Money Is the Answer

By Thomas M. Sherman

It's time to stop the often pompous and generally esoteric philosophical speculation about school reform. The political, social, moral handwringing that has produced the huge education-reform industry is largely perpetuating itself by ridiculous claims that change in schools will come only through overly intellectualized schemes spouted by self-styled reinventors, reformers, renewers, rebuilders, re-creators, etc. There's a lot of money to be made in the school-reform biz, but precious little money is available to actually reform schools.

Here is an example of a typical news report about a typical reform success: "Washington High School was mediocre in every way and nobody much cared. Then the Mega Buck Corporation gave it a half a million dollars and presto-chango the phoenix takes off." (There's almost always some reference to mythology.) Casual observation seems to show that virtually every reform success story thrust upon us by the reformers as a model of what everyone could or should do involves more money. When schools, teachers, parents, or school systems get more money, then they change what they do because they have the resources to change and, then, school achievement improves. It really is not magic or mysterious.

Positive change almost always follows money. Why was the automobile industry able to make such remarkable changes? Was this magic? What did the top executives who are taking credit for changing things do? First, they came up with some new ideas about quality, people, and service, and about how to build cars. Then, they invested billions and billions of dollars to make the ideas a reality. If they had just preached and talked and studied and lamented, we would still be driving updated versions of the 1980 Plymouth Belvedere. If there is a clear message that comes from the private sector, it is...