Some Thoughts on School Refrom

There is a big push for school reform, as documented in Steven Brill's recent article in the New York Times Sunday magazine.  Virtually all discussions of school reform focus on the obstructions arising from teachers' unions and the need to make individual teachers accountable—having their pay, promotions, and even their job security dependent on how their students perform on standardized tests.  Such efforts at accountability mirror what often occurs in for-profit companies and suffer from the same problems.  Here are a few.

W. Edwards Deming and the quality movement eschewed individual reward and punishment schemes because he thought that such arrangements often did not take into account factors affecting performance over which individuals had no control—namely, the system in which they worked.  I recall the COO of a large Florida electric utility gleefully telling me that his bonus depended on operating profits which, in a high-fixed cost company like a power provider, was mostly the result of capacity utilization—and how much the generators ran was a function of the weather.  So, this gentleman got rewarded for something—the temperature—over which he had no control.

In the case of teachers, much research shows that a) teacher quality matters but b) so do other things such as parental involvement, the community and its social resources, the physical condition of schools, and the actions of school boards and others party to the educational system.  Making people accountable for things over which they have limited control and making the consequences of their performance significant leads to—big surprise—attempts to the game the system.  As economist Steve Levitt has documented, rewarding teachers based on student test scores induces cheating, and the greater the consequences of the test scores, the more likely is the cheating.

It is all too easy to blame the teachers' unions for the problems of the educational system.  Yes, there's no doubt that ineffective teachers get protected.  But there's also no doubt, as the history of Civil Service reform in the U.S. shows, in the absence of job protections, what often occurs is not merit-based hiring and promotion but cronyism.  Recall Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and the replacement of United States' attorneys during the Bush administration?  That sort of political favoritism can occur in school districts as well, where the temptation to sell jobs for bribes (something that occurred in the recent past in New York City) and to hire people from one's same ethnic group can trump considerations of merit.

Children's learning depends on many factors.  Efforts to improve educational performance need to consider all of the factors and focus interventions not just on one, possibly the most politically vulnerable, target.