Opinion
School & District Management Opinion

Ending the Great School Wars

By James S. Liebman — December 11, 2012 6 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

In his Nov. 7 victory speech, President Barack Obama noted Americans’ “fierce” differences on “big” issues and urged us to come together around shared goals. First among the goals he hopes will unify us, despite our “noisy and messy” disagreements about how to reach them, is access by children “to the best schools and the best teachers.”

There is no escaping the angry debate about K-12 education in the United States, whether in battles over teacher evaluation in Chicago, “rubber rooms” in New York City, parent triggers in California, privatization in Philadelphia, or charter schools and “teaching to the test” almost everywhere. What’s missing is a framework for understanding what’s actually at issue in the debate.

Filling that gap is the goal of an intensive graduate-level course I teach with talented and public-minded Columbia University, New York University, and Yale University students, many of them former teachers. They have enrolled in business, education, law, and policy schools in search of ideas, skills, and careers in public education reform. My students work in consulting teams that provide affordable design, management, and implementation support to state and local education departments around the country. That work has helped us isolate the issues framing the current debate and identify a powerful family of solutions that offers a unifying middle ground.

To begin with, unlike the recent election, the K-12 debate is not about politics. Despite the left vs. right rhetoric about corporatized schools and slothful public employees, many of the adversaries in this battle are Democrats who agree on most political issues. In fact, liberals ally with conservatives, as in last year’s New York Times op-ed essay by Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond and the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick M. Hess. And some, like the respected education historian Diane Ravitch, seem to have switched sides entirely. This fight is also not about public school pedagogy or curriculum. Instead, it’s about whom we can trust to decide these and other questions of deep public concern, and whether government still has a key role to play.

BRIC ARCHIVE

My students and I developed a framework for understanding and evaluating the contending positions that may help others make sense of the great school wars (to borrow a phrase from Ms. Ravitch) and move beyond them.

We start with bureaucracy and interest-group politics. For many Americans, these are dirty words that epitomize public school systems. The widely held view is that one-size-fits-all edicts from central administrators at a distance from schools and constrained by labyrinthine work rules and clunky textbooks cannot possibly satisfy diverse student needs. The search is on for ways to rescue schoolchildren from command-and-control bureaucracies and self-serving adult interests. The conflicts we’re seeing in our class and consulting projects are a series of skirmishes and shifting alliances between competitors for bureaucracy’s mantle.

Some observers argue that centrally managed solutions fail only because we don’t fund them sufficiently, and that unless spending surges, student results will not. But the United States already spends more on public education than nations whose students consistently outperform ours, so this solution requires more money and hope than American taxpayers are likely to muster.

Others want to stop “feeding the beast” altogether and give families vouchers to use in a private market for schools. Because most families are happy with their public schools and fear a cheapened market substitute, this solution would require both a subsidized public system for most families and vouchers for others. Funding this dual system—and conjuring up a market for middle-class schools that doesn’t now exist—would demand even more capital and credulity than feed-the-bureaucracy solutions.

Despite the media attention lavished on calls to fatten or strangle the beast, my students and I have concluded that the real fight is between three more moderate views, all of which reject central mandates and promote school-level autonomy.

“Managerialist” strategies call for school systems to run as successful corporations supposedly (but rarely) do, by giving educators outcome targets and leaving it to them to solve the mystery of how children learn. Clever school and classroom managers who hit their targets should be promoted; inept ones should be fired. Without needing to know how effective educators succeed, student results will improve.

“Professionalism” or “craft” strategies replace chief executive officers with a vision that resembles how good family physicians supposedly (but rarely) work. Proponents of this approach urge school systems to abandon input and output mandates and let gifted, board-certified, and well-paid teachers work their magic with students whose unique needs and qualities they intuitively perceive. Here again, the secret to success is mysterious, but good results follow.

Neither approach explains, however, where all these master managers and professionals—and the money to attract them to schools—will come from. Worse, by themselves and unexamined, the student test scores that managerialist strategies use to sort educators are too insensitive to identify the best. And, as former New York City Schools Chancellor Anthony Alvarado discovered when he implemented a craft solution in the city’s District 2 in the 1990s, master professionals’ instincts, by themselves and unexamined, succeed only with the middle-class children most familiar to educators. They don’t alter patterns of failure by poor and minority children. As Alvarado—and John Dewey before him—realized, success will not spring magically from the brow of master managers or teachers. Instead, it requires systematic and accountable inquiry into how empowered and incentivized leaders and educators succeed.

