Maybe we could make this part of our message. -- Let teachers teach.
You Can't Buy Your Way Out of a Bureaucracy
By Philip K. Howard
The New York Times
December 3, 2004
Fixing America's schools sometimes seems like one of the hardest tasks in the history of civilization. The core requirement - a good teacher in an orderly classroom - somehow seems beyond our grasp.
This week, a court panel in New York made the latest attempt at a fix. The panel concluded that what's required in New York City for a "sound basic education" under state law is an extra $5.6 billion annually to be spent on students. It also said $9.2 billion in new classrooms, libraries and other facilities were necessary.
All things being equal, more money is always welcome. But no one knows where it will come from. Worse, experience shows that failing social institutions are rarely resuscitated by money alone. In 1985, a federal judge in Kansas City, Mo., ordered a makeover of its inner-city schools to attract a more integrated student body. Kansas City and the state spent some $2 billion, building new facilities and adding teachers - to the point where the student-teacher ratio was 13-to-1. The effect? Little improvement.
Before throwing good money after bad, it is perhaps wise to try to learn why school reforms almost always seem to fail.
Intractable problems usually have a silent partner, some assumption that everyone takes for granted. In education, the practice of reformers has been to identify a worthy goal - say, safety or fairness - and then to create a detailed legal structure to make sure it happens. Taken alone, each legal requirement seems reasonable. Together, they present an insurmountable legal barrier, blocking even the simplest choices.
A report this week by Common Good, a bipartisan legal reform group I founded, revealed that tens of thousands of discrete legal obligations now govern a typical New York City public school. Almost 100 legal steps and considerations are required to organize an athletic event. Regulations require automatic defibrillators and detail the size of earflaps for softball helmets. In the classroom, suspending a disruptive student can take months of mandatory legal process. The law is so vast that no one - not even the Department of Education - had ever compiled it before.
Law has a noble pedigree in setting educational goals, as happened 50 years ago with desegregation. Using legal dictates to specify how to achieve those goals, however, has had the opposite effect - it has basically killed the human instinct and judgment needed to run a school.
Law is brilliantly ill suited as a management system. Law is rigid and leaves no room to adjust for the circumstances. Once the idea of rule-based management takes root, the bureaucracy grows like kudzu. Teachers and principals spend the day tied up in legal knots. One principal weighed the legal dictates he received one year from the superintendent's office at over 45 pounds. In Alabama recently, 2,000 teachers filed grievances against excessive paperwork, saying that filling out all the forms interfered with their ability to teach.
A legalistic culture becomes poisonous, transforming what should be a cooperative enterprise into a viper's nest of competing entitlements, as people start parsing the rules to get their way. What matters, students quickly learn, is not right and wrong, but what you can argue. The principal's authority deteriorates under all these legal demands - by teachers, custodians, special education students, any students or parents who think they could have been treated better.
The legal overload is so great as to be comedic, as illustrated by bitter hearings before the New York City Council last year. The teachers union contract in New York, as one witness said, contains an "oppressive set of work rules" - the principal can't ask teachers, for example, to help out in the halls or lunchroom. Firing a patently incompetent teacher, as several principals detailed, takes years of preparation and legal hearings.
The head of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, struck back, citing the legal mandates imposed on teachers: "Every minute of the day and every inch of a classroom is dictated. The arrangement of desks, the format of bulletin boards, the position in which teachers should stand," she said. "Teachers are demeaned, they're stripped of their professionalism and they are expected to behave like robots incapable of any independent thought."
Instead of prolonging this mutual destruction, perhaps it's time to rethink basic assumptions. Is legal micromanagement the right way to run schools? Maybe teachers and principals should be allowed to think for themselves. That's how successful schools have always worked.
The sticking point is distrust. It's human nature to fear the worst, especially when things aren't going well. No one in education seems to trust anyone else. But breaking free from this legal nightmare doesn't require blind trust or some authoritarian structure.
Guarding against incompetence or unfairness can be accomplished far more effectively with human oversight than with legal central planning. Give someone the authority to act as a check and balance. And if we don't trust those in charge now, then let's set up parent-teacher committees with the power to review disciplinary and employment decisions. Parents and teachers know what's going on, and who's good and who's not.
The legalistic approach was mainly a byproduct of reforms from the 1960's, intended to guarantee individual fairness. But fairness in cooperative enterprise requires balancing of different interests, and a preoccupation with legal rights has achieved not fairness but a general decline of order, civility and achievement.
Schools depend on the energy, skill, judgment, humor and sympathy of teachers and principals. Liberate them to draw on all their human traits. Then liberate some of us to hold them accountable. Throw most of the rules overboard. Let law set the goals and basic principles, not dictate daily decisions.
New York schools face challenges that few other school systems do, and additional money, wisely spent, could result in significant improvements if the schools were otherwise functional. But no amount of money will rescue a ship that is sinking under the weight of endless rules and bureaucracy.
Philip K. Howard is a lawyer and the author, most recently, of "The Collapse of the Common Good."
