Too Big For School
Speed Gibson has this piece on the decline and fall of the Robbinsdale school district, one of Minnesota's largest.
What has happened to Robbinsdale and other large districts like Osseo will happen to the others eventually, for the same reason: lack of parental (customer) control. It happened first to the larger districts because they could afford more experts to accelerate the decline. One of the reasons for Wal-Mart's success was that its founder Sam Walton was ever wary of adding "experts" to the corporate staff. He wanted decisions made at the lower levels by those affected by them, not experts at headquarters with one-size-fits-all solutions.
The best thing Robbinsdale could do now is to break itself up into two or three smaller districts, to get closer to its customers. Close and sell the Administration building and release all of its employees.
Drastic? Not drastic enough, I think.
Gibson is right - school districts are too large. This makes perfect sense from a bureaucratic standpoint - but bureaucracy does not equal education. The districts infrastructure buildings and buildings become monuments to each sitting school board and superintendant; the policies and politics reflect the administrations' drives to forestall failure rather than to actually educate.
When is a school district too big? When its administration - superintendant, staff, board, and immense support structure - needs its own fortress-like facility. Saint Paul and Minneapolis qualify - their headquarters buildings are bureacratic-nouveau facades jammed with labyrinthine lairs crammed with bureaucrats.
If a school district is so big that a constituent (say, a parent) needs to perform dogged research to know who to ask about a simple question, it's too big.
So how small is small enough? Small enough that when parents say "Jump", the superintendant replies"how high?". I'm being facetious, sort of - teachers are often perfectly happy to have parents involved. But if you move up the food chain, the tolerance for uppity locals from principals, superintendants and school boards grows progressively less, the larger and more baroque the administration of your district.
It's why I'm such a fan of charter schools - schools run by parents, often enough. It, often more than curriculum, is the reason private schools do so well; parents have direct, free market control over every facet of the school, which is of course a reason public schools so detest the charter schools.
Much more to come.
Posted by Mitch at
October 5, 2004 05:36 AM
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While I do not like randomly assigning blame, here is a question.
What's the larger problem: The District or Education Minnesota pushing parents out of the decision making processes, or the parents resigning their roles in taking part of their children's education by not getting involved?
Posted by: Jerry Leigh at October 5, 2004 05:27 AMI'm not certain that small is much better. I lived in VT where the school districts were small and *very* local. The federal requirements these days drive a large bureaucracy, especially if you get just one special ed kid. Add to that that the teachers' union was large and well organized, often much better than the school district, which meant that often the districts were bulldozed by the teachers.
But at least the parents tended to be involved in the schools with the small districts. My experience is that parents tend to be less involved when they feel they aren't being heard by the pencil-pushers.
There's probably a balance to be struck, but with the current regulatory environment it's not by going micro or mega.
Posted by: nerdbert at October 5, 2004 11:19 AM