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PDK Forum No Community Left Behind If control of the local schools were returned to their communities, Mr. Schlechty believes, the results would be twofold. Communities would unite around the common cause of setting expectations for the schools, and the schools would improve to meet those expectations. THE DEBATE over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) generally overlooks -- or looks past -- what may be the most fundamental flaw in that legislation. As the law is now written, decisions regarding what the young should know and be able to do are removed from the hands of parents and local community leaders and turned over to officials and experts located far from the schoolhouse door. Removing the debate over such an important matter from the reach of citizens at the local level -- and denying them the right to act on the results of their debates -- destroys one of the greatest resources the nation has in the struggle to maintain a sense of community in an increasingly globalized and impersonal world.1 Good schools require strong communities to support them. It is time state legislators and members of Congress awakened to the fact that the best chance we have of significantly improving the quality of education received by most Americans is to revitalize the idea of local control of schools. Rather than entrusting the future of education to bureaucrats at the state and federal levels, regardless of how "expert" these bureaucrats may be, we must give our attention to building trustworthy local communities. I will argue that placing local communities at the center of the debate over standards is the best way to build such trustworthy communities. It is also the best way to create great schools in every community. Applebee's America In a recent book titled Applebee's America, the authors observe that many politicians and religious leaders are discovering that two of the most important motivators for many Americans are the quest for community and the desire to be associated with a cause that is greater than themselves.2 Americans are tired of sloganeering. They no longer respond well to bureaucratic jargon and symbols. Rather, Americans respond to leaders who appeal to "gut values" that have to do with their sense of belonging and their ability to contribute to the greater good. This suggests that American citizens will be increasingly unlikely to respond to leaders who are fixated on such instrumental concerns as test scores or who speak of students as products to be shaped to meet the needs of multinational corporations. Rather, Americans will want leaders who link school improvement efforts to the development of children as human beings and to the quality of community life. Instead of thinking and talking about test scores, they will want to be involved in discussions about what children need to know and should be able to do, and they will want to know, as well, that the results of these discussions can and will make a difference in what goes on in their schools. The unfortunate fact is that, as things now stand, many local school boards are barriers to community involvement in the life of schools, just as state and federal agencies are.3 Rather than seeking ways to reform the mechanisms of local control and causing school boards to operate differently, policy makers use the dysfunctional nature of many school boards as a convenient rationale for removing the control of schools from local communities. The fact is that legislation like NCLB results in part from the disdain some members of the policy elite have for ordinary citizens and from the belief these elites harbor that they know better than ordinary citizens what children need to know and be able to do. Thus, in a very real sense, the failure of the systems through which the sentiments of local communities can be developed and expressed is being used as a cover for taking away from local communities the right to express these sentiments in any meaningful way. If it happens that local citizens are not sufficiently informed about education to make decisions about what children should learn in school, taking power away from the citizens is not the answer. The answer is to provide them with the education they need. Moreover, if properly framed, the debates over what schools should teach and what standards should prevail could serve as a primary means by which communities could become educated about the condition of education. It is through such education that trustworthy communities might be created and defined. It is through such discussions that the common ground that binds communities together could be discovered. Building schools into the fabric of community life by involving schools in the building of communities, as well as involving communities in establishing standards for their schools, will satisfy both the needs of adults and the needs of children. Indeed, given globalization of the economy and the revolutions that are occurring in the way information is transmitted, processed, and communicated, if we do not move quickly to build a sense of community among us at the same time that we dramatically improve our schools, then the blessings that the information revolution promises can quickly turn into a hell that even Orwell could not describe. Absent the kind of communitywide conversations needed to define standards for schools and absent meaningful local input into the way those standards are to be assessed, the community-building potential of schools can never be exploited. If there was ever a time when community-building institutions were critical to the life of this nation, that time is now. The community-building conversations public schools might create