Abstract: Nobody is content with state of urban public schools, least of all people who work in them. When asked to envision kind of school they want, teachers describe much more orderly, focused, and collaborative working environments than they currently encounter. Principals, superintendents, school board members, and teacher union leaders each claim that they could do their work more effectively if they had less interference from others. All agree that they would prefer a system that valued professional initiative. Gridlock, a metaphor often used to characterize national government, also applies to decision making in big city school systems. As at national level, gridlock in school systems leads to waste, confusion, and mediocrity. Tragically, the enemy is us. If we want public schools to respect rights and values of a diverse population but also want to make most of individual students' and teachers' talents and initiative, we must find new ways to govern schools. There are urban public schools that provide rigorous instruction and help students succeed despite poverty and social turmoil. But these schools are nearly always exempted from rules and restrictions that govern vast majority of public schools. They have foundation grants, high-energy principals who can terrorize or circumvent central office, or special support from businesses. Schools that gain great reputations are admired and publicized, but school systems seldom try to reproduce them. The annual spectacle of parents camping in lines overnight to enroll children in popular magnet schools epitomizes this problem. School systems can create good schools, but few see it as their job to duplicate successes or to create for all schools conditions that have enabled some schools to succeed. Some observers have suggested that governance problems of urban public schools cannot be solved - that all decisions about education should be put into private hands. Others, however, have shown that privatization alone cannot protect children from possible harm or neglect at hands of those who would educate them.(1) Vouchers, tuition tax credits, and other forms of government support for private schools do not eliminate need for society to decide how much will be spent on education and what experiences schools must provide if they are to be eligible for public support. To date, all efforts to reform governance of public education have been piecemeal. Choice plans say how parents can get their hands on resources to demand better public schools, but not how public or private agencies will marshal these resources to provide them. Charter schools reduce burden of regulation on a few schools but leave vast majority of schools under existing governance system. Site-based management changes decision making at school level, but it does not change mission and powers of central office, and it does little to reduce constraints imposed by federal and state regulations, categorical program requirements, and union contracts. School board reforms urge an end to micromanagement, but they do not relieve members of need to resolve complaints and conflicts by making new policies that constrain all schools. So-called systemic reforms try to align different parts of public education, via mandated goals, tests, curriculum frameworks, and teacher certification methods, but do nothing to eliminate political and contractual constraints that create fragmented, unresponsive schools in first place. None of these reform efforts offers a complete alternative to existing governance system. Because they leave its core intact - commitment to governing public schools via politically negotiated rules that apply to all schools - they are much more likely to be transformed by system than to transform it. There is a true alternative form of governance for public education. …
Publication Year: 1994
Publication Date: 1994-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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