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The sad state of public education in Michigan and America is largely due to its organization as a government-protected monopoly. The authors argue that injecting choice, competition and accountability into education would result in dramatic improvement. The report explodes the myths that the problem in education is too little money and that choice would lead to segregation or elitism. One chapter focuses on the remarkable achievements of 107 non-public schools in Detroit. 102 pages.
No one disputes the critical value of good education. Without it, people suffer, economies deteriorate, and nations decline in influence.
More Americans than ever have chosen to get involved in the process of education, reflecting heightened concern that something has to be done to turn a number of unhealthy trends around. Several states have developed pioneering innovations designed to revamp the system of public schooling. Much of this activity is all to the good, but in many respects the work needed to promote excellence in education is just beginning.
In Michigan, both public debate and public policy have lagged behind trends in the more innovative states. Here, the central focus still is too often on superficial or peripheral issues that avoid the need for far-reaching and fundamental restructuring. Too much attention has been devoted to equalizing funding of schools and redistributing government aid. And all too often, dismay with the current system has given rise to counterproductive scapegoating and personal attacks on certain individuals or interest groups.
We believe that everyone has a vested interest in a well-educated populace. It's time for that universal interest to take precedence over any parochial concern about maintaining the status quo. The time to question long-held basic assumptions and to embrace fresh notions of meaningful reform has arrived.
This book makes the case that meaningful reform starts with "freeing up" education. As noted herein, many educational ills today stem from a system which puts a premium on self-preservation at the expense of children, a system which performs poorly not because it employs bad people, but because it restrains and penalizes excellence.
America's essentially free economy has produced more goods of higher quality for more people than any other economy in history. Vital pillars in that remarkable performance are the virtues of consumer choice and market competition. A surefire prescription for mediocrity – even failure – in almost any endeavor is to deny individuals the power to choose and to foist upon them a single supplier. These are truths from which all of us concerned about education have much to learn.
Education is simply too important to be insulated from the potent powers of choice and competition. In Michigan and across America, we must come together to find ways that infuse these time-honored virtues into the education of our children. If this book serves to activate creative minds to that end, it will serve its basic purpose.
Lawrence Reed and
Harry Hutchison,
August 1991
The discrimination of the future will not be based on
race, but on education. Those without education will find no place in our highly sophisticated, technical society.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
The United States is fast becoming a divided society. We are doing violence to the notion of an America where everyone is given a chance to reach his or her potential and contribute to society. Throughout our history we have fought an overt racism which excluded non-whites from the advantages of an upwardly mobile society. Through our legislative and judicial institutions we have established a more just America.
We are now confronted with a more insidious, but no less destructive, pathology which is eating away at the very foundation of the social fabric of our nation. We are rapidly becoming a two-tiered society where the well-educated can look to a more prosperous, healthier, joyful, and interesting future for themselves and their children, while the students who are forced to attend failing schools can anticipate hopelessness, despair, and poverty.
In calling for "educational excellence for all," Rudy Perpich, former Governor of Minnesota and the 1988-89 Chair of the Education Commission of the States, noted:
As many as one-third of the nation's 40 million school-aged children are at risk of either failing, dropping out or falling victim to crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy or chronic unemployment. What is even more troubling is that, despite the wave of educational reform that is sweeping the country, the evidence suggests that the gap between the educational "haves" and the "have-nots" is widening.
As Americans, we must come to grips with the fact that our present educational practices are contributing to the creation of a permanent underclass in our society. Our goal must be no less than equal access to educational excellence for all our children.
Students who are at risk of dropping out don't need a lecture – they need an alternative.
Because of the increasing demand for specialized skills in our economy, the educational haves and have-nots are fast becoming employment haves and have-nots. To a large extent, this polarization follows racial lines and portends devastating consequences for the future of our nation.
As trade barriers have been reduced and we have witnessed a dramatic increase in international commerce, the American consumer has been given the opportunity to purchase low-cost consumer goods manufactured in foreign countries that were previously only made in our country. While this phenomenon has spurred world economic growth, it has had a decidedly negative effect on those people who lack an educational foundation and technical skills.
Workers from Mexico and the Philippines who make several dollars a day are producing consumer goods which we import. They, in turn, purchase products and services from us which require increasingly sophisticated technical and analytical skills and specialized knowledge. Those people who pursue higher education in our country find that they are rewarded with large salaries and good benefits. Those who do not pursue higher education or specialized technical training increasingly find that they have bought a ticket to a life mired in poverty and despair.
The only credible solution is to invest in the education of our people. We simply must reach out to the poor of our land and let them know that they cannot afford to drop out of school. Our schools must be excellent, innovative institutions which inspire hope, foster discipline, and instill in all a desire for learning.
We must begin the process of renewal now. Already the evidence of the widening gap in family incomes threatens the social fabric of our society. Today, the top one-fifth of the U.S. population receives approximately fifty percent of the national income or about the same as all the rest of the population combined. This income differential will accelerate because the people who pursue college and university degrees often marry people with post-secondary educational degrees. While the uneducated struggle to make ends meet and watch inflation eat away at their purchasing power, the educated among us work in comfortable surroundings, live in relative luxury, and are able to afford unique vacations experienced by the poor only through their inexpensive Japanese television sets.
The educational elite cynically attributes the failures of the students to their "poor family structure" when, in reality, many parents are uninvolved because this same power structure has brazenly denied them involvement in the most personal, important, and fundamental decision possible in regards to their children's education – the kind of school they will attend.
The poor are forced to suffer the ultimate indignity by being accused of not caring for their children, of being irresponsible and uncommitted by the very institutions and educational power structure which denies them the right to choose the best school for their child and which strips them of their parental authority in being able to remove their children from educational chaos and select another school which will inspire, uplift and provide an authentic education.
Robert L. Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, headquartered in Washington D.C., argued in 1989 that:
Educational choice should be a fundamental right of all parents. Low-income parents want exactly what more affluent parents want – good education for their children to help them become independent and productive citizens.
The affluent already have many choices because they can pay tuition or choose where they want to live and where they want to send their children to school. So, when we talk about enhancing choice, we are simply talking about giving working class and poor people the same opportunity to choose schools and services for their children.
If we continue to allow children who are born into poverty to fail to receive the kind of education that will help them reach their potential and contribute productively to our economy and society, then we will surely cease to be a peaceful and prosperous country in the 21st century.
It is specifically among those who daily experience the destructive effects of a poor education who will do all in their power to ensure that their offspring have more auspicious opportunities. This is what one of the most articulate black educational leaders spoke of when she testified in 1987 before a Presidential Commission. Joan Davis Ratteray, President of the Institute for Independent Education in Washington D.C., spoke for millions who have no voice in the public square when she said:
As an African-American, I recognize that government support has been the means by which we and other minority groups have dismantled many legal barriers that have excluded us from the mainstream. In many respects, the federal government has been a "savior." But I also recognize that when government gives, it also takes away. One of the things it has taken away is choice .... Most Black Americans have only one "choice": inner city schools that have become the dregs of the nation's education system.
The Institute for Independent Education ...found hundreds of independent neighborhood academic schools meeting the needs of minority group youth from the upper, middle and low-income families all across the nation .... During my tour of forty such independent schools across America, I did not learn about absenteeism, a lack of motivation to learn, or discipline problems. I did not hear about drug traffic in the hallways or see uniformed policemen. What I found ...(were schools) proud of the results they have achieved, turning around children that others have labeled "underachieving." These independent schools represent the power of parental choice. They exist because quality education is not just a luxury for the well-to-do. They challenge public schools to be competitive without the infusion of larger and larger sums of tax dollars. They are islands of excellence, and some of them are models for innovation in public institutions.
Because so many of our inner city young people are not given the opportunity to attend the kind of school that Joan Davis Ratteray speaks about, and instead are forced to attend schools which are the breeding ground of failure, we see increased numbers of our best young people turn to violence and crime.
The homicide rate among young men in the United States is four to 73 times the rate in other industrialized nations according to researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics; 4,223 American men from 15 to 24 years of age were killed in 1987, a rate of 21.9 per 100,000. The rate for black men in that age group was 85.6 per 100,000, an increase of 40% since a low in 1984.
For young black men, however, Michigan was the most treacherous state, with a homicide rate of 232 per 100,000. While California was the most risky for young white men, with a rate of 22 per 100,000, this is still less than one-tenth the rate for blacks in Michigan.
– New York Times, 6-27-90, "U.S. Is By Far the Leader in Homicide."
In order to remove from our streets the products of our failed educational institutions, Michigan is in the process of building an unprecedented number of new prisons. From 1984 to 1991, the State of Michigan will build 24 new prisons and will increase the number of prison beds from 12,780 to 32,000 at a cost to the taxpayers of $900 million. When all of these new prison beds are available to house inmates, our prison system will still be overcrowded and will not be able to handle all of our prisoners according to the Department of Corrections.
In a paper done for the Citizens Research Council, the former Director of the Michigan prison system, Perry Johnson, and the former Director of Research for Corrections, William Kime, report that:
This rapid growth in prison population is without precedent. It has not been equaled – not in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, or California – not anywhere – not at any time. We can find no record in the Western world of any other increase in criminal prisoners of this proportion in such a short time.
According to the columnist Cal Thomas (Lansing State Journal, May 28, 1989), we are incarcerating a higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world except the Soviet Union and South Africa. Our national rate of incarceration is increasing fifteen times faster than the population and the increase in our state greatly exceeds the national pace.
By any measure, today's educational system is a failed monopoly. That it is failing large numbers of students is beyond dispute – one quarter do not graduate and another quarter are so poorly prepared academically that they are not ready for work or post-secondary education.
– David P. Kearns, Author, Winning the Brain Race
It is clear that something is fundamentally wrong with the educational system in the United States. Television, newspapers, and newsmagazines have all given notice to the fact that we have, in fact, reached an educational crisis.
In the landmark report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, entitled A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform, the commission warns in foreboding language:
The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur – others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
The commission examined the courses high school students took in 1964-69 compared with course patterns in 1976-81. From the findings they concluded that "secondary school curriculums have been homogenized, diluted, and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose." They found that a full 25 percent of high school credits were earned in "physical and health education, work experience outside the school, remedial English and mathematics, and personal service and development courses, such as training for adulthood and marriage."
Teachers across the nation increasingly indicate that students are tuning out in record numbers. Some experts believe that this is the result one would expect from a system which does not respect parental and student values and choices in regards to the kind of school they think is best.
In a report by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, entitled "The American Teacher 1988: Strengthening the Relationship Between Teachers and Students," teachers and students said a great deal of classroom time was wasted. Forty percent of the teachers said they taught less than 75 percent of the time they spent with students and 13 percent said they spent less than half their classroom time teaching. The majority of teachers said students did not pay attention most of the time and more than a quarter of the teachers said students paid attention less than half of the time they were teaching. In order to clarify just how critical the problem has become, the following data are presented:
In international comparisons of student achievement on 19 academic tests, American students were never first or second and, when compared with other industrialized nations, were last seven times. (National Commission on Excellence in Education)
Twenty-three million of American adults are now functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension. (National Commission on Excellence in Education)
Thirteen percent of all 17-year-olds in the United States can be considered functionally illiterate. Functional illiteracy among minority youth may run as high as 40 percent. (National Commission on Excellence in Education)
The average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched. (National Commission on Excellence in Education)
Over half of the population of gifted students do not match their tested ability with comparable achievement in school. (National Commission on Excellence in Education)
The College Board's Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) demonstrate a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980. Average verbal scores fell over 50 points and average mathematics scores dropped nearly 40 points. (National Commission on Excellence in Education)
Although there was a slight rise in SAT scores from 1981-85, they have not risen since 1985 and in 1988 suffered a 2-point fall. (The College Board, "News from the College Board," (Sept. 20, 1988). Table entitled, "College Bound Seniors, SAT Score Averages, 196788)
Both the number and proportion of students demonstrating superior achievement on SATs (those with scores 650 or higher) have dramatically declined. (National Commission on Excellence in Education)
According to tests administered to students at ages 9, 13, and 17 as part of the periodic National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), less than ten percent of all 13-year-olds are "adept" at reading and less than one percent are advanced. (Trends in Education Achievement, April 1986: pp. 43, 46; U.S. Congressional Budget Office)
In the first survey of geographic knowledge conducted and made public by the National Geographic Society, the Society said Americans share "an astonishing lack of awareness of the world around them." Young Americans (ages 18-24) scored in last place for geographical knowledge among the ten nations where the test was given. Fourteen percent of Americans could not find the United States on a world map. Only 32 percent of Americans could find Vietnam on a map. (The New York Times, November 9, 1989)
Most high school graduates possess only a junior high level of reading or math comprehension. (American Education: Making it Work. U.S. Department of Education)
Despite efforts at reforming the public schools in Michigan, the indices of performances are consistent with the rest of the nation:
High school seniors in Michigan scored lowest in six years on College Admission Tests in 1989. (USA Today, September 13, 1989)
Of the nearly 14,000 students who began ninth grade in Detroit's public schools in September 1989, it is estimated that 40 percent will drop out before graduation. But for those who do finish, only a relatively small number leave school with the kind of academic and social skills that make them attractive to college recruiters and employers. (The New York Times, September 27, 1989)
According to a study by the Business Education Alliance of the Detroit Chamber of Commerce, about 6,000 of 7,000 recent high school graduates had math and reading skills below 11th grade levels.
Only 68.5 percent of 10th grade students in Michigan attained at least 75 percent of the mathematics objectives measured by the Michigan Education Assessment Program (MEAP) for 1987-88. (Condition of Michigan Education 1989, Michigan State Board of Education)
Only 29 percent of 10th grade students in Michigan attained at least 75 percent of the MEAP Science objectives in 1987-88. (Condition of Michigan Education 1989, Michigan State Board of Education)
In 1990, 28 percent of Detroit Public School seniors flunked an eighth grade basic skills test and 50 percent of their second graders were found to be not academically prepared to advance to the third grade.
Not only are the test scores and drop-out rates indicative of an educational establishment in crisis, they represent a group of people who are woefully unprepared for higher education and employment.
College and university professors around the country believe that the academic performance among undergraduates has seriously declined, according to a report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Ernest L. Boyer, the foundation's president, noted that a survey of more than 5,000 professors "reinforce the fact that colleges can be no stronger than the nation's schools and that public education, despite six years of reform, is still producing inadequately prepared students."
In terms of their ability to enter the world of work, our students are even less prepared. The New York Times reported in an article entitled, "U.S. Businesses Brace for Disaster: Work Force Unqualified to Work," on September 25, 1989, that "American schools are graduating students who lack even the skills needed to fill existing assembly line jobs, let alone the sophisticated new jobs that increasingly dominate the economy."
At the MCI Communications Corporation in Boston, Joanne M. Ramsey, the residential sales manager, has reported that telephone sales jobs paying $7.10 an hour plus incentives are not filled because the company cannot find enough qualified applicants to fill them.
The poor performance of our public schools is a direct result of the way our school systems are managed. The system has come to display all of the symptoms one would fear from a monopoly with a captive clientele – waste, rigidity, and low productivity. In the many areas where Americans excel, organizations and businesses who provide services and products must compete with each other to meet the customer's needs and desires. However, the customer has almost no choice when it comes to primary and secondary education. Rather, the public school system is rigid, unresponsive, and answerable virtually to no one. Large and growing bureaucracies administer the school districts of most large U.S. cities and they prevent the necessary responsiveness and flexibility to address the basic problems of the local schools.
In the Chicago School District, over 3,000 employees work in the central and district offices just to perform administrative tasks. This compares strikingly to the 36 administrators assigned by the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago to serve one-third as many pupils. Furthermore, between 1976 and 1986 student enrollment in the Chicago Public Schools dropped by 18 percent and the number of classroom teachers fell eight percent. However, the number of employees assigned to the central and district offices rose by 47 percent. (Herbert J. Walberg, et al., We Can Rescue Our Children (Chicago: URF Educational Foundation and Green Hill Publishers, 1988).
A group of Chicago business leaders, sickened by the bloated bureaucracy of the Chicago Public School system, informed the Chicago Board of Education that the ratio of administrators to students in the Chicago Public Schools was one to 143, while in Chicago's Catholic Schools the ratio was one to 6,250. (Educational Choice: A Catalyst for Reform. A Report of the Task Force on Education of the City Club of Chicago, August, 1989, page 11).
Recently, Fordham University Professor Bruce Cooper and graduate student Robert Sarrel published a study which identifies "where every dollar of the $1.4 billion spent on New York City high school students went in 1988-89." The study finds that of the greater than $6,000 spent per high school student, less than $2,000 reaches the classroom. Approximately two-thirds is spent on the bureaucracy running the school system. They cited the example that at Brooklyn's education headquarters alone about 125 people work on public affairs and strategic planning. This study confirms the notion that in our monopolistic education system increased spending typically bloats bureaucracy and rarely reaches the classroom.
Andrew J. Stein, president of the New York City Council, explains how teachers, principals and custodians are not held accountable for their actions, even when they commit crimes. He writes:
The (New York City School) board's files bulge with appalling cases – teachers convicted of drug dealing and sexual abuse who continue to teach. Only one of 63,000 teachers was fired in 1988 for conduct unbecoming of a teacher. It is even less likely for a principal or a custodian to be disciplined. Although the city employs about 1,000 principals, not one has been fired during the past ten years; formal charges have been brought against only five.
The system not only doesn't deliver accountability, it wastes millions of dollars. The board currently spends more than $10,000 a day on salaries of teachers who sit idly in district offices while their cases drag on endlessly.
Accountability is further eroded because most teachers are protected by a six-month statute of limitations, making it almost impossible to prove incompetence. Principals are granted tenure tied to one school after three years – a practice unheard of anywhere else in America. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, for district superintendents or the Chancellors to exercise meaningful supervision of principals.
This coming fiscal year, the city proposes to spend $6.4 billion on education. We could spend $10 billion. But unless we create a system that rewards excellence and punishes wrongdoing, we will doom our children to a failed system (emphasis by author).
There is general agreement that American schools need fundamental restructuring. Superficial change is not sufficient. What is needed are changes in the way schools are organized and managed in order to help students master academic essentials and critical thinking ability.
More educational, political and business leaders are recognizing that the key to educational renewal lies in giving parents the ability to choose the best school for their children. We need, in a word, perestroika in our educational sphere. At present, government takes our educational dollars and distributes them in ways that are often not in line with how the consumer would choose to spend them. By returning to parents their tax dollars and allowing them to choose their child's school, the schools will have to restructure themselves to win the confidence and fidelity of the parents.
David P. Kearns, chairman of Xerox Corporation, has been an outspoken advocate of educational reform. He co-authored Winning the Brain Race with Dennis P. Doyle and concluded with this assessment:
By any measure, today's educational system is a failed monopoly. That it is failing large numbers of students is beyond dispute--one quarter do not graduate and another quarter are so poorly prepared academically that they are not ready for work or post-secondary education. But does that unacceptably high rate of failure have anything to do with the schools' monopoly position? We are convinced it does. The monopolist is free to ignore the legitimate needs and interests of both the consumer and the worker, a picture that describes the reality of today's educational system. Teachers and students are the losers .... In the parlance of business, that would be known as "conspiracy in restraint of trade"....
Providing choice means allowing schools to compete with one another for the most valuable of assets: students....
But choice in and of itself is an empty concept unless there are real decisions to be made among alternate providers. Henry Ford, for example, is reputed to have said that customers could have any color Ford they wanted so long as it was black. A real educational choice system can be effective only if it leads to significant diversity among schools, and if it's backed by the capacity of parents, students and teachers to make real decisions.
In the pages that follow, the case will be made that our parents and students can be given a real choice of schools. Once parents are free to choose, each school will naturally strive to become the best provider of educational services in order to attract students. Michigan, which has lagged behind a number of educational innovations taking place in the country, can put its mark on the future now by taking bold steps toward educational choice.
This kind of real reform, generated by parents and students, has the potential to transform our state and national education enterprise. We do not have to accept an inferior educational system. We can, once again, restore American leadership in educational excellence. We must demand change because the welfare of our children, our state, and our nation is at stake.
A new wave of school reform is beginning to sweep the nation. From coast to coast school boards and state legislatures are looking at ways to use parental choice, an innovative concept in school organization, to improve education. This is exciting because parental choice represents a genuinely promising approach to school improvement. Properly implemented, parental choice would eliminate perhaps the most crucial source of school failure in the United States today and create powerful new forces for school success in the years ahead. But parental choice may never fulfill its promise. Like so many past waves of reform, it may wash over the country's educational systems without making a desirable difference.
Parental choice may not fulfill its promise for precisely the same reason it has so much of it. A basic premise underlying the concept of parental choice is that America's educational systems are a large part of the reason that American education is mediocre. Organized as public monopolies, America's schools and school systems have come to exhibit many of the potentially serious problems – excessive regulation, inefficient operation, and ineffective service – that are inherent in this form of organization. If these problems are to be more than temporarily alleviated, America's educational systems will need to be reorganized fundamentally. Public school monopolies will need to be opened to competition, and social control over schools will need to be exercised less through politics and central regulation and more through markets and parental choice.
There are many reasons to believe that such reforms will promote school improvement. But what makes parental choice an especially promising idea is that it tries to get at the root of the problem of educational mediocrity. Unlike so many past reforms that treated symptoms and were eventually undone by our systems of education, parental choice tries to eliminate a basic source of mediocrity, the systems themselves. By aiming to do so, however, parental choice may ultimately never be able to fulfill its great promise: really changing any system as thoroughly institutionalized as public education may be more than today's reformers are willing or able to do.
Still, parental choice has made it onto political and governmental agendas around the country, was recently endorsed by the Bush administration, and is in limited use in many places already. In the next few years, parental choice is bound to be implemented, in one way or another, in more states and districts. The opportunity does exist for parental choice to make a desirable difference in public education. But the opportunity could easily be squandered or lost if reformers fail to appreciate the basic reason that choice has so much promise – that it provides the means to restructure the way American education is provided. If reformers do not understand this, if they see choice as just another reform to be turned over to our educational systems to implement and to control, choice will not make much of a difference. Fortunately, there are many sound reasons why reformers sincerely concerned about the quality of American schools should favor systemic change, and should support a system of educational choice. Our purpose here is to supply a good number of those reasons.
We shall do so by trying to answer the questions that we most frequently are asked by politicians, journalists, administrators, and educators who have read our work on school performance and reform, or who are otherwise interested in educational choice. We have already written many professional and popular articles on the causes of effective and ineffective schools. And the Brookings Institution has published a book in which our findings are elaborated, and the final results of our nationwide study – of 400 high schools and over 20,000 students, teachers, and principals – are reported in detail. But that work, however accessible we have tried to make it, was not written expressly for those interested in reform, and may not directly answer some of the important questions that reformers have. Here we try to answer those questions – and to show why reformers should give choice a chance.
Are America's schools really performing so poorly that we must consider wholesale changes in them?
Yes. Schools in the United States appear to be doing a worse job than schools in this country did in the past and than schools in other countries are doing now. We say appear because there are many factors that influence the accomplishments of students besides schools, factors that have never been adequately controlled in analyses of American students over time or in comparisons of American and foreign students. Nevertheless, a host of relevant indicators are disturbing.
The academic achievement of American students may be significantly lower today than it was twenty-five years ago. On the best known indicator of student ability, the SAT test, the average total score of college-bound seniors fell more than 90 points between 1963 and 1981, and remains more than 75 points below its high-water mark today. [2] Although some of this decline is explained by increases in the size of the test-taking population (a growing proportion of the population is attending college), similar declines were registered on many tests that do not present this problem in comparability. [3] Scores on the Iowa achievement tests, administered to students in grades G, 8, 10, and 12, dropped about as much as SAT scores during the late 1960s and 1970s. The same can be said of the tests administered to students at ages 9, 13, and 17 as part of the periodic National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). True, not all test trends over the last twenty-five years have been bad. The gap between minority and non-minority test scores has closed significantly. And during the late 1970s and the early 1980s, depending on the test, American students posted gains in performance. Unfortunately, those gains have now stabilized and may well have ended. SAT scores, to cite a clear example of this, have not risen since 1985, and in 1.988 suffered a 2-point fall. [4]
Another troubling trend is the persistently high rate of high school dropouts. Again, the facts depend to an extent on how the measurement is done. If dropouts include those young people of normal high school age who are not in school or out of school with a regular high school diploma – not equivalency credentials – the average dropout rate is currently at least 25 percent, and as much as 50 percent in some cities with high percentages of minority enrollment. [5] If the dropout rate counts only those students who have failed by their late twenties to receive either a regular diploma or high school equivalency credentials, the rate is not as bad – 13.9 percent in 1986. [6] But the disturbing fact about the dropout rate is that however it is measured, it has not declined significantly since 1970. After making great strides in increasing school attendance in the immediate postwar era – half of all adults did not have a high school education in 1950 – American schools have stopped making progress, far short of success, in reaching this modest educational objective. [7]
Trends aside, the accomplishments of average American students today are not very impressive. The NAEP classifies less than 10 percent of all 13 year-olds as "adept" at reading, and less than 1 percent as "advanced." [8] Large percentages of the 17 year-olds taking the NAEP tests answered questions requiring only basic skills or knowledge incorrectly. For example 47 percent could not "express 9/100 as a percent." Only 5 percent could calculate the cost per kilowatt on an electrical bill that charged $9.09 for 606 kilowatts of electricity. Twenty-six percent of the students did not know that Congress is part of the legislative branch of government. The same share could not define "democracy." On other nationwide tests, 43 percent of all high school students could not place World War I in even the broad historical period of 1900-1950, and 75 percent could not place Abraham Lincoln's presidency in the era 1840-1880. [9]
By international standards these kinds of performances also fail to measure up. Eighth grade students in the United States placed next to last on a 1981 mathematics test administered in 12 advanced industrial democracies. [10] The averages of Japanese students, the highest in the world, were about 15 percent higher than the averages of American students. In a 1982 comparison of the best math students in 11 nations, including many nations with which the United States competes economically, American students came in dead last in calculus and algebra, scoring at the same level as the median of all Japanese 17 year-olds. [11] The most recent comparisons tell the same story. A new study conducted by the Educational Testing Service for the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education found American 13 year-olds performing worse or no better in science and math than students in all of the countries in the study – the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Canada, and South Korea. [12] In math, South Korean students, the highest performers, are achieving levels four times those of American students – an alarming statistic indeed, but far from an isolated one. By most measures American students are doing rather badly, and their schools must bear some responsibility for this.
