Title: Sector Agnosticism and the Coming Transformation of Education Law
Abstract: IntroductionIn May 2014, the Louisiana Recovery School District closed the last of its traditional public schools in New Orleans and announced that it would, henceforth, no longer operate any schools in the city, but instead will authorize and regulate privately operated schools.1 Parents living in New Orleans today have the option of sending their children to a school or one of the five traditional public schools operated by the Orleans Parish School Board. Families under a certain income threshold also can receive a publicly funded scholarship to attend a private school.2 The New Orleans situation is, in many respects, sui generis, since the Recovery School District resolved to operate an all charter district in the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.3 In other respects, the Recovery School District's decision is emblematic of a much broader trend in education reform. A major shift is occurring in K12 education in the United States, especially in urban centers. Frustrated with the pace and prospect of efforts to improve urban public schools, reformers are increasingly focusing on growing the supply of high quality educational options outside the traditional public school sector.4 As a result, millions of American children now attend privately operated, but publicly funded, schools: approximately three million attend privately operated schools, and at least four hundred thousand attend a private school with funds provided by a publicly funded school choice program.5In the education policy world, has become a popular buzzword. Education models theoretically shift the role of public education officials from public school operators to the regulators of schools across multiple educational sectors.6 Portfolio strategies combine continued efforts to improve urban public schools with efforts to increase the supply of high quality schools accessible to low-income students in the sector, and, in states with publicly funded private school choice, the private as well. As a practical matter, however, even the most vigorous proponents of reforms face serious institutional impediments to implementing them. The reality is that the diffusion of authority over K12 education usually means there is no (and there is often no realistic possibility of) a portfolio manager. Except where a state has assumed control of a local school district and vested operational authority in the hands of a mayor (as in New York City, Newark, and Chicago) or a state-controlled entity (as in Philadelphia and New Orleans), local elected officials lack the legal authority to implement education reforms directly, but rather must assume the roles of cheerleader and talent recruiter.7 Even where the local school district has been divested of operational authority, state education law generally distributes control over core components of the across a variety of actors.8 State laws frequently determine the extent of parental choice (if any) by establishing the baseline conditions under which schools are permitted to operate and determining whether (and to what extent) private schools are included in the menu of publicly funded parental choice options. The accountability rules for public, private, and schools also are generally a matter of state and federal law, and are sometimes supplemented by even more rigorous expectations of private philanthropists.9 Federal education policy further complicates the picture by effectively forcing states to implement favored policies (such as the elimination of caps on schools and value-added teacher evaluation practices).10A more accurate description of the rapidly evolving landscape of urban K12 education-and the one employed throughout this Article- is what Andy Smarick dubbed sector agnosticism.11 That is to say, education reformers and urban leaders alike are coming to embrace a child-focused, rather than a sector-focused, reform agenda. …
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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