Education Next – Fredrick Hess
“One of my looooooong-standing frustrations is that talk about school choice, competition, markets, and the rest tends to be soaked in confusion, apology, spin, and invective. It feels like almost everything of note gets lost in debates about whether “school choice works” and amidst hoary claims of “privatization.” Three recent developments point to some of the issues here. One is the announcement that the Broad Residency for Urban Education has been accredited as an educational leadership program. The second was the reaction to a conducted by Huriya Jabbar and released by Tulane’s Education Research Alliance for New Orleans that found that thirty New Orleans principals said they mostly compete by marketing rather than by tackling their academic programs or school operations. (This shouldn’t unduly surprise—I wrote a book about this phenomenon more than a decade ago.) Third, just the other day, a USA Today column called for shuttering a Kansas City charter school whose students recently won the National Society of Black Engineers Robotics Competition because its test scores are only average. Before offering my take on all this, let’s recall a few basics about choice, competition, and markets. First, there are two basic spheres in a democracy: the public and the private. And the lines between them can be much blurrier than we might imagine. Public policy gives private employers guidelines regarding employment, health care, workplace safety, and marketing, while whole swaths of nominally “public” activity—from operating bus systems to cleaning toxic waste—are performed by privately managed firms.”(more)