Consider the following analogy: a school is a factory that takes raw materials (young students) and, through an intense process of manufacturing (instruction and assessment) churns out a finished product (educated pupils who are ready to function as responsible citizens of a democratic society). Now, suppose a quality control board (policy makers; the Department of Education; school reformers) oversees the manufacturing of the finished widgets, and is dissatisfied with the results being turned out at the factory after they have seen better widgets being turned out at other factories. After some debate, the board decides that they are going to explore the quality of the manufacturing process (instruction) as a means of turning out a better product, since this is the part of the process that they can control (in these factories, it is impossible to be selective about the raw materials that are used as inputs into the process). Through research and theory, the factories are able to decide exactly which attributes they want their finished widgets to possess. With a better idea of these desired attributes
(standards), the schools are able to change some of their approaches to instruction; hold instructors, administrators, and students (the “machinery” in this analogy) more accountable for the results; and create better ways to measure the progress they have made.
But what if the factory is turning out an inconsistent product? Some widgets are polished and well prepared to face the rigors of the real world; others are poorly manufactured and missing essential pieces needed to hold them together. Each widget goes through the same process at the factory, but there is debate as to whether this particular manufacturing process is the best option for all of the widgets being produced. Perhaps some widgets would respond better to an alternative manufacturing process, but the factory is set up in such a way that it is extremely difficult to carry out more than one method of manufacturing. Is it possible to use one method of manufacturing widgets that will help maintain the high quality and polished finish of some of the widgets, while improving the quality of the widgets that fail to meet final specifications? Such is the challenge that schools face in their attempts to use standards-based reform as a means of closing the achievement gap.
The reform of America’s public schools faces a big obstacle: the schools themselves, which have historically been local-run institutions, are not naturally connected to one another, and are, for the most part, analogous to isolated factories that happen to manufacture similar products. Each school (for the most part) has a unique student population, its own leadership and personalities, an isolated and freestanding physical structure, a unique community around it with unique issues, political climates, socioeconomic realities, and attitudes toward education. Each school is a small city in its own right, and each is as similar and as different from other schools as cities are from other cities. Because of the incredibly diverse nature of schools, standardizing education across the United States is a difficult challenge, but a worthwhile one. Standards-based reform, which has been America’s premier education strategy for the past two decades, seeks to tie classroom instruction to state-mandated learning standards, which point schools and districts in the directions that change should be focused. Furthermore, standards-based reform seeks to hold schools, educators, and students accountable for ensuring that students graduate from American schools with the proper knowledge and skills. The No Child Left Behind Act brought the federal government to the head of the board meeting table where local and state governments had previously sat. Although standards-based reforms have demonstrated positive gains and seem to be putting America’s schools on the right road, No Child Left Behind has received some flak for what many see as the federal government sticking their noses where they do not belong.
The issue of accountability is also an important question: are schools and educators more accountable for student achievement, or should the students themselves be held more accountable?
There are several potential benefits of standards-based reforms. These include, but are certainly not limited to: the establishment of a common national culture through American students’ required acquisition of certain predetermined important educational, social, and cultural values; a quantitative and objective system for measuring the quality of American schools relative to the schools of other countries; a means of holding students, teachers, and administrators accountable for the learning that goes on in school classrooms; a way for the public to monitor the progress of their tax dollars at work; a diagnostic tool for gauging the successes and failures of the various gears that make the schools run (teachers, students, districts, policies, etc.)
Although the workplace demands have a strong say as to what high school and college graduates must have in the way of minimum skills upon graduation, it is ultimately up to the schools themselves to decide and enforce the minimum requirements students need to achieve in order to graduate.
Fast Food Education
There are a surprising number of similarities between the public educational systems in the United States and the corporate structures of large, nationwide restaurant chains. Both strive to capture the success of an individual site and replicate this success in alternate locations. Both serve the public with essential goods and services: nutritional nourishment in the form of food, and intellectual nourishment in the form of the classroom instruction, respectively. Both are subject to public laws and regulations that seek to uphold the quality and physical accessibility of the service, and to ensure that no unacceptable discrimination prevents any member of the public from receiving these goods and services. Both require adequate physical facilities, decisive leadership and a staff of workers to run the day-to-day operations, and a formal code of ideas, concepts, recipes, and conventions to which all normal decisions are subject. To some, the comparison of these two entities might seem like a pedantic intellectual exercise, but I believe that comparing the operation of a large restaurant chain with that of a school system might provide some valuable insight into the issue of school choice and its potential effectiveness in closing the achievement gap.
