Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America's Schools
University of Chicago Press
December 1997
Paul Hill, Lawrence Pierce, James Guthrie
After a decade of efforts to improve American public schools incrementally, the initiative for education reform has shifted to outsiders who propose radical measures. Communities and states are now seriously debating reform options, such as vouchers and charter schools, that would have been considered implausible only a few years ago. Many current reform proposals seriously challenge the defining features of the American public school system that developed after World War II -- direct operation of schools by elected school boards, compliance-based accountability, civil service employment for teachers, mandatory assignment of students to schools, and control of funds by central district bureaucracies.
Starting with publication of Chubb and Moe's Politics, Markets and America's Schools, various fundamental reform proposals would replace regulatory compliance with student performance standards, make schools' existence and staff members' jobs contingent on performance, give families choices among public schools, and transfer control of public funds from centralized bureaucracies to individual schools. These represent efforts to redefine public education, to include schooling in any form and by any provider that can meet community standards for student learning and guarantee non-discriminatory access. They challenge the dominant way of thinking that equates "public" with "government-run."
Some of these proposals would place education almost entirely into private hands, allowing parents to choose any licensed school and relying on private initiative to develop and run schools. Such proposals are based on the belief that public education has evolved into a government- and professionally run bureaucracy that takes too little account of family concerns. Parents in big cities find public schools particularly unresponsive. City schools have become so constrained by rules and regulations made elsewhere -- governing, for example, how students and teachers are selected, what teachers can help what students, how long a child must be kept out of regular classes in order to receive a particular kind of remedial instruction, what a principal must go through in order to remove a disruptive student, and what work teachers may and may not do -- that many are unable to respond to the needs of students and parents. As Ted Sizer has noted, parents experiencing the blank bureaucratic face of such schools have reason to question whether they are really public at all: they appear profoundly private, controlled by government on behalf of teachers' unions and interest groups that have managed to capture the agendas of school boards and state legislatures.
Our collaboration on this book was based on our shared belief that something must be done to restore balance between the private and public interests in education. As people who had devoted their careers to education, we shared public education's commitment to equity but we thought schools needed greater control of their funds, staffs, and instructional methods than existing public schools now have. As political scientists, we knew that any reform proposal must be politically feasible, and that total school autonomy is an illusion: no one who takes the public's funds and educates the public's children should totally escape government oversight. We hoped to give policymakers, parents, and community leaders an option, a way of reforming schools that neither relied entirely on government nor rejected any role for it.
Our proposal tries to restore the partnership between schools and families that has been destroyed during a period of regulatory excess. It recognizes the public interest in schooling, in ensuring that students learn basic skills, prepare for responsible lives as earners and citizens, and understand basic democratic values. To protect these public interests, our proposal requires that every school operate under an explicit agreement with a duly authorized local school board. It makes room for the private interest in schooling by allowing families to choose among schools that take different approaches to education. Most importantly, our proposal creates conditions under which schools can serve both the public and private interests effectively.
We propose a new form of governance for public education based on contracting and family choice. Under the plan presented in this book, all public schools would operate under contracts that define each school's mission, guarantee of public funding, and grounds for accountability. These contracts would have two parties, the local school board and the individual school. A local school board would be party to many different contracts, one with each school. Contracts with failing schools or schools that did not attract students could be terminated. New contracts could be offered to groups or organizations that have run successful schools or that propose programs deemed likely to succeed.
Our proposal takes contracting literally: school would boards contract out for whole schools and schools would be run by independent organizations that have complete control over their budgets, programs, hiring, firing, and staff training. In the early 1990s school boards in Baltimore and Hartford hired independent organizations to run some schools, but the boards retained control of budgets and staffing. After periods of mutual frustration the contracts were canceled, with the school boards complaining about disappointing results and the school operators claiming they had been prevented from making necessary changes. Our proposal takes account of the lessons learned from earlier failures. To make a difference in school performance, contracting must be real and thorough: if school boards want to hold schools accountable they must give up trying to control school operations.
Our form of contracting would redefine the public school. Any school supported with public funds and operating under a funding and performance agreement with a duly constituted public education board would be, by definition a public school. Every public school would have such an agreement. Contracting extends the charter school concept, which allows small numbers of schools to gain control of money, staff, and programs, to the entire public school system.
