EDUCATION REFORM Beneath the Surface
Part II: Marketizing School Reform
by John Garvey
I ended the first article in this series by discussing the Department of Education’s focus on closing old and opening new schools. I’ll begin this second article by discussing the complementary focus on the marketization of school selection.
I’m no expert on markets. Indeed, I mostly rely on Michael Lewis, author of books such as The Big Short and the recently published Flash Boys, to understand them. Come to think of it, it might not be a bad idea for Michael Lewis to devote his next book to exposing the underside of the marketization of school reform. In the meantime, let me try to sort things out a bit.
In New York it all began with the establishment of new small high schools to replace quite deadly large high schools, especially in the Bronx. The plan was simple and quite good—close one bad big school and open up three or four new good small schools. That effort began before the Bloomberg era but it was enthusiastically embraced by the new regime. Early on, it secured the support of many millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. Over a decade, more than 400 new schools were started. A fair assessment would say that most of the small high schools are much better than the schools they replaced, evidenced by much higher rates of high school graduation. But most of those new schools have not reached the goals they were intended to achieve. Those schools were not simply supposed to be better than really dreadful schools; they were intended to be really good schools. That goal remains elusive.
But, in the meantime, one thing did lead to another. The process of developing and approving new schools morphed into what was called, by analogy with financial investment, a “portfolio” strategy. A portfolio of stocks includes winners and losers; over time, the winners and losers are identified; the losers lose money and the winners make it. When this approach is tried on schools, the kids who attend the loser schools—oops!
Ah! The way you avoid that bad outcome is that you give people choices, so they can identify winners and losers and pick winners. This didn’t actually work out so well with 401Ks. In any case, in a school system with only a few winners and a lot of losers, the choice is often a hollow one. Let’s try to understand the balance of winners and losers. Here in New York City, only about 22 percent of high school graduates are meeting the state’s expectations for being prepared for college—meaning that they would not be required to take remedial courses if they did enroll in college. This is a low bar. But that’s hardly the worst of it. For the just over 350 schools for which data for 2012’s graduates were reported, 10 percent (about 40) of the schools produced half of the college-ready graduates. Many of those schools are exam schools or have selective admissions policies. About half of the high EDUCATION REFORM Beneath the Surface Part II: Marketizing School Reform - The Brooklyn Rail: