Education, Equity, and the States: How Variations in State Governance Make or Break Reform
Sara E. Dahill-Brown
336 pages, Harvard Education Press, 2019
Most people who study education policy know a little bit about the story of Albert Shanker’s 1988 speech before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. There, Shanker embarked on a wide-ranging critique of reform, and referenced ideas developed by Ray Budde in his 1988 proposal, Education by Charter. This moment is often cited as the start of the charter school movement in the United States. What folks less often consider when they reflect on that moment is how the somewhat radical ideas in Shanker’s speech became a real policy proposal. In the first chapter of Education, Equity and the States, I reconsider this moment and the birth of the charter school movement, with an eye towards what we can learn about governance, in particular the states’ roles in U.S. educational governance. The excerpt below picks up in the middle of that story, and describes how understanding state governance is in fact central to making sense of the emergence, growth, and impact of charter schools as well as the success or failure of other reform efforts, particularly those aimed at addressing inequity. — Sara Dahill-Brown
On March 31, 1988, fabled teacher unionist Albert Shanker delivered a speech on education reform at the National Press Club (NPC) in Washington, DC. By the end, the moderator was asking Shanker whether his proposals might throw public school districts into a state of anarchy. This was the beginning of the charter school movement.
The origin story of charter schools, described momentarily, is illustrative for several reasons. First, and perhaps most importantly for this discussion, although the charter school movement can trace its early history to Shanker’s moment on a national stage, it was the combined efforts of advocates and policy makers at the state level—to reallocate funding, partner with new authorizers, and define the parameters of autonomy—that ushered charter schools into the world as active and durable policy. In Minnesota, the first state to enact a charter school law, the process of drafting the legislation was driven by state-level actors who fought and negotiated over a period of years before compromising on a plan that earned the support of a majority coalition in the legislature. Since then, states around the country have established charter school sectors, but evidence suggests that they are highly differentiated from one another, heavily shaped by the specific provisions of each state’s law and preexisting circumstances (geographic dispersion of the population between rural and urban areas, diversity and segregation, poverty and inequality, etc.).
The story of the charter school movement is also important because charter schools constitute a substantial, ongoing attempt to remake the governance of public schools. Though the particular critiques have varied with time and place—too partisan or not partisan enough, too democratic or not democratic enough—education reformers throughout American history, like charter advocates today, have cited the existing system of governance as a major reason for why schools fall short of collective aspirations. Charter reform is one of the many cases in which reformers have sought to improve educational quality and opportunity indirectly, through restructuring governance, by manipulating the configuration of power, the process for making decisions, and the mechanisms of accountability. The most public debates about charter schools may center on whether or not they improve academic outcomes, increase racial or economic segregation, or overuse punitive disciplinary practices—all important questions—but state charter laws do not directly speak to those issues. Nonetheless, both charter advocates and vehement opponents believe that transforming how schools are governed can significantly alter educational practices and outcomes. Studying the history of the charter school movement reveals that questions of governance, even when they are not named as such in public discourse, are often central to proposed reforms.
Finally, as the idea to create new, innovative, independent public schools diffused and evolved, it was actively engaged by many of the governmental institutions and nongovernmental constituencies who contribute to school governance throughout the United States. The emergence of charter schools therefore highlights the intersection of several major threads of education governance reform: an affinity for hyperlocal site- or school-based decision-making; standards, testing, and accountability, which advance a vision of a more streamlined hierarchy; and school choice, which relies on a vision of market-like innovation, specialization, and competition. Today, these latter two threads arguably comprise the conventional wisdom of a great deal of reform, with testing and accountability theoretically supplying the information that a market must rely on in order to function. The charter school narrative thus offers a glimpse into the complexity of and conflicts around education governance, and in so doing demonstrates the need for a framework to structure analyses of these many players and stakeholders.
