Fixing the Schools

Government management was considered an oxymoron until the 1990s, when a group of mayors came to office determined to do what most elected officials only talk about, which is make government more efficient, responsive and accountable. Since then, mayors like Michael Bloomberg in New York and Martin O'Malley in Baltimore have made enormous strides in improving things like trash pickups and pothole repairs. But one important part of government continues to defy rational management: the public schools. But there are signs that, even there, change is on the way.

You know why governments were considered management-proof in the past: no bottom line, muscular unions, timid bureaucrats and witless elected officials. But smart mayors are finding ways of applying bottom lines to government performance (through tying 311 citizen complaint calls to response reports), working with unions (by trading raises for productivity gains) and giving bureaucrats some backbone (through occasionally brutal performance reviews, as O'Malley instituted in Baltimore).

And yet for all the attention and resources that schools have received since 1983, when the "Nation At Risk" report alerted citizens and policymakers to the sad state of public education — not to mention a long line of short-term management fixes — we still don't know how to assure steady progress in our schools. But we're getting closer.

Once again, New York is a good place to see what lies ahead. At first glance, the school system there seems to be floundering. Three years after Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools and placed an attorney, Joel Klein, in charge, Klein is rethinking the entire management system. Where Klein spent his first years consolidating authority, he's now thinking of radically decentralizing it. Isn't this just more academic tail-chasing?

Actually no. The New York schools were a mess when Klein took over, divided into 32 community districts, many of which were patronage operations with scant interest in the actual education of children. Klein needed to wipe out that failed system, and by all accounts he has done so. (Test scores have risen, perhaps as a result, though hardly anyone is satisfied with where they are.)

What Klein is focusing on now is dramatically and permanently raising student performance. And he has come to recognize what others have: that the secret is highly effective principals. So the next wave of management reform in New York schools will almost certainly be about giving principals much greater leeway to select and assign teachers, move resources to problem areas, use outside vendors if the central office doesn't address the school's needs and so on — in return for meeting demanding performance standards.

In the future, then, principals may become the celebrated heroes of public education, not central-office bureaucrats or even teachers. A similar thing happened with the New York Police Department in the early 1990s, when the glory, rewards — and accountability — suddenly shifted to district commanders and away from police headquarters. Result: After a period of excuse-making and finger-pointing, performance soared and crime dropped. Could the same happen with the schools? Stay tuned.

Footnote: So why are the schools so hard to manage? They have the usual anchors of resistant unions, spineless bureaucrats and feckless elected officials, but there are two other barriers: state and federal regulations that make school administration nearly impossible and an apparently sincere academic crowd that believes schools can't be managed like every other human endeavor. One is Diane Ravitch, an educational historian, who blasted Klein's efforts in the New York Times recently, calling them "insane" and saying they are "far less important, far less consequential than the daily dealings between teachers and students." What Ravitch doesn't appear to recognize is that good management is how you improve those daily dealings across an entire school system.