A basic premise of many school reformers is that central authority is inherently bad because it stands in the way of innovation and change. So the first step toward improving schools, they say, must be to loosen the control of school boards, superintendents and central bureaucracies-- or remove it altogether-- and hand power over to people at the school level.
There are many school reforms that illustrate this. Charter schools encourage groups of teachers and others to set up schools which, though funded by tax money, are independent of local school authorities. School reform in Chicago has set up a system in which schools are run by locally elected committees with substantial authority over school budgets and school improvement programs and the power to hire and fire principals. And state-wide choice in Minnesota loosens the power of central authority over individual students by allowing them to enroll in any school they choose throughout the state.
So it's surprising that Ramon Cortines, the chancellor of the New York City schools, was applauded last week when he ordered one of the city's 32 community-controlled school boards to take back the superintendent it had fired. If local control is so good, why is there so much support for a chief central bureaucrat who has just issued a top-down order to a locally elected school board? The answer is that the board in question is famous for its corruption. A New York Times editorial (February 16, 1994) contrasts its dismal record with the excellent one of the superintendent it ousted (during his two years in office, test scores rose in a number of schools and a budget deficit was wiped out). Clearly, sometimes central authority can be exercised to improve schools, and sometimes local control can turn them into a shambles.
In a decentralized system like the one in New York City, you're going to get districts where a superintendent and board work together in relative harmony to achieve good things for the students. But there will also be districts where the boards hire principals and even superintendents on the basis of who they know rather than what they can do and where educating kids takes a back seat to providing jobs for cousins, political supporters and people who can slip a board member a few thousand bucks or provide sexual favors.
So you need a strong central authority to exercise a watchdog function-- to prevent patronage. You also need it to define common goals and standards for all the kids. And then you need to allow the local people to find innovative ways of reaching these goals and standards. But if a local board or committee doesn't care about reaching goals but only about finding jobs for friends or family or making a few bucks, it's not right to say, "Well, if that's what the local folks want, it must be OK."
Last year a special investigator in the New York City schools submitted a report on another corrupt community school board that raised the same issues with respect to decentralization and system-wide standards.
The investigator found that all the jobs in this community school district-- especially principal- and assistant principalships-- were part of a patronage mill. However, there was one exception: teaching jobs.
Why was that? As UFT President Sandra Feldman pointed out, it was because the union had not allowed the hiring of teachers to be handed over to the local school boards. Indeed the union had "fought tooth and nail to keep a centralized licensing and hiring process, to keep the process out of local school board hands." It had also fought (and won) when some community school boards went to court to contest a union- negotiated registry for substitute paraprofessionals that threatened to cut into the boards' patronage privileges.
When unions struggle to retain hiring rules that are applicable throughout a system, critics call them rigid and self-serving and say that the rules are merely a way of holding on to power. But maintaining a system in which teachers' jobs are not bought and sold is more than a question of union interests; it is also in the public interest and in the interest of students.
In education, we tend to accept new ideas without looking at their history. Centralized bureaucracies still rule most big-city school systems, but they have not been there forever. Superintendents and school boards with authority over many thousands of students were created as part of a movement to reform corrupt local school boards and bring good government to the schools. It's true that they've developed problems of their own and need change, but no person who understands history would want to swing the pendulum back.