While the story of charter schools’ emergence serves well to illustrate the centrality of governance to reform efforts, it is limited in its scope. One could easily get lost interrogating the peculiarities of a small number of reform efforts in a small number of places and lose sight of the big picture. Recognizing that states are critical actors in education governance is one step; starting to make sense of the many actors and institutions who collaborate on education governance is the next. To that end, later in this chapter I present a conceptual framework that categorizes the key elements of governance and establishes a foundation for comparing states to one another and measuring changes in governance over time. I then examine the characteristics of good governance and identify reasons for the backlash against education reform, including critiques of charter reform.
Inventing and Reimagining Charter Schools: A Governance Story
At the time of his speech, Shanker was in the fifteenth of his nearly twenty-five-year tenure as president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the smaller of the two major teacher unions. He authored a regular column for the New York Times and was well known to educators and policy makers alike. He was by then a prominent figure, what political scientists might call a policy entrepreneur—someone whose endorsement of an idea carried weight enough to catapult proposals into the national spotlight, and if the circumstances were right, onto the agendas of other leaders.
Historical and Contemporary Contingency in Education Governance
Education governance is shaped by entrepreneurial individuals like Shanker, but also by the contingencies of history: the policies, problems, politics, and institutions that have come before and which in combination can create windows of opportunity during which reform is especially possible. Shanker began his address by reflecting on the recent past and the new policies that had been sweeping through schools all over the country. Just five years earlier, in 1983, a presidential commission had set off a moral panic when it published the A Nation at Risk report, declaring that American schools had fallen low and were mired in an epic crisis. According to the report, American students were lagging behind their international peers, endangering the country’s economic future and ultimately compromising its security in the midst of the Cold War.
Though many disputed the report’s conclusions, pointing out that academic achievement was not in fact on a downward trajectory and underscoring the progress and tumult of recent decades (racial integration, the inclusion of students with disabilities, and more equitable funding systems), these critiques never earned as much attention as the initial report. Concerns over the quality of education seemed to eclipse concerns over access and equity.
For his part, Shanker accepted the premise of the A Nation at Risk report. In his speech at the NPC, he agreed that schools had become “too soft” and “too loose” during the 1960s and 1970s, and in his mind, the wake-up call had been a necessary one. Acknowledging this set of circumstances, he went on to express excitement about increased engagement with schools from the political and business communities. He also commended the swift responses of many state governments and local school districts, which organized their own commissions in the aftermath of the report.
Indeed, many state legislatures had raised certification standards as well as salaries for teachers and enacted new graduation and testing requirements. Shanker painted a picture of active state governments, energized local districts, schools that were striving to do better, and a public newly reengaged with education. But he also used his platform to suggest that there was a major flaw with this wave of reforms. His first line of critique centered on the processes by which proposals were chosen and implemented. There had been a naïve failure to grapple with the complexity of translating new policies into practice, he argued: “It’s top down, it’s regulatory, with thick books of legislation telling everybody how many minutes there should be in the school day and the school year, how many hours there should be of this and that, and what should determine whether someone passes or fails.”
In the twenty-first century, federal policies are described pejoratively as “top down.” In the late 1980s, however, it was state efforts that earned this moniker for disrupting the traditional autonomy of local school districts. According to Shanker, mandates and regulations from states, though well intended, often did not include adequate resources or time to support implementation with fidelity to the policy makers’ original vision. Further, and more damning from Shanker’s perspective, top-down policies did not make space for fundamentally new or transformative practices. He argued that they failed to address the diverse needs of students, and created an environment in which teachers and administrators were working harder, but were also increasingly constrained.
Shanker was a dedicated union leader, but also a former exasperated educator, and someone who violently resented bureaucratic procedures and red tape. Anticipating the twenty-first-century critiques of “one size fits all” standards and accountability, he argued that this new wave of reforms codified “one way of reaching kids.” A single set of strategies, he emphasized, would not help the majority of students realize their potential.