Educational policy seems to revolve around one central puzzle: replicating the model of successful individual schools on a large scale. Using the restaurant analogy, success on a single school basis is analogous to opening a small neighborhood eatery to rave reviews and customer bliss. This requires a combination of virtues occurring simultaneously: a master chef who prepares delicious and inspired dishes; a management team that seamlessly coordinates the various moving parts of a restaurant, human and non-human, and who deftly addresses any potential issues that arise between the patrons and the restaurant; a wait-staff that is both attentive and well trained to stay out of the way when they are not required; a desirable atmosphere where the patrons feel at home and appreciated; and a convenient location that makes it easy to patronize the business. Similarly, creating a single successful school requires the convergence of many essential elements: strong, dedicated, and visionary leadership that is able to simultaneously juggle the day-to-day operations of the school and steer the school toward future success; instructors who are knowledgeable, well-trained, and enthusiastic about teaching; a school culture that promotes personal and intellectual growth, and which compels students to continue their pursuit of this growth outside of school; and a community of parents and civic leaders that supports the efforts of the school leaders and the teachers.
There are, of course, many important areas where public school systems and chain restaurants differ. The first difference involves the relative the necessity of each. Although food is a primal human need, eating a brand-name jalapeno popper or a well-seasoned steak is not. Eating at a chain restaurant is entirely a choice, not a right. A quality education, however, at least according to the General Assembly of the United Nations, is a right rather than a privilege (Glenn, 9). While a chain restaurant is able to mark up the price of a meal based on the laws of supply and demand (i.e. whatever people are willing to pay), a public education, according to the U.N., “shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages,” and while patronizing or not patronizing a restaurant is a choice, “elementary education shall be compulsory” (Glenn, 1). A restaurant gets funding from the profits it makes on its food and drinks. As such, a restaurant is forced to fend for itself, and its very survival depends upon its ability to continually attract paying customers, an ability directly linked to the quality of the product provided by the restaurant. A public school receives funding from public property taxes and government aid (also from taxes), and in all but the most extreme cases, its funding is not affected by the quality of the service it provides. Unlike a restaurant, a public school has a captive clientele; a student body who will attend the school because laws require that all children of schooling age attend school, and whose attendance does not hold any attachment to the quality of service that the school delivers. When a restaurant fails, it closes its doors and former patrons are forced to select an alternate choice: eat at another dining establishment, or cook meals at home. When a school fails, test scores indicating this failure are made public and a sense of shame ensues; ineffective administrators and lousy teachers might be replaced or “reshuffled”; and the failing school might have to forgo receiving conditional aid from the federal and state governments. Unlike the patrons of a closed chain restaurant, however, the students in the failing school are, by and large, required to stay where they are and weather the storm until the failing school rights the ship. The ability to fix the problem is in the hands of many people and groups, some with competing interests, but unlike fixing a failing restaurant, where the patrons’ choice to continue or not continue patronizing the establishment can force the restaurant to improve its service or close its doors, fixing a failing school is out of the hands of its patrons, the parents and the students. This injustice is the argument behind school choice.
Proponents of school choice believe that providing a number of schooling options to students and parents, instead of the traditional approach of mandating that students simply attend the school that happens to be in the closest proximity to their homes, will allow for a greater flexibility of programs and will boost the overall quality of public education through survival of the fittest. According to Viteritti, Milton Friedman was one of the first people to advocate a “market approach to education” (Viteritti, 138) where competition would force failing schools to close, much in the same way that lack of customers would force a failing restaurant location to close. School choice offered a unique approach to fixing the problem of children being forced to languish in failing schools simply because they were not born into a life of privilege. Instead of focusing more time and effort on fixing the schools that were failing, school choice would shift the focus to the schools that were already successful. Allowing students from all backgrounds to freely patronize these successful schools would solve the problem of making a quality education accessible to all children, regardless of their economic background. The failing schools would close because parents would choose not to send their children to the schools, much in the same way that a failing restaurant closes when people choose to stop eating and drinking there.