What have American schools been doing about the troubling trends in student performance?
For the last twenty years American schools have been trying in many and varied ways to improve student performance. Educational systems did not wait until the 1983 presidential report, A Nation At Risk, warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" to begin seeking improvement. The national decline in test scores was apparent by the early 1970s, and efforts to turn that decline around – to boost student achievement – began in earnest at that time. For example, the 1970s saw a strong nationwide movement to hold schools accountable for student performance. The 1970s also brought innovations in curriculum, instruction, and special programs almost as numerous as the state and local systems of education that implemented them. To be sure, the 1980s saw stronger waves of reform sweep across the entire nation. But the important point is that America's school systems began introducing reforms attacking educational mediocrity for a long time and have continued to pursue such reforms over the last two decades. [13]
This experience should at least make reformers skeptical of new efforts to improve education through the existing school systems. While it would be premature to pass final judgment on the school reforms of the last five years, it is fair to say that America's school systems can provide little evidence that their last two decades of reform efforts have paid off. There is also ample evidence that the dominant approaches to reform that the schools have used, approaches that rely heavily on spending and regulation, have not been working out.
It may come as a surprise to some participants in the current educational debate, but public schools are increasingly well-funded institutions. From 1970 to 1987 per-pupil current expenditures increased 407 percent in nominal terms against an inflation rate of 177 percent. [14] That's a real increase of 83 percent. Total expenditures per student in daily attendance reached $4,300 by 1987. [15] For the sake of comparison, that amount is more than twice the cost of educating a student in a Catholic school, where research indicates the education is superior. [16] Even during the 1970s, the period of steepest decline in student achievement, per-pupil current expenditures in the public schools increased 44 percent in real terms. [17]
But what were these increased financial resources being used for? Some portion of the additional money was being used for two things that educational systems have long argued are vital to school improvement. Teacher salaries were increased and class sizes were decreased. From 1970 to 1987 the average teacher salary in the United States increased from $8,560 to $26,700, and the average ratio of pupils to teachers (a proxy for class size) fell from 22.3 to 17.6. [18] Moreover, the increases in teacher salaries purchased at least nominal gains in teacher quality. The percentage of teachers with master degrees doubled by 1983, reaching 53 percent. [19]
These "improvements" account for about half of the 83 percent real increase in per-pupil education spending over the period. Although the increase in average teacher salaries amounted to only 12 percent in real terms, the increase had to be paid to 27 percent more teachers per student. The cost of teacher salaries therefore rose 42 percent per student from 1970 to 1987. If the returns to this investment have been meager – and this apparently is so – there are several immediate reasons. One is that reductions in pupil-teacher ratios or class sizes of the magnitude achieved during the seventies and eighties simply may not produce systematic improvements in student achievement. Another is that these reductions were not achieved through careful efforts to increase student-teacher contact but rather as a by- product of efforts to minimize teacher layoffs during a period of declining student enrollments. A final reason is that the higher average salaries – actually 7 percent lower during the 1970s – were not being used to attract more talented teachers into the profession but to compensate those already in the aging teaching force for increasing experience and educational attainment.
If the increased investment in teacher salaries did not pay off as hoped, however, it had, and still has, a better prospect of improving education than most of the rest of the increase in public school spending that occurred from 1970 to the present. Schools are not spending more today than twenty years ago because of better books, materials, laboratories, equipment or other obvious improvements in instructional facilities. No, at least half of the 83 percent real increase in educational spending per pupil from 1970 to 1987 was consumed by such things as more expensive employee fringe benefits (which doubled their share of school system budgets); rising "fixed costs" such as rent, maintenance, and insurance; increasing use of "auxiliary teaching services "provided by aides and counselors; and last but not least, educational administration. [20] Indeed, after teacher salaries and fringe benefits, school bureaucracy may be the single largest beneficiary of the substantial increase in educational expenditures over the last two decades.
Because of problems of data availability and comparability it is impossible to estimate with confidence the size of the real increase in all administrative costs per pupil in America's public schools since 1970. But the data that are available describe very significant growth in public school bureaucracy over the last two decades. From 1977 to 1987, when the ratio of students to teachers nationwide fell 8.4 percent, the ratio of students to central office professional personnel dropped 21.0 percent. [21] In other words, administrative employment outside of schools was growing at two-and-a-half times the rate of instructional employment inside the schools. Between 1960 and 1980 local school spending on administration and other non-instructional functions grew by 1.07 percent in real terms, almost twice the rate of per-pupil instructional expenditures. [22]
More instructional matters were also being taken out of the classroom: between 1960 and 1984 the number of non-classroom instructional personnel in America's school systems grew 400 percent, nearly seven times the rate of growth in the number of classroom teachers. [23] In 1983, the last date for which such figures are available, full-time classroom teachers represented barely half (54 percent) of all local school employment; administrators represented 13 percent. [24] Whatever its precise magnitude, though, the recent growth in public school bureaucracy may have harmed more than helped the academic performance of schools. And, if the growth in bureaucracy was not generally beneficial, it partially explains why two decades of growth in school expenditures was not very effective.
In due course, we will provide many reasons for concern about school bureaucracy, but an immediate reason has to do with the role of bureaucracy in school reform. Two decades of school reform have substantially increased the regulation of public schools. The local public school is subject to far more regulations today than it was when the nation's educational slide began. Schools are more constrained in their use of personnel, their design of curriculum, their choice of instructional methods, their maintenance of discipline, and their provision of special programs. School reform is not solely responsible for this. Collective bargaining with increasingly powerful teacher unions has helped to constrain schools. And the school systems, for their own reasons, have seen fit to take authority out of schools and to centralize it in school headquarters. [25] Still, from the countless special programs of the federal government – for example, compensatory education – to the curriculum specifications of state departments of education, to the implementation of these innovations by district offices, school reform has increased the regulation of local schools.
During the 1980s, moreover, this tendency has picked up pace. The powerful waves of school reform that have swept the nation since 1983 have followed well-worn paths. First, educational spending has been increased more than anyone thought possible when A Nation At Risk called for a long list of expensive reforms. Between 1953 and 1988 aggregate spending on public elementary and secondary education increased by $56 billion – an amount greater than one percent of the Gross National Product. [26] Second, many new regulations have been written. Some of these regulations may be desirable (though research does not encourage optimism). For example, almost all states have imposed higher graduation requirements on high schools, and many states have required competency tests of new teachers. But much of the regulation – as we shall explain – has the prospect of backfiring. The increased regulation of student and teacher performance, now being widely implemented through evaluation and accountability systems composed of tests and a host of other "objective" criteria, could easily rob schools of vitality and undermine their performance. This is a fairly well-known danger, but it is a danger that educational systems, now so heavily dependent on central administration, are willing to accept. It is also a danger that politicians, ultimately responsible for these systems, can hardly avoid. With education organized as it is, politicians interested in improving school performance have little choice but to provide educational systems with more money and then try to regulate how those systems use it. Within the existing systems, reform options are limited.
Are these national trends in schooling and learning characteristic of education in Michigan, too?
There is little reason to believe that any state has substantially escaped the most disturbing developments in American education over the last two decades. In Michigan, average combined SAT scores are virtually the same as the national average – 906 in Michigan versus 904 nationwide in 1988. Michigan's scores have also followed national trends very closely. During the 1970s (state data on the 1960s are unavailable), when national scores fell 50 points, scores in Michigan dropped 46 points. During the 1980s, when national scores recovered 10 points, Michigan scores grew by more – 19 points, bringing them up to the national average. But despite this improvement, scores in Michigan remain well below where they were a generation ago. In addition, the percentage of Michigan's citizens with at least a high school education – only 68 percent at last count – has never differed from the national percentage by more than 2 points. School performance in Michigan has mirrored the slipping performance of schools nationwide.
Michigan has also followed the national trends in school finance. Per pupil education spending in Michigan – $3,954 in 1987 – is just above the national median: twenty states spend more than Michigan; twenty-nine states spend less. Michigan has allocated its expenditures in the same troubling way as the nation as a whole. While Michigan increased its real per pupil spending 68 percent between 1970 and 1987, it gave teachers only a 15 percent real increase in salaries over the same period. As in other states, some of this discrepancy can be explained by a reduction in pupil-teacher ratios. But with a ratio of 20.1 to 1 in 1988, Michigan ranked 45th among all states, and had used less of its increased resources to reduce pupil-teacher ratios than other states: twenty years earlier its staffing ratio was about the same as the national average. The fact is, a good deal of the increase in school spending went to finance the rising cost of bureaucracy. In Michigan, administrators represent 18 percent of all public school employment, about one third more than in the nation as a whole. Less than half of Michigan's public school employees (49 percent in 1983) are classroom teachers.
What do other researchers have to say about the recent trends in learning and schooling?
The decline (and rise) in student test scores over the last twenty-five years is one of the most researched and least understood phenomena in education. As yet, researchers have produced no simple or adequate explanation for the initiallytroubling, then temporarily encouraging, trends in test scores. The trends appear to be the product of many factors, some educational but many non-educational. The most important factor, accounting for perhaps a fifth of the total decline, appears to be a change in the ethnic composition of the test-taking population. [27] American schools were taking in different kinds of students, students who were more difficult to educate than students in the past. Influences in the home were also changing. The second most important cause of the decline and upturn appears to be changes in family size, with larger families initially hampering achievement and then smaller families encouraging it.
It is also clear that the decline did not affect all grades equally. The decline was comprised primarily of worsening scores among students born before 1963, the "baby boom" generation. [28] As these students moved through the schools, test scores declined, pushing SAT scores down from 1964 to 1979. But as the baby boomers began to be replaced, around 1970, by a new cohort, the "baby bust" generation, test scores in the early grades began to climb. By 1980 the younger cohort, now in high school, was taking the SAT tests, and posting the modest increases in SAT scores observed during the early eighties. Unfortunately, further gains have not been posted by subsequent cohorts, leaving achievement generally below the levels of twenty-five years ago.
The significant contribution of so-called compositional and cohort effects to changes in test scores highlights the importance of factors beyond the control of schools in producing student achievement. Yet, even when the full range of non-educational factors is taken into account – alcohol and drug use, and exposure to environmental lead (both of which had small effects on test scores); single-parent households, maternal employment, and television viewing (none of which had any effect on test scores) – no more than a third of the variation in test scores over time can be explained. [29] That leaves a lot of room for educational factors to make a difference.
But researchers have made little progress in identifying significant educational factors. The most comprehensive study to date, by the Congressional Budget Office in 1987, found some evidence that schools might have undermined achievement by watering down the content of courses, assigning less homework, and using less challenging textbooks. [30] But the study found no impact, positive or negative, from other educational factors such as teachers' test scores, teachers' educational attainment, or state graduation requirements. The fact of the matter is, most of the relationship between schooling and learning over the last twenty-five years remains a mystery.
Some clues about the relationship can be found, however, in other kinds of research into student achievement, research that has not focused on test score trends but on differences in tests among schools at any given time. This research has reached some fairly strong, though negative, conclusions about the connection between schooling and learning. This research implies that there is no surprise in the fact that test scores declined or stagnated while school resources and certain school conditions improved. A recent survey of 147 statistical analyses of school performance, for example, found no consistently positive and significant relationship between student achievement and any of the major factors popularly assumed to influence achievement: teacher-pupil ratios, teacher education, teacher experience, teacher salaries, and per-pupil expenditures. [31] In other words, much of what school systems were doing to turn test scores around may have no systematic effect on school performance.
Nevertheless, we know that factors outside of schools do not adequately account for student achievement either. And we know from casual observation, as well as careful case studies, that some schools are much, much better than others. The challenge remains to find out why. The research in which we have been engaged takes up that challenge.
Why does your research have anything new to say about the mysteries of student achievement and school performance?
There are two distinguishing qualities of our research, the first having to do with the kinds of causes of school performance we are looking at, the second having to do with the data we are using to study those causes. Research into the determinants of school performance and student achievement has been dominated by what are often called input-output studies. [32] Based on the economic concept of the production function, these studies have tried to explain educational "outputs," such as student test scores, with conventional economic "inputs," such as expenditures per student, teacher salaries, class sizes, and the caliber of school facilities. The fundamental idea behind these studies is that schools, like any economic enterprise, ought to produce their products – educated students – with varying degrees of effectiveness and efficiency as the combination of capital and labor used in production varies. Years of study now suggest, however, that schools may not be like just any economic enterprise. Since the famous "Coleman Report" of 1965, input-output studies have been unable to establish any systematic relationship between school performance and a wide range of indicators of school resources.
The research that we have been doing takes a different approach than input-output studies. It focuses more on the production process itself. It considers how schools are organized and operated – in other words, how inputs are actually converted into outputs. The production process may well be more important in public education that the economic theory of production functions would suggest. Schools are not part of a market where competitive forces can be assumed to encourage managers to organize their firms to use capital and labor efficiently. Schools are part of a political and administrative system where the forces that managers – principals and superintendents – are exposed to cannot be expected to encourage efficient organization. It therefore becomes especially important in analyzing the performance of a public enterprise such as a school to study its organization. It is also important to examine those non-economic forces that lead schools to organize as they do. While our research also considers the conventional economic determinants of school performance, our emphasis is on the production process – how it works and what causes it to work in different ways. Because of this emphasis, our research may well have something new to say.
Our research is also distinguished by the data it employs. We are far from the first researchers to suggest that school organization is important, that it can help explain the weak link between school resources and school performance. Indeed, over the last ten years many researchers have completed studies that show that successful schools have distinctive organizations. Better schools appear to be characterized by such things as clear and ambitious goals, strong and instructionally oriented leadership by principals, an orderly environment, teacher participation in school decisionmaking, and collegial relationships between and among school leaders and staff. The studies that have identified these characteristics – studies known collectively as "Effective Schools Research" – have not settled the issue of school performance, however. [33] There are serious doubts about the magnitude of the impact that school organization has on school performance and, indeed, about whether organization is a cause of performance at all: healthy school organizations may be a consequence of successful students, and not vice versa. It almost goes without saying that Effective Schools Research has provided few clues about the causes of school organization; the focus of that research has been on organizational consequences.
A primary reason for the doubts about Effective Schools Research is the methods that have been used in most of the studies. Research has been dominated by qualitative case studies of small numbers of schools, usually reputed to be unusually successful. Those few studies that have used somewhat larger numbers of schools and employed quantitative analysis have still not examined representative samples. From one study to the next there has been considerable variation in the particular organizational characteristics said to be important. And the conclusion that organization is important, however frequently it has been drawn, is still based substantially on impressionistic evidence, uncontrolled observation, and limited numbers of cases. In sharp contrast, input-output research, however negative its conclusions, is based on rigorous statistical analyses of hard data in hundreds and thousands of schools nationwide. There is consequently more reason at this point to believe that the relationship between school resources and school performance is unsystematic than to believe that school organization provides a strong link between the two.
In our research we explore how strong that link may be by employing the methods that have been used in input-output analyses. Unlike most Effective Schools Research, we investigate the resources, organization, and performance of a large random, national sample of schools in which all characteristics are measured with quantitative indicators, all relationships are estimated with statistical controls, and all inferences are careful to try to distinguish causes from effects.
Our data base is the result of merging two national surveys of American high schools – High School and Beyond (HSB), a 1980 and 1982 panel study of students and schools, and the Administrator and Teacher Survey (ATS), a 1984 survey (which we helped design) of the teachers and principals in half of the HSB schools. The merged data set includes over 400 public and private high schools – the privates providing a valuable look at school organization in a market setting – and approximately 9,000 students, 11,000 teachers, and the principals in every school in the sample. While no piece of research is ever definitive, and this is certainly true of research as new as ours, our work is a step in the right direction methodologically, and therefore a contribution that may well make a difference.
What did you find about the relationship between school organization and school performance?
If school performance is gauged by student achievement, school organization is a major determinant of effectiveness. All things being equal, high school students achieve significantly more – perhaps a year more – in schools that are "effectively" organized than in schools that are not. Indeed, after the aptitude or entering ability of the student, no factor – including the education and income of the family or the caliber of a student's peers – may have a larger impact on how much a student achieves in high school than how a school is organized to teach its students.
We reached these conclusions after analyzing the gains made by roughly 9,000 students on standardized tests – in reading, writing, vocabulary, math, and science – administered first during the sophomore year of high school and then again at the end of the senior year. It is important to recognize that by analyzing the gains on these tests, as opposed to analyzing only the final level of achievement on the tests, we have probably improved our chances of measuring the effect that schools actually have on achievement. Most studies of student achievement analyze test score levels, not gains. By high school, however, levels of achievement are heavily influenced by a host of factors preceding the high school experience. Our study looks at a variety of factors besides the school experience too, but our measures of student achievement are not contaminated by prior influences; the gain scores reflect only the learning that has taken place during the high school years.
The influences on student achievement, besides school organization, that we examined included several that are generally beyond the control of schools – the education and income of the parents, the race of the student, the education and income of the families in the school (a proxy for peer group influences), and the aptitude of the student. We also examined some of the conventional influences over which the school has control – pupil-teacher ratios, expenditures per student, teacher salaries, graduation requirements, homework loads, disciplinary policies, and more. When all of these influences were examined Simultaneously, and in various combinations, most did not make a significant difference for student achievement. School resources and prominent school policies were not systematically related to student performance. This is consistent with the results of countless input-output studies that precede ours.
In the final analysis, only four factors consistently made a significant difference in achievement gains by high school students. In order of importance they were student aptitude, school organization, family background, and peer group influence. Over a four-year high school experience the difference in achievement that would be expected to result from being in the top quartile rather than the bottom quartile on each of these factors, all other factors being equal, are as follows: aptitude, one-and-a-half years of achievement; school organization, a little more than one year of achievement; family background, one year of achievement; and peer group Influence, less than a halt year of achievement. In short, school organization may be as important to student achievement as the influence of families, a major influence indeed.
What are the organizational characteristics that seem to make schools effective?
Three general characteristics most distinguish effective school organizations from ineffective ones. The first is school goals. The objectives of effective schools are clearer and more consistently perceived that the goals of ineffective schools. The objectives of the more successful schools are also more academically ambitious. More than twice as many effective schools as ineffective ones make "academic excellence" their top priority. In contrast, the unsuccessful schools place more priority than do the successful ones on such objectives as basic literacy skills, good work habits, citizenship, and specific occupational skills. Overall, effective organizations seem more likely to possess a sense of "mission," something that many other observers of effective schools have also noted.
The second distinctive characteristic of effective organizations is leadership. The better schools have principals who are stronger educational leaders. Specifically, effective organizations are led by principals who, according to their teachers, have a clear vision of where they want to take the school and the firm knowledge to get the school there. This is consistent with the sense of mission that characterizes school goals. But there is more to effective leadership. There is a strength in the better principals that comes through in their reasons for wanting to head a school. Principals in effective schools are much more likely than their counterparts in effective schools to report that they took the job of principal to gain control over the educational performance of the school – over personnel, curriculum, and other school policies – and much less likely to admit that they simply preferred administration to teaching. In much the same vein, the successful school principals had more teaching experience and less ambition to leave the school for a higher administrative post. Overall, the principals in the successful schools seemed to be more oriented by teaching and less by administration. The successful principals seemed more like leaders, the less successful ones more like managers.
Finally, effective organizations were more professional in all of the best senses of that much abused term. Principals in the effective schools held their teachers III higher esteem and treated them more as equals. Teachers were more involved in decisions about various school policies and they were given more freedom within their classrooms. Teachers also treated each other more like colleagues. They cooperated with one another and coordinated their teaching more regularly, and held each other in relatively high regard. The teachers in effective schools behaved in another important way like professionals too: they came to school regularly and presented less of an absenteeism problem for principals. Finally, the teachers in effective schools exhibited stronger feelings of efficacy, beliefs that they could really make a difference in the lives of their students. And it is no wonder. In a school where everyone is pulling together, working as a team – the concept we think best captures the effective school – and in which teachers are trusted and respected to do their best, it stands to reason that teachers would tend to believe that they can actually succeed.
How do you know that schools with effective organizations haven't simply benefited from teaching bright kids or receiving the support of educated parents? In other words, how do you know that effective organizations promote student achievement rather than the other way around?
There are several reasons why we are confident that effective school organization means a great deal for student achievement. The first is that in our analysis of student achievement, school organization competes directly with many characteristics of student and family background to explain the observed changes in test scores. In this competition, school organization fares very well, coming in second. Now it is true that school organization may be receiving undue credit for influences on test scores that are really the result of student body influences working through the school organization. But it is also true that student bodies may be receiving undue credit – credit that should go to school organization – for boosting test scores. After all, it is school reputations for organization effectiveness that lead many parents to buy homes in the jurisdictions of better schools, and that, in turn, provide effective organizations with better students.
So, how should the alternative forms of "undue credit" be corrected'? Should the influence of school organization be downgraded because organization may be influenced by student body characteristics? Or should the influence of organization be upgraded because student body characteristics are influenced by school organization? The correct answer is that both should be done simultaneously. Unfortunately, such a correction is statistically impossible with our data. We must, therefore, be content that our estimate of the effect of organization on achievement strikes a happy medium between over- and under-estimation.
But there is another reason for confidence that school organization makes asubstantial independent difference for school performance. That is, we analyzed a variety of possible causes of school organization and found that the characteristics of students and parents were not the most important sources of effective or ineffective organization. A school may be effectively organized whether it is teaching bright students or educationally disadvantaged students, and whether it is supported by educated parents or scarcely supported by parents at all. As a result, a properly organized school can have a positive, independent effect on students of any kind.
What causes some schools to be more effectively organized than others?
This is a very important question, and one that has been asked too seldom. If school performance is ever to be lastingly improved, it will not be enough to know what effective schools look like. Knowing that effective schools should have clear goals, strong leadership, and a professional structure will not necessarily help reformers make schools more effective. It may not be possible, for example, to train principals to be stronger educational leaders, or to encourage them to treat teachers like colleagues or true professionals. Yet reformers in every state are trying to do precisely these kinds of things today. Based on Effective Schools Research, many state departments of education have established effective schools programs to encourage or force their schools to develop more effective organizations. Schools are being instructed to raise their expectations, to establish priorities, to make decisions more cooperatively, and so on. But this approach assumes that schools have become poorly organized because they did not know any better. Once schools know how to organize themselves more effectively, they will do so – or so it is assumed. This assumption, however, is likely to be very wrong.
Unlike Effective Schools Research, which has shown little interest in those things that might cause schools to become ineffectively or effectively organized in the first place, our research is extremely interested in the determinants of school organization. We are struck by the fact that many schools in this country have become effective organizations without the benefit of any research showing schools the way. By the same token, we find it hard to believe that many of the worst school organizations in this country have reached their sad state because their superintendents, principals, or teachers did not know any better. More likely, schools in this country have organized effectively or ineffectively in response to various political, administrative, economic, and educational forces that demand organizational responses. If this is correct, the key to school reform is understanding how those forces work, and then making adjustments to them.
We examined simultaneously the effects of a large number of such forces on school organization. Many mattered little or at all. For example, when all else is taken into account, higher teacher salaries and more expenditures per pupil do not produce more effective school organizations. Even if expenditures are used toreduce student-teacher ratios, there is no significant impact. More effective organizations do not have more teachers per pupil, or by extension, smaller classes. Ultimately, more effective organizations are distinguished from less effective ones by two kinds of forces. One kind emanates from the students in the school, the other kind is applied by politicians and administrators outside of the school.
High schools are much more likely to organize effectively – to set ambitious priorities, practice vigorous educational leadership, and operate professionally – if their students are well-behaved, have above average entering ability, and come from relatively well-educated and affluent families. If the students in a school exhibit any one of these traits, the organizational effectiveness of that school is likely to rank one or even two quartiles above that of a school whose students do not have these traits. This is not to say that the impact of school organization on student achievement is artificial, however. Students still register higher gains in schools that are effectively organized, all things being equal. But a school is more likely to get organized to provide this academic boost if its students are more academically inclined to begin with.