cannot occur if conversations about standards take place only among experts and a few selected committee members in offices far from local school districts. These conversations almost certainly will not occur at all if schools are made into the government agencies they are fast becoming under current policy. Commitment and Compliance The issue of where standards should be established is more than a community-building issue. It is a quality issue as well. If standards are to inspire excellence as opposed to minimum compliance, then the standards must have intrinsic value in the context where they are being applied. With regard to schooling, this means parents and teachers, as well as other concerned citizens, must understand the standards well enough to embrace them and to know when they are being met and when they are not. Such understanding and commitment can only be gained when parents, teachers, and community leaders are involved -- and feel they are involved -- in the development of standards and in the enforcement of standards. Indeed, the fact that standards must be enforced from the outside through threats of punishment and promises of reward is prima facie evidence that the standards being used to assess student performance are not personally compelling to teachers or to students. If standards are to be compelling, they must be based on values that are cherished by those to whom they are applied. In addition, they must be assessed by means that are credible to those to whom they apply. Standards are not likely to compel action when single tests become substitutes for a standard, even if the standard itself is compelling. When a test score becomes a proxy for a standard, then the problem is no longer framed by the standard; it is framed by the test. The goal becomes beating the test rather than educating children. As I heard one superintendent say, "We know why so many schools are not meeting the standard. Too many students are marking the wrong answers. All we have to do is figure out some way to get them to mark more right answers." Although this comment was made in jest, it contains more than a bit of truth about the way some school leaders are approaching the need to make sufficient progress each year to satisfy the standards set by the states that are operating as proxies for the federal government. The Erosion of Local Control One of the most dramatic changes that has occurred over the course of my career, which began in the late 1950s, has to do with the willingness of the U.S. Congress to exert control over the operation of local schools. Prior to the launching of Sputnik I in 1957, many members of Congress would become almost apoplectic at the mere mention of the prospect of federal intervention in the life of local schools. As Stewart McClure, chief clerk of the Senate Committee on Labor, Education, and Public Welfare at the time Sputnik was launched, recalled, whenever the idea of federal intervention in the life of local schools came up, some members of Congress would "get white and scream and wave their hands in the air about the horrible prospects of this vicious, cold hand of federal bureaucracy being laid upon these pristine, splendid local schools that knew better than anyone what needed to be done, and so forth and so forth."4 It is difficult to imagine federal legislators in the 1950s being willing to advance the idea that Congress had any business meddling in the way teachers were paid or specifying the frequency with which tests had to be given. Today, such proposals and actions are commonplace -- so commonplace that the propriety of federal control by state proxies is not even seriously debated. Rather, criticisms fasten on the technical aspects by which federal control is exercised (e.g., how many tests are enough tests?) and the absence of adequate funding to support the mandates that are enacted. Only a few have had the temerity to suggest that NCLB is simply wrongheaded.5 For the first few years after Sputnik, confidence in the notion that federal aid did not necessarily translate into federal control seemed to be well grounded. The National Defense Education Act (1958), for example, specifically prohibited the federal government from providing any form of direction, supervision, or control over curriculum, programs of instruction, or administration of personnel in any educational institution. Similarly, when the National Science Foundation became involved in curriculum development, its officials were very careful to insist that the agency offer "grants" to private providers rather than contracts. (As a recipient of many of these grants, I was well aware of this distinction and the significance the leaders of NSF attached to it.) The turning point in making federal intervention into local educational matters legitimate was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Unlike previous federal education legislation, ESEA was based on the assumption that the spending clause of the U.S. Constitution entitled Congress to behave more aggressively toward local schools than had traditionally been the case. The spending clause, along with the commerce clause, had been used quite effectively by New Deal legislators to bypass 10th Amendment prohibitions in many areas of civic life that had theretofore been exempt from federal control. Since 1965, these precedents have been applied increasingly to education, until the 10th Amendment is becoming as irrelevant in education as it is in many other areas of civic life. NCLB is nothing more or less than the latest reauthorization of this 1965 legislation, which is once again up for renewal. Unfortunately, the present round of legislation does not seem likely to reverse the trend that began in 1965. Indeed, even as