But Friedman’s plan did not offer much to middle class parents, who were satisfied with the quality of the schools that served their children; the inner-city schools that served primarily children of the poor and working class were the ones that needed to be addressed. The large and often inefficient bureaucracy of an urban school system is a model that probably does not best serve the needs of the students. Returning to the restaurant analogy, the building of a successful restaurant chain presents an entire set of challenges that are unique from those of opening a single successful location. In the case of many chain restaurants (Bertucci’s, Legal Seafood, and TGI Friday’s come to mind), a group of investors will identify a mom-and-pop eatery they feel will be successful at other locations. They study the successes of the original location, encapsulate this success into a replicable idea (called a “concept”), and use it as a model on which to base their other locations. In many cases, they will try to maintain the original décor and a relatively similar menu at the new locations. The goal is to make dining at TGI Friday’s in Chattanooga as similar as possible to dining at the original location in Manhattan.
Replicating the “concept,” however, is not the same thing as recreating the success of the original location, whether we are discussing a single restaurant location or a single urban school. It is relatively easy to create success on a single-sight level, but it is much more difficult to replicate that success at multiple sites. The success of every restaurant and school is dependent upon leadership and the people that provide the customer service. Quality individual people are unique and invaluable. In the case of the restaurant, I am talking about the seasoned hostess who knows all of the regular customers by name or the celebrity head chef whose cloud-inspired foie gras attracts eager diners from 100 miles away. In the case of the school, this individual could be the charismatic dean who makes each parent feel like his or her opinion matters, the eminently able teacher who is both scholarly and kid-friendly, or the office secretary whom the staff describes as the “glue that keeps the school together.” Quality individuals create the culture of a school, enact the rules and practices in their own individual ways, and connect on a personal basis with the students and the other members of the faculty. Their value owes as much to their independent virtues as it does to their positions within the schools and the communities, and how they respond to the demands of these positions. As such, a harmonious team of individuals can create magic at an individual school, but the fickle human element of mixing personalities makes it infinitely more difficult to replicate an individual school’s success to scale.
Supporting this idea is Wilson’s example of the initial failure of the EMO, Beacon Education Management. Unlike other EMOs that subscribed to a more rigid set of educational and pedagogical beliefs, Beacon “was educationally agnostic and managed schools across the pedagogic spectrum, from traditional to progressive” (Wilson, 92). Presumably, the theory behind this hands-off approach to educational management was that Beacon would provide the important resources that schools would need to be successful, but would back off when necessary to let the talented individuals at the schools work their magic with a full range of support. However, “Beacon’s model of tailored services to individual charter schools proved unprofitable and difficult to bring to scale”(92). It is unsurprising that a management system predicated on the idea of providing all of the resources necessary to deliver quality education, except for the crucial human element, would fail to successfully bring their concept to scale. An exceptional group of talented educators who work together seamlessly could probably create a successful school with barely any additional resources aside from the human resources. People are much more important than technology, textbooks, facilities, or even curriculum.
It is for this reason that urban school systems are bound to fail, and that school choice makes the most sense in these urban areas. The monolithic nature of urban school systems makes them too bureaucratic and too impersonal to foster the kinds of individual contributions that come together to create a school that is consistently successful. Such success must come from the on-site management of personnel and students, and perhaps the psychological weight felt by the staff of a failing school is too much to overcome. Every large school district will inevitably have schools that range from the top of the chain to the bottom of the heap in terms of their position on the pecking order. Individuals in an urban school system see this pecking order, and it is easy to see why, for many working at the least successful schools, their greatest opportunity for improving their lot is jumping ship to a better school, not working harder to improve their own failing schools. “Individual schools can and will go in the directions [of success] if given the chance,” according to Charles Murray, “large school systems will dither, posture, and get nowhere” (Murray, 151).
That being said, school choice is not, by itself, a panacea for all that ails the urban school systems. An important idea behind school choice is that parents know their children best, are therefore qualified to decide where their child should go to school, and economic circumstances should not impede this freedom of choice. This begs the question as to whether all parents are, in fact, competent to assess the quality of their children’s education. According to Glenn, the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights “implied that (parents) had a right to choose an education other than that provided by government” (Glenn, 1), so the governing bodies of the Free World support the theory behind school choice and the democratic nature of education. However, common sense and practical experience tells us that a parent’s decision about many aspects of childrearing, including the child’s education, is not always the decision that is right for the child. How could a non-educated parent be more qualified to decide where a child goes to school than a trained professional who has the child’s best interests in mind? There are absent and mediocre parents everywhere who do not necessarily have their children’s best interests in mind at all times.
