Education governance puts most people to sleep. The topic is arcane, sort of boring and, above all, seemingly immutable. If you can’t do anything about a problem, why agonize over it, or even spend time on it?
Of course, some people don’t even see it as a problem. They just take it for granted, like the air surrounding them, the sun rising in the morning, and the Mississippi flowing south. It just is what it is.
That’s wrong-headed. The governance mess is a large part of the reason that so many education problems are impossible to solve. As Mike Petrilli and I wrote three years ago about “our flawed, archaic, and inefficient system for organizing and operating public schools”:
[America’s] approach to school management is a confused and tangled web, involving the federal government, the states, and local school districts—each with ill-defined responsibilities and often conflicting interests. As a result, over the past fifty years, obsolescence, clumsiness, and misalignment have come to define the governance of public education. This development is not anyone’s fault, per se: It is simply what happens when opportunities and needs change, but structures don’t. The system of schooling we have today is the legacy of the nineteenth century—and hopelessly outmoded in the twenty-first.
Perhaps the foremost failing of that system is its fragmented and multi-polar decision making; too many cooks in the education kitchen and nobody really in charge. We bow to the mantra of “local control” yet in fact nearly every major decision affecting the education of our children is shaped (and mis-shaped) by at least four separate levels of governance: Washington, the state capitol, the local district, and the individual school building itself. And that’s without even considering intermediate units (such as the regional education-service centers seen in Texas, New York, Ohio and elsewhere), the courts (which exert enormous influence on our schools), or parents and guardians, and the degree to which all of their decisions influence the nature and quality of a child’s schooling.
At Fordham, we’ve done our best to call attention to the governance problem and suggest possible solutions, but we’ve never had a comprehensive answer to the legitimate question, “If you don’t like the current governance arrangement, what exactly would you do instead if you could?”
Now riding in from the far northwest with a coherent and compelling alternative are Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim, whose new book, A Democratic Constitution for Public Education, is timely, elegant, and systematic.
Their central insight is that education governance needs a proper constitution, much as the American colonies did, and that it’s time to replace a messy, failed, de facto arrangement with a clear sorting-out of duties, powers, limits—and checks and balances.
Their main focus is at the community level, where they preserve and revitalize the concept of local control while both freeing educators to do their best and holding them to account for their results. One might say they get “tight-loose” right. School boards as we know them are replaced by locally elected “Civic Education Councils” with clearly delineated responsibilities (and limits), and the “central office” as we know it is replaced by a CEO arrangement that oversees but does not run a network of more or less autonomous schools. In fact, schools get a “bill of rights” so that their autonomy doesn’t gradually get sapped by an overweening CEO or meddlesome council.
Hill and Jochim also take pains to recast both state and federal roles. Following the principle that everyone should be accountable to someone, the state’s main job, besides setting standards and learning objectives, is to monitor the performance of the local councils and intervene (or replace them or take schools away from them) when they mess up. (States, having sovereign constitutional responsibility for education, are accountable to their citizens and voters, not to Uncle Sam.)
As for the feds, the Department of Education becomes “a provider of ideas, examples, data, and research, not a prescriptive national ministry.” Regulation-heavy categorical programs are replaced by “backpack” funding of needy kids whose education costs Washington helps to bear.
The whole arrangement is designed to meet five criteria that the authors deem essential for a viable K–12 governance system. It must be “efficient, equitable, transparent, accountable and democratic.”
What about feasible? They’re not naïve. They understand that changing education governance is a “long, bumpy road” and don’t expect it to happen in one fell swoop. They usefully point to partial examples of these kinds of changes already being made in various parts of the country. They cite the reworking of school governance in half a dozen cities (e.g., New York) the emergence of a couple of “recovery” districts, portfolio districts, and a bit more. The authors do a swell job of describing obstacles, possible transition stages, and ways that the new arrangement, once enacted, could backslide (as some would say the U.S. Constitution has done!). It has to be said that one doesn’t end the book with a high level of confidence that Hill and Jochim’s “democratic constitution” can be put into place and sustained. But one ends it thoroughly persuaded that it should be. So please awaken from the governance slumber and read it!
SOURCE: Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim, A Democratic Constitution for Public Education (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).
