Why Freer Schools Are Better Schools
By Philip K Howard
President Obama’s proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind is long overdue. Over the past decade the regime’s rigid metrics and penalties transformed schools into testing factories. Unfortunately, the White House proposal—which replaces NCLB’s legal sticks with new legal carrots—won’t come close to fixing America’s schools.
The president has drawn the wrong lesson from the law’s failure. The fundamental defect of No Child Left Behind is that it elevated a sensible evaluation tool—standardized testing—into a legal requirement.
Teachers began teaching to the test. Facing the embarrassment of continued failure and the threat of closure, states set standards so low they were laughable. When none of this worked some schools and teachers resorted to cheating.
But No Child Left Behind, even with all of its deficiencies, is not the root cause of school failure. It is simply the latest misguided reform effort.
Public school failure can be traced directly to the technique of reform: centralized legal dictates. A steady accretion of law since the 1960s has smothered personality and individual responsibility in schools. There’s no oxygen left for educators to build healthy school cultures.
Law became our de facto school management system as an unintended result of the rights revolution. Desegregation required new laws, but reformers didn’t stop with those important changes. They wanted to guarantee not just equality of opportunity but fairness in every interaction. So they started writing elaborate codes governing daily classroom choices.
Now, some 50 years later, a legal library is required to keep up with mandates for due process, special education, work rules, and a jungle of local laws and regulations that try to dictate a uniform response to any issue that might arise. A 2004 study of the rules in one New York City school by Common Good, the legal reform organization I run, found that the daily decisions made by teachers and principals are dictated by thousands of regulations.
Over 60 steps and legal considerations are required to suspend a disruptive student. Manuals of 200 pages describe the “rights” of students. Work rules in the union contract have the force of law and hamstring principals in the most basic management decisions.
Law is brilliantly ineffective as a management tool. It is too rigid and doesn’t account for the need to adjust to particular circumstances. Fairness generally depends on context and requires judgment on the spot.
Looking at daily choices as a matter of legal rights polarizes people. One effect is paralysis: Educators will do almost anything to avoid yet another legal argument. Another effect is bureaucracy growing at warp speed, as educators write rules to validate the legality of ordinary choices. Fairness disappears when rules replace common sense, as in the recent suspension in Michigan of a 6-year-old for pointing his finger like a gun, mandated under “zero tolerance” rules.
Experts say you can tell a successful school within five minutes: There’s a palpable sense of productivity, the low hum of activity, quiet classrooms, students striding purposefully to the next class, and an absence of loud disputes. Many charter and parochial schools fit this description, proving that creating such an environment is possible even in the most challenging neighborhoods. What’s different about those schools? Daily choices aren’t dictated by law.
America’s schools can never be fixed as long as teachers and principals go through the day responding to rules instead of their common sense. We must let the humans take charge again. The guiding principle should be to replace legal dictates with individual responsibility.
First, we must restore teachers’ authority to maintain order. A 2004 Public Agenda survey found that 43% of teachers spend more time trying to maintain order than teaching. The rise of school disorder is directly correlated with the rise of due process, NYU Professor Richard Arum found in his 2003 landmark study “Judging School Discipline.” Teachers must be able to remove disruptive students immediately. Otherwise the other students have no chance to learn. Formal due process should be limited to severe suspensions and expulsion.
Second, we must replace bureaucracy with individual responsibility. Both teachers and principals are immoblized by law. The cure is mutual disarmament. Teachers must be given the freedom to be themselves. Good teachers hold the attention of class through their personality, not rote recitations. By encouraging teachers to be professionals again, good people will be attracted to teaching as a career.
At the same time, principals must have freedom to get rid of bad teachers. If teachers want to be free to use their best judgment, principals must be free to decide whether the teacher is doing the job.
Reviving accountability does not mean unlimited discretion. The key is to abandon adversarial legal proceedings and protect against abuses with a local oversight committee. Parents and other teachers know who’s good and who’s not. That review can be made in weeks—not the years often required in a due process hearing.
President Obama has long championed the expansion of charter schools. But scaling up these schools, which educate only 3% of America’s students, will take decades. The better idea lies in plain view: Let public schools operate with the same freedoms as charter schools.
Originally published in the March 25, 2010 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
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