Not too much should be made of the organizational advantage of educating bright kids, however. The single largest determinant of whether a school is effectively organized is not associated with the caliber of the students in the school but with the strength of the pressures outside the school. Specifically, the more a school is subject to the influence of administrators, unions, and indirectly, school boards, the less likely the school is to be effectively organized. Schools that have relatively little control over curriculum, instruction, discipline, and especially hiring and firing are likely to fall more than two quartiles in overall organizational effectiveness below schools with relatively great controls over these matters. This is true, moreover, when the influences of students and parents are held constant. Schools with less academically able students can be organized quite effectively, and succeed, if they are given the freedom by politicians and bureaucrats to do so!
Why is autonomy from outside authority so important for effective school organization?
Autonomy is vital for many reasons, but two seem to be paramount. First, and clearly most important, if schools have control over their personnel, they are far more likely to develop many of the qualities of organizational effectiveness than if they do not. A principal who has the power to staff a school – to hire teachers, and if need be, fire them – is likely to fill the organization with teachers whose values, ability, methods, and behavior are compatible with his or her own. In other words, such a principal is likely to create a team whose members are deserving of trust. Team members are therefore more likely to be involved in school decisions, to be delegated more authority, and in general to be treated like colleagues. Because of all of these influences, teachers are also likely to treat each other more like colleagues. The end result, then, of vesting more control over personnel in principals is to increase the prospect that a school willpursue a coherent mission as an integrated, professional team.
The result of withholding control over personnel from principals is much the opposite. Stuck with staff that have been assigned to the school and cannot be easily removed, the principal will discover that teachers disagree with his or her educational objectives, and with the objectives and methods of each other. In this setting of conflict and disagreement, which the principal ultimately can do little about, the principal is going to be reluctant to involve teachers in school decisionmaking or to delegate additional authority to them. Teachers are also less likely to feel great affinity for each other and therefore less likely to work together closely. The school willtend, then, not to operate as a professional team but as a bureaucratic agency managed by explicit rules and careful supervision. Unfortunately, the personnel systems of many public schools leave principals so little discretion that the schools do tend to operate much like other, less professional government agencies.
Personnel provides but the most important reason that autonomy is vital to school organization, however. Another reason, close in importance, is that successful teaching is probably more art than science. In any case, teaching is a highly contingent process, its results depending on the interaction of the methods used and the students those methods are used on. No one method, employed inflexibly, will work for all students. Unfortunately, when officials outside of schools try to direct teaching, they inevitably push teachers toward the utilization of one best method. In the extreme, the well-intentioned regulation of curriculum and instruction so limits teacher flexibility that the quality of teaching deteriorates for many students, especially those whose needs are not met by the one best method. And this is not just a hypothetical problem: many researchers have identified overregulation of curriculum as a serious problem in today's schools. [34] Ours is hardly the only research to find that schools with too little autonomy from external control often perform badly.
Since school-level autonomy seems to be so important for effective school organization and performance, how is it that some schools have autonomy, but most do not?
To aid us in figuring out how America's schools might be given more autonomy, we investigated why some schools already enjoy it. Much as we concluded when thinking about how schools could be led to organize effectively, we decided that school autonomy was probably not a virtue that would come to schools just because researchers or reformers thought it was a good idea. Rather, it seemed that autonomy stood a better chance of being increased if the forces that reduced it were understood and then attacked. Thus, we examined a number of factors that we suspected would influence the degree of autonomy that a school would experience. The results support two generalizations, one about public schools, the other about private.
Public schools are given relatively high levels of autonomy only under very special conditions. All things being equal, public schools will fall at least two quartiles below private schools in autonomy from external control. To enjoy the kind of autonomy that the private school receives on average, the public school must exist in the most favorable of circumstances. To be permitted to control its own destiny, the public school must be located outside of a large city in a suburban school system. Its students must be making significant gains in achievement, and its parents must be in close contact with the school. In other words, when the public school is performing well, is being monitored by parents, and is not part of a large administrative system, it will be given relatively great control over its policies, programs, and personnel.
Unfortunately – and predictably – the public schools that now enjoy autonomy are not the ones that are most in need of improvement. And the inner city public schools that most desperately require improvement are the ones that have so little of the autonomy they arguably need. It may even be that urban public schools are caught in a vicious cycle of deteriorating performance, increasing control, and eroding organizational effectiveness. Under political pressure to do something about city schools that are failing, school boards, superintendents, and administrators tend to take the only actions that they can. They offer schools more money, if it is available, but then crack-down on underachievement with tougher rules and regulations governing how teachers must teach and what students must "learn." But crackdowns are seldom carried out deftly. And any intervention that responds clumsily to the real needs of teachers and students may undermine school organization rather than build it up.
Private schools, even in urban systems with high percentages of poor students, generally do not face these troubling pressures. Private schools, almost regardless of their circumstances, tend to be free from excessive central controls by administrators, boards, and unions. The main reason appears to be market competition. In a process much the reverse of the one in public schools, where political pressure leads to an increase in central control, competitive pressures lead to an increase in autonomy in private schools. To stay in business private schools must satisfy parents, and satisfy them more than the public schools or alternative private schools. Private schools are therefore forced to organize themselves in ways that above all else respond to the demands of parents. One thing this clearly means is that private schools must vest a lot of control over vital school decisions – about personnel and curriculum, for example – at the school level where the wishes of parents can be more clearly perceived and accommodated. Strong external control is incompatible with the imperative that private schools either satisfy parents or lose them to other schools. In contrast, strong central control fits public schools very nicely. Public schools need not satisfy parents first; indeed they must ensure that parents are not satisfied at the expense of other legitimate groups such as unions, administrators, and various special interests. Policymaking is therefore taken out of the public schools themselves where parents would have a political edge.
Because public schools are ruled by politics, and private schools by markets, public schools may be at a decided disadvantage in developing effective organizations and promoting student achievement. Private schools, without the benefit of any reform at all, are encouraged by competitive forces to operate autonomously and to organize effectively. And indeed, the private schools in our study have more of the attributes of organizational effectiveness than public schools, regardless of the quality of their students. Public schools, however, are usually not granted the autonomy that they need to organize effectively – political forces discourage this – and must therefore be periodically reformed from the outside.
What does your research suggest will be the consequences of the many school reforms and improvements of the 1980s?
Our research suggests that the school reforms that have been pursued so aggressively during the 1980s will have disappointing results. We offer this assessment with some caution because our research does not examine the consequences of specific reform efforts. Nevertheless, it is fair to assume that the consequences of reform will depend on how reform affects those attributes of schools that are most strongly related to student achievement. Most current reforms either fail to influence school characteristics that seem to matter most for student achievement or influence those characteristics in counter-productive ways.
Public school reform in the 1980s has had essentially two thrusts, one to spend more money and the other to impose more standards. Thus, teacher salaries and per-pupil expenditures have been increased by enormous amounts (as we explained in question 2), and graduation requirements, teacher certification and performance standards, and student achievement objectives have been raised substantially too.
Spending reforms obviously do not have a very good track record. For example, per-pupil expenditures increased nearly 50 percent in real terms during the 1970s (see question 2) while high school achievement slid downward. If our research is correct, the record of the 1970s will be repeated. The amount that a school spends on each pupil or on each teacher is unrelated to the amount that students in a school achieve, all things being equal. Many schools succeed in this country with relatively low levels of funding and many others fail with relatively high levels of funding. Because so many forces more powerful than money influence how a school performs, spending more money on schools will probably not transform the bad ones into good. In the very long run higher teacher salaries ought to attract more talented people into teaching and provide some overall improvement. But there is no evidence that in the short-run higher teacher salaries, paid to poor and excellent teachers alike, will spur improvement. And, there is little evidence that the small reductions in class size that might be purchased with greater school revenuewill boost achievement either. Schools can succeed with relatively high pupil-teacher ratios and fail when those ratios are low. In sum, if schools are given more funds to employ in essentially the same ways funds have been employed in the past, there is little reason to believe additional spending will bring about improvements.
Of course, many school reformers are wary of throwing good money after bad. They recognize that past investments in public schools have not produced their expected returns. Many reformers understand that giving poor schools and incompetent teachers more money will not turn either around. Reformers during the 1980s have therefore gotten tough with the schools, holding them to higher standards and telling them more explicitly what to do. Some of this may be helpful. It is hard to argue with competency tests that prevent the truly unprepared from becoming teachers.
But most of the well-intentioned crackdown that reformers have launched on mediocrity during the 1980s may not help at all. Our research shows that student achievement is not promoted by higher graduation requirements or more demanding homework policies – two favorite targets of school reforms. And more fundamentally, our research shows that the regulation of teachers and teaching can be detrimental to school performance. Current reforms employ more extensive teacher evaluation systems, use more frequent standardized testing to keep track of student performance, and impose more detailed curricula and instructional methods. Yet, these are precisely the kinds of reforms that can rob schools of the autonomy that they need to organize and perform effectively.
School reformers are not ignorant of the dangers of excessively regulating schools, however. And some reformers are taking small steps to provide schools with autonomy. School systems are experimenting with school-based management and other forms of decentralization. For example, the entire Chicago school system is converting to a system of community control over schools. There are several problems with these efforts, however. First, the so-called autonomy that schools are being given is being circumscribed by regulations governing precisely how decentralized policies must be made – specifying, for example, decision processes and participation rules. Second, the use of autonomy is being monitored with elaborate performance accountability systems – for example, employing standardized tests – that threaten to distort how autonomy is used. Finally, autonomy is always vulnerable to political pressures that it be reduced. If schools utilize their increased authority in ways that are unwise or displeasing – and some inevitably will – school authorities such as superintendents and school boards will be pressured to intervene in school decisionmaking and to return to the pre-autonomy ways of doing things. Increasing school autonomy is simply not consistent with public education as it is now organized. Unfortunately, autonomy, not spending and regulation, seems to hold the key to school improvement.
Does your research suggest any promising approaches to school improvement?
Our research suggests that the key to better schools is more effective school organization; that the key to more effective school organization is greater school autonomy; and finally, that the key to greater school autonomy is school competition and parental choice. We therefore believe that the most promising approaches to school reform are those that promote competition between schools and that provide parents a choice among schools – for example, magnet school programs, open enrollment systems, and voucher or scholarship plans. Not just any reform that increases competition and choice will do, however. To succeed, an arrangement employing competition and choice must ensure that the systemic forces now discouraging autonomous and effective school organization are fundamentally weakened. In effect, this probably means restructuring today's systems of public education.
The greatest virtue of a system of competition and choice, and the virtue that sets such a system apart from current systems of public education, is that competition and choice make it possible to provide schools autonomy without relinquishing accountability. In a school system organized according to principles of competition and choice, the responsible government authority can permit schools to make virtually all decisions for themselves yet be confident that schools will not generally abuse the vast discretion delegated to them. If the principles of competition and choice are followed closely, schools are not guaranteed students or funds: enrollments and financial support come only when students and their parents choose to use particular schools. Schools that use their control over personnel, curriculum, discipline, and instruction to organize in ways that are displeasing to parents and students – and to teachers – will quickly find themselves struggling to stay open. Schools that use their authority to organize effectively, to provide the kinds of educational gains demanded by parents, will be well-supported. In a system of competition and choice, autonomous schools, schools that are substantially free from top-down regulatory control, are nonetheless, held accountable for their performance.
In public education as it is currently organized, autonomy and accountability work at cross-purposes. Efforts to enhance autonomy come at the expense of accountability, and vice versa. If public education were reorganized so that schools were forced to compete for the support of parents, who had the freedom to choose, autonomy and accountability would work in harmony. Competitive pressures would encourage educational authorities to delegate power to the school level where it could be used most effectively to meet the demands of students and parents. The ability of parents to leave schools that were not meeting their demands would work as a powerful force on schools, holding them accountable for their performance.
To be sure, the accountability that would he provided by market forces in a reorganized system is different from the accountability provided by administrative and political forces in the current system. In a system of competition and choice, schools would be more accountable to students, parents, and teachers, and less accountable to bureaucrats, politicians, and the interest groups that influence them. While that may not be the kind of accountability that school reformers want, it is the only kind of accountability that is fully consistent with school autonomy, and by extension, with more effective school organization and performance.
In practical terms how would a system of competition and choice work?
In an ideal world, one where a new system of public education could be created from scratch and previous systems were of no consequence, a system of competition and choice would utilize educational vouchers or scholarships. The government would still fully fund education with tax revenues, but the money would be distributed to students and their parents, in the form of vouchers or scholarships, and not distributed to the schools. The schools would receive their funds when they cashed in the vouchers from the students they were able to attract to their school. Beyond acting as a public education bank of sorts, the government's direct role in the system would be limited. The government would establish the criteria that a school would have to meet in order to qualify for vouchers – obviously, racial non-discrimination in admissions, and probably basic accreditation standards having to do with course offerings and graduation requirements. But most of the rest of the decisions – about curricula, personnel, discipline, instructional methods, priorities, etc. – would be made by the schools themselves – teachers and principals – responding to their clients. While the government might want to be more involved in decisionmaking for schools, and might well get more involved, the government would be under strong pressure from most schools and parents, for whom competition and choice would be working effectively, not to intervene.
Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world where we can organize public education anew. This means that we may need to employ less sweeping reforms than vouchers to implement competition and choice. The leading alternatives include district- or state-wide open enrollment systems and magnet schools. These practical alternatives to vouchers can work. Mechanisms other than vouchers can bring about many of the changes in school organization and performance generally promoted by competition and choice. But if the practical alternatives to vouchers are to make a significant difference in school performance they too must make basic changes in the way our systems of education are currently organized.They must make substantial changes on the demand side and the supply side of public education.
On the demand side the changes are straightforward, Parents and students must be given the right to choose the school that the student will attend. Students must not be assigned to schools on the basis of geographic proximity or for other strictlyadministrative reasons. All students should attend schools that they have chosen. This is not to say that all students will attend the school that is their first choice. Schools for which there is excess demand will have to turn some students away. But those students who are unable to have their first choice should not automatically be consigned to the school closest to their home, or to any other school they have not chosen. Students who lose out on their first choice should have the chance to attend the school that is their second choice – or third or fourth choice, if necessary. If students are denied the right to make more than one choice, the system will not work for those students who are not accepted at the school they most prefer. Magnet school programs generally have this defect. Students who win acceptance to the magnet schools are made better off; students who are not accepted are left behind, sometimes worse off, in their neighborhood schools.
The shortcoming of magnet school programs points up a deeper problem in grafting a system of competition and choice onto an established educational system. That is, while it is relatively easy for a school system to restructure its demand side – to provide parents and students with some choice – it is very hard for a school system to restructure its supply side. Unfortunately, if the supply side of public education is not restructured, changes on the demand side will not generate many benefits.
For a market to work properly, there must be enough suppliers, and enough potential for the entry of new suppliers into the market, so that suppliers cannot dictate to consumers. If there are too few established suppliers, and no prospect of new suppliers, consumers will have no choice but to take what existing suppliers provide (assuming the good or service has no substitutes – is a necessity – which is true of education). In a system effectively controlled by suppliers – a monopoly or oligopoly – the consumer is not sovereign; the demands of consumers are not driving the production of the good or service. The very point of crating a system of educational competition and choice, however, is to change the system of control – to increase the influence of the consumers of education and to decrease the influence of the monopoly suppliers. This cannot occur if parents and students are given the right to choose schools, but the schools from which they must choose are tightly controlled by a single authority.
So, how must the supply of schools be changed? To begin with, no school should be entitled to students. Schools that are not chosen by students – say as a first, second, or third choice – should be closed. No student should be forced to attend a school that is so bad that no parent would voluntarily have his child attend it. Closed schools could then be reopened under new management, with new objectives, new programs, and perhaps even a new teaching staff. Of course, this raises the question of what should be done with the principals and teachers in schools that students reject and that therefore are not entitled to financial support. In a private market, the employees of a failed business must seek employment elsewhere. In a public school system, where tenure and other rules negotiated by unions protect the jobs of teachers according to seniority, many of the staff of closed schools are likely to be reassigned to successful schools, however unwelcome those staff may be. It a school system maintains all of tile rules of job protection established prior to the installation of competition and choice, the supply of schools will ultimately fall far short of satisfying parent and student demand, and of raising system performance. This has been a problem in magnet school programs where the most talented teachers win assignments to the magnet schools and the less talented teachers are permitted to continue toiling in the traditional schools.
An obvious way around this kind of rigidity in the supply system, the kind that may force students to attend undesirable schools, is to allow teachers, principals, or any qualified entrepreneurs, including parents, to start schools on their own. If the only schools that are created are the ones that central educational authorities permit to be created, the sovereignty of parents and students will be undermined. If, on the other hand, schools are free to be created by any educational entrepreneurs that can win parental support (and meet governmental standards of eligibility as a school of choice), the demand for the kinds of schools that are wanted will ultimately be satisfied.
So-called entrepreneurial schools might exist within established educational systems and therefore be subject to the same personnel rules as other schools. But if this were so, the kinds of rules – for example, tenure and seniority – that can impede the efforts of principals and teachers to organize effectively would come under strong pressure for change. If entrepreneurial schools operated outside of established systems, the staff in those schools would have the right to vote to bargain collectively for the same job protection. But chances are the staff of autonomous entrepreneurial schools would not want or need the kinds of personnel rules found in public school systems. In any case, once students are not forced to attend schools they have not chosen, and educators are permitted to create schools that they believe students will choose, the key changes in the supply of public education will have been made.
There is one other important change in the supply of education that should accompany basic changes in the structure of educational supply and demand. Decisionmaking about school personnel and policy should be delegated to the school itself. Where truly basic changes have been made, decentralization will tend to occur naturally. Competition induces decentralization. In public systems of educational choice where basic changes in the structure of supply and demand have not been made, decentralization will not be as strongly encouraged, but it will be vigorously pursued nonetheless. In a system where schools know that their resources are dependent on their ability to attract students, schools will insist that they have the authority to organize and operate according to their best judgments of what students want and need. Central authorities will be hard pressed to retain control over many of the matters that they now dictate.
The sooner central authorities recognize that only decentralized decisionmaking – school autonomy – is consistent with the new kind of accountability provided by competition and choice, the better the chances a new system will have to work. In a competitive system of relatively autonomous schools, central authorities will still be able to contribute. They will be able to learn from the market who the weak principals and the less competent teachers are, and which schools are ineffective. Authorities can then use this information to work constructively with – or ultimately to eliminate – problem personnel, and to preserve the autonomy of successful teachers and principals. Systems of open enrollment could readily operate with central authorities performing in this new capacity.
How successful have actual systems of competition and choice been?
Genuine systems of competition and choice do not yet have much of a track record. Magnet schools and limited forms of open enrollment have been tried in hundreds of school systems around the country. These experiments have generally proven popular with parents and students, and have been credited with improving education of the students fortunate enough to attend schools of choice. [35] Magnet systems have also had some success in promoting desegregation, a goal that first brought many of the magnet programs into existence. But whatever the virtues of these innovations, they only hint at the prospective consequences of competition and choice. Virtually none of the existing innovations has made the kinds of changes in the demand and supply sides of public educational systems that are necessary for the results of competition and choice to be adequately observed. The results of the many experiments with competition and choice are encouraging, to be sure. But they are only encouraging; they are not confirming.
Nevertheless, there have been a few experiments with competition and choice that have made more radical changes in previous systems. These experiments support the concepts of competition and choice rather strongly. In East Harlem, New York, one of the poorest areas in the country, student achievement has been raised from the lowest in New York City to the median using a system of competition and choice that has multiplied the number, variety, and effectiveness of schools, while reducing the size and central control of them. In the state of Minnesota, students have been free to choose to attend any public school in any district in the state since the fall of 1987. The most comprehensive system of competition and choice in the United States, the Minnesota plan has not been operating long enough to gauge its effects on school performance. But the plan has proven to be workable administratively, and it has already resulted in abundant efforts by schools to reach out to students and parents. It has also encouraged school improvement without the actual transfer of many students – less than 1,000 so far. The mere threat of student departures seems to influence schools significantly. Finally, the Cambridge, Massachusetts educational system, faced with the increasing flight of affluent parents to private schools, created a system of elementary school choice in the early 1980s that has won back parents and satisfied the first or second choices of the overwhelming majority of students.
What kinds of results should we expect from a genuine system of educational competition and choice?
In an educational system in which schools compete for their funding from parents and students, who are free to choose among a range of existing and new schools, a number of desirable consequences are likely to result. Our research suggests, first, that the management of schools would be substantially decentralized. Schools would be given the autonomy to chart courses more consistent with the directions in which clients wanted schools to go. Second, this autonomy would be used by schools to shape their organizations in whatever ways proved most effective in meeting demands. All indications are that schools would tend to become more focused and mission-oriented, recruit stronger educational leaders, and develop more professional teaching staffs. Finally, schools and students would become more closely matched. A constellation of schools, different schools serving different kinds of students differently, would probably emerge. Each school would still accomplish the minimum goals set by the government – for example, providing four years of English, three years of mathematics, and so on, to high school graduates – but each school would meet requirements in different ways and pursue its own objectives as well. Some schools, for example, might stress the fine arts, others the liberal arts, others math or science, still others business and assorted occupations. But whatever the orientation of the school, it would tend to match the interests of its students.
These kinds of developments will lead schools to perform those educational functions desired by parents more effectively than they are now performed by public schools. For example, high schools whose very reason for being is to teach computer science will prepare students better in that subject than comprehensive high schools do today. But there is also reason to believe that schools of choice will better promote student achievement more generally. To begin with, our research shows that autonomous, effectively organized schools are more successful in bringing about student achievement, regardless of the caliber or family attributes of the student. Second, the experiences of magnet schools suggest that students achieve more when the school motivates students according to their diverse interests. Finally, parents should become more interested in and supportive of schools when they have gone to the trouble of selecting the schools their children attend. This too has occurred in magnet school experiments. The sum total of these forces – organizational, motivational, and parental – stands to be higher student achievement.
In a system driven by the demands of parents and students, many of whom do not really know what is best for them, won't schools that are unsound but superficially attractive flourish?
While a choice system driven partly by the demands of some frivolous parents might encourage the development of academically unworthy schools offering easy courses, no homework, and diplomas for all who stay four years, competition would tend to drive unworthy schools out of business over time. Parents and students would quickly learn that the schools conducting flashy, superficial programs were awarding degrees that employers and colleges did not respect, and providing "educations" that left students unable to function effectively as adults. Parents and students would quickly discover that schools offering more effective and no less interesting programs were more deserving of support. Ultimately there is no reason to believe that parents would not choose those schools with a proven record of educating students with the particular interests and capabilities of their children.
Even if a lot of frivolous schools do not flourish in a choice system, won't the children of uninformed or disinterested parents end up in mediocre schools?
A properly designed system of educational competition and choice would not relegate the children of apathetic or uneducated parents to mediocre schools. To begin with, many of the benefits of a market can be enjoyed by consumers regardless of their sophistication or level of information. In a competitive system, schools would recognize that because many parents and students are making informed choices, a school that did not strive to meet demands for quality would risk losing financial support. Hence all schools would be encouraged to improve, and parents who knew little about school quality, and enrolled their children in schools based only on geographical proximity, would nonetheless know that their schools had survived the competitive test. The uninformed parent would be served in much the same way as the hasty shopper in a supermarket: even the shopper who pays little attention to unit prices or to other indicators of value is well-served by the market – by the informed choices of millions of shoppers and the competitive pressures on producers to serve those shoppers best. This is not to say that some uninformed parents would not be taken advantage of by some schools in the short-run. But in the long run, competitive pressures would tend to force out of the market schools that did not serve parent needs relatively well.
Uninformed parents would not be served as well as informed ones, however. Those parents who care most about education would strive harder to match their children with the most appropriate schools. Of course this happens in today's educational system too. Parents who value education choose their homes based on the quality of local schools or, if they can afford to do so, send their children to superior private schools. But the inequities in the current system are no excuse for inequities in a new system.
To reduce inequities in a system of competition and choice, the government should take two measures. First, it should give schools a financial incentive to attract the children of uneducated, uninformed, and unconcerned parents. Schools that enroll students from such educationally disadvantaged families should receive additional support, perhaps $1,000 more per student. The government would need to decide what set of circumstances puts a student at an educational disadvantage, but it could use as a reasonable approximation the poverty standard it uses now for programs of compensatory education. The government could also use the money now spent at the federal and state levels for compensatory education to offer bonuses of $1,000 per student to schools enrolling the truly economically disadvantaged. These bonuses would not only encourage schools to reach out to those parents who would not make an informed choice, but would also encourage schools to take on the greater challenge of serving students who do not come to school already well prepared to learn.
The government could take one other step to reduce inequities in schools of choice. The government could take responsibility for informing parents about the choices available to them. The government could provide all parents with detailed information about school programs, orientations, faculties, and students. The government might also provide statistics on school performance such as graduation rates or test scores. Such statistics would have to be assembled with great care, however. The government could easily distort school programs by imposing narrow achievement measures that encourage schools to "teach to the tests."