Education governance often takes place within a system of institutions and actors whose primary focus is schools (and where the design of institutions may deliberately attempt to dampen the influence of partisan politics), something Jeffrey Henig has described as exceptionalism.9 However, it is critical to bear in mind that educational politics and policy are always influenced by broader happenings in the world; at times, major policy change has been provoked by these contingencies. Just as the tide of concern about educational quality reflected anxieties about the economy, the Cold War, and the international position of the United States, Shanker’s critique reflected a broader shift in the theory and practices of governance.
Particularly in countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), skepticism toward government was on the rise, and a conventional wisdom coalesced around what is now called “new public management.” The approach was shaped by a distrust of top-down, command and control policies, but had little to say about democratic processes. Instead, proponents encouraged a focus on efficiency and wanted accountability for results rather than procedures. They valorized competition, and drew conscious inspiration from the private sector, often preferring to administer public programs through for-profit businesses under contract rather than government agencies. Several times throughout his speech, Shanker contrasted the constraints applied to schools with the autonomy and innovative capacity he ascribed to private enterprise.
Resistance to Top-Down Governance
In keeping with this emerging ideological consensus, Shanker’s preferred alternative was to continue setting standards and to encourage high levels of engagement, but to avoid prescribing how academic goals should be achieved. Shanker expressed a faith in small groups of committed educators, whom he likened to corporate research and development teams. He emphasized that good managers would not tell their subordinates how a problem should be solved, only that it needed to be solved. Shanker believed educators should be empowered to steer and differentiate reform efforts, and he expected that they would transform school systems gradually, with innovative teachers convincing their more reticent colleagues by demonstrating transformative practices. Shanker imagined such a process would help attract new and especially talented teachers to the profession with the promise of a dynamic career and professional autonomy. He cited prominent school districts and networks where this more bottom-up style of reform was under way, describing these efforts as a smaller but also more promising and innovative wave of reform.
Though he admired the efficient practices of private enterprise and expressed gratitude for business communities’ renewed interest in schools, Shanker remained a proud socialist. He was careful to specify that there were some necessary conditions for successful reform. These included adequate public investment and physical infrastructure; some measure of political stability so that leaders might feel secure; strong collective bargaining rights that empowered teachers; trust between labor and management; and partnerships with key constituencies like universities or foundations who could help maintain momentum and bypass bureaucracies when necessary. In short, Shanker believed local reform could succeed, but only when local agencies possessed capacity and resources; when they were supported by political leaders, civil society, and the business community; and when relations between governmental and nongovernmental actors were positive. While labor relations might have been highly localized, the availability of adequate resources and the extent of collective bargaining rights were conditions largely in control of the states.
Having described models of bottom-up efforts and called on state and local leaders to establish baseline conditions for effective school reform, Shanker finally turned his remarks to a specific proposal developed by Ray Budde, a school administrator and professor of education in Massachusetts. Budde was a great believer in John Dewey’s assertions that high-quality teachers were the critical element for any endeavor in education reform. As such, he had proposed a redesign of the traditional school district’s four-part hierarchy with the school board at the top, superintendent as CEO, principal as manager, and teacher at the bottom.
In Education by Charter (1988), Budde recommended a flatter configuration in which groups of educators would petition school boards to obtain charters and form their own schools. He plotted a timeline for the stages of developing and monitoring chartered schools, even sketching a case study in which a hypothetical school district entirely reorganized itself over the course of ten years. Through the case study, Budde imagined the new system gradually but fundamentally altering the roles of nearly every actor within the school district. He suggested that such a system would change teachers’ relationship with their work and encourage them to develop special expertise; draw parents and other members of the community into dialogue about educational practices; and weave research, learning, and collaboration into daily activities.
A few months after his speech at the NPC, Shanker presented Budde’s idea to the national convention of the AFT, earning the delegates’ collective endorsement for the proposal. In his July 10th “Where We Stand” column for the New York Times, he wrote triumphantly about a “new course” for schools. Newspapers broadcasted Shanker’s words around the country. In several states, serious conversations about the scheme began to take shape.