Fwd: How Can Schools Be Accountable?

[Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>
> Date: July 9, 2006 9:24:21 PM CDT
> To: campbellp@mail.montclair.edu
> Subject: [Transform Education] How Can Schools Be Accountable?
>
> Terry Moe is the chair of the Political Science department at  
> Stanford University and a Hoover Institution senior fellow. He's  
> also a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, whose  
> members include well-known ideological conservatives like John  
> Chubb, chief education officer and one of the founders of Edison  
> Schools, Checker Finn, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution  
> and president and trustee of the Fordham Foundation, and E. D.  
> Hirsch, the famous English professor turned cultural literacy  
> expert who's also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Moe  
> makes the following argument in the July/August 2006 edition of  
> Stanford Magazine:
>
> For any organization, public or private, the key to effective  
> performance lies in getting the incentives right, and thus in  
> motivating employees to pursue the organization’s objectives as  
> productively as possible. This is Management 101. Yet  
> traditionally, public education has failed to follow this simple  
> principle. And for that it has paid a heavy price, not just in  
> lackluster performance, but in reforms that disappoint. Huge  
> amounts of money have been pumped into the schools, with spending  
> up more than 75 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars per student  
> since 1980. Yet the recipients have had little incentive to spend  
> it efficiently, and they haven’t put it to productive use. Similar  
> problems apply to virtually all other mainstream reforms. The push  
> for smaller classes, for example, is extraordinarily expensive, has  
> only modest effects on student learning—and does nothing to change  
> anyone’s incentives. A mediocre teacher in a smaller class is still  
> a mediocre teacher.
>
> This seems eminently practical. Who could question such a statement?
>
> Indeed, you've heard policy-makers of all stripes, conservative and  
> liberal, say something like what Moe argues: huge amounts of money  
> have been invested in school, more than has ever been invested --  
> literally mountains and mountains of cash -- and we have nothing to  
> show.
>
> But we actually have LOTS to show.
> more students than ever before are attending public schools,  
> hitting new record enrollment levels in the mid-1990s
> more students than ever before are graduating from schools
> more students than ever before are taking advanced classes (in  
> 1982, 11 percent of high school graduates completed courses like  
> trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus. By 1998, 27 percent had  
> completed that type of advanced coursework. Over the same period,  
> the percentage taking advanced science courses rose from 31 percent  
> to 60 percent.)
> schools are performing more services for students than ever before
> This last accomplishment listed above is probably not a good thing.  
> But, because no one else is willing to perform these services, our  
> schools are charged with not only educating our children, but  
> providing them an unprecedented range of services to help them. As  
> Noel Epstein wrote in the Washington Post on 11/27/05:
>
> (Public schools) not only provide before-school programs,  
> breakfasts, lunches, after-school care, afternoon snacks and  
> sometimes dinners (as well as summertime meals). They also instruct  
> children about sex and, in many places, teach them to drive. They  
> face growing pressure to take tots as early as age 3 in pre- 
> kindergarten programs. They share responsibility for keeping  
> children off drugs, making sure they don't carry weapons,  
> instilling ethical behavior, curbing AIDS and other sexually  
> transmitted diseases, battling alcohol abuse, preventing student  
> suicides, discouraging cigarette smoking, tackling child obesity,  
> heading off gang fights, providing a refuge for homeless children,  
> ensuring that students are vaccinated, boarding some pupils,  
> tending to toddlers of teenage mothers and otherwise acting in loco  
> parentis in ways not anticipated a generation ago.
>
> There's little doubt that what is happening in a large number of  
> schools, especially inner-city schools, is horrible. But we have to  
> ask this simple question: what should schools be responsible for  
> doing? Or, to use the current parlance, what are schools  
> accountable for? If you say that schools are accountable for acting  
> as surrogate parents, taking kids off the street for 9 months out  
> of the year, giving them lots of busywork, and pumping them full of  
> facts in order to prepare for state standardized tests, I'd argue  
> that schools are doing pretty well. But if you say that schools are  
> accountable for preparing the future citizens of America, for  
> creating doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, and scientists, for  
> inculcating a sense of civic duty and a desire to be ethical and  
> honest, and to compensate for the economic disparities that exist  
> between the wealthiest and poorest Americans, I'd say the vast  
> majority of schools -- even the "good" ones -- are not doing their  
> jobs at all.
>
> So what would it take for schools to be able to perform their  
> duties, to fulfill the aspirations of country and our planet and  
> ensure that all will be well when our children are handed the reins  
> and take over?
>
> Listen to Noel Epstein again: "It's time to put an end to all the  
> headlines about achievement problems in our schools -- a far easier  
> chore than most people imagine. All we need to do is two things:  
> First, stop calling those establishments simply schools, when  
> they're really hybrid institutions that are raising many of our  
> children, not just educating them. Then ensure that those who  
> deliver family-like services there are devoted exclusively to those  
> tasks, so that the educators can focus fully on academics."
>
> Even with the things that we can show are working, dumping  
> boatloads of cash into schools is not going to significantly affect  
> what happens in them because we are doing nothing to change what is  
> happening outside them.
>
> So how can schools be accountable? Let them be accountable for what  
> they're supposed to be accountable for.
>
> --
> Posted by Peter Campbell to Transform Education at 7/09/2006  
> 09:24:00 PM