As an alternative, and one that we believe would prove superior, the government could allow schools to provide whatever information they thought most useful for attracting parents, and then regulate the accuracy of the information provided. Recognizing that schools of choice would have strong incentives to communicate their virtues to prospective students and parents – and this might well include the publication of test scores and graduation rates – the government could opt to ensure "truth in advertising" rather than to provide information itself. In either case, by ensuring that parents are informed, and providing schools financial rewards for enrolling the educationally disadvantaged, the government could go a long way toward reducing inequities in a system of choice.
Because of the costs of transporting students away from neighborhood schools, won't systems of educational choice be more expensive than current systems?
A system of educational choice need not cost more than current educational systems, and might cost less. Transportation only raises costs significantly if the supply of schools is restricted to public schools as they are now constituted. If the supply of schools is allowed to respond to demand, the supply is likely to expand, with relatively small numbers of large comprehensive schools being replaced by larger numbers of small, specialized schools. This expansion could easily occur without the construction or acquisition of new facilities if several schools shared a building. "Schools within a school," as this concept is usually known, were used to more than double the number of schools in East Harlem's choice system. But however the supply expanded, students would find a significant number of choices within a distance that is now served by the transportation arrangements of public education systems.
Of course, if the supply of schools were not expanded, transportation would cost more, and either taxpayers or parents would have to pay for it. But these costs might not prove to be onerous, for they could be offset by administrative savings in operating a decentralized system. There is every reason to believe that the administrative structure of a public choice system would be less bureaucratized than today's public school systems, and look more like private educational systems, where competition compels decentralization and administrative savings. While the efficiency of a choice system might not reduce the costs of education substantially – depending on how it is measured, administration only represents 5-20 percent of the costs of public education – the savings ought to be enough to offset any increased transportation costs, which are not now a large part of school budgets either.
Should private schools be permitted to participate in a choice system?
Private schools would not have to be included in a system of educational choice for such a system to work, but including private schools would raise the probability of success. The greatest obstacle to a successful system of educational choice is a restricted supply of schools. If students who are unable to attend the schools that they choose are compelled to attend schools that they would never choose, a choice system is not fully working. The system is mostly benefiting those students fortunate enough to attend their chosen schools. Those students forced to attend the schools that every student and educator who really cares about education is trying to flee may be made worse off. The solution to this problem, as we explained in our answer to question 14, is to decontrol the supply of schools – to allow unwanted schools to close and to encourage new, more responsive schools to open. Decontrol will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish within established systems of public education, however. Decontrol would be much easier to implement if the private schools were made part of the educational supply.
If a system of educational choice is implemented without private school participation, a provision would need to be made to permit new schools to organize in response to parental demand. If schools can only be organized by central educational authorities, the chances are great that the supply of new schools will not be adequate to meet parent and student demand. Central authorities will be pressured by teacher unions and constrained by the rules of personnel systems not to close old schools or create new schools by transferring, dismissing, or even "counseling out" unwanted teachers. While competitive pressures will make it more difficult for central authorities to protect and maintain ineffective schools, central authorities will certainly not permit the supply of schools to respond to demand in the way a market of autonomous schools would respond. Unfortunately, to the extent that a system of competition and choice fails to shift school organization and control from top-down regulation to bottom-up self-determination, the new system will fail to improve school performance. Thus it is essential for even a fully public system of educational choice to permit principals, teachers, or entrepreneurs, free from central administrative control, to organize schools when they see the demand for particular kinds of schools going unfilled.
If any group of parents or any educational entrepreneur is free to organize a school to be funded by the public system of educational choice, however, it is but a small step further to include private schools. To illustrate, what would be the difference between a public school of choice organized autonomously by a group of educators and parents, and a private school'? The autonomous public school would need to satisfy eligibility criteria – for example, requiring particular courses, and meeting safety standards – but private schools must already satisfy many state regulations, too. Indeed, a public choice system might well adopt the minimal kinds of regulations now imposed on private schools to specify what autonomous public schools of choice would have to do. But however autonomous public schools of choice came to be regulated, they would actually look a lot like private schools – provided the new public schools were genuinely autonomous. In an effective system of public educational choice, then, there would be little difference, besides funding, between public and private schools, and less reason for prohibiting private school participation.
There is, moreover, a very good reason for including private schools in a choice system. Private schools would immediately expand the educational supply, the range of educational options. Private schools would ensure that the educational supply would not be dependent entirely on the entrepreneurship of educators willing to bear the risks of starting new schools or on the responsiveness of central educational authorities. Private schools would immediately inject competition into the educational system, for in most states private schools are in abundance. Nationwide, one out of every five schools is private. [36] If tapped, the ready supply of educational options in the private sector would ensure that more parents provided with school choice would actually have their demands fulfilled. Without private school participation, a choice system could easily prove less responsive.
Wouldn't private school participation in a choice system destroy public education?
In contemplating the effects of private schools on a system of educational choice, it is important to distinguish between public schools and public education. Private school participation in a system of educational choice might indeed cause some public schools to go out of business; some public schools could be destroyed. But this is not the same as saying public education would be destroyed. Far from it. The objective of a system of' educational choice is to strengthen public education, to improve file duality of education that is provided with government funds under general government supervision. If a choice system were to raise the average level of achievement of American students by encouraging competition among and between public and private schools, that reform would be revitalizing public education, not destroying it. Educational reform should ultimately be evaluated in terms of its effects on students, not on schools.
It should be pointed out, moreover, that private schools might be changed as much as public schools by a system of educational choice. Private schools that elected to participate in a choice system would become wholly, or almost wholly,supported by public funds, and fully subject to the (hopefully minimal) regulations imposed on public schools of choice. Participating private schools would therefore be hard to distinguish from public schools. And the distinction would literally disappear if participating private schools were not permitted to charge tuition on top of the payment received from public education authorities. Because most private schools now operate with far less revenue per pupil than public schools, many private schools would probably not object to operating without supplementary tuition. Any system that awarded private schools a sum approaching the current per-pupil expenditure in public schools would make most private schools better off.
Still, some schools, public and private, might want to charge tuition in excess of their per-pupil allotment. Whether this should be permitted is not a question we can answer, for it depends heavily on value judgments that can only be made by the political process. Permitting participating private schools to charge tuition beyond the public expenditure would permit those parents wanting "more" education for their children, and able to pay more, to purchase a more expensive education without having to foot the whole bill themselves. The virtue in this is that more children would be able to avail themselves of a potentially (though not necessarily) superior education than are able to currently, either because they cannot now afford tuition at elite private schools or mortgage payments in the neighborhoods of elite public schools. But there is a possible price to pay for satisfying parents with high educational demand. Permitted to charge additional tuition, schools would have an increased incentive to try to attract affluent students, and the means to create large inequities in the student composition and financial resources of schools. These inequities may not be as large as those that plague public education today,but it remains the responsibility of the politicalprocess to decide whether those inequities are too great to justify the benefits that tuition add-ons might provide for many students.
It is also the job of the political process to settle one other issue of private school participation. The majority of private schools in this country are parochial or religiously-oriented institutions. While there is plenty of reason to believe that these schools provide very good academic educations, better on average than public schools, there is at least some reason to exclude parochial schools from participation in a public system of education choice. [37] Americans may still believe as they once did, that religion can interfere with the social integration that schools are trying to accomplish, and that religious schools should not therefore be aided by the government. The Constitution provides additional support for this view. But there are enough constitutional precedents for public support of students who choose to be educated in religiously-oriented institutions – for example, government grants for private higher education, and special government programs for poor or handicapped children attending religious schools – to indicate that the courts would permit parochial school participation in a choice system. Ultimately, the question of parochial school participation probably hinges more on the views of the public and less on the views of the courts, since the courts have no clear cut precedents to guide them. Be this as it may, before parochial school participation can be urged, value judgments must be made. We cannot say whether the potential benefits of opening up many good (and currently under-enrolled) religious schools to public school students is worth the potential costs of providing some public encouragement to the dissemination of religious values.
What, in conclusion, are the most important points for school reformers to bear in mind?
If our research into the causes of school performance is basically on target, it holds several simple but important lessons for school reformers. The first is that school performance can easily be undermined by school reformers. If reformers believe, as many certainly do, that greater effectiveness can be obtained from schools through enlightened regulation and training, reformers are likely to be proven wrong. The qualities that effective schools most need to possess – ambitious academic goals, strong educational leadership, professional staff organization – cannot easily be imposed or taught by education reformers or government authorities. Indeed, external efforts to force school change, however well-intentioned, can make schools worse. The reason is that the organizational requisites for effectiveness tend to develop not when schools are told how to operate, but rather, when they are given the autonomy to develop their organizations themselves.
The second lesson of our research, then, is that school reformers should provide more discretion and authority to the schools. More decisions about personnel, curriculum, instruction, and discipline should be made by principals and teachers, and fewer decisions should be made by state legislatures, school boards, and superintendents. Educational policymaking should be substantially decentralized.
The third lesson, however, is that decentralization must involve more than the restructuring of public school administration. If schools are to be provided with meaningful autonomy – the kind that gives schools more adequate flexibility to tailor their staffs and their programs to the needs of their students, and thereby to improve the performance of their schools – decentralization cannot be accompanied by elaborate administrative accountability systems. To the extent that schools are required to make decisions and produce outputs according to the specifications of central education authorities, the value of autonomy for school improvement will be reduced. The only way to preserve autonomy and accountability too is to move to an alternative system for ensuring accountability. If our research is correct, the most promising alternative to a system of political and administrative control is a system that controls schools through the market. Public educational systems governed by the forces of school competition and parental choice are far more likely than current educational systems to encourage the development of autonomous schools that perform effectively.
There is a fourth and final lesson, however. If a system of educational choice is to make a significant difference in school performance, it must be freed from a key source of control now exercised by public school authorities. It will not be enough for reformers to grant parents the right to choose their children's schools. If the schools from which parents must choose remain under the firm control of central education authorities, parents will not have a real choice, and the system will not be subjected to the market forces that promise to change school organization and performance. Choice is relatively meaningless if the choices are not permitted to change. Hence, reformers should recognize that the most crucial reform for them to make, if parental choice is to promote real school improvement, is to end the monopoly that public school systems have long exercised over the supply of schools.
Limited forms of parental choice are steps in the right direction, to be sure. But partial measures are precisely the kinds of measures that public education systems are most likely to undo. If educational choice is to make a real difference, it must be given a real chance.
John Chubb and Terry Moe are the leading researchers in analyzing what makes good schools work and, in particular, the phenomenon of educational choice in the United States. Mr. Chubb is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Mr. Moe is a tenured Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.
This Policy Study was originally published by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute in 1989. The Mackinac Center is pleased to have been granted their permission to include it here as a chapter. Mr. Chubb revised question three and applied its associated response to Michigan.
Because this paper was written primarily to inform education reformers about the practical implications of our research on public and private schools, and not to report the results of our research directly, this paper does not provide extensive primary or secondary documentation of our arguments or findings. Readers interested in detailed supporting material can find it in our other publications, especially John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1989); John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, "Politics, Markets and the Organization of Schools," American Political Science Review, (December 1988): pp. 1065-1087; and John E. Chubb, "Why the Current Wave of School Reform Will Fail," The Public Interest, 90 (Winter 1988): pp. 28-49. In this paper we will document only those arguments or conclusions not documented in our other published work.
U.S. Congressional Budget Office, Trends in Educational Achievement (April 1986), ch. 3; Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, Youth Indicators 1988: Trends in the Well-Being of American Youth (August 1988): pp. 68-69.
Congressional Budget Office, Trends in Educational Achievement (April 1986), ch. 3.
The College Board, "News from The College Board," (September 20,1988), table entitled, "College-Bound Seniors, SAT Score Averages, 1967-1988."
"Data Bank," Education Week (February 18, 1987): pp. 19-21.
Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, Youth Indicators 1988: Trends in the Well-Being of American Youth (August 1988): p. 52.
Ibid., pp. 52-55.
This and the following examples are discussed in U.S. Congressional Budget Office, Trends in Educational Achievement (April 1986): pp. 43, 46.
William J. Bennett, U.S. Secretary of Education, American Education: Making It Work (April 1988): p. 13.
Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. Youth Indicators 1988: Trends in the Well-Being of American Youth (August 1988): pp. 64-65.
Bennett, p. 12.
Barbara Wobejda, "Survey of Math, Science Skills Puts U.S. Students at Bottom," Washington Post (February 1, 1989): pp. Al, 14.
On school reform in the 1960s and 1970s see especially Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education 194_5-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
Calculated from the following tables: U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Public Elementary and Secondary School Estimated Finances, 1970 to 1987, and by State, 1987," Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1988 (Washington D.C., 1988): table no. 217; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Estimated Public School Expenditures, 1970, and Personal Income, 1968, by States," Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1970 (Washington D.C., 1970): table no. 181.
Bennett, p. 45.
Per pupil current expenditures in Catholic high schools averaged $2,690 in 1987-88. Conversation with Fred Brigham of the National Catholic Education Association, Washington, D.C., February 8, 1989.
Calculated from the following tables: U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Public School Finances, 1975 to 1981, and by State, 1981," Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1982-83 (Washington, D.C., 1982): table no. 27t; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Estimated Public School Expenditures, 1970, and Personal Income, 1968, by States," Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1970): table no. 181.
Salary figures were obtained from: U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Public Elementary and Secondary Schools – Number and Average Salary of Classroom Teachers, 1960 to 1987, and by State, 1987," Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1988 (Washington, D.C., 1988): table no. 211; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Public Elementary and Secondary Schools – Estimated Number and Average Salary of Classroom Teachers, States: 1970," Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1970): table no. 185. Pupil-teacher ratios were obtained from: Eric A. Hanushek, "The Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in Public Schools," Journal of Economic Literature, 24 (September 1986): p. 1148; and for the most recent year, Nancy Protheroe, Educational Research Service, Arlington, Virginia, information provided by phone.
Eric A. Hanushek, "The Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in Public Schools," Journal of Economic Literature, 24 (September 1986): p. 1149.
Glen E. Robinson and Nancy J. Protheroe, Cost of Education: An lnvestment in America's Future (Arlington, Virginia: Educational Research Service, 1987).
Ibid. p. 18.
Bennett, p. 46.
Ibid.
National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, "Staff Employed in Public School Systems, by Type or Assignment and by State: Fall 1983," Digest of Education Statistics,1985-86 (Washington, D.C., September 1986): table 47.
On centralization and consolidation in American public education see especially David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); and Ronald I. Campbell, et.al., The Organization andControl ofAmerican Schools, 5th ed. (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill. 1985).
Bennett, p. 45.
U.S. Congressional Budget Office, Educational Achievement: Explanations and lmpli-cations of Recent Trends (August 1987): pp. 30-31.
Congressional Budget Office, Trends in Educational Achievement(April 1986): pp. 3139.
U.S. Congressional Budget Office, Educational Achievement: Explanations and lmpli-cations of Recent Trends (August 1987): pp. 32-35.
Ibid.
Eric A. Hanushek, "The Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in PublicSchools," Journal of Economic Literature, 24 (September 1986): pp. 1141-1177.
For the most recent comprehensive review of this literature see Ibid.
For a friendly, comprehensive critique of the Effective Schools Literature see Stewart C. Purkey and Marshall S. Smith, "Effective Schools: A Review," Elementary School Journal,83, 4 (1983): pp. 427-452.
For example, see Linda Darling-Hammond, "The Over-Regulated Curriculum and the Press for Teacher Professionalism," NASSP Bulletin (April 1987).
For a survey of educational choice experiments see Mary Anne Raywid, "The Mounting Case for Schools of Choice," unpublished manuscript, Hofstra University (May 1988).
National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, "Number of Schools, by Level and Control and by State: 1982-83," Digest of Education Statistics, 1985-86 (Washington, D.C., September 1986): table 8.
See especially James S. Coleman and Thomas Hoffer, Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
In an era in which the growth in United States productivity shrinks relative to countries like Japan, Germany, and South Korea, while the number of Wayne County individuals who are incarcerated rises, when the future seems irretrievably lost to crime, drugs and despair, many of Detroit's leaders rightly focus their attention on education.
The Detroit Strategic Planning Project's Report sees the city as "the stage for humanity's greatest failures and most persistent inhumanity." [1] While acknowledging Detroit's past success, the report suggests that "massive and intractable concentrations of poverty, hopelessness, crime, disease, and untimely death" are at least part of Detroit's story. [2]
Turning to education, the report states that "we must retool Detroit's educational system for the new era, believing that every child should have the opportunity to succeed."
The Strategic Planning Project suggests these improvements:
Principals, teachers, and parents must be given more responsibility for the quality of their schools.
Greater amounts of money for the education of Detroit's disadvantaged children must be provided. [3]
The Detroit Public School system's focus on improved education has resulted in the Detroit Quality Education Plan proposal for school empowerment, higher teacher salaries, and smaller class sizes.
Beneath the headlines, researchers and commentators both locally and nationally point to a society considerably less homogeneous in terms of values, religion and race. Historically, professional educators and school boards have supported the myth that a single common school system would prove adequate even in an era of "pluralism of cultures, viewpoints and talents." [4] When confronted with the incontrovertible evidence of the failure of the common school system in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Detroit, a common refrain ensues. The professional administrators and educational leaders claim that 1) increased educational expenditures, 2) improved teacher/pupil ratios, and 3) increased teacher salaries will solve the problems. Let's examine these claims by looking at Detroit's private and public schools.
In the United States, public school spending per pupil doubled in constant dollars from 1960 to 1980. Moreover, average class size shrank and the number of teachers with master's degrees rose from 25 to 50%. [5] In stark contrast, the performance of public schools, as measured by SAT scores, fell approximately 9% over the same period. [6]
In Detroit, education expenditures rose from $2,766 to $3,998 per pupil from the 1983-84 academic year to 1988-1989, a 44.5% increase. [7] During the same period, the consumer price index for the Detroit-Ann Arbor area rose by less than 17%. [8]
Moreover, Detroit's per-pupil expenditures exceed the state-wide average. In 1988-89, state-wide expenditures per pupil were $3,836 while Detroit spent $3,998 or approximately four percent (4°10) more than the state-wide average. Furthermore, out of 524 state school districts Detroit ranks 98th in expenditures or in the top 20% of the school districts. [9]
Notwithstanding these expenditures, Detroit ranks consistently in the bottom 3% of state school districts in terms of educational performance.
This lack of correlation between expenditures and educational achievement is well documented and not limited to the city of Detroit. For instance, the Oak Park Public School district ranks 10th in annual per-pupil expenditures of $6,198, or in the top 3% of state school districts. Yet, Oak Park ranks consistently in the bottom 3% of Michigan school districts in terms of educational achievement. [10] On the other hand, the Berkley school district ranks 139th in per-pupil annual expenditures. Berkley spends $3,737 per-student, 66% less than Oak Park; yet Berkley students consistently out-perform Oak Park pupils.
At the national level, Professor Eric Hanushek of the University of Rochester confirms that little positive correlation exists between educational expenditures and performance. Indeed, at least some studies suggest the possibility of a negative correlation. [11]
Notwithstanding the existence of incontrovertible data, some professional bureaucrats and their supporters persist in pursuing the money illusion. A November 25, 1990 Detroit Free Press editorial stated that "the basic injustice of Michigan's system of public school finance has been obvious for years." [12] The editorial continues by supporting educational expenditure equalization, claiming that "toleration of huge disparities in per-pupil spending from district to district violates Michigan's constitution." [13] While this claim rests on a debatable legal foundation, its central assumption cannot withstand examination in logic or economics. As the data from Oak Park unequivocally illustrates, increased funding may simply translate into poor educational achievement. Indeed, if operating expenditures per pupil were equalized at current state-wide average levels, the Detroit Public Schools would lose funds!
In sum, neither expenditure increases nor levels seem to have much impact on educational performance. Moreover,
Instructional expenditures per pupil in the United States exceed the level of other industrial nations. In 1985, U.S. expenditures per pupil were 47 percent greater than West Germany, 66 percent greater than France and Australia, 74 percent greater than the United Kingdom and 83 percent greater than Japan. [14]
In contrast, the basic math and science skills of high school students in each of these countries exceed the level of U.S. high schoolers. [15] Additionally, when comparing a group of 10 states possessing the largest increase in real expenditures for the period 1970 to 1988 against 10 states with the smallest increase in real expenditures, those states with a smaller increase did better in terms of graduation rate improvement and SAT and ACT scores. [16] Given the current structure of our educational system, there is no reason to believe that higher levels of educational spending will improve public school student performance.
On the other hand, Detroit's private school spending per pupil is dramatically and significantly lower while educational achievement is relatively high. In general, per-pupil annual expenditures are less than $2,000 per child in our sample. Moreover, statistical reports of standardized tests demonstrate a qualitative advantage for private, primarily religious schools.
Valerie E. Lee and Carolee Stewart, after comparing Catholic and public schools, concluded that "the advantages of Catholic high schools documented elsewhere are generalizable to elementary and middle school levels." [17] Moreover, they concluded that while earlier national assessment results focused on the writing and reading advantages, the benefits of Catholic schools are also evident in mathematics and science. Importantly, proficiency differences between minority and white students are smaller in Catholic schools than in public ones. Accordingly, Catholic schools demonstrate a thrust towards social equity unlike most schools in America. [18] This narrowing in achievement gaps between whites and minority students is not limited to Catholic schools. It occurs at all private schools. [19] In our survey, schools like Bethany Lutheran and Evergreen Lutheran mirror the national results. For instance, at Evergreen Lutheran, the majority of 8th grade students read at the 12th grade level, yet annual cost per pupil was less than $1,300 during 1989-90.
Meanwhile, average Detroit Public School achievement was considerably lower yet per pupil expenditures were 200% higher.
For decades, public school educators have claimed that smaller class sizes would significantly improve educational achievement. However, the national data fails to support this premise. Reviewing 152 studies of teacher/pupil ratios, Hanushek found only 27 were statistically significant. Fourteen studies found a positive correlation and 13 studies found a negative correlation between smaller teacher/pupil ratios. [20]
In our sample, we found that Detroit private schools tend to have significantly smaller class sizes than Detroit Public Schools. Class sizes among private schools tended to range between 14 and 2.5 pupils. The average class size in the Detroit Public Schools in 1989 was approximately 34.
On the other hand, the Boston School System which spends more than $7,000 a year per enrolled student, has 15 students per teacher, yet its dropout rate at 47% was nearly identical to that of the Detroit Public School District. [21] In sum, class size is not likely to be a significant determinant of educational achievement.
During the 1986-87 academic year, teacher salaries in the Detroit Public School District averaged $33,206. Today, the figure is an estimated $35,000. Our survey of private schools found teacher salaries ranged from between $12,000 and $25,000. The estimated average was between $18,000 and $21,000. At Benedictine High School, the principal noted that the school board had succeeded in raising teacher salaries to 70% of public school levels. As noted by the school librarian however, it is not money that makes the difference in education; it is philosophy, leadership, and values.
In general, Hanushek's report indicates that the relationship between student performance and teacher salaries is statistically insignificant. Of 69 studies reviewed, 54 revealed that teacher salary and educational performance were not statistically related. Of the remaining 15 studies, 11 found a positive relationship and 4 found a negative relationship. [22]
Closer to home, teacher salaries in the Detroit Public School District exceeded those of the Southgate Community District, yet Detroit student achievement was significantly poorer than that of Southgate pupils. [23] Again, teacher salary, like class size and educational expenditure per child, is not a significant determinant of educational performance. Accordingly, we must look elsewhere.
As Paul DeWeese points out, decades of school reform have witnessed a substantial increase in the regulation of public schools. The slide in educational achievement coincides with the rise in regulation. Public schools are straight- jacketed in rules, procedures, and administrative constraints which curtail their flexibility and ability to respond to the unique need of their local constituents. Regulations circumscribe the ability of public schools to design and to implement their curriculum, to hire and to fire personnel and to engage in classroom discipline. In sum, school systems have removed authority from local schools and centralized it in school headquarters.
As the increased regulation associated with "school reform" fails to improve educational outcome, politicians and educational administrators routinely demand more money, resulting in more oversight and more bureaucracy to ensure the money is properly spent, resulting in a vicious and negative cycle. Schools will not become dynamic, creative, and responsive institutions until they are freed from unnecessary, overbearing, and centrally dictated regulations. For this to occur, our schools must turn the focus of their attention from the various desires of the central administrative bureaucracy to the needs and desires of students and parents.
Chubb and Moe in their excellent book, Politics, Markets and America's Schools, point out:
Schools do indeed perform better when they have clear goals, an ambitious academic program, strong educational leadership and high levels of teacher professionalism.
The most important prerequisite for the emergence of effective school characteristics is school autonomy, especially from bureaucratic influence.
