Heather Schwartz, Columbia University
Ford Foundation Project on Choice District Governance
January 2010
This draft paper prepared for the Ford Foundation asks a simple question, “how far does the decentralization of school district administrative functions go?” Much of the rhetoric surrounding decentralization, observes author Heather Schwartz, a recent PhD recipient of Teachers’ College, outstrips the actual autonomy enjoyed by schools in these allegedly decentralized districts. She looks at two decentralized districts, one that is made up of all “traditional” but highly-autonomous district schools (Edmonton, Alberta) and one of all charter schools (Lake Wales, Florida). She finds that though the schools in these two districts enjoy more freedoms than schools in many “centralized” districts, they are by no means fully- or even semi-autonomous. This is mainly because of economic realities of scale; it is much cheaper for the district to purchase certain services or make particular decisions in bulk, and thereby spread the costs across schools. But there’s also a certain amount of territorial behavior on the part of the central office, too. We found similar constraints for charter schools in our recent report on charter autonomy. Though these two district models are hardly the norm, this paper is an interesting contribution to the decentralization research; read it here.