I write this and no doubt as you read it, congressional committees and their expert advisors are busy crafting even more regulations than existed in the version of ESEA that has come to be known as NCLB. Only a few legislators have had the courage to suggest that the problem may be that the federal government has no business regulating the operation of local schools in the first place, and few of the education lobbying groups have taken this position. Apparently, federal government control of local schools is acceptable to some professional educators as long as that control is exercised in ways that serve the interests of their particular professional group. Our children and our nation deserve better, and our traditions demand better.6 The Community-Building Function of Public Schools Make no mistake. I am not opposed to federal involvement in public education or to federal aid to education. What I am opposed to is federal control of local schools. Indeed, I would prefer less state control. What I am in favor of is maximum participation by local citizens in determining the direction their schools should take and the ends their schools should serve. What I want is schools that help build communities as well as serve them. I want the schools to have more meaning in the life of communities than do government agencies such as the postal service. Schools are, or should be, cultural institutions that define communities and signify how members of a community see themselves and their collective futures. The needs of business for a "world-class work force" and the needs of colleges for "qualified students" are important and must be satisfied. These needs are more likely to be met, however, if the needs of students, parents, and communities are served well first. What is good for children, parents, and local communities is good for American business and higher education. (Whether or not one should add "vice versa" to this statement, as Charles Wilson, the former CEO of General Motors, once did when making a similar claim, depends on the social sensitivity and civic orientation of American business and of our institutions of higher education.) Business leaders who would help the schools improve must surely understand that one of the reasons many American businesses get into trouble is that they place the needs of stockholders and management above the needs and values of customers or the welfare of their employees. In business terms, students and parents are the first-line customers of schools. Students are not products and parents are not stockholders or even stakeholders. Students and parents are -- or should be -- the focal point of school activity. Businesses and institutions of higher learning are stakeholders in and have rightful claims on the public schools. The biggest stakeholders, however, are our posterity and our democratic way of life. To respond well to the needs of these stakeholders, the schools must ensure that all children are well educated and fully prepared to participate in and benefit from a vital democratic social order. And that goal is more likely to be achieved if the public schools attend to their real business: providing engaging intellectual experiences for students that result in their learning what they need to know to lead full and satisfying lives in a democracy that is threatening to overwhelm its citizens with information. This means that schools must provide all students with experiences that engage them in vital intellectual pursuits -- experiences that require them to discipline their minds and from which they learn those things necessary to be able to distinguish sense from nonsense. Certainly, preparing our students for their role in our democracy means that all students should learn to read and write. It also means all students need to have what Aristotle referred to as an "educational acquaintance" with the academic disciplines. More than that, all students need to develop an appreciation for the culture they inherit and the attitudes and dispositions it takes to fully participate in a democratic life -- tolerance for diverse opinions, willingness to listen to and hear others, the ability to think critically and creatively, an expansiveness of views, a feeling of hope for the future, and a sense of charity toward others. These are things that do not show up on a test, but they are probably more important for students and society than many things that do appear on tests. Unfortunately, federal intervention in schools and overbearing state intervention distract the attention of teachers from the needs of students and the needs of the communities in which schools are located. This top-down pressure results in fastening the attention of teachers and principals on meeting the requirements imposed by a bureaucratically oriented policy community concerned more with producing measurable results than with producing profound outcomes. The Need for School Transformation The fundamental problem with our schools is that they are bureaucratic in form. So long as they retain this form, they cannot accomplish what we want them to accomplish. Schools, especially urban schools, were bureaucratic long before state legislators and members of Congress became assertive regarding their role as arbiters of the educational tastes of all citizens. Unfortunately, all that the present reform movement is doing is relocating bureaucratic authority from the local level to the state and federal levels. The schools are being reformed, but they are certainly not being transformed. Rational authority and expert authority -- rather than the moral authority of the community and its leaders (including its educational leaders) -- continue to dominate decisions about schooling. If schools are to