For conservative reformers of education, the main explanation for why our public schools perform so poorly is that they are untouched by competition, that great flywheel of endless striving which drives the capitalist engine. Such critics see unionized schoolteachers, secure in their tenures and unthreatened by either promotion or demotion, as lacking the necessary goad which might incentive them to heroically raise our children up from semiliterate idiocy to job-generating entrepreneurship. Thus the slogan of “school choice”—by turning parents (and, to a lesser degree, students) into a kind of consumer, the state could force schools to duke it out on the open market, catering to their client’s expectations and constantly proving their merit and agility.
Overall, I find this line of criticism deeply unsatisfactory, and more than a little disingenuous, for it ignores completely the structural problems of family inequality and economic opportunity, and provides cover for the kinds of parents who simply want the option of micromanaging what is and is not appropriate for their child to learn. Perhaps one reason that I find it so hard to swallow is because I myself went to a big, messy, general-admission public high school, and I found the teachers there to be anything but autopiloted robots fattened by the comforts of a good middle-class sinecure. On the contrary, I found teachers by-and-large wanted to perform well at their jobs simply because performing well at one’s job is innately satisfying, even when unattached to praise or fortune.
But let’s, for a moment, grant the conservative reformers the point that introducing a touch of the competitive spirit might help encourage schools to try new ways of teaching and prevent them from ever sinking into complaisance in the face of the daunting task which has been set before them. It is possible to do this without converting families into educational consumers shopping around for the best deal. The federal “Race to the Top” initiative is one such example: it rewards entire states with grant money when they meet certain goals laid out by the Department of Education. Though it has its problems (particularly its reliance on standardized testing), the concept behind Race to the Top is a good one, and it is a cheap way to get states experimenting with how they might make school a better experience for everyone involved.
Yet an American state is a rather abstract and difficult to excite team, and I doubt very much whether the average teacher, much less the average student, cares very much about Racing to the Top for the Greater Glory of Tennessee, or New Hampshire, or wherever. So I wonder whether we might take the team-competition concept and shrink it down to a level where the individuals involved actually feel some sort of agency over the success of their group. The willingness of people to pour their enthusiasms into a team they care deeply about is one of the greatest sources of motivational vigor that the we’ve got as a species.
Here’s the experiment I have in mind. Take a moderately-large public school district—something like Boston or Cleveland, for example. Divide it into two or three upper administrations entirely separate from each other, each with its own superintendent, assistant superintendents, curricular staff, and so on. (It might make sense, for efficiency’s sake, to leave a general-services staff, for things like purchasing and office administration, which is shared by all subadministrations). Then—and this is the crucial part—let them divvy up the city’s schools using a method invented on the schoolyard itself: by taking turns. If the subadministrations were divided geographically, the experiment would face a huge problem of unequal demographics, in which one subadministration had the rich suburbs and another the poor immigrant neighborhoods. But by taking turns, the strengths of the schools would be distributed reasonably fairly between the different subadministrations. Then, set up a series of metrics, perhaps measured over the duration of three to five years, which all the stakeholders can mutually agree to be fair (they might include, but hopefully not rely on, test scores). Finally, set a prize for the winning subdistrict—20% salary increases across the board, perhaps? And then let the subdistricts do what they want: experiment with curricula, change teaching styles, introduce new teacher-training programs, partner with nonprofits … just about anything. At the end of the agreed-upon period, say three years, the winning subdistrict would be rewarded (rather than the losing subdistrict being punished). Repeat in three-year increments. Every nine or twelve years, rerun the team-choosing distribution game so that one subdistrict doesn’t pull permanently away from the rest.
It’s far from a magic bullet, but I do think it’s an experiment which would test whether the competitive urge is in fact one of the solutions to our national educational crisis. And, while it might take a daring school board to initiate such a program, I don’t think there is any reason why it should be completely politically unpalatable. If I could couple it with two policies which are much less likely to find support, I would draw the unit larger than a municipal boundary to include a metro area (instead of three Boston subdistrict teams, twelve Boston Metro subdistrict teams), and I would ban private schools. Though I think those additions would help the experiment immensely, I don’t think they’re necessary (and I’m under no illusion that they’d ever be tried).
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2013/08/22/432/