Go to the Principal's Office: How to Improve the Schools

From Otis White's Civic Strategies Notebook:

...Three years after Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools and placed an attorney, Joel Klein, in charge, Klein is rethinking the entire management system. Where Klein spent his first years consolidating authority, he's now thinking of radically decentralizing it. Isn't this just more academic tail-chasing?

Actually no. The New York schools were a mess when Klein took over, divided into 32 community districts, many of which were patronage operations with scant interest in the actual education of children. Klein needed to wipe out that failed system, and by all accounts he has done so. (Test scores have risen, perhaps as a result, though hardly anyone is satisfied with where they are.)

What Klein is focusing on now is dramatically and permanently raising student performance. And he has come to recognize what others have: that the secret is highly effective principals. So the next wave of management reform in New York schools will almost certainly be about giving principals much greater leeway to select and assign teachers, move resources to problem areas, use outside vendors if the central office doesn't address the school's needs and so on — in return for meeting demanding performance standards.

In the future, then, principals may become the celebrated heroes of public education, not central-office bureaucrats or even teachers. A similar thing happened with the New York Police Department in the early 1990s, when the glory, rewards — and accountability — suddenly shifted to district commanders and away from police headquarters. Result: After a period of excuse-making and finger-pointing, performance soared and crime dropped. Could the same happen with the schools? Stay tuned.

Footnote: So why are the schools so hard to manage? They have the usual anchors of resistant unions, spineless bureaucrats and feckless elected officials, but there are two other barriers: state and federal regulations that make school administration nearly impossible and an apparently sincere academic crowd that believes schools can't be managed like every other human endeavor. One is Diane Ravitch, an educational historian, who blasted Klein's efforts in the New York Times recently, calling them "insane" and saying they are "far less important, far less consequential than the daily dealings between teachers and students." What Ravitch doesn't appear to recognize is that good management is how you improve those daily dealings across an entire school system.

Index Keywords: education