be based in moral authority derived from community consent and consensus, then what we need are schools that follow Peter Senge's model for learning organizations. According to Senge, learning organizations are organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.7 Creativity, expansiveness, and collective will are typical of a learning organization. Learning organizations manifest a sense of community because they are based on shared commitments and common beliefs. They are based on trust and mutual respect and assume a common commitment to excellence and shared standards by which excellence is judged. Bureaucracies, on the other hand, are segmented systems that are held together by rationalized rules and clear sets of sanctions in support of those rules. Unlike learning organizations, in which standards are used to set direction and inspire action, bureaucracies rely on standards and their enforcement as the primary means of exercising organizational power and ensuring compliance. Bureaucracies seek to ensure minimums. Learning organizations seek to promote optimal performance. Organizational theorists have recognized for many years that bureaucratic accountability measures are more likely to increase estrangement and sabotage than they are to drive performance to increasingly higher levels, especially when the standards are applied in the mindless way that many government bureaucrats are prone to apply them. Indeed, when standards are imposed by bureaucratic superiors, those most affected by the standards -- in this case teachers and students -- are likely to comply only to the point necessary to avoid punishment. Today's state and federal efforts to improve schools are based on the assumption that standards imposed from outside a system can inspire excellence within a system even as they ensure that performance does not fall below some minimum level. As organizational theorists have also known for a long time, this assumption reflects a mistaken view of human motivation. If the auditing process associated with enforcing standards becomes too onerous and if the anxiety produced becomes too high, the presence of externally imposed standards will almost ensure mediocrity -- even in places where there once was a commitment to excellence. Given the direction that NCLB has set, I am convinced that the best we can hope for is that eventually all children will have equal access to a mediocre education. Those who want excellence will need to look outside the public schools. Surely that is not what state legislators and members of Congress intend, nor is it what our society and our economy demand. And it is decidedly not what all our children deserve. Incentives for Transformation: A Few Recommendations The answer to the problems that vex our schools is to provide federal incentives to local school districts to transform their schools into learning organizations charged with the obligation to provide each student with the kind of education a discerning community expects and demands. To ensure accountability, local districts should be given incentives and support to develop ways of making the performance of the schools transparent enough to give the citizens of the community a sound basis for judging whether they are getting what they expect from their schools. The federal government might also provide incentives to local school districts to link their school improvement efforts to efforts to build and maintain a sense of community around the schools, for schools that have no community to serve cannot serve students very well. What might these recommendations look like in practice? Here is a proposal:
Choice I am sympathetic to the view that market forces can serve as powerful tools to help make organizations accountable. However, I do not believe that privatization is the only way to bring market forces to bear on local school leaders. Another way is for the state to create competing modes of delivering education that are available statewide. Parents and students would then be able to choose alternatives if they are dissatisfied with what their local community has to offer. Nor is choice among existing public schools the only option. For example, the state of Florida has created a virtual school that provides students with an alternative means of meeting the requirements for a high school diploma offered by their local school districts. Some state-run virtual schools suffer from the same pathologies that afflict many other state bureaucracies, but others, like the Florida Virtual School, possess many qualities that characterize a learning organization. Assuming my assessment of the Florida Virtual School is accurate, there is no reason that a similar school could not be established in every state (with help from federal funding). Such a school could serve as an accessible choice for any student or parent who found the local school offerings unacceptable. This virtual school alternative has many advantages, especially when viewed as part of an accountability system attached to a statewide school improvement effort. Here are some of the potential advantages of the virtual school option: • Any student in the state could enroll in courses offered by the virtual school at no additional cost to parents or students. Whether or not the virtual school would be empowered to offer diplomas would be a matter left up to the state. (The Florida Virtual School does not offer diplomas.) • If the state chose to do so, local school districts might be charged for virtual courses taken by students enrolled in the local school unless these courses were taken as a part of a formal partnership between the local school and the virtual school. The aim here would be to encourage underperforming schools to take