A report from Education Sector explores how the movement toward giving schools more autonomy has played out in the District of Columbia and other urban districts.
School autonomy—giving school leaders the ability to hire and fire teachers, select a curriculum, and create their own budgets—has been going on for some time. The District of Columbia system gives autonomy to some schools as a reward for good performance, while in Boston, the district has reduced the autonomy of individual schools and seen increases in student performance.
A key issue in granting schools more authority, says the report by the Washington-based research group, is a school’s capacity to govern itself.
