School Administrators often complain that they could do a better job of running their schools -- and making them work for students -- if they didn't have to deal with the constant meddling of school boards in day-to-day operations. School boards defend themselves by saying that they are responding to constituents, which is what they are elected to do. Both sides have a point. In principle, anyway. But ask the chief executive of any company how easy it would be to manage the business if the board of directors met and handed out advice every week or so, especially if the directors didn't know much about business.
Many school reform proposals try to deal with this problem. Chicago's school reform transferred daily decisions from the central school board to people at the school level. Boston's mayor proposed dissolving the school board and setting up a commission that would report directly to him. And voucher plans, like the "market schools" that John Chubb and Terry Moe describe in Politics, Markets and America's Schools, would make parents and private schools responsible for school governance instead of elected local boards.
Chubb and Moe (unlike Mayor Flynn) agree with board members that they are just doing their job. But that, Chubb and Moe say, is the problem. When school board members constantly respond to political pressures, their decisions often do more to mess up schools than improve them. Chubb and Moe's radical solution is to get rid of democratic governance altogether and substitute market forces. Among the many things they don't take into account is that countries with far more successful education systems than ours, like Germany, France and Japan, have democratic school governance. So it's not democracy that is at fault but the particular form it takes here.
Phillip C. Schlechty, president of the Center for Leadership in School Reform, offers a new and refreshing proposal for maintaining democratic control of schools while getting rid of its problems (Education Week, April 10, 1991 ). Instead of electing school boards, why not let communities send out requests for proposals from organizations interested in taking charge of their schools? Then, after public hearings at which they debated the merits of the various proposals, communities could choose the proposal offering the programs and services they liked best.
As Schlechty sees it, the process would be regulated by a state education commission operating much like a utilities commission. It would make sure that proposals met state and federal standards and that organizations were capable of providing the services they offered.
Organizations could include school boards, groups of teachers or parents, a union -- any nonprofit organization with a proposal that passed muster. (At a state's discretion, for-profit organizations might also compete, but Schlechty does not favor this because of "quality-control problems presented by proprietary schools.")
An organization elected to be an education provider would run a community's schools for ten years. This sounds like a long time, but it would take at least that to judge the success of a new program. And the commission could dismiss an education provider and call a new election if complaints indicated it was not giving the services it had promised.
Schlechty' s proposal has a number of things going for it. It solves the problem Chubb and Moe have identified in democratic governance: Voters have a chance to debate specific plans and choose the plan they want, but the people in charge -- who have been elected on the basis of their plan -- are free to run schools in the way that they think will achieve their goals.
The proposal also addresses an important problem that is ignored in voucher and private school choice plans like Chubb and Moe's. The assumption in all these plans is that, while the public would continue to pay for children's education, the choice of what is desirable belongs to parents ( and private schools) alone. This ignores, as Schlechty says, "the already tenuous support given schools by nonparent taxpayers." How long will the majority be willing to provide the minority -- parents -- with an expensive service about which they have no say?
It also ignores the fact that the general public has profound stake in public education. "Entire communities and total societies are affected by the quality of education provided to the young," as Schlechty says. And he believes there is no reason to think that parental choice exercised in a voucher plan will lead to a system that is in the best interests of the community or the society:
Anyone who believes that some parents will not exercise choice on grounds other than those that have to do with high-quality democratic education misunderstands why the Brown vs. Board of Education decision was necessary in the first place. Anyone who believes that academic quality is the basis of choice in all, or nearly all, instances does not understand the
power of basketball and football in the life of schools and communities.
Schlechty' s questions about private school choice are important. So is his proposal about school governance. It suggests a way to get the innovation and accountability being promised by advocates of private school choice without destroying a community's right to exercise democratic control over its schools.