advantage of the opportunities such partnerships might provide to increase access to technical assistance in the use of digital learning opportunities to improve schools. • The virtual school can be made subject to the same transparency requirements that are applied to locally run public schools. (Private schools, especially parochial schools, are often exempt from such state mandates, even when they receive voucher payments.) • School choice is really not a viable option in many smaller school districts because population density does not make it possible to support a brick-and-mortar alternative school. Moreover, commuting to a school in another district can often present students with insurmountable obstacles in terms of time and money. Virtual schooling can be delivered at any time and in any place, and the funding to make the needed hardware available would be considerably less than the cost of new school buildings.8 • Partnering relationships between the state virtual schools and local schools would offer the possibility of creating truly blended schools and could improve local schools without destroying them and without having the state engaging in a non-voluntary "takeover." • Home-schooling families could be given access to the services of the state-run virtual school. Indeed, the state, using the standards it sets for high school graduation for students in local schools, might empower the state virtual school to grant diplomas to home-school students as long as the state virtual school is subject to the same auditing process that applies to local school districts. • The number of students opting out of local schools and pursuing their studies through the state-sponsored alternative could be published in the annual report of each local school district. It would be up to the citizens of the local community to attach meaning to these numbers and to determine whether they were indicative of a problem with the schools or simply a matter of the idiosyncratic preferences of a few families. Closing Comments Clearly, we need schools that are much different from the ones we now have. However, this does not mean that schools need to be made into more efficient bureaucracies or governmental agencies. Rather than becoming reformed bureaucracies, schools need to be transformed into vital community institutions capable of engaging the hearts and the minds of students, parents, and others who are seeking connections with their community. Schools should not only serve the educational needs of students but also become focal points for building community among the increasing number of Americans who are seeking association with a cause that will unite rather than divide. It is time to retrieve our schools from the bureaucrats who would transform them into just one more government agency that provides minimum performance. It is time to reinvent our schools as vital centers of community life and places around which the culturally diverse society that typifies America can be united in a common cause bigger than any of us. 1. Though he says it differently, David Mathews makes a similar point in his excellent book Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy (Dayton: Kettering Foundation Press, 2006). 2. Douglas B. Sosnik, Matthew J. Dowd, and Ron Fournier, Applebee's America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). 3. The argument I am making here is in many ways similar to the argument David Mathews presents in Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy. The main difference is that I believe that the best way to reclaim our democracy is by reclaiming the public schools. Indeed, it is my view that the public schools are the last best hope we have of creating the kind of communities we need to ensure the continuation of our democratic way of life, and thus it is essential that school leaders -- especially school boards -- assume the role of community builders rather than representatives of the factions and groups that now divide our communities. 4. Stewart E. McClure, chief clerk, Senate Committee on Labor, Education and Public Welfare, "1949-1973 Oral History Interviews," Senate Historical Office, Washington, D.C., January 1983, pp. 110-11. Available at www.senate.gov. Google the title. 5. This point is also made by Neal McCluskey and Andrew Coulson in a recent op-ed piece that appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal under the headline "The Failures of No Child Left Behind." This article appeared after I had drafted this piece, but it was gratifying to find support for what I am asserting. See Neal McCluskey and Andrew J. Coulson, "The Failures of No Child Left Behind: A Report by the Cato Institute," Louisville Courier Journal, 13 September 2007, p. A-11. 6. See, for example, Joel Packer, "The NEA Supports Substantial Overhaul, Not Repeal, of NCLB," Phi Delta Kappan, December 2007, pp. 265-69. 7. Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1990), p. 3. 8. So much of the attention of education policy makers is focused on solving the problems of large urban districts (those with more than 100,000 students) that it is sometimes overlooked that nearly two-thirds of all students attend schools in districts with fewer than 25,000 students (K-12) and that nearly one-third attend schools in districts with fewer than 5,000 students. School choice has much less meaning in a small town in South Dakota than it might have in inner-city Chicago. PHILLIP C. SCHLECHTY is founder and CEO of the Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform, Louisville, Ky. Many of the ideas presented here will be developed further in a book to be published by Jossey-Bass in 2009. (c)2008, Phillip C. Schlechty.
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