Political pressures are another potential pitfall for school choice. Viteritti points out that school choice is a concept whose virtues are clouded by political agendas from both sides. The idea of school choice, which allows demand to dictate the opening and closing of schools, is consistent with the typical Republican mantra of creating smaller government that interferes as little as possible with the regulation of the market. But Republican educational reforms face opposition from the very people they are meant to serve- the poor. According to Viteritti, the poor are skeptical of Republicans, whom they perceive as being “determined to eliminate the welfare state that many poor people believed served their needs” (Viteritti, 139). In order to bring about a revolutionary, large-scale change in the structure of the educational system, it is necessary to garner the political support of the public. It is easy to see why the idea of school choice might scare some people who are proponents of big governments, who are not leery of large bureaucracies, or who feel that the current educational system is just fine. The majority of this group consists primarily of the middle-class suburbanites whose schools are not in peril. It is the responsibility of urban politicians to jump behind the idea of school choice, sell the idea to their constituents, and put the idea into action.
The best possible scenario for school choice is a system where students and parents enjoy a wide range of choices for schooling, all of which are top quality, and each of which caters to a certain type of student. Charles Murray envisions a concept of school choice “driven not primarily by vouchers or by charter schools, but by the evolution of home-schooling into thousands of small private schools operated through a combination of parental effort, one or two professional staff members, and the exploitation of increasingly sophisticated educational resources” (Murray, 153). Greater choice does not necessarily guarantee a better educational outcome for all students, but the establishment of more self-run, individual schools, each of which are held to a high standard, run by on-site management teams who have the autonomy to quickly make the right decisions for their individual school, and foster a strong environment of intellectualism and collaboration, can only be a good thing.
Educational policy seems to revolve around one central puzzle: replicating the model of successful individual schools on a large scale. Using the restaurant analogy, success on a single school basis is analogous to opening a small neighborhood eatery to rave reviews and customer bliss. This requires a combination of virtues occurring simultaneously: a master chef who prepares delicious and inspired dishes; a management team that seamlessly coordinates the various moving parts of a restaurant, human and non-human, and who deftly addresses any potential issues that arise between the patrons and the restaurant; a wait-staff that is both attentive and well trained to stay out of the way when they are not required; a desirable atmosphere where the patrons feel at home and appreciated; and a convenient location that makes it easy to patronize the business. Similarly, creating a single successful school requires the convergence of many essential elements: strong, dedicated, and visionary leadership that is able to simultaneously juggle the day-to-day operations of the school and steer the school toward future success; instructors who are knowledgeable, well-trained, and enthusiastic about teaching; a school culture that promotes personal and intellectual growth, and which compels students to continue their pursuit of this growth outside of school; and a community of parents and civic leaders that supports the efforts of the school leaders and the teachers.
There are, of course, many important areas where public school systems and chain restaurants differ. The first difference involves the relative the necessity of each. Although food is a primal human need, eating a brand-name jalapeno popper or a well-seasoned steak is not. Eating at a chain restaurant is entirely a choice, not a right. A quality education, however, at least according to the General Assembly of the United Nations, is a right rather than a privilege (Glenn, 9). While a chain restaurant is able to mark up the price of a meal based on the laws of supply and demand (i.e. whatever people are willing to pay), a public education, according to the U.N., “shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages,” and while patronizing or not patronizing a restaurant is a choice, “elementary education shall be compulsory” (Glenn, 1). A restaurant gets funding from the profits it makes on its food and drinks. As such, a restaurant is forced to fend for itself, and its very survival depends upon its ability to continually attract paying customers, an ability directly linked to the quality of the product provided by the restaurant. A public school receives funding from public property taxes and government aid (also from taxes), and in all but the most extreme cases, its funding is not affected by the quality of the service it provides. Unlike a restaurant, a public school has a captive clientele; a student body who will attend the school because laws require that all children of schooling age attend school, and whose attendance does not hold any attachment to the quality of service that the school delivers. When a restaurant fails, it closes its doors and former patrons are forced to select an alternate choice: eat at another dining establishment, or cook meals at home. When a school fails, test scores indicating this failure are made public and a sense of shame ensues; ineffective administrators and lousy teachers might be replaced or “reshuffled”; and the failing school might have to forgo receiving conditional aid from the federal and state governments. Unlike the patrons of a closed chain restaurant, however, the students in the failing school are, by and large, required to stay where they are and weather the storm until the failing school rights the ship. The ability to fix the problem is in the hands of many people and groups, some with competing interests, but unlike fixing a failing restaurant, where the patrons’ choice to continue or not continue patronizing the establishment can force the restaurant to improve its service or close its doors, fixing a failing school is out of the hands of its patrons, the parents and the students. This injustice is the argument behind school choice.
