Barack Obama is a champion of education reform. So is Mitt Romney. Even in the midst of an extremely...

1. Moving beyond our vacuous education reform discussions
Barack Obama is a champion of education reform. So is
Mitt Romney. Even in the midst of an extremely polarized political season, the former Massachusetts
governor has offered praise for Arne Duncan, President Obama's secretary of education, and for the
Obama administration's Race to the Top initiative. The same is true of Jeb Bush, the former Florida
governor, who has emerged as the GOP's leading point person on fixing America's schools. To those
who lament partisan rancor, this might look like very good news. But it's not. Rather, it is an
indication that our conversation about "education reform" is pretty vacuous.
The reform label applies to at least three broad ideas: (1) standards-oriented reform, or let's have
more testing and accountability; (2) human capital reform, or let's have better teachers; and (3)
choice-oriented reform, or let's use "backpack funding" that will allow public education dollars to
follow the student wherever she chooses to enroll, whether it's a neighborhood public school, a
public charter or (perhaps) a voucher-eligible private school. Many people who love one kind of
reform hate the others, so saying you're "pro-reform" doesn't mean very much.
That shouldn't come as a shock. There is something about public education that starts Americans
gushing and makes them sentimental and unrigorous. Hardly anyone disagrees with the late RB
songstress Whitney Houston, who believed that the children are our future and that we should teach
them well and let them lead the way. Schmaltz is deployed on all sides of the debate - from teachers'
union members who insist that those who oppose across-the-board pay hikes don't care about kids to
voucher proponents who specialize in heartstring-tugging tales of inner-city youth.
It's not just schmaltz that limits our ability to think clearly about public education. Frederick Hess,
an education policy scholar at the center-right American Enterprise Institute and one of the smartest
think tankers I know, has argued that we're also hamstrung by our collective fixation on schools as
instruments for achieving social justice.
The stubborn gap between the graduation rates and achievement levels of white Anglo and Asian
American students on the one hand and Latino and African American students on the other is a real
problem, particularly as the Latino share of the population surges. But by viewing public education
first and foremost through the lens of this "achievement gap," philanthropists and legislators have,
in Hess's view, prioritized raising reading and math scores of the weakest students to the detriment
of reforms that could boost performance across the system as a whole.
How could focusing on the poorest, most vulnerable kids be a bad thing? In effect, achievement gap
thinking allows the vast majority of middle-class parents to remain complacent about their own
mediocre schools while focusing attention on a handful of dysfunctional urban school districts that
educate a minority of America's K-12 students. This complacency suits suburban America's elected

2. officials and school administrators, as it allows them to avoid contentious battles over truly
innovative instructional models that could rattle the status quo.
The biggest barrier to the embrace of these innovative models is cultural. We find it very hard to
imagine structuring schools in new and different ways. Even the most celebrated charter school
networks are just slightly modified versions of the public schools most of us attended as children.
And the reform conversation tends to focus on minor tweaks. Consider human capital reform.
Reformers on the left and right tend to oppose so-called last-in, first-out hiring policies, salary
schedules that emphasize years on the job over effectiveness, and tenure rules that make it virtually
impossible to fire underperforming teachers. Moving beyond these practices could very well make a
difference in the quality of education, and that shouldn't be dismissed.
But these measures fail to address the deeper problem: that K-12 education makes little use of
specialization, the main driver of productivity growth in every other sector of the economy. As Hess
and Olivia Meeks observe in The Futures of School Reform, the size of the teacher workforce tripled
from 1.1 million in the 1950s to 3.3 million in the early 2000s. At the same time, college-educated
women who once had few professional options outside of teaching saw their opportunities expand
dramatically. And so it became far less likely that a new public school teacher had graduated in the
top 10th of her high school class. Many human capital reformers argue that the right solution to this
problem is to dramatically increase compensation for teachers. Many also champion shrinking class
sizes. Even if we could afford to pursue these strategies, and it's far from obvious that we can, there
will come a point at which we will exhaust the supply of American adults who are willing and able to
teach.
Instead of simply increasing the number of teachers, Hess and Meeks propose shifting teaching from
a http://privatetutoring.us/ profession built around generalists - people who teach reading and
fractions and supervise bus-loading and monitor the cafeteria and grade papers - to one built around
specialists. Just as the Mayo Clinic has specialists working on discrete medical problems
(cardiologists here, neurosurgeons there) and support staff who enable them to do their work,
schools could "unbundle" the job of teaching. We don't find it strange or scandalous that highly
trained obstetricians don't also clear bedpans. In the same vein, schools should rely more heavily on
support staff to load the bus, monitor the cafeteria and grade exams while letting teachers who are
really great at teaching fifth grade geometry focus on teaching fifth grade geometry. Like medical
specialists, specialist teachers in the rarest, most demanding fields should expect more
compensation. School employees with skills that aren't quite as uncommon, meanwhile, could be
paid less without sacrificing quality.
To be sure, we shouldn't replace one rigid, centralized approach with another. While the Hess and
Meeks vision of schools that deploy talent in http://huntingtonhelps.com/page/academic-skills-math/
smarter ways is attractive, there isn't a single best way to unbundle education. And that is the
reason why choice-oriented reform is a crucial complement to real human capital reform - we need
new schools and school networks to experiment with different models.
According to Neerav Kingsland, the CEO of the non-profit New Schools for New Orleans, the key
emerging divide in the education world is between reformers and those he calls relinquishers.
Reformers are school district leaders who aim to make centralized, government-run educational
systems work more effectively by imposing new rules and regulations concerning what school

