By Matthew Ricchiazzi:
In an already excessively centralized, top-heavy, bureaucratic education system that has simultaneously dumbed down achievement standards for our highest performing students while demoralizing our most challenged students – justice demands of us a better way.
Too many students are being robbed of a future – denied their civil rights – because central office bureaucrats are unwilling or unable to evolve an archaic service delivery system into the 21st century. The system is bloated and plagued with the insular training of doctorates of education – a degree that only narrows and obfuscates one’s perspective.
The root of the dysfunction doesn’t lie primarily with teachers. Our failures are management failures: an unwillingness to innovate; a culture of fear oriented around self-preservation rather than performance and outcomes; and leaders incapable of providing leadership.
Option One is an aggressive, unyielding, unapologetic package of pro-market education reforms that will wholly transform how our education system is managed, governed, financed, delivered, and evaluated. We have the opportunity to architect a new education system – one with realigned incentives that posture it for performance.
Now is the time to end an operating structure rooted in communist notions of egalitarianism and undifferentiated mass production. Rather than attempting to force all kids through a one-size-fits-all government managed centralized bureaucracy, we should recognize that children have different interests, abilities, and needs.
And we should come to the recognition that monopoly systems fail to fulfill all needs.
Phase One: Decentralized Decision Making
Principals have been disempowered and made impotent by an organizational structure that treats them as little more than liaisons to a central office bureaucrat – namely, a “Chief of School Leadership” that adds absolutely no value to a campuses’ operations or performance.
Despite claims that the central office staff “supports” and “coaches” principals in the campuses, the central office adds no value at all. It is nothing more than an expensive jobs program for over paid administrators who have been educated to possess all of the wrong skill sets – paid for on the backs of your children.
Instead, we should dissolve the central office and layoff the doctors of education and empower principals with all of the tools of a Chief Executive – capable of managing their own campuses entirely independently of a central planner.
Phase Two: Community Based Governance
A district-wide school board – particularly one as incompetent and lacking leadership as the one we have – will never be capable of managing such a diverse and unwieldy city wide organization.
Rather than district-based governance, we should adopt a model of community-based governance. We should recruit parents, teachers, alumni, management experts, and business leaders to comprise independent boards of trustees responsible for the governance of each campus.
With independent boards rooted in their campus communities, the decision makers will be infinitely more connected to the people affected by their decisions – offering our neighborhoods and campus communities a newfound stability and connectedness that a district-wide school board could never provide.
The central office should retool itself – conceived not as an active “manager” or “operator” of the campuses, but as a “regulator” and “performance monitor”. There should be no direct reporting relationship between the central office and the campuses.
Phase Three: Student Driven Financing
Forcing parents to send their kids to an underperforming school is unconscionable. Instead, let’s empower parents and students by giving them a system of universal vouchers (and tuition tax credits that act, look, and feel like vouchers), so that they can attend any school of their choosing: charter, private, parochial, vocational, or otherwise.
Once we liberate parents from the soviet-style education system that we have today, independent schools will compete for students based on best service, location, and the specialization of curriculum, programing, and student services.
By establishing a marketplace for public education, we introduce the competitive incentives that will improve performance by better allocating resources.
According to Carl Paladino’s analysis, we’re spending about $29,000 a year per student (after cash flows dedicated to charter schools). That’s an enormous sum of money and could finance the highest quality private education available in the market today, if it were given directly to parents and students.
Let’s structure the market such that we create focused sub-markets, tiered based on a student’s age. Early childhood education is less capital intensive than vocational education, and a universal voucher program should be structured accordingly:
Students and parents should also be given supplemental vouchers for wellness and enrichment programs that also compete in their respective markets based on student interests. That will give students an additional range of options that allows them to further customize their own education experience by virtue of their choices over time:
A highly decentralized system will emerge that allows for mass customization, because the market’s driving force will be an incentive to specialize offerings based on niche student needs and interests. Their navigation of that market will give them a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and opportunities wholly unlike the culture of mass standardization and testing that still pervades the federal policy discourse.
The horribly ill-conceived Common Core will eventually be recognized as catastrophically harmful to students. Students have normally distributed natural abilities that resemble a bell curve – and it’s a different bell curve for each subject area. The Common Core attempts to reshape the bell curve by establishing a standard that is dumbed down for high performers and excessively difficult for less gifted students.
The system will not work better because of the Common Core, nor will our society derive any improved economic performance. In practice, the Common Core will achieve only one thing: it will have a devastating impact on the self-esteem of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and immeasurably harm their physiological wellbeing while providing no economic or social value to those students.
Instead, we should identify what every student is most interested in and where their natural abilities are oriented. For the kid interested in science, they should have access to a school that has a great depth and breadth of curriculum and programing opportunities specialized in science. The same goes for a student with natural abilities in math, English, foreign languages, art, music, or any other subject area.
Rather than trying to give all students a little bit of everything at each campus, specialized campuses will be able to offer a level of depth that we will never be able to achieve in the monopoly of an operating model that we have today.
Phase Four: Campus Specific Labor Contracts
We will be unable to achieve a requisite level of flexibility that is required for a competitive and functioning market to emerge. Labor relations must be done on a campus specific basis in order for campuses to meaningfully differentiate themselves by providing students with a distinct product.
I can imagine a school emerging for students who can’t sit in a classroom for 7 hours a day, which might want to experiment with later start time or a shorter school week. I can also imagine a school specializing in serving students with a high level of need wanting to offer Saturday tutoring. Any school should be able to manage their own calendar – regardless of the misplaced, self-concerned, and utterly offensive objections of Phil Rumore.
By dissolving the Buffalo Public Schools into this voucher consortium of independently managed and governed schools, we can immediately discontinue the existing union contract and begin negotiations campus-by-campus.
With this newfound flexibility, you can expect principals to offer recruitment incentives, performance based bonuses, and a better pay scale designed to attract the best talent. You can also expect that they will end tenure as we know it, eliminate the cosmetic surgery rider, and adopt sane outcome oriented labor contracts.
Phase Five: Real Time Data Platforms
We have no effective means of evaluating how the spending of $1 dollar impacts student performance relative to another $1 spent on another program. We have no means of objectively identifying one program as successful, and another as unsuccessful – let alone an ability to see where we’re getting the biggest bang for the public buck.
That’s because we don’t have objective real time data that would allow us to see how a policy decision affects performance outcomes. The technology exists. We can track performance based across a number of variables for students, classrooms, teachers, departments, and campuses – but we need a pervasively deployed data platform to do so.
Such a platform will become immeasurably valuable to teachers, who will be able to more thoroughly and instantaneously analyze each student in real time, knowing which students are having difficulty in which subsets of curriculum. The ability to respond to this type of analysis will hugely improve a teachers’ labor productivity.
It will also improve the administrator’s ability to evaluate resource allocation and to optimize spending by funding the most impactful programs – and ending programs that have little effect.
Without data, managers are blind and lack accountability – left only to peddle feel gooderies.
If you would like to join the Option One Organizing Committee, please contact me at matthew.ricchiazzi@changebuffalo.org; or via changebuffalo.org/education.