The Committee for Economic Development, a business group that has already put out two excellent reports, one about school improvement and the other about the problems of disadvantaged and at-risk children, began meeting on a third report the other day, and I was particularly struck by one speaker's comments on the obstacles that bureaucracy puts in the way of innovators.
The speaker was Lisbeth Schorr, a professor of social medicine at Harvard and author, with her husband, news commentator Daniel Schorr, of Within Our Reach: Breaking the Circle of Disadvantaged She was talking about how programs for pregnant teenagers often fail to prevent complications of pregnancy and low birth-weight babies because they offer only medical services and the teenagers need a much broader kind of program. These girls are very likely to be depressed.
Perhaps they've been kicked out of the house so they are fending for themselves. And there's a good chance they've been using and abusing alcohol and drugs because of their depression. So while most pregnant women need only routine medical check-ups, most pregnant teenagers need much more -- counseling, education and community and peer networks - if they are to deliver healthy babies.
You'd think that intervention programs offering a full range of medical and support services would be common. In fact, they are unusual. Government funding formulas are written to reimburse clinics for strictly medical services because medical services are easier to measure and monitor than the support services these girls also need.
Unfortunately, as Schorr points out, this approach encourages programs that are limited and inflexible, and it discourages people from figuring out what their clients need and providing it. What we should do, of course, is to base funding on a program's success rather than on whether it stays safely within established categories. But this more sensible approach would be harder to monitor with a bureaucrat's checklist.
Schorr' s description of how funding formulas and regulations can actually prevent the right services from being delivered will sound familiar to school people - especially the ones who have tried to make any significant changes in the way their schools are run. And it helps explain why most of our schools are virtually unchanged after seven years of "school reform." Change is difficult in and of itself; when innovators also have to pick their way through a wilderness of regulations, it's enough to discourage all but a few superheroes. I recently ran across a good example of this problem when I was in St. Paul, Minn., for the opening of the Saturn School.
The people at Saturn want to recast their school in a completely different mold from the I 9th-century, factory-model schools that most of our children still attend. Since kids learn in different ways and at different rates, Saturn is replacing the one-size-fits-all curriculum with individualized learning plans and the standard teacher-centered classroom with a mixture of computer-assisted instruction and group learning with mixed-aged groups.
St. Paul's superintendent is committed to the Saturn experiment and so is the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, but the people at Saturn often find themselves in difficulty because they don't fit into the usual slots. Their staffing doesn't follow the standard pattern, and neither do the hours they work. So when they try to order the supplies or equipment they need or when they try to get
reimbursed for some expenditure, they're always having to explain and negotiate -- and they're always wondering, "Will the expenditure go through this time? Will we actually get this piece of equipment?" Some bureaucrats make life difficult for those in innovative programs because they don't like innovative, but even when the people in the school system are not hostile, they just aren't used to dealing with requests that don't fall in the customary categories. But for the people at Saturn, the reason for the hassle doesn't matter because the effect is the same - another roadblock to improving teaching and learning.
Lisbeth Schorr' s account of clinics for poor people and the experiences of school reformers in St. Paul tells us something about why innovation is so different in a system governed by bureaucratic rules. And they make clear why we're never going to see significant change in our education system until we give money -- and the discretion to use it - to individual schools and hold them accountable for the outcomes. It's tough enough to make changes in a system if all you have to deal with is people's natural disinclination to change. But when you also have to keep running downtown to explain why a certain rule doesn't apply to your situation or why you couldn't fill out the form completely -- at the same time as you're worrying about whether you'll get the money you need-- you're likely to give up because nobody can fight simultaneously on two or three fronts. Well, almost nobody. As Lisbeth Schorr says, it would take a combination of Mother Theresa, Machiavelli and a certified public accountant to pull it off