Contract schools would differ from one another, offering different instructional methods and extracurricular activities. Some might even operate at different hours of the day or different numbers of days each year. With such a variety of alternatives available, there would be no justification for requiring a family to send a child to a particular school, especially if the parents knew of another school that would better fit the child's needs or the families ideas about a good education. Families would be free to choose among local public contract schools. Because their freedom to choose would be bounded by the range of schools available in their locality, parents could petition the local school board to establish a new contract for a type of school that was not locally available, or to reproduce a school that had become so popular that it could admit no more students. The local board could authorize new schools, but it could also decide that a particular type of school was not likely to be effective or could not attract a large enough student body to be financially viable.
Contracting would also redefine define a public school board, as a local community agent responsible to provide a portfolio of school alternatives that meet the needs of the community's children. School boards would no longer have authority to run schools directly or to create systems of regulation that exhaustively constrain what all schools may do. They would no longer have responsibility for directly hiring, evaluating, paying, or dismissing teachers, administrators, or other employees for individual schools. Their only responsibility would be finding, hiring, paying, and monitoring the performance of the independent contractors that would run schools.
The local board would identify the need for particular schools: for example, a district with a significant population of Spanish-speaking children might decide to run a bilingual elementary school, or a district containing a new high-technology industry might want to provide a school whose curriculum was built to help students understand and prepare for careers in that industry. The local board would then seek operators for the schools, through requests for proposals or by negotiating directly with qualified providers. It would monitor schools to determine that all admit students without respect to race or income, that no child is obliged to attend a bad school, and that students attending failing schools are provided with viable alternatives. As a portfolio manager, the board would not be required to guarantee that everyone liked, or even approved of, a particular school. Because families could choose among schools, no private individual would have standing to interfere with a school's operation on grounds that its focus or program was offensive to him or her. Schools could therefore be able to run consistent and coherent programs, free of the need to be all things to all people.
A local board could replace contractors who fail to honor their promises, or force schools to make substantial quality improvements when performance falls below acceptable levels. A board could also maintain quality by "pruning" its portfolio of schools, meaning the lowest-performing schools could be closed and replaced.
School evaluation would have to be based on state or local student performance standards, establishing requirements for student learning in all schools. The task of applying these standards fairly to all schools, given the inevitable differences in school instructional methods and students' levels of preparation, would be a serious challenge. Contracting makes this challenge unavoidable, but it does not create it: any governance system seriously concerned with school performance -- including the existing one -- must solve the problem of how to hold different schools to universal standards.
Schools would hire teachers, either on the open market or from a registry of certified teachers, depending on the terms of their contracts. Teachers would be employees of individual schools. This would create a true labor market for instructional and administrative staff. Schools would make decisions about hiring, evaluating, and terminating their own staff members. Teachers and administrators would be free to assess and select their workplaces. Salaries would be set by the market, and schools might compete for good staff by providing incentives to prospective teachers, such as a good benefits package or training programs. Teachers could demand higher pay for difficult situations or heavy responsibilities, and schools could offer bonuses for high performance.
Teachers' unions would act as hiring halls for schools in search of teachers. Unions might even accept full management responsibility for certain schools. If they were awarded school contracts, then teachers' unions would no longer simply be "labor. " They would also become entrepreneurs or providers, as are professionals in other fields like law, medicine, and accounting.
New laws would be necessary in many states to authorize school boards to contract out for whole schools and to pay contractors on per-pupil basis. Many states would also need new collective bargaining laws that allow individual schools to employ teachers and to hire on the basis of fit with the school's mission and instructional approach.
Contracting is an important and practical idea. It encourages innovation and diversity in public education, avoiding the need for a whole community to make a single choice in favor of one method of instruction. It eliminates zero-sum conflicts among families that have different ideas about how children should learn: since public schools can differ and parents can choose, there is no need for parents to contend with one another about the one best model of schooling. It also promotes efficient use of limited public funds, by focusing money and decisions at the school level. Contracting can produce these results without abandoning public education's concern for fairness, equality of opportunity, and progress for the disadvantaged. Though it would create stressful changes in the live of some administrators and union leaders, it would create new opportunities for parents and teachers alike.
Contracting is not a modest proposal but it need not be treated as an all-or nothing proposition. It would take time to make a transition. States might experiment with contracting, by establishing it first in big city districts where there are few good schools and thousands of students in desperate need of a more effective alternative. Similarly, cities might try it first as an alternative for neighborhoods where the regular public school system has failed for decades to provide good schools.