Proponents of school choice believe that providing a number of schooling options to students and parents, instead of the traditional approach of mandating that students simply attend the school that happens to be in the closest proximity to their homes, will allow for a greater flexibility of programs and will boost the overall quality of public education through survival of the fittest. According to Viteritti, Milton Friedman was one of the first people to advocate a “market approach to education” (Viteritti, 138) where competition would force failing schools to close, much in the same way that lack of customers would force a failing restaurant location to close. School choice offered a unique approach to fixing the problem of children being forced to languish in failing schools simply because they were not born into a life of privilege. Instead of focusing more time and effort on fixing the schools that were failing, school choice would shift the focus to the schools that were already successful. Allowing students from all backgrounds to freely patronize these successful schools would solve the problem of making a quality education accessible to all children, regardless of their economic background. The failing schools would close because parents would choose not to send their children to the schools, much in the same way that a failing restaurant closes when people choose to stop eating and drinking there.
But Friedman’s plan did not offer much to middle class parents, who were satisfied with the quality of the schools that served their children; the inner-city schools that served primarily children of the poor and working class were the ones that needed to be addressed. The large and often inefficient bureaucracy of an urban school system is a model that probably does not best serve the needs of the students. Returning to the restaurant analogy, the building of a successful restaurant chain presents an entire set of challenges that are unique from those of opening a single successful location. In the case of many chain restaurants (Bertucci’s, Legal Seafood, and TGI Friday’s come to mind), a group of investors will identify a mom-and-pop eatery they feel will be successful at other locations. They study the successes of the original location, encapsulate this success into a replicable idea (called a “concept”), and use it as a model on which to base their other locations. In many cases, they will try to maintain the original décor and a relatively similar menu at the new locations. The goal is to make dining at TGI Friday’s in Chattanooga as similar as possible to dining at the original location in Manhattan.
Replicating the “concept,” however, is not the same thing as recreating the success of the original location, whether we are discussing a single restaurant location or a single urban school. It is relatively easy to create success on a single-sight level, but it is much more difficult to replicate that success at multiple sites. The success of every restaurant and school is dependent upon leadership and the people that provide the customer service. Quality individual people are unique and invaluable. In the case of the restaurant, I am talking about the seasoned hostess who knows all of the regular customers by name or the celebrity head chef whose cloud-inspired foie gras attracts eager diners from 100 miles away. In the case of the school, this individual could be the charismatic dean who makes each parent feel like his or her opinion matters, the eminently able teacher who is both scholarly and kid-friendly, or the office secretary whom the staff describes as the “glue that keeps the school together.” Quality individuals create the culture of a school, enact the rules and practices in their own individual ways, and connect on a personal basis with the students and the other members of the faculty. Their value owes as much to their independent virtues as it does to their positions within the schools and the communities, and how they respond to the demands of these positions. As such, a harmonious team of individuals can create magic at an individual school, but the fickle human element of mixing personalities makes it infinitely more difficult to replicate an individual school’s success to scale.
