recipe for inequity—that increasing the
role of the private nonprofits or for-
profits in schooling is a de facto retreat
from public schooling?
I’d say a couple of things. One, I see
massive inequities in U.S. schooling
today. Affluent suburbs are able to do a
reasonable job operating schools with
the tools they have at hand. They get
the teachers they need to make current
school models work. They have two-parent households in which children
come to school with a number of advantages. So trying to play by the same old
rules will, in many ways, maintain the
inequities that we see out there today.
Second, public education is not a
form of delivery; public education is a
function that we, as a nation, are
committed to providing to our kids. If
we can provide that education more
effectively, especially to the kids who are
the worst off, that is entirely consistent
with the ethos of public education.
I think greenfield has the opportunity
to help combat inequities because it is
going to create an opportunity to
leverage expertise and talent and tools
in those places where they’re most
needed. The greenfield premise doesn’t
imagine that we should go around
razing districts or schools or taking
resources, willy-nilly, away from current
operations and just handing them over
to anybody. What it suggests is a mind-set in which we’re focused on creating
opportunities for problem solvers to
solve problems.
Say that a teacher has devised a
powerful way to teach 8th grade
algebra, or to help English language
learners master the language more
rapidly, or to run a creative writing
program in grade 5. The way we do
business right now, when people hear
about this enough, folks might start
flying in from another district to eyeball
this program so they can fly home and
try to imitate it. A teacher would typi-
cally also be told, “That’s neat! Why
don’t you go start a charter school?”
Well, I’ve got no confidence that that
teacher wants to start a charter school or
that observers are going to learn enough
to faithfully, consistently replicate her
efforts, or that we want her to spend her
time finding a facility or assembling a
faculty.
What’s worth preserving about tradi-
tional public education?
A lot. One of the huge advantages that
the United States as a nation enjoys is
that we have invested trillions of dollars
in capital stock—the schools that we’ve
built, the technologies, the educators.
And we’ve spent $600 billion a year
providing this. The result is an enormous and enviable array of schools, of
services, of systems for tracking student
performance, for managing school
district needs. We have 1,300-plus
teacher preparation programs; we have
an enormity of physical resources.
The downside of all of this is that we
have a large investment in the way
things have traditionally been done. We
have colleges of education that in many
cases are a century or more old, that can
trace their roots to 19th-century normal
schools. We have school districts that
have literally dozens of data systems,
one stacked upon the other, going back
in some cases a half century.
Listen to the audio version of this interview online
at www.ascd.org/authortalks#hess.
Frederick M. Hess is
Director of Education
Policy Studies at the
American Enterprise
Institute and a former
high school teacher;
RHess@aei.org.
Deborah Perkins-
Gough is Senior
Editor, Educational
Leadership; dperkins@ascd.org.
AUDIO