By Philip K. Howard
The New York Times
December 3, 2004
Fixing America's schools sometimes seems like one of the hardest tasks in the history of civilization. The core requirement - a good teacher in an orderly classroom - somehow seems beyond our grasp.
This week, a court panel in New York made the latest attempt at a fix. The panel concluded that what's required in New York City for a "sound basic education" under state law is an extra $5.6 billion annually to be spent on students. It also said $9.2 billion in new classrooms, libraries and other facilities were necessary.
All things being equal, more money is always welcome. But no one knows where it will come from. Worse, experience shows that failing social institutions are rarely resuscitated by money alone. In 1985, a federal judge in Kansas City, Mo., ordered a makeover of its inner-city schools to attract a more integrated student body. Kansas City and the state spent some $2 billion, building new facilities and adding teachers - to the point where the student-teacher ratio was 13-to-1. The effect? Little improvement.
Before throwing good money after bad, it is perhaps wise to try to learn why school reforms almost always seem to fail.
Intractable problems usually have a silent partner, some assumption that everyone takes for granted. In education, the practice of reformers has been to identify a worthy goal - say, safety or fairness - and then to create a detailed legal structure to make sure it happens. Taken alone, each legal requirement seems reasonable. Together, they present an insurmountable legal barrier, blocking even the simplest choices.
A report this week by Common Good, a bipartisan legal reform group I founded, revealed that tens of thousands of discrete legal obligations now govern a typical New York City public school. Almost 100 legal steps and considerations are required to organize an athletic event. Regulations require automatic defibrillators and detail the size of earflaps for softball helmets. In the classroom, suspending a disruptive student can take months of mandatory legal process. The law is so vast that no one - not even the Department of Education - had ever compiled it before.
Law has a noble pedigree in setting educational goals, as happened 50 years ago with desegregation. Using legal dictates to specify how to achieve those goals, however, has had the opposite effect - it has basically killed the human instinct and judgment needed to run a school.
Law is brilliantly ill suited as a management system. Law is rigid and leaves no room to adjust for the circumstances. Once the idea of rule-based management takes root, the bureaucracy grows like kudzu. Teachers and principals spend the day tied up in legal knots. One principal weighed the legal dictates he received one year from the superintendent's office at over 45 pounds. In Alabama recently, 2,000 teachers filed grievances against excessive paperwork, saying that filling out all the forms interfered with their ability to teach.
A legalistic culture becomes poisonous, transforming what should be a cooperative enterprise into a viper's nest of competing entitlements, as people start parsing the rules to get their way. What matters, students quickly learn, is not right and wrong, but what you can argue. The principal's authority deteriorates under all these legal demands - by teachers, custodians, special education students, any students or parents who think they could have been treated better.
The legal overload is so great as to be comedic, as illustrated by bitter hearings before the New York City Council last year. The teachers union contract in New York, as one witness said, contains an "oppressive set of work rules" - the principal can't ask teachers, for example, to help out in the halls or lunchroom. Firing a patently incompetent teacher, as several principals detailed, takes years of preparation and legal hearings.
The head of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, struck back, citing the legal mandates imposed on teachers: "Every minute of the day and every inch of a classroom is dictated. The arrangement of desks, the format of bulletin boards, the position in which teachers should stand," she said. "Teachers are demeaned, they're stripped of their professionalism and they are expected to behave like robots incapable of any independent thought."
Instead of prolonging this mutual destruction, perhaps it's time to rethink basic assumptions. Is legal micromanagement the right way to run schools? Maybe teachers and principals should be allowed to think for themselves. That's how successful schools have always worked.
The sticking point is distrust. It's human nature to fear the worst, especially when things aren't going well. No one in education seems to trust anyone else. But breaking free from this legal nightmare doesn't require blind trust or some authoritarian structure.
Guarding against incompetence or unfairness can be accomplished far more effectively with human oversight than with legal central planning. Give someone the authority to act as a check and balance. And if we don't trust those in charge now, then let's set up parent-teacher committees with the power to review disciplinary and employment decisions. Parents and teachers know what's going on, and who's good and who's not.
The legalistic approach was mainly a byproduct of reforms from the 1960's, intended to guarantee individual fairness. But fairness in cooperative enterprise requires balancing of different interests, and a preoccupation with legal rights has achieved not fairness but a general decline of order, civility and achievement.
Schools depend on the energy, skill, judgment, humor and sympathy of teachers and principals. Liberate them to draw on all their human traits. Then liberate some of us to hold them accountable. Throw most of the rules overboard. Let law set the goals and basic principles, not dictate daily decisions.
New York schools face challenges that few other school systems do, and additional money, wisely spent, could result in significant improvements if the schools were otherwise functional. But no amount of money will rescue a ship that is sinking under the weight of endless rules and bureaucracy.
Philip K. Howard is a lawyer and the author, most recently, of "The Collapse of the Common Good."
posted by Sid Cottingham | 2:31 PM
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