Education Week: Accept No Substitutes for Real Decentralization:
"Is anyone recommending that General Motors repair itself by retraining its workers, or by adopting performance-based compensation for them? Are people advocating that we solve the nation’s health-care problems by altering the curriculum in schools of medicine?
The answer to both questions is no. Why, then, does it make sense for us to attack the problems of urban schools with equivalent measures: improving teacher training, adopting merit pay, or changing the curriculum and books?"
General Motors got into trouble by being overcentralized in its management, and the debate over health-care reform is largely about whether centralization will make it better or worse. When big organizations get into real trouble, the issue is often about centralization.
Urban school districts are dysfunctionally centralized, and putting improved subsystems of selection, training, and compensation into them cannot overcome the larger problem. To see how inappropriate are the currently voguish palliatives, we need only to observe what happens when principals are given the freedom to spend their budgets as they see fit, staff their schools as they think best, and arrange curricula and schedules according to the desires of their teachers.
"Is anyone recommending that General Motors repair itself by retraining its workers, or by adopting performance-based compensation for them? Are people advocating that we solve the nation’s health-care problems by altering the curriculum in schools of medicine?
The answer to both questions is no. Why, then, does it make sense for us to attack the problems of urban schools with equivalent measures: improving teacher training, adopting merit pay, or changing the curriculum and books?"
General Motors got into trouble by being overcentralized in its management, and the debate over health-care reform is largely about whether centralization will make it better or worse. When big organizations get into real trouble, the issue is often about centralization.
Urban school districts are dysfunctionally centralized, and putting improved subsystems of selection, training, and compensation into them cannot overcome the larger problem. To see how inappropriate are the currently voguish palliatives, we need only to observe what happens when principals are given the freedom to spend their budgets as they see fit, staff their schools as they think best, and arrange curricula and schedules according to the desires of their teachers.