America's system of public education inhibits the emergence of effective organization because its institutions of democratic control function naturally to limit and undermine school autonomy. [24]
The vehicle for inhibition and restraint is the educational bureaucracy. As of September30, 1988, the Detroit Public School District had 5,820 non-instructional staff plus97 unclassified staffers for a total of5,917. In addition, instructional support staff included 66 individuals for attendance, 423 for guidance, 118 social workers and300 secretary-clerical staffers. [25]
Based on the breakdowns provided to the Michigan State Department of Education, the Detroit Public School District central bureaucracy had 33.4% of the total staff of 17,702. Based on our revisions, 907 staffers should be reclassified as non-instructional for a total of 6,824 which means that nearly 40% of the Detroit Public School staff is non-instructional. Additionally, "support services and benefits consumed about 40 percent of the budget in1987 compared with about 24 percent in 1967." [26] More alarming, the portion spent for basic education was cut in half from 60 percent to 30 percent during the same time. [27]
On the other hand, private schools in the United States spend a small percent of total revenues on administration. For instance, the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit spends less than 0.7% of revenues on its central administration. In fact, for 13,000 Catholic school students in the city of Detroit and 60,000 in the entire archdiocese, it has less than 20 bureaucrats or 0.6% of total staff.
This situation is not unique to Detroit. As William Brock points out, the City of New York Public School District has more bureaucrats than the country of France, and the state of New York has more education bureaucrats than the entire European common market.
Mary Raynid of Hofstra University, when speaking of New York City's public schools, says to be effective within the city school bureaucracy one has to beconstantly guilty of creative insubordination. [28] Carlos Medina, the superintendent of District 4 confirmed this: "Here we call it creative noncompliance." Later, Ms. Raynid asked him almost in jest, "And I suppose the people who work for you are indulging in "creative insubordination?" Mr. Medina nodded seriously and said "I certainly hope so." [29]
Paul DeWeese, the author of this book's opening chapter, received the following personal letter in May, 1990 from Mr. Andrew Warren. It's a poignant example of the failure of our public schools to be either responsive to parental concern or effective at educating students. Mr. Warren is an African American and the president of the Eleanor Roosevelt Middle School P.T.A. in Oak Park, Michigan. He wrote:
Dear Paul:
I am writing you in regards to the Oak Park School District. We spend $6,300 per student. This is the 11th highest in the state, yet we rank near the bottom in MEAP (Michigan Education Assessment Program) scores each year. We recently spent $22 million on school buildings, but there were no science rooms built in any of the elementary schools. There is no science or foreign language program in K5 in the Oak Park School District.
For three years, community committees made up of teachers, politicians, and community leaders struggled to impact our schools. However, the school board gave the Middle School teachers the right to veto any recommendations they did not like. They eliminated all advanced classes. They would not allow parents to volunteer to teach after school classes free. They put in a new grading policy that allows a child to be promoted every year even if they never pass a single test. The reason? Education is secondary. It is their view that it is more important to teach children social skills.
Prior to this year (when there will no longer be an advanced or honors program in the district) our gifted and honors program consisted of a spelling bee and speech contest. All of this despite the fact that national tests show our children rank in the lower 25% of the nation.
The Oak Park School District would be a fine place to build black support for giving parents the ability to choose the school their children attend. The problem with our schools is not insufficient money. The problem is very poor management and the teachers' union. If we doubled the money, we would be no better off.
Sincerely,
Andrew E. Warren
As we will see, public schools have become beholden to interests which do not allow them to create effective reform. These interests have resulted in a sclerosisof initiative and inhibit our schools from implementing the changes which are necessary if our schools are to effectively usher us into the 21st century.
The Center for Policy Research in Education, a federally financed consortium of Rutgers, Michigan State and Stanford Universities, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, issued a report of the results of educational reform in October 1989. It noted that while teachers' salaries are higher and state and local governments have boosted educational funding, attempts to improve education have met with only modest success. The report said states tend to reject complicated recommendations in favor of more manageable ones. The easy changes that were adopted have stayed in place while the more difficult ones (those which are resisted by interests which are threatened by effective reform), like teacher assessments, have been modified or diluted. The report concluded that changes adopted by most states lacked any coherence, "sending a barrage of signals to schools and districts without setting clear priorities."
The National Education Association, in an effort to "maintain the momentum" and create the illusion of its interest in reform, announced in December 1989 the designation of four school districts as sites for the union's Learning Laboratories Initiative. At each school building site, teams of teachers will attempt to address educational goals by participating in a broad array of staff development activities. This process is supposed to help teachers become adept at collaborative decisionmaking skills essential to meaningful change. The NEA's press release indicated that, "Each school site team will collaboratively profile the learning challenges specific to its school and fashion a mission statement that offers a vision that will help educators and students move from where the school is to where it ought to be." James Kilpatrick, regarding this new initiative by the NEA, wrote:
The union is immersed in the diffuse jargon of collaborative profiles, mission statements, implementation plans and site-based decision-making. It seeks experts, consultants, coordinators, one-on-one interaction and new models of school management.
– (Lansing State Journal, Dec. 24, 1989)
A French Prime Minister once remarked that war is much too serious to leave to the generals. There is an analogy here for our public schools: Education is much too serious to leave to the educators. We must give much more power and accountability to parents, the primary educators of the students.
The current focus on the role of the state, suggests that many of the public school reformers are quite willing to ignore the history of schools within the United States. As K. Alan Snyder points out, from the time of the early colonies to the conclusion of the war between the states, private schools flourished in the United States. Today, they are an attractive alternative to parents concerned about the quality of education and discipline available at public schools. [30]
An early rationale for public schools was expressed by Horace Mann. He sought to overcome the potential for social strife by mixing the rich and poor in a public system that would instill each child with non-sectarian thinking. To the contrary, public schools have simply promoted sectarian segregation while advancing secular values hostile to those of parents. This view finds at least some support in the comments of Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, concurring in Lemon V. Kurtzman:
While the evolution of the public school system in this country marked an escape from denominational control ... it has disadvantages. The main one is that a state system may attempt to mold all students alike according to the views of the dominant group and to discourage the emergence of individual idiosyncrasies. [31]
This attempt to discourage the emergence of individual idiosyncrasies is seen by many as an attempt to isolate children from parental values. As Dr. James Dobson and Gary Bauer in their book Children at Risk suggest, the "campaign to isolate children from their parents .... is being waged primarily in public schools." [32]
While it is not our purpose to attack public education, we wish to point out that a system of public education can be at variance with the values of parents. Society engages in a coercive transfer of funds from parents to educators so that students can be educated in a manner inimical and hostile to the wishes and the values of those from whom the funds are coerced. While it is true that public education is based theoretically on the concept of local control, in practice, real power resides in the hands of the unelected: the centralized professional elite. This elite in general has pressed for more control, even arguing that it is above politics. [33]
On one hand, public schools claim to be neutral, subject to parental control. open to ethnic, religious, racial and ideological diversity. In practice, public schools in general advance a secular philosophy placing man at the center of all things, prevent parental control, and are operated in a racially segregated and pedagogically intolerant manner. With respect to racial segregation, for instance, public schools are becoming more segregated while private schools are growing more integrated. Indeed nationally, minorities account for 20.4% of the 1982-83 Catholic school enrollments and minority enrollments have nearly doubled in the last ten years. [34]
The private school environment in Detroit is open. It lacks administrative control. The market allows diverse schools to operate relatively free from any requirement of uniformity. Detroit's private schools allow religiously, ideologically and pedagogically diverse views to flourish and nourish the individual. Some private schools are secular, others are religious. Some emphasize Western culture while others are ethnocentric. The market welcomes diversity.
The private schools in our survey represent at least some of the pluralism which exist in the United States and in Detroit. While improved educational achievement and improved student safety are central to the success of private schools, the schools represent a diversity of goals and methods in achieving their mission. They range from a small Islamic school, Sister Clara Muhammed with 70 students, a small Afro-centric school, Nataki Talibah to modest sized East Catholic High which encourages black awareness.
Spirited attempts to modestly reform the Detroit Public School District, led by former Superintendent Porter and School Board President Patrick, have not been warmly received by existing administrators, staff and unions. For instance, on July 18, 1990 as part of the Detroit Quality Education Plan (DQEP) a proposal was issued to provide empowerment, on a very limited basis, along with an opportunity to become a school of limited choice. Less than 5% of the schools in the Detroit Public School District applied to be a part of this program.
This plan defined empowerment as "the granting of greater autonomy through increased authority to make school level decisions." [35] This proposal attempts to be comprehensive in terms of goal setting. It is also comprehensive in terms of rule setting. Compliance with nine other monographs is a requirement for empowerment. In addition, application by a variety of school constituencies such as teachers, staff and parents, is also a requisite. In addition, it must be an excellent or satisfactory school with adequate building utilization. This panoply of requirements inhibits and constrains true reform and inhibits true local school autonomy. Moreover, compliance with the standards for becoming empowered entitles the school to only $10 more per student, but no less than $5,000 per school to be utilized at the school's discretion. Some flexibility in scheduling and budgeting is granted, but importantly, direct hiring and firing authority is not granted. As Chubb and Moe note, informal criteria is important in determining good or poor teachers. Accordingly, it is important that power to hire and fire reside in the hand of the principal.
Detroit private schools act without substantial central administrative constraints. Hiring and firing decisions are made autonomously. The primary constraint faced by private schools is the market itself rather than elected school boards, or institutional bureaucracy. Accordingly, strong leadership at the school level emerges.
As the principal of St. Gerard says, "We simply implement discipline and high standards for our children." The market in the city of Detroit responds accordingly. The private schools we looked at are not uniform in terms of mission. Each school responds to the market somewhat differently. Parents are free to assess the school, its resources and likelihood of success for their children. The bottom line at most schools we surveyed is improved educational opportunity for poor and middle income students, even students who have discipline problems. For instance, Evangel Christian Academy reports that approximately 10% of its enrollees were rejected by the neighborhood public school because of discipline problems. While these incoming students are behind their appropriate grade level by up to 4 years, the gap narrows the longer they are at Evangel.
In addition to constraints from local central administration, the public school faces bureaucratic interference at the state level as well. The Detroit Public School Board at this writing proposed an innovative open-enrollment academy geared towards the city's disadvantaged black males. However, state bureaucrats at the Department of Education discouraged this plan because some believed it violated Federal anti-discrimination laws, notwithstanding the existence of all-girl academies. In fact, in August 1991, a Federal Judge – as the result of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the National Organization for Women's Legal Defense Fund – ruled the schools as proposed to be illegal. Once again, an innovative attempt to deal with a significant problem within the context of the public schools was thwarted. Meanwhile, the plight of black male youth is incontrovertible.
Wayne County has the nation's worst homicide rate for black males aged 1524 and the school dropout rate for black males is 70% in a district where the overall dropout rate is 40%. [36] It seems no matter the problem, nor how promising the solution, bureaucratic constraints arise to preclude progress.
The bureaucratic structure at the district, state and federal level is very adept at building political connections which protect itself from discerning scrutiny. As Paul DeWeese says, this administrative organism is quite effective at creating justifications for its own existence. Above all, it continues to maintain a facade of unjustifiable optimism in the face of the most catastrophic failure. As an example of the blinders worn by the administrators of our public school monopoly, the National Center for Educational Information, in a nationwide survey late in 1987, found that 87 percent of the public school superintendents contended that schools in their communities had improved in the last five years. In striking contrast, a Gallup poll a few months earlier had reported that only 25 percent of the population polled concurred with this assessment.
Beyond the self-serving public school administrative structure there is another factor which explains why our schools are resistant to real reform. The system has created barriers which significantly hinder its constituents from effectively communicating their concerns.
In other areas of our society which compete for the allegiance of customers and therefore strive to meet their concerns, complaints are sought out in order to address them as quickly as possible and preserve a contented relationship. If a customer remains unsatisfied or feels that his concerns are not being heard, he may take his business elsewhere and in the process, sully the reputation of the offensive firm.
Myron Lieberman, a nationally recognized analyst of educational issues, has written persuasively about the importance of being able to exit the public schoolsystem. When parents and students can exit, school officials listen and react. [37] When parents cannot exit an unsatisfactory school situation except at great cost, the educational system does not get the message that something is wrong and therefore the message does not facilitate effective reform. Only when the consumer can take his or her dollar to another supplier will the producer change unsatisfactory practices.
True education reform must be driven by the dreams and aspirations of our people. Once we allow parental values and choices to be respected, we will unleash a process of positive change. As parents choose the schools that are uniquely suited to their children, a "market" will emerge and it will respond.
A just system of reform must be consistent with our most enduring traditions and cherished values. The American experiment has shown the world that pluralism, democracy and the market system enhances social stability and most effectively meets the material and spiritual aspirations of society.
The pluralism in Detroit's private schools, their willingness to take risk, reflects diversity and as James Skillen suggests, perhaps we have entered a stage of history where the pluralism of cultures, viewpoints, and talents is so great that a single "common school" will no longer prove adequate or desirable.
After several decades of attempts to reform education by political and bureaucratic mandates, a growing number of critics are now arguing that all such efforts to stem "the rising tide of mediocrity will fail because they do not go to the root of the system's difficulties"...an open system of plural choice that uses market mechanisms and puts control in the hands of individual schools and parents will have to be instituted before good schools become the rule rather than the exception across the country. [38] Detroit's private schools respond to parental concerns about educational achievement, safety and diversity. The parents and students can be viewed as demanders of educational services. A free market responds to demand by increasing supply. The market system is essential in education because only in a freely-functioning market can the creative talents of people be free to produce new, vibrant, and responsive schools. Without the market system, pluralism cannot exist because our diversity is not respected or allowed to manifest itself. In addition, by operating in a competitive market, private schools guided by strong leadership and school-level autonomy perform better at lower cost.
Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, a distinguished educator and psychologist put it this way:
What is most important in understanding the ability of the educational establishment to resist change is the fact that public schools are protected monopolies with only minimal competition from private and parochial schools. [39]
To be effective, schools require strong instructional leadership, a safe and orderly climate, school-wide emphasis on basic skills, high teacher expectations and continuous assessment of pupil progress. [40] These characteristics are encouraged in the context of a market system. Most of the private schools we surveyed demonstrate possession of these prerequisites for success. At Dominican High School for instance, Sister Peggy Manners said that goals are "practical" and evaluated periodically by faculty and staff. No goal is unrealistic". As a result of strong leadership and motivated parents, students win scholarships as well as receive local and national recognition.
A precondition for strong instructional leadership is school-level independence. Strong leadership tends to require disciplined teachers and students. Moreover, strong leaders tend to require that teachers be demanding of students. In large urban areas like Detroit, strong leadership and school autonomy is more likely to exist in a market system. Schools which fail to perform within a market will be forced to exit. While strong educational leadership and school autonomy are not the only determinants of student success, they are the primary factors which can lead to genuine reform. [41]
The basic arguments for educational choice are relatively straight-forward and have been discussed at length elsewhere. [42] We list the arguments thusly:
Public schools, especially in poorer areas, are monopolies. Consistent with economic theory, most monopoly schools are inefficient and wasteful. They underperform schools which face serious and direct competition. In contrast, private schools compete at the margin by more efficient resource deployment, more innovation, and more diversification in terms of educational approaches. In sum, private schools deliver a higher return at lower cost while public school monopolies "ignore the legitimate needs and interests of both the consumer and the worker." [43]
Private schools tend to be free from democratic control mechanisms such as bureaucratic central administration. Consequently, private schools are much more likely to exhibit strong autonomy and strong leadership at the school level.
Diversity is an additional virtue of choice. In light of the pluralism of views and values in our society and in light of the lack of consensus on the range of things Americans should learn, choice provides an excellent alternative to the single common school. Parents have access to more information about their children than school bureaucrats. Accordingly, parents are in a better position to make informed decisions. Choice makes that possible.
Robust choice opens up the supply side of the market. While many proposals abound supporting choice within public schools only, robust choice which opens education to the rigors of the market will increase the supply of good schools.
The achievement gap between minorities and whiles narrows ill private schools. It widens in public schools.
Our list is not exhaustive. Other important arguments exist in favor of robust choice. Sugarman in his working paper, "Using Private Schools to Promote Public Values" lists other arguments. [44] One rests on the idea that choice-based schools can recreate community. This sociologically grounded argument states that the community is created by "like-minded parents selecting schools whose mission and values they identify." [45] Accordingly, it "stands to reason that where school placements are voluntary the school can and does make greater demands on the pupils to work up to their capacity, and the students and their families acquire loyalty to the school and with that a greater sense of responsibility for its success." [46]
The value of voluntary transactions and decision-making is an important condition for the maintenance of a free society. Limiting parents to one school for a child not only inhibits freedom, but results in inefficiency and underachievement. Both James Buchanan and Richard Posner have explicated important lessons on the value of voluntary exchange. [47]
To repeat, we find the arguments for robust choice, including private schools financed by some form of voucher or tax credit system, compelling. Accordingly,we propose that the Detroit education system be expanded to include complete and untrammeled choice, including private schools and home schooling options.
To be sure, any effort to change the existing education establishment within the city of Detroit will face opposition from interest groups. Some will claim that full blown choice 1) exacerbates inequality, 2) entangles the government in a church-state morass, and 3) leads to fraud, waste and lack of accountability. In our view, these claims are without merit.
The claim that choice worsens inequality possesses a certain surface appeal. Those who make this claim suggest that choice favors knowledgeable, affluent parents. Allegedly, the public system looks out in loco parentis for the poor and disadvantaged among us. It is frequently stated that private schools select the best and brightest, leaving the truly disadvantaged to slowly drown in a sociologically disadvantaged environment.
These claims cannot withstand examination. In our survey, school after school was asked whether they took only the best, the brightest and those from middle income families only, or from educated families. The common response was that the students who attend Detroit area private schools reflect the surrounding geographical areas which by and large were relatively poor, low-income and insome cases middle-income areas. A large number of schools reported a student body which was 95-99% black, characterized in many cases by single parent households. Most students who attend Catholic or Lutheran schools in Detroit are not Catholic or Lutheran. Those schools simply provide relatively strong educational leadership, relatively strong educational achievement, and relative safety. Accordingly, they were viewed by parents as an attractive option.
If one looks at East Catholic High School, located in a relatively low income area on the east side of Detroit, Evergreen Lutheran located in a lower-income area in the west side of Detroit, Sister Clara Muhammed, located on the lower east side in a poor area of Detroit, or countless other private schools, one finds that low-income and moderate-income parents, recognizing the deficiencies of local public schools, placed their children in private schools despite severe financial sacrifice.
To be sure, exceptions exist. Gesu School and Nataki Talibah attract students from fairly affluent families; Gesu because of location in an affluent area on the north side of Detroit and Nataki because its tuition is relatively high.
As Sugarman points out, the general claim that choice favors the rich is simply unexamined nonsense.
It is often asserted that rich, white and savvy folks will . . . exploit the system at the expense of the non-rich, non-white, and less savvy folks. To those of us who favor choice as a way to help children of the poor, there is something exasperating about this complaint. The present system, after all, already clearly favors those with money who can so much more easily buy their way into schools of choice by paying tuition or purchasing a home in a public school system of their choice. [48]
The poor, the non-white, the less-educated parent recognizes more clearly than the bureaucrats and special interest groups the failures of public education. As Dr. Clark points out, unaccountable monopolies fail the constituency in most need of educational achievement: the poor.
The poor and the non-white in our present public system are viewed as powerless and unworthy of being allowed to hold the well-paid professional elite to account.
To the contrary, we believe that the poor, the non-white, the non-rich deserve an opportunity to choose. Choice must be backed by sufficient economic power to make it a reality, not simply a theoretically plausible ideal. The perceptiveness of African-Americans, who are among the groups who have the most to gain from choice, is reflected by public opinion polls which indicate over 72 percent of blacks favor schools of choice. In contrast, only 60 percent of whites favor choice. Moreover, public school teachers in Detroit favor choice to a great degree. One-third of Detroit public school teachers place their children in private schools. This is twice the rate for Detroiters as a whole.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
– United States Constitution, 1st Amendment.
The First Amendment has two complementary objectives barring government preference of a religion as well as protecting the individual's right to practice a particular religion without government interference. As James Skillen notes, every argument for fundamental education reform encounters the claim that an open pluralistic system violates "the first amendment's establishment clause because public monies will end up in the hands of religious schools." [49]
In reality, choice places funds in the hands of parents who elect either public or private, religious or non-religious schools. In Detroit, most parents who select private schools elect sectarian ones primarily because they offer strong leadership, educational achievement and safety and availability. The school's religious mission is not the primary selection factor.
Single common public school systems such as Detroit's Public System owe much of their philosophy to Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, and other educational reformers. Jefferson believed that rational empiricism and enlightened moralism should be substituted for explicitly Christian doctrines which at the time were guiding many families, schools, and churches. [50] The Jeffersonian approach, a secularized form of Protestantism, became a major tenet of faith of school reformers as the United States moved from a system of private education to public education.
Educational reformers led by people like Horace Mann held a hidden agenda which included a diverse range of goals which were to be achieved by politicizing the educational system, encouraging the adoption of compulsory public education, and shifting responsibility for education from the family to the state. [51] From the 1840's through the next 100 years the common public school movement sought to institutionalize a system of government-established, government-funded, and government-run schools acceptable to the majority. [52] This trend was accelerated by the influx of largely Catholic immigrants to Boston and New York City. "When Catholics began to appeal for public support of their schools on the same basis" as Protestant schools, there was a reaction. [53]
The largely Protestant majority in each city reacted to the pluralizing threat by making the argument that their own schools were common and "non-sectarian" but that Catholic schools were parochial and "sectarian". They engineered the circumstances politically to give public backing and funding to the so-called "nonsectarian common schools." [54]
Lower income groups, in both poor and rural areas, fought compulsory schooling as a limitation of parental rights. The Irish boycotted the public schools which displaced Catholic private educational institutions. [55]
Public schools reflecting the evolving distinction between church and state saw the removal of religious instruction and became more secular in character. [56] Consistent with their agenda, uniformity of thought was encouraged by school reformers. For instance, Mann, an acknowledged leader in the one common school movement, accepted racial segregation in education and admonished educators who spoke out publicly on that issue. [57] Democracy legitimized incursions of the state into family affairs based on the utilitarian view that such incursions reflected majority rule. The rights of the family, particularly on religion, were to be sacrificed for the good of the community. [58] Such a single common system which implicitly and explicitly promotes values inconsistent with the United States', Michigan's, and Detroit's pluralism cannot be intelligently squared with the First Amendment's goal of protecting the individual's right to practice a particular religion, free from governmental interference. In essence, the Jeffersonian dogma as it evolved discriminates in favor of one dogma at the expense of literally hundreds of opposing dogmas.
Moreover, many special interest lobbyists critical of choice are unwilling to accept the premise that the government should be simply neutral on matters of religion. They go further and throw their "weight on the side of those who believe that our society as a whole should be a purely secular one." [59]To the contrary, we believe, consistent with the diversity of views in Detroit and beyond, "nothing in the first amendment or in the cases interpreting it requires such an extreme approach"... (Justice William Rehnquist, U.S. Supreme Court). [60]
On the other hand, by the 1930's and 1940's, the ruling Jeffersonian hegemony (modified by the religious secular distinction and John Dewey's pragmatism) with its discrimination against non-government schools became the unquestioned starting point for citizens and justices alike. [61]
While a review of the entire historical and constitutional record is beyond the scope of our book, it is important to look at a few relatively recent cases.
In Board of Education v. Allen, 392 U.S. 236 (1968), the United States Supreme Court held that a state of New York law requiring local public school authorities to lend textbooks free of charge to all students in grades seven through twelve including private school student was not in conflict with either the First Amendment or 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The court looked at earlier cases and said the test is whether the purpose and the primary effect of the statute is to advance or inhibit religion. Here, the statute authorized the loan of secular books. Accordingly, it did not advance or inhibit religion. Therefore, the court found the provision of books acceptable.
Another significant case is Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, (1971). The court was asked to review a Pennsylvania and a Rhode Island statute providing state assistance to church-related elementary and secondary schools. Pennsylvania provided financial support to non-public schools by way of reimbursement of instructional cost related to specified secular subjects. Rhode Island paid a 15% salary supplement to non-public elementary school teachers. In Lemon, the court stated a three part test to determine whether a program violates the establishment clause of the lst amendment:
The statute must advance a secular purpose.
Its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion.
It must not foster "an excessive government entanglement with religion."
The court found that both programs had a secular legislative purpose and did not advance or have the primary intent of advancing religion. However the court did conclude that the programs involved excessive entanglements between government and religion.
On the other hand in Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U.S. G72, (1971), the Supreme Court upheld Federal construction grants to religious institutions for buildings used exclusively for secular purposes. The court dismissed the claim that every form of financial aid to a church-related activity violates the religion clause. Instead, it asked, does the legislative program have the principal or primary effect of advancing a religion? The court found that grants to colleges and universities did not have the primary effect of advancing religion.
Turning to the excessive entanglements questions, the court found significant differences between church-related elementary and secondary schools and church-related universities and colleges. College students, it is claimed, are "less impressionable and less susceptible to religious indoctrination." Consequently, the court held that while the four institutions in question were governed by Catholic religious orders and both the faculty and student bodies at each were predominantly Catholic, their mission was a secular one: provide students with a higher education. Accordingly, the court found the entanglement between church and state insufficient to bar government assistance.
In Mueller v. Allen, 103 S. Ct. 3062 (1983), the Supreme Court upheld a Minnesota program which allows a deduction against income for state income tax purposes. Tuition, textbooks and transportation expenses are deductible for both secondary and elementary schools, either private (including sectarian) or public. The court held that the education had a secular purpose of "ensuring that the state citizenry is well educated." Moreover, the court held that the state had a strong public interest in ensuring the survival of both religious and non-religious private schools because they:
Relieve the public schools of educating a certain percentage of the state's population.
Provide competition to public schools. [62]
Moreover, the court found that the primary effect of the Minnesota program was not the advancement of religion.
Two other cases are of interest. In Bowen v. Kendrick, 108 S.Ct. 25(2 (1985), the Supreme Court allowed Federal monies to be used for a church-run social welfare program. Additionally, the Supreme Court, in Witters v. Washington Dept. of Services for the Blind 474 U.S. 481 (1956), held that the state may use rehabilitation funds for a blind person's seminary training.
Based on the foregoing cases, a system of choice, financed through vouchers or tax credits, would not violate the First Amendment, would increase the supply of good schools, reduce cost thereby reducing financial pressure on Michigan's overburdened taxpayers, as well as increase the educational performance of students from poor and low-income and middle-income families, and ensure diversity and pluralism.
First, a voucher or tax credit system advances a secular purpose. The principal objective of tax credits or vouchers is the use of private schools to promote public values.
Competition improves educational achievement at lower cost. As Sugarman points out, "there is reason to fear that choice limited to public schools will shield such schools from the competitive pressures needed to force their own improvement." [63] Without private competition, lousy public schools will not be allowed to go bankrupt, poor teachers will be allowed to keep their jobs.
Values such as pluralism and diversity are likely to be encouraged. The single common public school system fails to reflect tolerance of differences. Instead, a single ideological agenda is encouraged. In our view, "government should treat all its citizens evenhandedly and without discrimination. There is no question that justice demands it." [64] The requisite evenhandedness and non-discrimination cannot be achieved under our present educational system.
In many urban areas, private schools are the only practical source of racially integrated education for minority children. [65]
Choice improves the economic prospects of minorities without coercion. As mentioned previously, the achievement gap between black and white students narrows considerably in Catholic and other private schools while in public schools this gap widens. This is extremely important when one considers that at least one third of black Americans subsist below the poverty line.
In light of these secular purposes which are advanced by choice, it seems clear that the first prong of the Lemon establishment of religion test is met.
Second, neither the principal purpose nor the primary effect of choice will be to advance religion. This view is strengthened by virtue of the fact that the funds go to parents who select a school, public or private. Consistent with Mueller, a system of tax credits or vouchers made available to the parent, irrespective of whether the benefit is used at a public or private school, is no different from other government entitlement programs such as social security or rehabilitation funding. To benefit from social security, the recipient is not limited to non-religious or secular uses of funds, as the purpose of such a program is to supplement retirement income. Similarly, a system of open choice has the primary purpose of improving educational outcomes by providing minimum education income.
Turning to the third issue, excessive entanglements, a market system of education which provides funds to parents of school children who expend the funds at private or public schools does not lead to excessive entanglements, consistent with Tilton. In Tilton, the Supreme Court held that a system of grants to church-related universities passed constitutional muster. Part of that decision, however, was premised on the distinction between impressionable school children and less impressionable college students. The court found the level of entanglements insufficient where the mission of the institution was a secular one. In our view, this distinction between elementary, secondary and university education is tenuous at best. Moreover, the evidence in our survey suggests that the primary reason Detroit area parents send their children to Catholic and Lutheran Schools is very much like the reason college students go to church-related universities – to get a good education. The majority of students at Catholic schools in Detroit are non-Catholic and come from non-Catholic homes. Neither students nor the parents are required to convert. Accordingly, a publicly-financed program of choice is consistent with Lemon as explicated by Tilton.
In sum, a market-based system of individual choice advances public values and does not have the primary effect of advancing religion, nor does it involve excessive government entanglements with religion. Accordingly, such a plan should pass constitutional muster, especially in light of recent changes in the makeup of the Supreme Court. Led by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the court seems more willing to allow government accommodation of religious beliefs. [60] Moreover, such a system has the advantage of preventing the educational staff from attempting to mold all students to the view of the dominant group while preventing the emergence of individual values, likes, desires, and purposes. A market-based system of choice neutrally allows the individual to flourish within a pluralistic and diverse culture. Parents have the opportunity to choose the values and beliefs to which their children are exposed. Competition and choice encourage freedom of expression. Public school monopolies suppress it.
As Gwartney and Wagner note in their important book, Public Choice and Constitutional Economics, the task of government consistent with the Constitution is to promote the security of individual rights and provide those services that people cannot provide for themselves. Accordingly, in a system based on mutual agreement, behavior (by government) that oppresses some for the benefit of others is pathological. [67] Maintenance of public school monopolies in Detroit and beyond allows the poor to be oppressed for the benefit of the bureaucracy. A market-based system of education ends this oppression. Choice is not only constitutional; it promotes individual rights as well.
Moreover, tax credits and vouchers provide aid to parents without state discrimination. Where government treats competing activities that are secular the same way it treats religious activities, it will create neither incentives nor disincentives to engage in religious activities. [68] In our view, tax credits and vouchers move us towards the goal of neutrality. Accordingly, such a program should be embraced.
Any discussion of educational choice in Michigan would be incomplete without calling attention to Article VIII of the Constitution of Michigan. Among other things, this section precludes the provision of public monies for non-public schools. Accordingly, any serious attempt to reform education in Michigan requires that proponents of choice consider amending, changing or abolishing this section which prohibits payments, credits, tax benefits, deductions, and vouchers for parents who exercise their choice to demand better schools for their children. This provision was drafted in large part by the protectors of the public school monopoly, teacher unions.
To be sure, changing the state constitution will not be easy. It will require committed individuals and groups. The children of Detroit and Michigan demand no less.
This criticism of market-based choice rests on the claim "that consumer choice imposes costs on both providers and shoppers." [69] The concern is "that buyers will be forced by false and misleading claims made by sellers." [70] Many fear parents will be influenced to make selections on the wrong basis or to adopt the wrong objectives. [71] In essence, this claim says once we free the market from monopolies, otherwise avoidable decision-making costs and search costs are imposed on society. [72]
While possessing a surface appeal, this allegation is essentially a false argument of those who favor the current entrenched bureaucracy which drains an ever increasing amount of money from taxpayers. The real question is whether given a choice, parents can act responsibly, intelligently and carefully when the education of their children is at stake. When asked this question, the available data suggests a compelling answer: Yes. Public opinion polls indicate that ninety-five percent of those polled if allowed to choose for instance a public school, would inquire about the quality of the teaching staff, the maintenance of school discipline, and the courses offered. [73] Moreover, most respondents would examine the track record of graduates in high school, college, and on the job, as well as test scores of students and class size. [74] Furthermore, statistics indicate minority group members favor choice to a greater extent than whites, an excellent indication that blacks and minorities are well informed regarding the deficiencies of neighborhood public schools, and as a result, are in a better position to make decisions than unelected bureaucrats.
The perception that America's schools underperform, especially in large urban areas has been held for quite some time by members of low-income groups. This view is now grudgingly shared by a few special interest group leaders. Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers Union with which Detroit's public teachers are affiliated recently stated that United States public schools are "really bad". How bad are things'? Shanker said "95 percent of the kids who go to college in the United States would not be admitted to college anywhere else in the world." [75] This is true of Detroit's public school students in spite of the fact that both Detroit Public School spending per pupil and the rate of expenditure increase is substantially higher than in Detroit's private schools. In comparing fraud, waste and accountability, the record is clear: private schools are less susceptible to fraud and waste and they are assuredly more accountable. Significant numbers of parents in low-income areas of the city of Detroit have assessed the quality of the teaching staffs, school discipline, course offerings as well as the track record of graduates. Despite their meager economic resources, these parents have placed their children in private schools and that is testimony to their ability to make informed consumer decisions while holding schools accountable.
It seems clear that if full-blown choice is adopted and funded at the same level per child as public education the total public expenditures for education cost could rise since between 11 and 14% of children attend private schools nationally. In the city of Detroit about 10 percent of the students attend private schools. If choice is adopted, those students who now attend private schools would be eligible for funds on an equal and non-discriminatory basis. Therefore, choice could increase the overall cost of education in Michigan. We suggest, however, that the voucher or tax credit be set equal to 90% of available public school funding to account for this problem. Accordingly, as more public school students elect to attend private schools, less public money will be spent.
Most United States experiments in choice are limited to public schools only. Programs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, East Harlem, and Minnesota allow some form of public choice. In Cambridge, the percent of students choosing to attend public schools rose from 74°1o to 82°% after choice was allowed. In East Harlem, two schools which failed to attract students were closed and later reopened with new staff and programs. [76]
Importantly, pursuant to state legislation, up to 1,000 Milwaukee public school children from low-income families were allowed to attend private, non-religious schools at state expense under a choice plan. The initial indications are encouraging. One mother when asked whether her son was thriving in his new private school said: "He doesn't like it. It's a serious school where they give him homework and want him to learn. The classes are smaller and they know what he's doing. He's not accustomed to being in any class where they are paid any attention." [77]
While choice offers real hope for improving the education of the poor and the non-white, and while sponsored by Polly Williams, a black legislator from the inner city, a list of opponents is instructive. Opponents include the superintendent of public instruction for the State of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Milwaukee Branch), the Association of Wisconsin School Administrators, Wisconsin Congress of Parents and Teachers, Inc., and the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers.
Superintendent Grover, who publicly opposed the program prior to its passage, encouraged, indeed welcomed, a suit challenging the law. [78] His opposition is based on the view that the law allows public funds to pass to private schools unaccompanied by sufficient control and accountability to ensure the quality of teachers and curriculum. He also expressed concern that the program would drain Milwaukee public school funding without a comparable reduction in the fixed cost of maintaining those public schools, leading either to an increase in Milwaukee property taxes or to a reduction in the level of services to students remaining in public schools. A Wisconsin state court of appeals ruled in November 1990 that the legislation was unconstitutional. State officials are allowing students to remain in private schools while appeals are exhausted. [79]
Again, the unelected special interest groups and their champions rise to prevent poor people from choosing. Polly Williams criticized the traditional remedy for the poor: desegregation. She believed that the poor and the non-white need both the power and the responsibility to educate their own. Finding the Milwaukee public school bureaucracy unresponsive to her ideas, she pushed for private choice. [80] It remains to be seen whether the Wisconsin courts will allow the poor to choose or remain powerless.
By contrast, in 1917 the Netherlands enacted a constitutional amendment guaranteeing full-blown choice. Any responsible group, public or private, is guaranteed the right to private education. Discrimination in funding is precluded. Public schools and private schools are treated equally with regard to funding. Moreover, in regulating private schools, "due regard must be paid to their own freedom to private education in accordance with their religious beliefs." In 1920, nearly 70 percent of Dutch children attended public schools. Today more than 70 percent attend private schools. [81]
Accordingly, it is understandable that superintendents, teacher unions, school administrators, and perhaps the NAACP would oppose programs such as Milwaukee's which would give true power to poor, non-white parents while taking it away from bureaucrats.
To be competitive as a nation, the United States will have to begin to look at the work force of the future. It will be increasingly black, Hispanic, and female – as well as unprepared for the 16.5 million new jobs that this economywill generate over the next twenty years. Eight hundred thousand kids drop out of school annually with another 800,000 more graduating illiterate.
– Robert Woodson
Education in the United States – public and private, elementary, secondary and post-secondary – is an enormous enterprise, spending $33 t billion per year. It employs 7 million persons of whom 3.4 million are teachers. Over 269 billion per year is spent on public education. Public elementary and secondary education costs taxpayers at least $183 billion. [82] Detroit public school annual expenditures exceed $730 million. The Detroit public schools have a staff of 17,702 including 8,388 teachers.
While Detroit's private schools lag behind their public school counterparts in terms of per-pupil expenditures, teacher salaries, and the extravagance of their buildings, private schools have one central achievement: relatively high student performance. Our focus is quite deliberate. We have declined to focus primarily on Detroit's public education system. Its problems and failings are well documented elsewhere. As Robert Woodson says, "the only thing you can learn from studying poverty is how to create it. The only thing you can learn from studying failure is how to create it." [83] On the other hand, we believe, much can be learned by studying Detroit private education's success. We encourage others to do likewise.
Throughout this chapter, a case has been made for authentic educational reform. There is widespread recognition that the achievements of our educational system do not match our aspirations and Detroit's international stature, nor is it commensurate with our large social and economic investment. Traditional "reform" efforts have not recognized the importance of family choice in educational services. We are united by a voluntary compact which is strengthened when our unique social and religious values are respected and given a voice. To the extent that these motives are suppressed, people feel alienated and disenfranchised. Every credible study of the cause of our educational lethargy has determined that parents should be more involved in their children's educational regime. And yet, we permit our educational system to embezzle the parents' prior right to determine the kind of education their children should receive. What right does society have to request of parents' personal involvement in the education of their children when they are denied a voice in the distinctive character of that education?
Choice encourages parental involvement. It also allows the voice of parents to be heard. The frustration with the egregious flaccidity of our current education system and the bureaucratic excuses from our educational establishment has led to
the demand for enlightened and effective change in Detroit, in Michigan and the: United States.
Several broad groups in our society are in favor of family choice in education, and if brought together, their energies can be mobilized and channeled behind a specific reform agenda.
Business
The business community has a vital stake in the effectiveness of our educational system because it must bear the costs of retraining people who leave public schools unable to read, write, or perform basic arithmetic. A Conference Board survey of 130 major corporations revealed that nearly two-thirds regard primary and secondary education their number one community affairs concern, up from less than half in 1985. (Associated Press, "Education is Top Concern of Business," Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 12, 1987). A recent poll by North Coast Behavioral Research Group of Cleveland of 1,200 of our nation's major corporations revealed that 64 percent of the human resource officers indicated that high school graduates entering the work force cannot read, write, or reason well. Among business groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, there is a general consensus that our competitiveness, our technological inventiveness, as well as our future strength and prosperity are threatened by the present dysfunctional educational infrastructure.
The corporations, small business leaders, church leaders, educators, and others who made up the Detroit Strategic Planning Projects in 1987 said,
The decline of the school system's effectiveness comes, sadly, at a time when the need for sophisticated education is more critical than ever. ...now, employers in the burgeoning service industries that will stoke Detroit's economy in the future demand skills that are far more complex. Detroit schools have not met the challenge of refocusing educational priorities for a revitalized and diversified economy. [84]
In light of the recognition of the intractable problems which afflict public schools, the time has come for Detroit's leaders and Detroit's business community to focus attention where it is deserved: upon private schools. Business leaders can make an enormous contribution by:
considering the value of private education;
supporting market based choice options; and
adopting private schools in the inner-city of Detroit which serve poor and low-income students.
Scholarships, grants, and other forms of aid directed to inner city private schools can go a long way towards improving the availability of a good education to a diverse group of poor and low-income students. In return, the supply of well-educated students capable of working in Detroit's growing service sector will rise. [85]
Poor
Locked into a degrading system which does violence to their natural aspirations of a better life for their children, low-income groups have consistently expressed the strongest interest in parental choice among any group in society. They are the ones who have no choice. Educationally disenfranchised in our society, they stand to benefit most from a system which delivers educational excellence. The poor are forced by law to send their children into the cavernous buildings of the inner city, where a facade of educational activity exists, but which are more aptly described by one observer as nothing more than an institutionalized form of child neglect. Finally, it is the poor who are the helpless recipients of the widespread elitist notion of society that they are too unconcerned and apathetic to benefit from parental choice.
Parents of Students
As demonstrated by many recent polls, parents across the socio-economic spectrum express a deep interest in parental choice. They long to have the opportunity to actively determine what school most suits the needs of their children.
While nationally 11-14 percent of school-aged parents have willingly demonstrated their commitment to parental choice by paying the extra tuition required to send their children to non-public schools, many more parents would choose to follow their example if given some assistance. In a 1981 poll by Newsweek, 23 percent of parents with children in public schools indicated they would most likely transfer their children to non-public schools if they received tax credits of $250 to $500 per year. [86]
Society
Beyond these particular groups in society, the consensus is we are ready for genuine reform. All parents have a deep interest in the education of their children, wanting the very best educational opportunities available. When it becomes clear that a policy of parental choice will result in the improvement of public schools as well, then parents across the ethnic and socio-economic spectrum will join the chorus for change.
Each parent should have the right to remove their child from a school that is either dangerous or lacks quality. No child should be forced to attend such a school. Each responsible parent who finds his or her child in such a situation and has thecapacity to either move to anew neighborhood with a better school or pay the extra tuition for a non-public education can exercise choice. Can we continue to deny to the poor that which we allow the rich and middle class?
Many theoretical concerns will be expressed concerning the problems authentic reform may cause. It is true that problems will arise when parents can choose which school their children will attend; however, we ought not establish a double standard on this issue. Could parental choice result in a worse situation than we have now? A substantial majority of the poor express their preference for parental choice. Shall we deny them that which we reserve unto ourselves in order to preserve "the system"? We must ask ourselves whether we are more interested in maintaining institutions, jobs, and security for employees than in providing justice, hope, and social mobility for all.
The failings of public education are intractable and resistant to traditional reform efforts.[87] Certainly, the risks inherent in fundamental change are well worth taking – especially given the broad advantages associated with such a change. Certainly, we can creatively embrace reform while we recognize that in any system designed by people there will be inadequacies. Let us not allow the uncertainty of choice to prevent us from leaving the current destructive public school monopoly.
While market-based choice will not solve all of Detroit's problems, it seems clear that the current public school monopoly is intolerable. The time has come to move beyond the rhetoric of reform to the reality of choice.
Detroit's future and the future of its people demand that every child, black, white, hispanic, and Asian, rich, and poor be given an opportunity to succeed. The time has come to end the public school system's pathological oppression of the poor by bureaucrats. In our view, market-based choice is more than "mere reform"; it is a panacea.
The Report of the Detroit Strategic Planning Project, November 1987, p. 1.
Ibid., p. 1.
Ibid., p. 43.
James Skillen, "Religion and Education Policy: Where do we go from here?" Journal of Law and Politics, Spring 1990, Volume VI, No. 3, p. 503. See also C. Glen, The Myth of the Common School (1988).
William A. Donohue, "Why Schools Fail: Reclaim the Moral Dimension of Education," Heritage Foundation Lecture 172, (Summer 1988), p. 4.
Dwight R. Lee, "An Alternative to the Public School: Education Vouchers," Intercollegiate Review, (Spring 1986), p. 30. See also "Verbal Skills Slid As SAT Scores Fall," The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 1990, pp. 81 and 83.
Michigan State Board of Education. Bulletin 1014 for 1988-1989. This is based on current operating expenditures per pupil.
Statistical Abstract of United States, 1990, p. 472.
Michigan State Board of Education, Bulletin 1014 for 1988-1989.
Ibid. See also, "Oak Park Schools Under Fire," The Detroit Free Press, June 22, 1990, p. 38.
Eric Hanushek, "The Impact of Differential Expenditures on School Performance," Educational Researcher, May 1987.
The Detroit Free Press, November 25, 1990, p. 2F.
Ibid. It should be noted that disparity in per-pupil expenditures within the Detroit public school system itself is quite large. For example, per-pupil spending at Murray-Wright High is 39°,'0 of per pupil spending at Denby High. See The Detroit News, March 26, 1991 p. 6A.
James D. Gwartney, CATO Journal, Volume 10, No. 1, (Spring/Summer 1990), p. 159. See also, "It's Education's Turn to Restructure," Publication #91, Center for the Study of American Business, Washington University, April 1989.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 162, 163.
Valerie E. Lee and Carolee Stewart, "1985-86 National Assessment of Educational Progress: Proficiency in mathematics and science, Catholic and public schools compared," University of Michigan, November 15, 1988, p. 46.
Ibid., p.43.
Phil Keisling, The Great School Debate, edited by Beatrice & Ronald Gross, Simon & Schuster, report on Dr. Coleman study, p. 458.
Hanushek, The Educational Researcher.
The Detroit News, April 10, 1989, p. 8A.
Hanushek, The Educational Researcher.
Michigan State Board of Education, Bulletin 1014 for 1988-89 and Bulletin 1013 for 1985-86.
Harry Hutchison, "Better Schools: Let Competition Heat Up," The Detroit News, August 22, 1990, p. 15A. See also, Public Choice and Constitutional Economics, James Gwartney and Richard Wagner, "Public Choice and the Conduct of Representative Government," edited by Gwartney and Wagner, Cato Institute and Jai Press, 1988, p. 15.
Report prepared by Detroit Public School District (DS-4061- A-LEA) for Michigan Department of Education pages 3 and 4, received December 14, 1988. (Our source, Citizens Research Council).
The Detroit News, April 10, 1989, p. 8A.
Ibid.
Mary Raynid, Parental Choice: The Solution for the Education of our Children, transcript of the New England Educational Summit, Yankee Institute, October 18, 1988, pp. 54-57.
Ibid., p. 55 and 56.
K. Alan Snyder, Critical Issues: A New Agenda for Education, edited by Eileen M. Gardner, The Heritage Foundation, 1985, p. 13.
403 U.S. 602, 625 (1971), (Douglas, J. Concurring) cited in Skillen, p. 504.
James Dobson and Gary L. Bauer, Children at Risk, Word Publishing, 1990, p. 36.
K. Alan Snyder, p. 14.
K. Alan Snyder, p. 16. See also, the advisory panel on Financing Elementary and Secondary Education's comments on the school finance project, prepared by Vituilo-Martin Consultants, April 29,1984 (available from the Chairman's office, Free Congress Foundation, 721 Second Street, N.E., Washington D.C. 20002).
DQEP Proposed Policy on Empowerment & Schools of Choice, July 18, 1990, p. 5.
The Detroit News, November 26, 1990, p. 8A.
Myron Lieberman, Privatization & Educational Choice, St. Martins Press, (1989), p.150.
James W. Skillen, p. 503.
Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, Avon Book,,, (1979), pp. 161-162.
Walberg, Bakalis, Bast, Baer, We Can Rescue Our Children, Heartland Institute, (1988), p. 89.
Ibid., pp. 89-103.
Ibid.
David T. Kearns and Dennis Doyle, Winning The Brain Race, ICS Press, (1988), p. 16.
Stephen D. Sugarman, "Using Private Schools to Promote Public Values", working paper no. 18, Earl Warren Legal Institute, School of Law, University of California at Berkley, November 28, (Draft), p. 5.
Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid., p. 5.
See James Buchanan, "The Contractarian Logic of Classical Liberalism" Bowling Green University, Social Philosophy Center Conference, October 20. 1988 and Richard Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, Little Brown & Company, 1986.
Sugarman, pp. 6 and 7.
Skillen, p. 504.
Ibid., p. 510
Barry N. Poulson, "Education and the Family During the Industrial Revolution", The American Family and the State, Edited by Pepen and Gladhe, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, (1986), p. 152.
Skillen, p.511.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Poulson, p. 153.
Ibid., p. 154.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 157 and 158.
Meek v. Pittenger, 421 U.S. 349 (1974), at p. 395 (Rehnquist, Concurring in the Judgment in part, dissenting in part).
Ibid., p. 395.
Skillen, p. 512.
Thomas R. Ascik, "The Courts and Education", Critical Issues: A New Agenda for Education, Edited by Eileen Gardner, The Heritage Foundation, (1985), p. 63.
Sugarman, p. 13.
Skillen, p. 515.
Sugarman, p. 13.
Of some relevance is recent litigation concerning The Equal Access Act. In Board of Education v. Mergens, 110 S. Ct. 23-56 (1990), Justice O'Connor's plurality opinion resting on the logic ofWidmar v. Vincent 454 U.S. 263 (1981) concluded that the equal access policy has a secular purpose--prevention of discrimination against religious and other types of speech. See Richard R. Duncan, "Religious Civil rights in Public Access", Indiana Law Review,vol., 24, No. 1 pp. 111 at 123 and 124, (1>91). See also Michael W. McConnell, "Free Exercise Revisionism and the Smith Decision", The University of Chicago Law Review, vol, 57, p. 1109, ('1990) and Michael W. McConnell and Richard A. Posner, "An Economic Approach to Issue of Religious Freedom", The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 56. p. 1 (1989).
Gwartney and Wagner, p. 25.
McConnell and Posner, p. 11.
Sugarman, p. 7.
McConnell and Posner, p. 11.
Sugarman, p. 7.
Sugarman, see pp. 7-10.
Times, p. 3A, 1990.
Carol Innerst, p. 3A.
The Detroit News, July 17, 1990, p. 8A.
Joan Richardson, "Public Problem Private Solution," The Detroit Free Press, November 18, 1990, p. 1G.
Joan Richardson, pp. 1G and 4G.
Lonzetta Davis et al v. Herbert J. Grover, Judge Steingass; decision and order Case No. 90 CV 2576, August 6, 1990. Circuit Court Branch 8, State of Wisconsin.
Joan Richardson, p. 4G.
Sugarman, p. 15.
Warren Brookes, "Education Reform: Time to Go Dutch," The Detroit News, June 7, 1990, p. 15A.
Patrick J. Keleher, St. Croix Review, October 1990, Volume XXIII, No. _5, pp. 9-18.
Robert Woodson, Parental Choice: The Solution for the Education of Our Children, transcript of the New England Educational Summit, Yankee Institute, October 18, 1988, p. 71.
The Report of the Detroit Strategic Planning Project, p. 45.
For additional insights on the value of private education see Philip K. Porter and Michael L. Davis, "The Value of Private Property in Education: Innovation, Production, and Employment," Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 397-426 (1991).
Myron Lieberman, Beyond Public Education, Praeger Publishers, (1986), p. 186.
See Ron Russell, "30% of Detroit Seniors Fail Basic Skills Tests," The Detroit News. May 17, 1991, p. 1A.
Education in Detroit is in crisis. Most people familiar with the city would assume without much deliberation that such an assessment applies to public education and would readily agree. What is typically not understood, and certainly under-appreciated, is the fact that thousands of Detroit children are receiving surprisingly good educations in more than 100 little "oases of excellence" all over the city.
We speak here not of such well-known places as Cass Tech, Renaissance or M. L. King High Schools which have distinguished themselves from the typical public schools in Detroit, but rather of the non-public schools in the city. They don't make the headlines much, but perhaps they should. As a rule, they are providing children with access to quality education in safe environments at considerably less cost than their public counterparts.
This is not to suggest that private or parochial education in Detroit is thriving. In fact, a common concern among those most intimately involved is that it is in trouble too – often struggling for the funds it needs and always starved of the attention it deserves. In any event, non-public education is not endangered by poor performance; that's the one "luxury" it can least afford.
In a 1986 study for the Chicago-based Heartland Institute entitled "Access to Quality: Private Schools in Chicago's Inner City," Dr. Joan Davis Ratteray wrote, "Inner-city parents all across America are breaking away from large government monopolies in education." Detroit is no exception. What too often is missing is a willingness on the part of the educational and business communities in Detroit to take notice and learn from the experiences of the non-public schools.
The most potent incentive for non-public schools to succeed is the fact that they can fail – that is, go out of business for lack of patrons. No one is required to pay their bills regardless of what happens in their classrooms. They have customers, not captives.
When it comes to non-public education, parents are fully vested with the power of choice. Indeed, when parents choose to send their children to private schools, they usually are choosing to pay twice for education – in tuition at the private school and in taxes for the public system they are attempting to escape. It's not enough for a non-public school to provide a package that's no better – or even slightly better – than the neighborhood public schools it competes with; it must offer a total package which parents regard as much better.
In an effort to catch a glimpse of what is happening in Detroit's 107 non-public schools, we interviewed scores of principals, teachers, parents and students. We surveyed literature and reports they provided. We consulted with experts in education from both private and public sectors. We personally visited more than one-third of the city's non-public schools.
Unlike public school systems, no central office compiles exhaustive data on private schools. Individual school policies on gathering and keeping information vary, and in the case of such matters as parental income, almost none of Detroit's non-public schools make any careful attempt to determine, let alone file, such data. Though this may appear as a hindrance to our study, we take pains to avoid assertions except those we feel are justified by what we have learned.
We hasten at this point to inform the reader that our limited focus prevents us in this study from examining another alternative to public schools, namely, home schooling. Some parents (we have no idea how many in Detroit) have resorted to this method of education for some of the same reasons other parents have chosen the extra expense of non-public schools. Research has been cascading forth recently which shows that home schooling is surprisingly good on the average, with home-schooled children doing considerably better on standardized tests than their public school counterparts. It may, for some parents in Detroit, represent a feasible and much-to-be-desired alternative to the public system they are confronted with.
This is not the most comprehensive report possible, but it may be the most comprehensive one to date. We firmly believe that the impressions we derived are warranted, but we sincerely hope this is only the first of many serious and more thorough examinations of the phenomenon of non-public education in the Motor City. As far as education is concerned, government is not the only game in town.
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What do parents find attractive about the non-public schools they send their children to? What methods or policies form the underpinnings of the schools' success? What shortcomings do the schools have? These are just some of the questions we hope to answer as we look more closely at non-public education in Detroit.
Detroit's 107 non-public schools are notably diverse in character and methods.
Almost all are non-profit and in some way connected with a church or religious organization. Those with Catholic Church affiliation number 46. Lutheran schools number 16. Comprising the remainder are Baptist schools, Christian but non-denominational schools, Montessori schools, Muslim schools, a Krishna school, and a very small number of for-profit, non-sectarian schools.
Total enrollment of Detroit children in the city's non-public schools for 1990-91 was approximately 19,500, or about 10.5 percent of that for Detroit's 248 public schools. This does not include what we believe to be a substantial number of Detroit children attending non-public schools outside the city, in neighboring communities. Unfortunately, no one keeps thorough records that could reliably project a total figure but we do know, for example, that 82 percent of the 491 students enrolled in Grosse Pointe Park's St. Clare of Montefalco (in 1990) came from the city of Detroit.
Tuition at the church-affiliated schools, for the 1990-91 academic year, ranged from a low of $725 to a high of about $2,500. Average charges were less in the lower grades. Average tuition at the church-affiliated high schools was approximately $1,700. Catholic schools spend about $1,300 per pupil on average, which represents less than a third of what Detroit's public schools spend per pupil. (The situation is similar to that in many major American cities. In New York, for instance, the Catholic schools spend $1,200 per pupil compared to $7,107 for that city's public schools, according to the May 4, 1991 New York Times.)
At Detroit's very few non-sectarian private schools, tuition is much higher, starting at a little under $4,000.
Almost all the non-public schools have payment plans which allow parents (or whoever is paying tuition) to pay in installments: semi-annually, quarterly, or even monthly. Such factors as low teacher salaries, little administrative overhead, fundraising activities and church subsidies help keep tuition down – a "must" if the schools are not to lose customers to their "free" public counterparts – but rarely allow for scholarship assistance for needy students.
The lack of scholarship monies means that the schools do not bother to attempt to determine parental incomes. Such data, we feel, would likely verify what one senses when visiting the schools and the neighboring areas they serve, namely, that the overwhelming share of their clientele are from low-income, often single-parent households. Nearly every principal we talked to advised us, based frequently on intimate, personal knowledge of the families, that Detroit's non-public, churchaffiliated schools are serving thousands of very poor families who struggle and sacrifice every day to scrape together tuition money. We feel this story of love and heroic commitment is one of Detroit's beautiful but under-reported secrets.
Many people are under the impression that Catholic schools are for Catholic children, Lutheran schools are for Lutheran children, and so on. The believe that parents send their children to religious schools because they want the family's faith taught in the classroom. In the wealthier suburbs, where three-quarters or more of the students enrolled in religious schools do indeed come from families who practice the same faith as the schools, that would seem to be the case. But in Detroit, the numbers tell a different story. In the Catholic and Lutheran schools, the numbers of students who are not of the same faith as the school equals or exceeds 80 percent of the student body.
That's right: at least 80 percent of children in Catholic schools in Detroit are not Catholic. At least 80 percent of children in Lutheran schools in the city are not Lutheran. Upon examination, the reasons parents are sending their children to these schools becomes apparent: they want their children to get a good education in a safe environment where values of right and wrong are strongly emphasized. Those parents do not feel their children will get these things in the public schools.
Incidentally, we did notice one interesting difference between the Catholic and Lutheran schools beyond the obvious ones. It's a difference which may give one an edge over the other in the struggle to survive in an inhospitable environment with a shrinking population base. Lutherans seem more able to get parents involved than the Catholics (in fundraising, parent/teacher meetings, etc.) and perhaps as one result, Lutheran administrators are notably more optimistic about the future of private education in Detroit than are Catholic administrators.
Racial strife in Detroit non-public schools is almost non-existent, even though teaching and administrative staff are overwhelmingly white and the student population is overwhelmingly (often 90 percent and higher) black. A values-oriented, Christian emphasis is one reason for that. Another reason is economic in nature: to in any way inject racism or allow it to fester could be financially devastating; where survival depends upon earning the public's voluntary favor, racism is stupid and costly.
"Values" is a word that has cropped up here more than once already, and deservedly so. It seems that the schools we surveyed are not only oases of academic performance, they are oases of values as well. Students in these schools come from many of Detroit's most crime-ridden and drug-infested neighborhoods, yet it is difficult for us to imagine that they could ever end up in anywhere near the trouble that their neighborhood peers in public schools do. We base this not on any hard and fast statistics (collecting them would make a fascinating and, we think, most revealing study for someone), but on impressions from our visits and discussions.
Many teachers in private schools who once taught in Detroit's public schools will cite the presence of values in private school curricula as a major reason for their willingness to teach there at perhaps half the pay they formerly earned. Discipline, manners, respect for life and property are ingrained into the children by the teachers and the administrators, with the full backing of the parents. One teacher told us that she could impart values "without the ACLU breathing down my neck telling me that's religion." She said that what was needed in Detroit, habitually one of the two or three most crime-ridden cities in America, was "a heavy dose of values." We found that hard to argue with.
Writing in The New Republic (May 13, 1991), Abigail Thernstrom cited values as the telling virtue of church-affiliated schools. Referring in particular to Catholic schools, she argued that the demands upon the students "extend to their relations with others and their spiritual growth. The moral seriousness of these schools stemming from their religious commitment makes them willing to dwell on such values as respect, self-respect, and responsibility – topics they touch upon in every class .... Of course they teach religion, but they don't pressure non-Catholics to convert. Indeed, students belonging to Western and non-Western faiths share their religious life. `They don't convert, but they do come out thinking about what's right and wrong,"' according to a New York City official.
Thernstrom's article, incidentally, mentioned another success of Catholic schools which we feel is in evidence in Detroit. The so-called "disadvantaged" student, she says, is typically "not disadvantaged in a Catholic school environment. Single-parent black or Hispanic students will learn more math and acquire better verbal skills in a Catholic school than they will in either public or (non-Catholic) private schools. The Catholic schools do what the public schools are supposed to do: equalize educational opportunity. They greatly narrow the gap in performance between the haves and the have-nots."
A March 28,1991 page-one story in The Wall Street Journal by Gary Putka was full of praise for Catholic schools in general. For example: "Based on the latest available comparisons, students in Catholic school beat public students by an average of 4.5% in mathematics, 4.8% in science, and 12.5% in reading in the three grade levels of the federal government's National Assessment of Educational Progress test," while "Catholic high school sophomores are four times less likely to drop out than their public school counterparts," and are "much more likely to go on to college."
Not surprisingly, we found in our visits strong verification of much of what Brookings Institution scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe found in their studies. Because these non-public schools must attract, not coerce, customers, they aim to please. They have found that an effective school is one that thinks and acts like a team. Teachers and administrators work together or they part company, quickly. The schools usually have a mission which is understood and carried out by everyone. Principals commonly are part-time teachers too, or at least very few became principals because they wanted to "get out of the classroom." Teachers feel they really are making a difference, that their time is not wasted following the directives of some distant board or bureaucrat, that their talents are respected and their abilities valued; in short, they feel "empowered."
All that helps explain a lot of things, not the least of which is the extraordinarily low dropout rate in non-public schools. Whereas that rate hovers around 40 percent year after year in the public schools, our numbers suggest a rate of less than 5 percent for the non-public schools.
The findings of Chubb and Moe regarding bureaucracy seem to be borne out in Detroit as well. The central administrative bureaucracy of the city's public schools numbers in excess of 6,800, while pupils in the classroom number more than 167,000. The central administrative bureaucracy of the educational division of the archdiocese of Detroit has 20 employees, while students enrolled in the schools it oversees in three counties number about 60,000.
Beyond those revealing statistics, it's even more shocking to learn that a high number of the administrators in the public schools (and teachers as well) frequently have a very high absentee rate. Citing the school district's monthly Report on Educational Quality for February 1990, an editorial in The Detroit News (April 23, 1990, p. 6A) revealed that "39 percent of the central administrative staff and 35 percent of teachers had unsatisfactory attendance during the period. That means they were present in tile classroom 84 percent of the time or less .... Employers in the private sector expect their employees to maintain a minimum 95 percent attendance rate...." Indeed, many a non-public school would drive its costs up, its performance down, and its customers away long before its employee attendance rate plunged to such levels.
Low administrative overhead is a cardinal rule at the non-public schools. The cost per pupil at Holy Redeemer Elementary, as a typical example of Catholic schools, for instance, was $1,400 last year. The lowest cost public school in the state of Michigan spends approximately $2,800 per pupil. The patronage of private schools is entirely voluntary, one of the many reasons they cannot afford the "luxury" of massive bureaucracies and unionized employees.
The National Center for Education Statistics has shown that almost half of all money spent in public schools goes for expenses other than those in the classroom; only 58.5 percent of their budgets in 1988-89 went directly to teacher salaries, benefits and classroom supplies. The rest went for food services, interscholastic athletics, maintenance, and a myriad of other non-instructional "support services." All indications are that a much higher percentage of expenditures go for direct instructional purposes in non-public schools, and that Detroit is probably quite representative of the national picture.
Yet another reason for the disparity in costs between public and non-public schools is student occupancy. In our visits to the non-public schools in Detroit, we saw little wasted space and few, if any, idle employees. Each school and its student population seemed to make for a close fit. That's probably because as the city's population has declined, non-public schools have had to downsize accordingly to survive the financial pressures.
Detroit's public schools, on the other hand, have been reluctant to do the same – instead, often hanging on for political reasons to costly staffed facilities with very low student occupancy. As recently as the 1989-90 school year, for example, 55 percent of Detroit's public schools were less than 75 percent full (at least two were less than 30 percent full), prompting a belated proposal from the Superintendent to close 16. An outside consultant who studied the district's finances said it would make more sense to close as many as 100!
Numbers which tell another major story come from a 1985 study done by Dennis P. Doyle and Terry W. Hartle of the American Enterprise Institute. They found that 35 percent of "central city" Detroit's public school teachers sent their children to private schools, which was considerably higher than that for the general population. In Michigan as a whole, 18 percent of public school teachers sent their children to private schools while just 12 percent of the general population did.
Non-public schools have plenty of shortcomings, most of which stem from their meager financial resources. Teacher salaries are half to two-thirds those in the public schools. Average starting salary, for instance, is approximately $13,000, compared to $24,000 in the public schools. Interestingly, The Detroit News (May 20, 1991, p. 6A) pointed out that Michigan's public school teachers are very well paid: average pay for the 1990-91 school year was $37,682, or 205.4 percent of the state's per capita income of $18,346. Put another way, says The News, Michigan's average public school teacher salary is 14 percent higher than the national average and the eighth highest in the country, whereas state per capita income is actually below the national average.
The private schools in Detroit are frequently not equipped to handle those with learning disabilities. Parental involvement, though generally more prevalent than exists in public schools, is still shamefully scarce. There are almost no black male teachers as role models in the classroom (a shortcoming shared by the public schools). Tight budgets have worked against the introduction of the latest computers and teaching aids in many of the schools.
Some people say another drawback of non-public schools is that they generally offer fewer courses, less vocational training, and not as many extra-curricular activities as the public schools do. We are inclined to side with those researchers who argue that "variety" may actually be retarding educational progress in the public schools by diluting the intake of what's really important. By putting more attention on the "basics" with fewer distractions or frills, non-public schools may be taking their students further down the path to success in later life. Too often, all those "extras" in public schools simply mean, as John Witte of the University of Wisconsin at Madison puts it, "Kids are able to escape taking difficult courses in public schools."
The preponderance of Detroit's non-public school administrators believe that their brand of education in Detroit is in trouble. A generally somber attitude prevails. Many of the non-public school administrators and teachers feel unnoticed and under-appreciated, ignored by an "establishment" that regards public education as a sacred cow that can be criticized but never opened to genuine choice and competition on a level playing field with their non-public counterparts.
At each private school we visited, we asked if anyone from the public schools, the Michigan Education Association, or the Department of Education had ever come by to learn firsthand of the school's progress, its successes, whatever it was doing right. That sort of thing was almost unheard of; officials from just two schools told us they could recall such a visit. Does the "education establishment" in Detroit and Michigan at large think it has nothing to learn from what is happening in non-public schools? We strongly believe in the need for regular contact, a serious dialogue, between public and non-public schools.
The appendix portion of this book consists of very brief descriptions of some of the schools we've been talking about here. They are not by any means thorough. Qualities cited in one school may in fact be present in most or all of the rest; we have written simply a few of the attributes that stood out in our minds as we looked at each school one at a time. Taken as a whole, the sampling will suit our purpose if it does little more than whet the reader's appetite to further explore Detroit's non-public schools.
In any event, the more we learned about these institutions, the more we became convinced that not only do they deserve encouragement, but more of Detroit's children ought to have a chance to have access to them. Why wouldn't it be helpful to the state of education and society, we asked ourselves, if more parents who are unhappy with the public schools could avail themselves and their children of the opportunities the other schools have to offer? We could only conclude that such a development would indeed be a very positive one.
Detroit is already inching in this direction, fortunately. Roman Catholic Archbishop Adam Maida's plan to open two new nondenominational schools in the fall of 1991 is evidence of that. Maida's formula will combine a nondenominational framework with many of the features found commonly in Catholic schools and cited here in some detail. In the first year, 400 Detroit schoolchildren will participate – 400 who otherwise would become statistics in the public system. Echoing the favorable response the archbishop has generated around the city, The Detroit Free Press editorialized (May 19, 1991, p. 2F), "If the formula proves successful, the dominant, all-too-slowly reforming public school system may find itself under more pressure to improve."
What Detroit (and Michigan) really needs, however, is choice that is much more far-reaching, choice that maximizes the ability of parents and teachers to make a positive difference in the education of children.
(EDITORS' NOTE: For brief descriptions of some of Detroit's non-public schools, see the Appendix.)
More and more Americans these days seem to understand that if there's one good way to finance and deliver education, it certainly isn't the way the government does it now. In fact, it's becoming increasingly clear that there may be many good ways to do it, all of which employ elements of choice, competition and the private sector.
Among the innovations worthy of note are those from two neighboring New England states, Vermont and New Hampshire. They are clearly doing something right, or at least less wrong than what's going on in almost every other state: both are spending close to the national per pupil average for education and both spend less than the national average for teacher salaries, while student performance in both states is consistently at or near the very top in the country.
There may well be a direct connection in these states between student performance and the degree to which education is run and paid for at the state level. In New Hampshire, 90 percent of education money comes from local government and only 6 percent comes from the state, compared to the national averages of 44 percent and 50 percent, respectively.
Some have objected to the New Hampshire system because it has produced the highest property taxes in the nation. However, citizens there shoulder the lowest burden of overall state and local taxation of any citizens in the country. New Hampshire, in fact, remains the one state which has neither a personal income tax nor a broad-based sales tax. (Its economy, not by coincidence, has been consistently robust, outperforming that of almost every state over the last two decades.)
In Vermont, 61 percent of education funding is derived locally and 34 percent comes from the state. That's practically the same as the average for Michigan, though our uniquely complicated education funding formula produces wide variations from district to district. The two New England states, however, have been considerably more innovative than Michigan when it comes to education.
Following the principle of "He who pays the piper calls the tune," less involvement by state government means more local control by the very people who are most involved with education in the first place. That means teachers, principals and parents. Less state involvement usually means less bureaucracy and politics, lower costs, more freedom for innovation, fewer schemes from professional "educrats" in state capitols to "homogenize" and mold young minds.
Greater emphasis on local control also fractures the power of teachers' unions, which is why their leadership has generally favored centralization. It's easier to get your way statewide by renting a few legislators than by bowling over large numbers of parents and local school boards. In this state, the Michigan Education Association – a teachers' union – is widely regarded as one of Lansing's most powerful lobbies.
Back in New Hampshire, the small town of Epsom is the home of a pathbreaking new experiment that is turning into what The New York Times labels "a national testing ground for plans that offer parents a choice as to where their offspring will go to school."
Enacted late in 1990, the Epsom plan grants a $1,000 property tax rebate to parents who send a child to any school, public or private, other than the local public high school. For every family that opts for the rebate arrangement, Epsom will save $3,600 off the $4,600 it now pays per pupil to Pembroke Academy, the public school. The plan's author, Jack Kelleher, argues that the program combats the drawbacks of "a government monopoly over schools" by fostering "choice and competition." "This is the only program I know of," he says, "where the more people participate, the more the government saves."
Something even more interesting – and extremely unusual – has been going on in Vermont for decades. It might properly be called the nation's oldest education voucher plan.
Nearly half of Vermont's 240 or so towns have no public high school and do not belong to any of the state's high school districts. School boards in these towns either designate a nearby public high school and pay the full tuition for any local student to attend it, or simply pay to any approved nonsectarian high school in the nation (that a local student chooses to attend) a tuition amount equal to the average Vermont public high school tuition – in effect, a voucher plan.
Most of the students over the years who have utilized the voucher option have chosen to go to nearby public or private schools in Vermont. But not a small number have gone out of state and one young Vermonter even used a voucher to enroll some years ago at a school in Ketchum, Idaho.
The lessons from New Hampshire and Vermont cry out for attention in Michigan, where the conventional wisdom is that what's needed is not just more money for education but a higher share of it coming from the state as well. Instead of the more money approach, what we should be concentrating on is a bold departure from the past – one that emphasizes local control, enhanced parental choice, and free enterprise.
One Size Doesn't Fit All
Almost everywhere in our economy, free enterprise proves its superiority over government operation. If we could inject some of the virtues of free enterprise into schooling – even transforming public schools into privatized entities themselveswhere feasible – the benefits would be enormous.
Parents would be able to choose a school they believe would benefit their children's unique learning needs, instead of the "one size fits all" variety. Liberated from the bureaucracy that now smothers their initiative, stimulated by competition and challenged by the opportunity for personal rewards, teachers would take a more prominent role in improving the schools. Encouraging entrepreneurship in schooling would expand both the supply of schools and their diversity. Taxpayers would have greater assurance that their investment in education would show positive results and not simply declining performance and rising demands for more funding.
As earlier chapters in this book have made plain, the problem in public education today is not funding. It's not equity in funding. The problem has everything to do with the fact that we deliver education the same way we deliver the mail – by way of a bureaucratic monopoly. If we allow the "more money" or "equal funding" morass to stymie real reform and throw good money after bad, then we will fail the schools and we will fail the children. They both deserve better.
For real choice to be effective in improving the schools, we must welcome diversity. We must place at least as much faith in the market and the private sector as we have mistakenly placed in the public sector in the past. We must not be afraid to trust that the vast majority of parents, when empowered by choice, will seek out and demand the quality education they have too often been denied by the way we do things now. In short, we must agree to disagree about schools, with you having your school and I mine.
As measures are implemented to foster these changes, private schools are likely to grow and proliferate. For real choice to be effective, we must embrace such a development. Worse than the system we are plagued with now would be one in which government uses choice to expand its influence over private education. Government should, in fact, recognize its own failure and not seek to intrude even further into private schools. Indeed, simultaneous with any program to implement greater parental choice ought to be concrete steps to diminish the role of government in all aspects of private education except perhaps for health and safety. We've trusted bureaucracy and monopoly for too long. It's time to put our faith in the virtues that made America great in all areas where they have been tried: competition, private initiative, and, of course, consumer choice.
One way to accomplish this would be through a voucher plan, one that would include both public and private schools. It is not within the scope of this work to present a detailed prescription for implementing vouchers but rather to suggest that minds be opened to the idea and a public discussion begin. It is quite likely that at some point in the not-to-distant future, Michigan voters will be asked to consider serious voucher proposals.
Even Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York, in another context, has said that though certain things may be government's responsibility, that doesn't always mean that government itself must provide them, so long as it puts mechanisms in place thatinsure somebody will.And if that somebody can actually provide those things better and more efficiently, then allowing that to happen is nothing short of wise stewardship of scarce resources.
One program the government has to assist the needy is the food stamp program – a kind of voucher plan. Whatever you may think of food stamps – and admittedly, there are problems – there would be a much worse way to get the job done, namely, to require that everybody get their groceries from government grocery stores or pay twice to patronize private ones. That would mean doing it the way we provide education – with all the attendant high costs and bureaucracy. As it is, the food stamp program gives poor people a "voucher" and they shop around among private enterprises for the best deals, preserving the elements of choice and competition to the benefit of all concerned.
Vouchers might be given to parents for their children's schooling, worth in dollars what the taxpayers are willing to spend per pupil. Parents would "spend" this money at the school(s) of their choice, public or private. Vouchers might be equal across the state, or they could vary according to local costs of living, special education, or other factors. Parents could add their own money if they wished to "purchase" a more expensive school.
Because schools would have a new source of direct revenue other than taxpayers – the parents – measures to please the parents and sharpen parental involvement would be encouraged.
Another innovative idea (which could be put in place with or without a voucher plan) would be to give ownership of each public school to the teachers now teaching there, without the bureaucracy we now confront – and giving the teacher-owners the same freedom as private schools. Since it would give teachers a direct financial stake in the change, many would support the idea from the start. Some might choose to organize their schools as corporations, with profit-sharing plans or stock options. This may seem far-fetched, but it's already being done in a number of private schools. Teachers would benefit both financially and in improved self-esteem. And the opportunity for reward and profit would encourage teacher-owners to improve education.
Are teachers qualified to run schools? Some say that teachers are not entrepreneurs and are incapable of running schools, a statement which may be true for some but surely not for a great many in the profession. Given the opportunity, entrepreneurial qualities blossom from people in any and all walks of life.
Minnesota will begin experimenting in the fall of 1991 with a plan that is intended to tap the spirit of enterprise among teachers. That state will allow the creation of independently run public schools, known as "chartered schools." A new law gives teachers, backed by parents, the right to apply for charters to set up and operate their own schools.
According to The Los Angeles Times, "With chartered schools, the role of the school board, traditionally the educational system's dictator, fades to that of a monitor. Teachers must demonstrate to their sponsoring school board that they are performing on agreed-upon educational goals, but they gain unprecedented classroom freedom.
"Chartered schools are funded," says The Times, "from the same pool of public money now spent on traditional public schools .... Open enrollment will allow students to pick schools in whatever district they choose, and their state education dollars will follow them...."
The new Minnesota plan is a further small step in the right direction, but so much more could be done. And Michigan is still far behind Minnesota!
The bottom line is this: Transforming the public schools into free enterprises, or at least injecting free enterprise virtues into education to the maximum degree possible consistent with the noble goal of making education available to all who seek it, is the path to genuine reform and real progress. We could cut the Gordian knot that has thwarted the potential of so many from teachers to students to parents. We could halt or even roll back ever-increasing taxes for a system that fails to deliver. Michigan could excel in education and as a consequence, in every other aspect of life and society.
The time for change has arrived. The time for educational choice for Michigan is now. What are we waiting for?
Please note: Initial figures for grades, number of students, numbers of fulland part-time teachers, and tuition apply to the 1989-90 school year. Figures in parentheses apply to the 1990-91 school year and appear only when different from the previous year.
St. Ambrose Academy (Catholic), 1091 Alter Rd.; founded 1914; pre-school through 8th grade, 203 students; 11 full-time teachers, 2 part-time teachers; tuition: $990.00/yr. (No change in this data for 1990-91).
Fundraisers and subsidies from the archdiocese provide vital financial assistance at St. Ambrose, which has one of the very lowest tuitions in the city. Sister Marie Cyril Delisi, principal, reports that some of her enrollees were former public school students with major problems. "We do not get the cream of the crop," she says, "but we take each individual with all his/ her faults and limitations and try to work with them." Weekly school assemblies are designed to give recognition and peer support for students who have in some way succeeded or excelled during the previous week. Regular homework assignments are regarded as "critical" and are integral to school policy. An exceptional program for those with "Learning Disabilities" has frequently produced advances in students of as much as two years.
St. Thomas Aquinas Elementary (Catholic), 5845 Auburn; founded 1956; K through 8th (pre-K through 8th), 228 students (250 students); 9 full-time teachers (10 full-time teachers), 2 part-time teachers; tuition: $1,650/yr. non-parishioner, $1,030 parishioner ($1,670, $1,100).
Parental involvement is considered essential and is actively cultivated at St. Thomas Aquinas, with a notable degree of success. Administrators such as Sister Jan Stocking, principal, regard parents as "co-educators of the children," and have encouraged them as volunteers in the school, members of the school board, coordinators of workshops and seminars, and planners of "family-type" activities from picnics to ballgames. Test scores (American Testronics) put this school's students at the 70th percentile of students nationally. Fundraisers and subsidies from the archdiocese assist in financing. The school currently has a waiting list of prospective students.
St. Clare of Montefalco (Catholic), 16231 Charlevoix, Grosse Pointe Park (included here because students who reside within Detroit make up 82% of the school's enrollment); founded 1928; K through 8th, 491 students (468 students); 21 full-time teachers, 2 part-time teachers; tuition: $1,690/yr. non-parishioner, $1,125 parishioner ($1,845, $1,250).
This school boasts a strong reading program, an outstanding sports program, a gifted/talented program for grades 5-8, professionally-produced public relations materials including handbook and brochures, and numerous academic achievements in spite of a library that is "woefully outdated." The school's goals are clearly outlined in a mission statement and are broken down in actual practice into "current" goals and "long-range" ones. Progress is carefully monitored and in the long-range category, goals are occasionally refined and updated. The principal, Hank Burakowski, reports that in meeting the goals for the most recent year, the school was nearly 100°1o successful. Homework is deemed very important, and guidelines throughout all grade levels are part of school policy. An endowment fund, uncommon among non-public schools in Detroit, supplements tuition, church subsidy and fundraising efforts. The school currently maintains a waiting list of prospective students.
Dominican High School (Catholic), 9740 MeKinney; founded 1940, 9th through 12th grades (will add 6th-8th in fall 1990), 260 students (243 students in grades 9-12, 65 in grades 6-8); 19 full-time teachers (22 full-time teachers), 5 part-time teachers; tuition: $2,100/yr. ($2,250).
Sister Peggy Manners, principal, strongly differs with the "myth" that Catholic or other private schools pick and choose "the best and brightest." Her conviction is that minorities and disadvantaged youth excel and succeed in Catholic schools at a rate far superior to that in public schools. Her conviction is supported by several studies she referred to. Goals are "practical" and evaluated periodically by staff and faculty. "No goal is unrealistic," says principal Manners. Students wear uniforms. Many win scholarships to colleges and universities as well as local and national recognitions. Homework is regarded as important in every class, but each teacher sets his/her own requirements. The rather large gap between tuition per pupil and actual cost per pupil is made up through a raffle, candy sales, church assistance and a development drive.
Holy Cross Lutheran (Lutheran), 14213 Whitcomb; founded 1927; K through 8th grade, 200 students (180 students); 10 full-time teachers, 2 part-time teachers; tuition: $1,600/yr.
Known for a number of science fair winners and its music programs, Holy Cross Lutheran reports great difficulties in bringing public school transferees up to grade level. Discipline is a strong attribute; students wear uniforms. Typical of the complaints of most non-public school administrators, principal John Reed notes very low parental involvement in spite of it being highly desirable.
Most Holy Trinity (Catholic), 1229 Labrosse; founded 1840; ages 5-9 (non-graded), 200 students (187 students); 8 full-time teachers; tuition: $675/yr. ($725).
In a unique, non-graded regime in which teachers work with levels instead of grades, individual students pursue reading and mathematics according to their personal abilities, not their age. Special attention is given to fostering a strong desire to learn, a deep appreciation for knowledge, that the students will hopefully carry with them as they continue their schooling elsewhere later. The relaxed, relatively non-structured environment carries over to homework requirements. Sister Irene Theresa Gumbleton, principal, reports that "parents and students must realize that homework doesn't always mean written assignments. We do not impose any minimum homework requirements," she says. Standardized tests are "a contradiction" to the school's philosophy.
Mt. Calvary Lutheran (Lutheran), 17100 Chalmers; founded 1923; K through 8th grade, 160 students (142 students); 8 full-time teachers, 1 part-time teacher; tuition: $1,325/yr. ($1,400).
Principal Walter Krone makes the point that non-public schools such as his do choose selectively in the middle and upper grades "because students coming from public schools are so far behind." However, in the lower grades, especially kindergarten and first, there is "very little" selection because "we can teach any child to read and write if we can start them out ourselves." Homework from kindergarten on up is applied on a regular basis by the teachers, but by consensus not by set minimum school-wide standards. Students have consistently scored above the norm for students in their comparative grades on standardized tests, though not as high above as several years ago, "as the standard of living in the surrounding community has declined." Church subsidy is substantial.
GA. Zurstadt Lutheran (Lutheran), 22159 Grand River; founded 1924; K through 8th grade, 124 students (119 students); 5 full-time teachers (6 full-time teachers), 1 part-time teacher; tuition: $1,550/yr.
Though two teachers here are not certified, they have taught successfully at Zurstadt Lutheran for over 25 years. All seven of the school's board members are parents of children in the school. Students score well above average on standardized tests (Stanford Achievement). The school boasts a large percentage of its graduates who go on to attend and complete high school, with many going on to college. Awaiting list exists for prospective students.
Zion Lutheran (Lutheran), 4305 Military; founded 1577; Pre-school through 8th grade, 91 students; 5 full-time teachers; tuition: $1,350/yr. (No change in this data for 1990-91).
Daily homework for students at Zion is mandatory in all grades. Students score better than Detroit public school counterparts, but below national average. Funding sources besides tuition are increasingly hard to come by, according to principal Joe Dickerson. Starting salaries for teachers is $12,000, about the average for non-public schools in Detroit. The school maintains a waiting list of prospective students.
St. Gerard Consolidated School (Catholic), 19900 Evergreen; founded 1957; K through 8th grade plus Spec. Ed., 240 students (246 students); 12 full-time teachers, 4 part-time teachers; tuition: $1,675/yr.
Bingo, raffles, candy sales and a small church subsidy supplement tuition. The school has highly regarded sports, art, music and computer programs. To the claim that private schools have an advantage over public schools in that they can "pick and choose" their students, principal A. Francis Bontumasi replies, "Ridiculous! We simply implement discipline and high standards for our children; public schools can do the same but don't. It's that attitude that we can pick and choose that stops them (public schools) from adopting similar high standards." Regular parent surveys help the school assess its success. Students score at an average level (American Testronics) among peers nationwide.
Sister Clara Mohammed (Masjid Wali Muhammad Church), 5505 Van Dyke; founded 1932; K through 9th grade, 70 students (95 students); 7 full-time teachers, 2 part-time teachers; tuition: $2,000/yr.
Principal Nadir Ahmed estimates that 10°10 of students here have one or more parents who are teachers in public schools. Students wear uniforms in this highly disciplined environment with Islamic roots. Homework is standard both daily and on weekends. Emphasis is very strong on "keeping the moral climate high and intact without deterioration." Students score a grade level or two above their counterparts in nearby public schools. There is a waiting list for 1990-91.
Our Savior Lutheran (Lutheran), 12844 Elmdale; founded 1975; K through 8th grade, 130 students (112 students); G full-time teachers, 1 part-time teacher; tuition: $1,570/yr. non-members, $1,370/yr. members.
Parents here can volunteer as lunch monitors, teacher aides, room parents and, in some cases, one-day substitute teachers, but principal Howard Alexander reports that parental involvement is nowhere near what the school would like to have. He complains strongly about "apathetic parents." Nevertheless, the school counts among its greatest strengths a stable staff extremely dedicated to the "teaching ministry," school-wide computer instruction from K through 8th grade, and firm, consistent discipline that the children often do not receive in their home life. The governing board is relatively inexperienced and needs to work harder at firming up its goals. Students generally score about average.
Evangel Christian Academy (Evangel Echos Church of the Air), 11055 Glenfield; founded 1983; Pre-school through 12th grade, 320 students; 18 fulltime teachers; tuition: $1,350 in elementary, $1,550 in high school. (No change in this data for 1990-91).
Fundraisers and a church subsidy which takes care of mortgage payments on the school building assist in the school's financing. Principal Susan Conti reports that approximately 10% of enrollees were "rejected" by the public schools because of discipline problems. The school does test incoming students, but as a means to determine at what grade level each child should be assigned, not as a way to "weed out" undesirables. Parental involvement is deemed so important that the school "couldn't survive without it." The parents "call a lot," says Conti. Special emphasis is placed on "developing the whole person," with programs to encourage interest in the arts, sports and music. Administrators report that students coming here have been behind as much as four years but the longer they attend, the narrower the gap becomes. Some extreme deficiencies, such as in vocabulary, have been dramatically improved. The dropout rate in the high school grades is near zero.
East Catholic High (Catholic), 7320 St. Anthony Place; founded 1967 as an amalgamation of seven high schools on the east side; 9th through 12th grades, 234 students (200 students); 12 full-time teachers, 3 part-time teachers; tuition: $1,375/ yr. ($1,475).
The city's Catholic schools enroll a substantial number of non-Catholic students. At East Catholic High, 80% of the students are not Catholic. The dropout rate is less than 10% Rarely does East Catholic turn down a prospective student, even those with histories of troublemaking, and expulsion from public school. Administrators, most notably principal Sister Judy Dutka, make a habit of knowing each student personally. They stress values, mutual appreciation and knowledge of black traditions and history, and respect for life and property in a neighborhood where the great majority of children "have had friends or family members assaulted or shot." Seventy percent of the parents are below poverty level. The student population is 100% black, whereas teaching staff is composed of 11 whites and 4 blacks. About 80% of the school's graduates continue their education at 2-year or 4-year colleges. The school is especially proud of the large number of its graduates who have gone on to earn higher degrees and then come back to Detroit to live and work in the city and work to improve life in the neighborhoods. East Catholic is the only co-ed Catholic high school left on the east side (Dominican, the only other Catholic high school in that part of Detroit, is all-girls).
Bethany Lutheran (Lutheran), 11475 E. Outer Dr.; founded 1889; K through 8th grade, 210 students; 9 full-time teachers, 2 part-time teachers; tuition: $1,700/ yr. non-church members. (No change in this data for 1990-91).
Members of Bethany Lutheran Church who have children enrolled in the school do not pay tuition, but are expected to keep their annual contributions to the church at a level at least equal to the tuition charge. The school is currently drafting a document which will clearly specify academic goals to be achieved by each grade level. Class size is limited to 25. James Johnson, principal, also teaches certain classes – a phenomenon not uncommon among principals in non-public schools. Parents are expected to assist in fundraising efforts. Test scores (Stanford Achievement) show average to slightly above average student performance. Incoming students are tested only for grade level assignment.
Greenfield Peace Lutheran (Lutheran), 7000 W. Outer Dr.; founded 1952; K through 8th grade, 236 students (227 students); 9 full-time teachers; tuition: $1,800/yr.
Greenfield Peace regards itself as "liberal with admissions and strict with retention and graduation standards," according to principal Patricia Schultz. She is quick to point out that the school is not equipped to serve the very gifted or "the very far behind," and testing incoming students is designed in part to avoid admitting children the school can't help. Nevertheless, occasions have arisen when the school has accepted children expelled from public schools and successfully "turned them around." Parents are expected to perform 20 hours of volunteer time per year, from providing field trip transportation to fundraising. Parents are also urged to spend at least 15 minutes each night assisting, their children with homework. Nearly 100% black, the student body exhibits exceptional spirit. Administrators are proud of the numbers of their students who have gone on to Cass Tech, Renaissance and Martin Luther King high schools, and on into "almost every profession." Home visits by teachers used to be a school policy but sadly, due to perceptions of potential danger, this is no longer a policy.
Detroit Urban Lutheran (Lutheran), 8091 Ohio St.; founded 1972; K through 8th grade, 225 students, 9 full-time teachers, 1 part-time teacher; tuition: $1,600/ yr. ($1,700).
Between 30% and 50% of students admitted at Detroit Urban Lutheran are below grade level at the time of admission, but within a few years most perform above grade level. The school is especially proud of the large numbers of its graduates who go on to success at Renaissance, Martin Luther King and University of Detroit high schools, or at Cass Tech. In 1988, the school was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for its exemplary schools program because every graduating senior, for several years consecutively, had scored above grade level. Starting salary for teachers is high for non-public schools, at $16,000. Parental involvement is deemed very important and is required in some instances, such as for field trips, cultural, social and athletic activities, fundraising and a parent-teacher league. The school's teachers maintain exceptionally high homework requirements. Racial make-up of teaching staff is white by a ratio 2 to 1, but the student body is 99% black.
Gesu School (Catholic), 17139 Oak Dr.; founded 1920; K through 8th grade, 828 students (813 students); 35 full-time teachers, 2 part-time teachers; tuition: $1,780/yr. ($1,850).
Gesu is able to offer options often unavailable at other non-public schools: drama, Spanish, after-hours care, and many extracurricular activities. The school has accepted enrollees who had been asked to leave public schools. An entrance exam is required but is used to place the student at the appropriate grade level. Students are required to read 15 books outside the classroom per year. Many go on to the city's best public high schools. Student achievements are prominently recognized and encouraged. Though mathematics is not the school's strong suit academically, its students have excelled at science fairs, in English writing competitions and in the arts. The school enforces a dress code. The principal claims "a lot" of children who attend Gesu have parents who are public school teachers. Unlike most of the schools in this survey, Gesu patrons are not typically low-income, tending instead to be from middle-income families.
Evergreen Lutheran (Lutheran), 8680 Evergreen; founded 1956; K through 8th grade, 117 students (98 students); 5 full-time teachers; tuition: $1,652/yr. nonmembers, $1,120/yr. members.
Parents are asked to give 15 hours per academic year in volunteer work. All teachers give homework, even on weekends. As part of the school's "family" atmosphere, every child gets "hugged" at least once every day. Enrollment since 1988 is up 75%, and a waiting list is kept. Entrance exams are given, but teachers are not told the results until the child has been attending the school for one year, so as to prevent any pre-dispositions about the child's potential. This school is a rarity in that the school contributes financially to the church. Accordingly, school cost per pupil is less by a substantial amount than tuition. Additionally, most 8th grade students score at the 12th grade level on standardized tests.
East Bethlehem Lutheran (Lutheran), 3510 E. Outer Dr.; founded 1944; K through 8th grade, 219 students (209 students); 10 full-time teachers; tuition: $1,725/yr. ($1,600).
Though the teachers are certified and the school is accredited, principal Wayne Wolfrom makes an interesting point on the matter: "In reality, the accreditation that counts is the accreditation that the parents give us." Parental involvement is not as great as he would like to see, but is "encouraged" by requiring attendance at five evening parent meetings per year and two days per year lunchroom assistance.
Benedictine High School (Catholic), 8001 W. Outer Dr., founded 1955; 9th through 12th grades, 642 students (561 students); 32 full-time teachers (30 fulltime teachers); tuition: $1,890/yr. ($2,290).
Sister Jacqueline Murray, principal, is noted for knowing every student by name. The dropout rate is near zero (one student in the past academic year). A minimum of at least one hour of homework is required per night. The school's board has succeeded in bringing teacher salaries up to 70% parity with public schools. Between 85°1o and 95% of the students go on to college. In three out of the past four years, Benedictine had one student among the 10-member Detroit All-Academic Team. An entrance exam is given, but the principal emphasizes that the school "will accept almost any child regardless of scores if we have a program that can suit him." The librarian, Mrs. Ballard, makes the point that, "It's not money that makes the difference in education; it's philosophy, leadership and values."
Fairview Christian (Fairview Baptist Church), 14142 Ford ham; founded 1986; 1st through 6th grades, 56 students (61 students); 3 full-time teachers (4 full-time teachers), 1 part-time teacher; tuition: $1,300/yr. plus a $200 "fundraising fee" which is returnable if parents assist in school-sponsored fundraising and raise that amount.
Students transferring here from public schools sometimes must be put back a grade. Homework is required every night but Wednesday and parents often must sign it before the students brings it in the next day. Parents are also encouraged to be involved in a number of ways: they cook dinner for "Grandparents Day," assist in a student fashion show, attend chapel, cook lunches for students, attend parent-teacher meetings, etc. Principal Janet Parkhurst regards one of the school's greatest strengths to be turning around the low self-esteem which many incoming students have. A weakness she cites is the difficulty of finding black teachers.
Detroit Waldorf School (non-sectarian), 2555 Burns; founded 1965; Preschool through 8th grade, 160 students (180 students); 10 full-time teachers, 7 part-time teachers; tuition: between $3,725 and $4,850, depending on grade.
Though the tuition is more than double that of religious schools, many of the children attending Detroit Waldorf come from low-income and lower-middle income families. Some parental involvement is required. The school excels in music and art. It has no principal in the traditional sense, but is instead a "faculty-run" school.
Friends School (Quaker), 110 St. Aubin; founded 1965; Pre-school through 8th grade; 150 students (107 students); 18 full-time teachers (19 full-time teachers), 3 part-time teachers; tuition: $3,800 to $4,300, depending on grade).
Students at Friends School are from predominantly single-parent, minority households (not atypical of Detroit non-public schools), which have middle-level incomes. The cost of educating each student is remarkably high at about twice the tuition average of other non-public schools. The difference coming from grants, awards, donations and fundraisers. Dr. Ed Jacomo, principal, believes parents choose Friends because of the school's commitment to academic excellence and the Quaker "social consciousness" that is infused into the curriculum, though almost none of the parents (or children) are actually Quakers. Efforts to encourage parental involvement are particularly strong, involving many parent-teacher conferences, "narrative" report cards, and school-sponsored programs on parenting and a parenting library. Homework requirements are rigorous, culminating in two hours per night by the 8th grade, including weekends. Following Quaker philosophy, the students do not play competitive athletics and do not participate in rivalrous contests. Dr. Jacomo cites a problem that universally plagues non-public education in Detroit, namely, far less support (moral or otherwise) from the business community than is deserved. It is still rather "unfashionable" socially and politically to be perceived as less than fully committed to public education.
Academy of Detroit (non-sectarian, for-profit); 16418 W. McNichols; founded 1973; K through 6th grade, 150 students (114 students); 7 full-time teachers; tuition: $2,100/yr. ($2,400).
Academy of Detroit has the lowest tuition of any of the non-sectarian schools responding to the survey, and as one might imagine, the school is overflowing. The waiting list is substantial. This location is an "affiliated school" of the larger Academy of Detroit network, which maintains school sin Oak Park and Southfield as well. An impressive 20-page StudentParent Handbook details policies and philosophy. An assessment of each new student is done after enrollment, but for placement, not admission purposes; as a policy, the school accepts all children except those who have been expelled from other schools for severe discipline problems. Optional bus service is provided for an additional fee.
Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit (non-sectarian), 19176 Northrop; founded 1978; K through 8th grade, 70 students (92 students); 4 full-time teachers, 4 part-time teachers; tuition: $4,000-$5,000/yr., depending upon grade.
Located in a former public school and named for a deceased child of the founder and principal, Carmen N'Namdi, Nataki Talibah impresses the visitor with a sense of excitement and pride in many accomplishments. The curriculum provides an "Afro-centric" approach and is high on innovative programs involving family activities and field trips. Academic excellence is a vital ingredient, but administrators stress the school's efforts to develop the "whole" child into a "global citizen" with strong self-esteem and leadership qualities. Instruction is highly personalized. Mrs. N'Namdi recently received an important award from Learning Magazine and has been asked to assist the M.S.U. teacher training program. Parents tend to come from middle to upper-middle income levels. Students wear uniforms.
Faith Christian Academy (Word of Faith Christian Center), 7616 E. Nevada; founded 1982; Pre-school through 8th grade, 246 students (250 students); 12 full-time teachers, 3 part-time teachers; tuition: $1,650/yr. non-church members, $1,450/yr. church members.
"Excellence or nothing at all" is the motto of Faith Christian, where teachers and administrators feel it is important to always have very high expectations of the students. "If you don't expect much," says headmistress Joyce Stevens, "you won't get much back." Like the other non-public schools, Faith Christian accepts many transfers from public schools and finds that after perhaps a year of difficulty, the student catches up and begins to perform at his or her best. Parents are very involved, as are other members of the adjacent church, which provides a subsidy to the school. Class size is limited to 22.
Children's Village (non-sectarian), 14901 Meyers; founded 1974; Grades 1 and 2, 12 students (15 students); 1 full-time teacher; tuition: $1,040.
This struggling school has been plagued by location in a high-crime neighborhood. It suffered eight break-ins during 1989-90, the main reason it has been extremely difficult to attract and keep a teacher for very long or to add grades. The parents' main motive for sending their children here is a desire for them to learning a relatively safe and reliable environment. The school is open year-round and is closed for just six major holidays.
Pyramid Elementary (non-sectarian, for-profit), 17151 Wyoming; founded 1976; K through 8th grade, 75 students (79 students); 5 full-time teachers; tuition: $56.50/wk. for 39 weeks ($60.00/wk for 39 weeks).
According to Mrs. Perkins, principal, between 30% and 40% of parents with children here are teachers or administrators in public schools. The key, she says, to keeping good teachers in spite of salaries well below those in public schools, is giving teachers freedom to innovate and experiment in the classroom and making them feel they are part of a team or "family." Students come from low-income and lower middle-income families and have been recipients of many awards, from WKBD TV — Channel 50 to the National Geographic Society. Results on MEAP, California Achievement tests and others put students here above the average.
Lutheran High School West (Lutheran), 8181 Greenfield Rd.; founded 1944; 9th through 12th grade, 216 students (200 students); 14 full-time teachers (13 full-time teachers), 4 part-time teachers (3 part-time teachers); tuition: $3,000/yr. Non-church members ($3,400/yr. non-church members), $1,500/yr. members ($1,700/ yr. members).
Despite teacher salaries which are 50-55% of Detroit public school salaries, this school has been able to attract high quality teachers who seek to integrate shared goals and religious values throughout the curriculum. According to the principal, parents select the school because of its values, its safety, and its discipline. Students tend to come from low-income families and while parents strongly support the teachers, the level of parental involvement is slight. The school adheres to a strong attendance policy. Additionally, 30-40% of students receive some kind of scholarship assistance.