There is no escaping the angry debate about K-12 education in the United States. ... What’s missing is a framework for understanding what’s actually at issue."

Institutional-learning strategies of just this sort are in use with strong results in the Aldine, Texas; Denver; New Haven, Conn.; New York City; Sacramento, Calif.; and other school districts and underpin the Obama administration’s No Child Left Behind waivers and other initiatives. These strategies use test scores not just as “lagging” indicators of success, but diagnostically, to direct attention and resources to students a school or teacher has failed. They use parent, student, and teacher surveys and qualitative peer review as “leading” indicators to delve inside the black box of management and teaching and distinguish real from lucky results. They use structured-inquiry teams to make professionals’ tacit knowledge explicit, spur innovation, and customize successful strategies to struggling classrooms and schools.

Though vilified by the left for making success a prerequisite for continued funding, by the right for trusting government, and by believers in managerialist and professional strategies, the idea that adults in schools, no less than children, should be self-conscious and systematic learners is more promising than the other models. Institutional-learning approaches make teachers and principals into self-conscious, collaborative innovators who can steadily help children accelerate their learning by tailoring improvement strategies to each student, educator, and school, then carefully monitoring results and adjusting interventions based on what does and doesn’t work.

Our consulting teams have helped school systems solve problems and reduce conflict by applying institutional-learning strategies to a number of issues, including how to conduct rigorous, qualitative, and outcome-based evaluations of teachers and schools; and how to empower parent working groups to shape school reform. The teams’ success provides more evidence that it isn’t magic, but self-conscious and accountable inquiry into institutional success and failure, that enables committed managers, professionals, and stakeholders to come together around shared goals, as the president urged last month, and devise solutions that improve schools and boost the life chances of all children.

A version of this article appeared in the December 12, 2012 edition of Education Week as Ending the Great School Wars

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Mathematics Webinar
Pave the Path to Excellence in Math
Empower your students' math journey with Sue O'Connell, author of “Math in Practice” and “Navigating Numeracy.”
Content provided by hand2mind
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Recruitment & Retention Webinar
Combatting Teacher Shortages: Strategies for Classroom Balance and Learning Success
Learn from leaders in education as they share insights and strategies to support teachers and students.
Content provided by DreamBox Learning
Classroom Technology K-12 Essentials Forum Reading Instruction and AI: New Strategies for the Big Education Challenges of Our Time
Join the conversation as experts in the field explore these instructional pain points and offer game-changing guidance for K-12 leaders and educators.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

School & District Management Q&A Behind a New Effort to Recruit and Support Progressive School Board Candidates
By targeting school board races, this political group hopes to recruit candidates who can counter conservative messages.
6 min read
Voters fill out their ballots in booths on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, at Petersen Residence Hall on the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City, Iowa.
Voters fill out their ballots in booths on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, at Petersen Residence Hall on the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City, Iowa.
Joseph Cress/Iowa City Press-Citizen via AP
School & District Management What's Stopping Later School Start Times That Support Teen Sleep? Bus Schedules, for One
See practical strategies for districts looking to move start times to accommodate teen sleep schedules.
5 min read
Crossing guard Pamela Lane waves at a school bus passing her intersection as she crosses students going to Bluford Elementary School on Sept. 5, 2023, in Philadelphia.
Crossing guard Pamela Lane waves at a school bus passing her intersection near Bluford Elementary School on Sept. 5, 2023, in Philadelphia.
Alejandro A. Alvarez/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP
School & District Management Opinion 'I Used to Think School Systems Were Broken': Educators Reflect
Changing your mind or evolving your thinking is not easy. Hear how these education leaders did just that.
1 min read
Used to Think
Hear how these Harvard education graduate students evolved their thinking around both their practice and work as systems leaders.
School & District Management Opinion I Teach Educators How to Change Their Minds. Here’s How
Four important lessons for how educators—school and district leaders, especially—can create opportunities for growth.
Jennifer Perry Cheatham, Erica Lim & Carmen Williams
5 min read
Video stills
The students from the Leaders of Learning class taught by Jennifer Perry Cheatham at the Harvard Graduate School of Education last year.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week