Supporting this idea is Wilson’s example of the initial failure of the EMO, Beacon Education Management. Unlike other EMOs that subscribed to a more rigid set of educational and pedagogical beliefs, Beacon “was educationally agnostic and managed schools across the pedagogic spectrum, from traditional to progressive” (Wilson, 92). Presumably, the theory behind this hands-off approach to educational management was that Beacon would provide the important resources that schools would need to be successful, but would back off when necessary to let the talented individuals at the schools work their magic with a full range of support. However, “Beacon’s model of tailored services to individual charter schools proved unprofitable and difficult to bring to scale”(92). It is unsurprising that a management system predicated on the idea of providing all of the resources necessary to deliver quality education, except for the crucial human element, would fail to successfully bring their concept to scale. An exceptional group of talented educators who work together seamlessly could probably create a successful school with barely any additional resources aside from the human resources. People are much more important than technology, textbooks, facilities, or even curriculum.
It is for this reason that urban school systems are bound to fail, and that school choice makes the most sense in these urban areas. The monolithic nature of urban school systems makes them too bureaucratic and too impersonal to foster the kinds of individual contributions that come together to create a school that is consistently successful. Such success must come from the on-site management of personnel and students, and perhaps the psychological weight felt by the staff of a failing school is too much to overcome. Every large school district will inevitably have schools that range from the top of the chain to the bottom of the heap in terms of their position on the pecking order. Individuals in an urban school system see this pecking order, and it is easy to see why, for many working at the least successful schools, their greatest opportunity for improving their lot is jumping ship to a better school, not working harder to improve their own failing schools. “Individual schools can and will go in the directions [of success] if given the chance,” according to Charles Murray, “large school systems will dither, posture, and get nowhere” (Murray, 151).
That being said, school choice is not, by itself, a panacea for all that ails the urban school systems. An important idea behind school choice is that parents know their children best, are therefore qualified to decide where their child should go to school, and economic circumstances should not impede this freedom of choice. This begs the question as to whether all parents are, in fact, competent to assess the quality of their children’s education. According to Glenn, the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights “implied that (parents) had a right to choose an education other than that provided by government” (Glenn, 1), so the governing bodies of the Free World support the theory behind school choice and the democratic nature of education. However, common sense and practical experience tells us that a parent’s decision about many aspects of childrearing, including the child’s education, is not always the decision that is right for the child. How could a non-educated parent be more qualified to decide where a child goes to school than a trained professional who has the child’s best interests in mind? There are absent and mediocre parents everywhere who do not necessarily have their children’s best interests in mind at all times.
Political pressures are another potential pitfall for school choice. Viteritti points out that school choice is a concept whose virtues are clouded by political agendas from both sides. The idea of school choice, which allows demand to dictate the opening and closing of schools, is consistent with the typical Republican mantra of creating smaller government that interferes as little as possible with the regulation of the market. But Republican educational reforms face opposition from the very people they are meant to serve- the poor. According to Viteritti, the poor are skeptical of Republicans, whom they perceive as being “determined to eliminate the welfare state that many poor people believed served their needs” (Viteritti, 139). In order to bring about a revolutionary, large-scale change in the structure of the educational system, it is necessary to garner the political support of the public. It is easy to see why the idea of school choice might scare some people who are proponents of big governments, who are not leery of large bureaucracies, or who feel that the current educational system is just fine. The majority of this group consists primarily of the middle-class suburbanites whose schools are not in peril. It is the responsibility of urban politicians to jump behind the idea of school choice, sell the idea to their constituents, and put the idea into action.
The best possible scenario for school choice is a system where students and parents enjoy a wide range of choices for schooling, all of which are top quality, and each of which caters to a certain type of student. Charles Murray envisions a concept of school choice “driven not primarily by vouchers or by charter schools, but by the evolution of home-schooling into thousands of small private schools operated through a combination of parental effort, one or two professional staff members, and the exploitation of increasingly sophisticated educational resources” (Murray, 153). Greater choice does not necessarily guarantee a better educational outcome for all students, but the establishment of more self-run, individual schools, each of which are held to a high standard, run by on-site management teams who have the autonomy to quickly make the right decisions for their individual school, and foster a strong environment of intellectualism and collaboration, can only be a good thing.
Works Cited
Glenn, Charles L. “Schooling and the Sovereign State.”
Murray, Charles. Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back
to Reality. New York, Crown Forum, 2008.
Wilson, Steven F. “Realizing the Promise of Brand-Name Schools.” Brookings Papers on
Educational Policy: 2005.
Viteritti, Joseph P. “School Choice: How an Abstract Idea Become a Political Reality.”
Brookings Papers on Educational Policy: 2005.
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