School Accountability Accounting
by Neal McCluskey, May 8, 2005

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Neal McCluskey is a Cato Institute education fellow.

"Public accountability" is what we get from public schools, and what we would lose if parents could choose their child's school, especially private schools.

Government schools, we're essentially warned, are all that stand between us and academic anarchy akin to philosopher Thomas Hobbes' "state of nature," a "war... of every man against every man" in which life is "nasty, brutish, and short."

But public accountability has failed to erect a wall around the state of nature. Instead of keeping corruption and marauders at bay, poor parents and their children, as well as taxpayers who pay for the schools, have been locked into failure and corruption. Every day, around the country, the news makes this obvious. Consider just a few recent examples:

The Arizona Republic April 19 ran an editorial about the Colorado City, Ariz., school district, where a "polygamous cult calling itself the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints controls the Colorado City District School Board, which bought a $220,000 private plane while going more than $1.5 million in debt and issuing rubber checks to its teachers."

An April 12 Associated Press article about New Orleans school superintendent Anthony Amato's resignation noted Mr. Amato was leaving "after more than two stormy years in the post, during which the school system lost millions of dollars, federal officials investigated allegations of corruption and test scores remained among the worst in the state." In Mr. Amato's defense, the article noted financial problems and corruption were rampant long before he arrived in the Big Easy.

According to an April 11 Denver Post article, tiny Elizabeth, Colo., is still getting over several years when "a $300 cellphone, self-help books, catered parties and secret bonuses were among the goodies principals and administrators gave themselves. All the while, the school system was racing toward a budget crisis."

Finally, there's Roslyn, Long Island, in New York, where in March a state audit revealed district officials had stolen $11.2 million from the schools, spending it on everything from cars to Concorde flights.

For the people of Colorado City, New Orleans, Elizabeth and Roslyn, public accountability has clearly failed. Indeed, in each case the culprits behind the corruption were superintendents, principals, administrators and school boards -- the very people entrusted with providing accountability.

Unfortunately, there are very few studies of public school corruption, forcing us to use mainly anecdotal evidence, like the outrages above, to conclude public accountability is a sham.

Recently, though, Lydia Segal, a criminal law professor and former special counsel to the special commissioner of investigation for the New York City schools, shed a little more light on how corruption takes hold. In Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools she explains that far from protecting the integrity of public education, huge bureaucracies have "eroded oversight, discouraged managers from focusing on performance, and made it so difficult to do business with districts that employees and contractors have sometimes had to seek 'creative' or illicit ways to get their jobs done."

Corroborating Ms. Segal's findings is Making Schools Work by University of California-Los Angeles professor William Ouchi, a book on which Ms. Segal collaborated. Based on observations of many school organizations, from centralized districts like New York City to independent schools, Mr. Ouchi finds autonomy, not bureaucracy, is the key to success.

It's not a new realization. In 1990, researchers John Chubb and Terry Moe came to the same conclusion in Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, and offered an answer to our woes: school choice, they said -- letting parents and children out of the accountability pen -- was the key to fixing U.S. education.

Unfortunately, though we know the "public accountability" on which we've counted so long doesn't work, whenever choice is proposed those who have a stake in the status quo block it. Where's the accountability, they ask. The reply is simple: While no system will ever be totally free of corruption, the best accountability comes from freeing every parent to select the schools that work well, and to escape those that betray their trust. In other words, the opposite of today's "accountability."

This article appeared in the Washington Times April 24, 2005.

School Reform Options: Rock or Hard Place?
by Neal McCluskey, Cato Institute, School Reform News, December 26, 2003

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Neal McCluskey is a policy analyst with the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute.

The United States is sliding toward dictatorship in what many regard as the bulwark of American democracy: our public schools. It's not a jackbooted-thug dictatorship; rather, a massive concentration of power in a few hands. For instance, in Detroit, Michigan, and Washington, D.C., debates are brewing over stripping control of schools from boards of education and consolidating it in the hands of mayors. In cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago, it's already been done.

Why this trend? Because, like the dilapidated institutions that have given rise to autocracies throughout history, many of our school districts are broken, and democratic bodies -- school boards -- are largely to blame. Too often these boards are mere rungs on the career ladders of politicians trying to make names for themselves. Photo opportunities and posturing are allowed to trump education. "What we have today in the local school board," writes Denis Doyle and former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education Chester Finn, "especially the elected kind, is an anachronism and an outrage.... We can no longer pretend it's working well or hide behind the mantra of 'local control of education.'"

