The Limits of Turning Schools Into Businesses

Has anyone noticed how much business vocabulary has infiltrated discussions about urban schools? “Market competition,” “customer satisfaction,” “empowered employees,” “the bottom line” and “leaner organizations”--all are now stock phrases used by educators and critics when debating school reform. Some school systems, especially in big cities, are even applying “market principles” to boost student achievement.

In New York City, Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani and Chancellor Rudy Crew exchanged jobs for a day. Both want to downsize school bureaucracies and end tenure for principals to make city schools more efficient. Mayor Richard Riordan has openly speculated about Los Angeles Unified School District becoming a part of city government and privatizing many key school functions. Nowhere have these principles been more extolled than in Chicago.

For almost a decade, a business-led coalition of reformers has applied corporate practices to Chicago public schools to improve the “bottom line” of student academic achievement. Initially, it aimed to take decision-making on school curriculum and instruction to where the “customers” were. Corporate and community activists convinced the state legislature and governor in 1988 to establish the ultimate decentralization policy to “empower” parents: 540 community-led school councils that could hire and fire principals, determine where money should be spent and strive to raise students’ test scores.

A few years ago, however, the corporate-led coalition altered its strategy. Repeated district-budget deficits, insufficient progress in raising student scores and declining popular support for school councils returned corporate executives to the state capital. What was needed this time, they said, was a heavy dose of managerial efficiency and accountability. The 1995 amendments to the ’88 law shifted the center of gravity from bottom-up leadership of school reform to top-down governance. Most of the authority for running the schools was transferred to the mayor’s office. Local site councils still exist and make decisions for their schools, but they are no longer major players in reforming Chicago’s schools. Mayor Richard M. Daley is.

Since 1995, the mayor has picked the people who really run the district. Three of his five appointments to a board of trustees came from the business community; its president was Daley’s chief of staff. The district’s chief executive officer was the mayor’s budget director.

Within six months, the CEO’s team consolidated fiscal authority, downsized administration and privatized some school operations. Budget shortfalls disappeared. More than 200 positions were cut. New contracts with private firms provided advice and services to the schools. Labor peace was secured with a multiyear contract with the teachers’ union. Community-dominated site councils still hire principals, have authority to spend at least a half-million dollars a year and set some priorities. But they must now satisfy certain district-imposed criteria to operate. When they don’t, the CEO can disband them, as he has. The business-management model of running schools is on full display in Chicago.

So is accountability. The ’88 law had focused on improving students’ academic achievement. To that end, the CEO chose to use standardized test scores to identify low-performing schools. Last year, he placed 20 elementary schools and eight high schools on the remediation list, warning their staffs that they need to raise scores. If they don’t, their schools either will be placed on probation or “reconstituted,” that is, all staff must reapply for their positions at the school.

Chicago thus appears to be an exemplar of corporate efficiency and accountability applied to a large school district. Is its approach worthy of emulation?

* Whether schools are run from the top or from the bottom is not academically consequential. There is absolutely no research evidence establishing the superiority of one or the other in producing higher student achievement. What matters are the voices shaping policy.

The political coalition shaped by Chicago Mayor Harold Washington included neighborhood groups, parents, educator-activists, union officials, business leaders and academics. The ’88 law was an uneasy compromise, yet maintained a role for each of these groups. Parents dominated the local school councils, corporate leaders oversaw district decisions and community activists organized neighborhoods for council elections. Most coalition partners recognized the many inefficiencies in this bottom-up way of running a big-city school system, yet they were held together by the steadfast support of cross-city, diverse constituencies.

The recentralization of political authority and the imposition of corporate-management techniques, called for in the ’95 law, have created important efficiencies. But new disagreements have arisen. Are students’ interests being served? Are resources being equitably allocated? Are teachers getting enough help?

This is not surprising, of course. But there is one important difference. Many community activists, teachers, neighborhood groups and site-council organizations no longer feel they have as strong a stake in the school system’s success as they did before the ’88 law was amended.

* The current trigger for a Chicago school going on academic probation is when 15% or fewer of its students score above the national average on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in reading and math. Put another way, 80% of a school’s students can score below the national average on the Iowa tests and still not be placed on academic probation.

No continuum of standards and assessments is available to push all students and schools to improve their performances when they exceed the minimum. Such standards would have to take into account what students already know when they enter a grade or class and try to assess how much they have learned as a result of their schooling. The Iowa test is not designed to do this.

If the CEO and other mayoral appointees running the district are to value high performance standards for all students, they need to use assessment in ways that support higher, not lower, standards.

* Although Chicago’s school reformers might like to dismiss it, the well-known relationship between student poverty and achievement is alive and well in their city. Two-thirds to 90% of the students of schools on probation or that have been reconstituted come from poor, minority families. Even when all schools are “empowered” with governing bodies that have some resources and authority, schools with better teachers and fewer students from impoverished families will continue to offer better opportunities. The linkage among poverty, race, ethnicity and achievement makes it crucial for those in authority to create an explicit and public understanding of what each child has a right to expect from school and what fair treatment is for students and those working at the school. That has yet to occur in Chicago.

Although cutting staff, penalizing low-performing schools and contracting out certain tasks increase efficiency in some parts of Chicago’s school system, while attracting applause from media and taxpayers, hard-core, intractable issues of academic standards, building teachers’ capacity to work with low-performing students and equity remain unaffected. As such, other cities should be cautious about importing the Chicago experience.