, with little opposition. In contrast, nearby Philadelphia fought state efforts to privatize schools. Finally, on July 31, 2002, the joint state‐city Philadelphia School Reform Commission partially privatized 45 (17 percent) of the city’s 264 public schools, while partly reconstituting 41 others. Published sources, fieldwork, and semistructured interviews with 26 policy makers and educators are used to explain the different approaches to privatization. The small size and related low community involvement of Chester, Pennsylvania, enabled the state to conduct more thoroughgoing policy change with less opposition. Further, Philadelphia schools had made some progress in the 1990s, while dire conditions in Chester encouraged more extreme reform. Chester’s less scrutinized, more thoroughgoing privatization had a more troubled first year than did the more measured reforms implemented in Philadelphia, suggesting that a more open political process may yield better programmatic results. The article concludes with empirical and normative lessons about school privatization in urban school districts. Of particular import is that, paradoxically, political factors may force privatization and related reforms to be rushed in ways that make their educational success problematic.

School Choice: How an Abstract Idea Became a Political Reality

When Diane Ravitch mentioned that she was putting together a collection of Brookings papers on hopeful developments in American education, I told her that it would probably be the shortest volume in the series. I was then reminded of an essay we had written together for the Public Interest in 1996 that began on a similarly upbeat note, declaring, "Yes, there is hope."1 Encouraged by the varied initiatives that were already taking hold around the country, we envisioned a transformation in the basic character of schooling, one that would replace the existing bureaucratic system that prizes compliance with a deregulated system focused on performance. Parents would be able to choose from a range of educational options, delivered by an array of educational providers beyond public schools run by local school districts. At the time we were pleased to observe that Wisconsin and Ohio had passed far-reaching voucher laws and that nineteen states had enacted charter school legislation. The Edison Project (later, Edison Schools) and Educational Alternatives offered living examples of how private companies could manage public schools; and it was already apparent that whereas the former was well on its way toward developing an innovative model that could reshape the institutional structure of schooling in some places, the latter was quick on the path to self-destruction. As I write today, school voucher laws have been enacted in Florida, Colorado (halted by litigation), and the District of Columbia. In 2004 similar proposals came under serious consideration in Arizona, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Vermont. Only nine states do not have charter school laws. Privately financed scholarship programs sponsored by groups such as Children First America and the Children's [End Page 137] Scholarship Fund now operate in nearly every state. Brand-name schools like the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) academies have sprung up all over the map. Fifty-one for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) currently operate 463 public schools in twenty-eight states, compared with thirteen operating 135 schools in fifteen states just five years ago.2 At the urging of President George W. Bush, the Congress passed legislation that has engaged the states in a dialogue on accountability that is unprecedented in American education. Change has not occurred overnight, but it has occurred in a big way. This paper takes a retrospective and prospective look at the phenomenon of school choice to measure the distance we have come and to assess what needs to be done to advance choice further. It is a case study of how an idea was converted into policy through the political process. Some pessimists might claim that the process of political compromise has denuded the idea of its power to exert real change. Optimists, to the contrary, might argue that the idea of choice has become an unstoppable force that can only gain strength with the passage of time. In accord with the spirit of the present symposium, I take the latter position. Because politics is the apparatus that converts ideas into policy, my analysis is very much a tale—not too tall a tale, I hope—of how an abstract notion came to be translated into a plausible and appealing proposal for improving American education. When contemplating the phenomenon of choice, scholars tend to focus on research; pundits, especially in a presidential election year, are taken with the national political scene. In the end, research and national politics will prove to be peripheral in determining the future of school choice. If we can learn anything from the experience thus far, the real story of school choice will be written at the level of local politics. The Market Concept The choice idea is commonly traced to a fifty-year-old essay by the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, who advocated a market approach to education.3 Friedman wanted to give all parents a voucher so that they could...

The Larger Purpose of Public Schools

While there are points on which they can agree, Ms. Nathan questions whether Mr. Hess is truly interested in strengthening education. AT TIMES I want to cheer for Frederick Hess' words in What Is a 'Public School'? Principles for a New Century. How true it is that many reformers regard schooling as a politicized obstacle rather than a shared ideal. How true that of us committed to the promise of education are obliged to see that the idea does not become a tool of vested interests. Yet there is also something chilling about his article that stops the cheer in my throat. His use of innuendo in place of evidence, his sloppy logic, and his attacks on some of the most effective school reformers -- painting them as the enemy -- suggest that his real agenda is not strengthening education but privatizing it through vouchers and for-profit takeover schemes. Hess' labored analysis obscures a simple fact: schools have a larger and democratic purpose than private and parochial schools (although this is not to say that these schools contribute nothing to life). Public school systems are open to everyone regardless of disability, wealth, status, race, or religion. Private and parochial schools are not. While some are open than others, they can have entrance exams and can explicitly exclude students with disabilities or those who otherwise don't fit a profile. And of course they can also exclude those who can't pay. They can expel students who cause trouble, at their sole discretion, without recourse. Hess himself acknowledges this core principle of universal access, conceding that schooling an obligation to ensure that all students are appropriately served. But he seems indifferent to the inequities inherent in his more expansive notion of what makes a school public. Hess makes a false analogy when he equates schools that buy textbooks from for-profit companies with schools that are managed by for-profit firms. Basic educational decisions should be made by of the local school -- not by distant shareholders looking only at a corporate balance sheet. (It's ironic that Hess picks as his exemplar Edison Schools, Inc., which sold off the textbooks, computers, lab supplies, and musical instruments of the Philadelphia schools it had been hired to manage just days before school was to open in 2002 in order to pay down the company's mounting debt.) Hess objects to teaching and affirming diversity because, he says, these words are open to multiple interpretations. Then he states that public schools should children the essential skills and knowledge that make for productive citizens and teach them to respect our constitutional order, as if these were absolute truths not open to interpretation. The example of tolerance he cites, wherein a radical Muslim is calling for jihad, slyly exploits a hot-button issue to imply that the professional community of educators condones terrorism. Similarly, he smears the notion of defending tolerance as uniformly teaching students to accept teen pregnancy as normal and implies that liberals equate these activities with their definition of public schooling. Nonsense. His attack on Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, and others is equally baseless. It's the classic straw man fallacy: he attributes a position to them -- that they oppose the teaching of basic academic mastery in favor of promoting preferred social values -- that they have in fact never espoused. Meier's argument, with which Hess is surely familiar, is that such a tradeoff is unnecessary and that strong academic habits and mastery of literacy are essential and are furthered by an intellectually open and challenging spirit of inquiry. The Coalition of Essential Schools, another of Hess' targets, gets similar treatment. …