3. administrators and teachers can and cannot do. Relinquishers, in contrast, believe that the job of the
school district is to empower charter school operators to teach as they see fit, subject to oversight
from a small and nimble central office.
The caveat is that relinquishers have a special responsibility to shut down schools that fail and help
schools that succeed grow as quickly as possible. In New Orleans, where 85 percent of students are
enrolled in charter schools, Kingsland's organization launched seven schools just this fall, and he has
also been involved in the wrenching process of shutting failing schools down.
Yet New Orleans is very much an outlier; it is hard to imagine school districts across America
voluntarily following the lead of New Orleans. Fortunately, school choice isn't the only way to drive
innovation and experimentation in education. Instead of relinquishing at the level of the school,
schools can start relinquishing at the level of individual courses.
John White, Louisiana's state superintendent of education, has worked with Governor Bobby Jindal
to push forward the most ambitious education agenda in the country. One of White's most promising
initiatives is course-level instructional choice. Having previously served as superintendent of the
Recovery School District, White recognizes the power of charter schools - yet he also recognizes
their limitations. "It takes an enormously talented leader to start a new school, and the number of
such organizations is inherently limited," he explained. "So in order to really scale quality and
innovation and access, you can shrink the unit that needs to be developed from an entire school into
something smaller." That is, instead of expecting parents and students to leap from one school to
another, you can give them the option of choosing, say, a Spanish class taught by a local teacher or a
Mandarin class taught online. For White, the beauty of this approach is that it allows students to
leverage the many other institutions - colleges and universities, private firms, the military - that can
provide developmental experiences as valuable as those offered by K-12 schools.
More broadly, course-level instructional choice might even improve the cost-effectiveness of
education. Burck Smith, the CEO and founder of the low-cost higher education provider
StraighterLine, has floated the idea of an educational "cafeteria" plan, in which students would be
assigned a fixed budget that could be used for a wide array of courses. By taking a low-cost online
language course, for example, a student could save money for extra precalculus tutoring or a
summer enrichment program.
Relinquishers remain a small minority in the education world. Most education visionaries are still
chasing after the One Big Solution, whether it's merit pay, better teacher evaluations, or mimicking
Finland or Shanghai. Charter schools are still seen as a boutique movement, and relatively few
policymakers have even heard of course-level instructional choice. But as Americans face up to the
limitations of one-size-fits-all school reform, the relinquishers are slowly gaining ground.
PHOTO: Jazmine Raygoza, 18, (C) adjusts her cap before her high school graduation in Denver, May
19, 2012. REUTERS/Rick Wilking