With confidence in elective bodies lost, school systems have increasingly turned toward mayoral control, exchanging the paralysis of school boards for the efficiency of consolidated power. In many cases, it seems to be working. Since Mayor Richard Daley took over Chicago's schools the percentage of education-money going to instruction has increased and the dropout rate has fallen. Boston has experienced modest test score increases since its schools came under the control of Mayor Tom Menino. And Sol Stern reports in the City Journal that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein "have dismantled the dysfunctional old bureaucracy, put the teachers' and principals' unions on the defensive, and created a streamlined administrative apparatus to funnel a bigger slice of the systems' $12.5 billion annual budget into the classroom."

Unfortunately, there is a dark side to this success. As Stern reports, there is a decidedly dictatorial turn in New York City, where the mayor is "micromanaging teachers and principals to an extent unprecedented in American K-12 education. Agents of the chancellor (euphemistically called 'coaches') operate in almost all of the city's 1,200 schools to make sure that every educator marches in lockstep with the Department of Education's approved pedagogical approaches. There is now only one way ... to teach the three R's in the schools."

Arguably, chief among the sources of discontent in the Big Apple is the mayor's imposition of a reading program called "Month by Month Phonics" in all but a few schools. Critics of the curriculum argue that despite having "phonics" in its title, the program provides little such instruction -- a potential disaster for struggling city students. Unfortunately, with power consolidated in the mayor's hands, no one in New York City can block the program's implementation.

It's a situation that illustrates the danger of vesting power in one person: Everyone must abide by his dictates, wise or not. When wise, the results can be positive. But what happens when it's the latter? In New York City's schools, if the critics are right, it could mean illiteracy for thousands of children. Historically, we know that the consequences of unchecked power can potentially be worse.

But if mayoral control is too dangerous and school boards are too ineffective, what can be done to save failing districts? The answer: Government -- the source of the problem -- can be bypassed. Parents can be empowered with school choice, and schools themselves can be given autonomy. Parents and schools, not ineffectual school boards or unfettered mayors, can be put in control.

While no totally choice-driven district exists in the United States, the evidence is clear that where even limited choice is available, it's working. Academically, numerous studies have shown that students whose parents have exercised choice do at least as well as their public school peers. More telling, the sort of deep dissatisfaction that has fueled drives to exchange inept school boards for dictators is nowhere to be found among choosers. Polls consistently show overwhelming satisfaction among parents who choose their children's schools.

As school districts have failed, parents have typically been offered only two options: leave power with bumbling school boards or concentrate it in the hands of a single person. History has shown both options to be dangerous. Fortunately, choice offers something better.

The CATO Institute publications on School Choice

In New York City, Chancellor Joel Klein wants children and their parents to have choice:

The New York Post
EDITORIAL
KLEIN'S CHARTER CRUSADE

May 9, 2005 -- Schools Chancellor Joel Klein went up to Albany last week to beg the Legis lature to let him open up more suc cessful schools in New York City.

Why does he have to beg, when so many of the city's public schools are failing so miserably?

Because the schools he wants to open are charter schools - publicly funded, privately run institutions that must meet strict performance goals or face being shut down.

Charter schools tend not to be unionized, and that makes them Enemy No. 1 to the teachers unions, which own the jelly-spined politicians in Albany.

Hence, the begging.

Still, Klein has a compelling case.

When New York first passed a law allowing charter schools, back in 1998 - over the bitter opposition of the United Federation of Teachers and its Albany go-fers - the Legislature insisted that no more than 100 charters be granted statewide.

Ostensibly, the idea was to "test" the concept of charter schools. In reality, the unions wanted to keep competition with their unionized, bureaucratic, slothful, public-school fiefdom to an absolute minimum.

Now, however, the unions are in a fix.

Some 80 charters have been granted, and by the end of this calendar year, the state may well be bumping up hard against the 100-charter cap.

If the charter-school experiment were a failure, this would be the end of the story.

But it's been tremendously promising.

A study last year by Harvard education economist Caroline Hoxby, who gathered data on 99 percent of kids in charter schools nationally, found that charter-school kids were 5 percent more likely to be proficient in reading than their counterparts at the closest public school of a similar racial composition - and they were 3 percent more likely to be proficient in math.

Here in New York, a report on charters' first five years (mandated under the charter law) concluded that the schools "have proven themselves to be educational havens, particularly in urban areas across the state, offering new educational opportunities to children and families who could not afford to opt out of their local public schools."

The unions have no reasonable excuse to stand in the way of giving children in New York City access to more schools like the KIPP Academy, which for seven straight years has been the highest-performing middle school in the Bronx.

And neither do their puppets - like Steve Sanders, the Manhattan Democrat who chairs the Assembly's Education Committee.

Klein's proposal is for Albany to exempt New York City from the statewide charter-school cap. That makes sense, given Klein's aggressive push to open 50 new charter schools in the city by 2007 - injecting some competition into a calcified system.

But the Legislature also shouldn't neglect upstate.

Every charter school in the state has a waiting list - some have waiting lists twice as large as their enrollment.

Students all over the state are crying out for choice. It's time Albany uncapped their potential.