The Campaign for Fiscal Equity suit, if it is to ever come of anything, will not only include more equitable funding for New York City’s schools (or at least higher, though still inequitable funding) but also increased “accountability” for those schools. That is what the court decisions call for, and that seems reasonable, given that the city’s schools have been so bad for so long that the legal system finds that they violate the state constitution. The usual way to create “accountability” in the public sector is to have a board or boards of people who don’t run an agency second guess it. Implied is an acknowledgement that for our legislative elected officials, quality public services efficiently provided are not generally a priority. After all, the New York City Council and New York State legislature control the purse strings and, in the latter case, the structure of the New York City schools. They therefore have ultimate control over them, and have the ability to hold them accountable. The City and State Comptrollers may audit their finances, and the New York State Department of Education and Board of Regents audit their performance. And Mayor Bloomberg claimed that by putting him in charge, the city would gain accountability because he could be voted out if the schools didn’t work well. But none of this is enough. And yet another oversight board, appointed by the same politicians who have failed the city’s schools for 30 years, will not be enough either.
The only way the schools will be held accountable is if those who attend them, and those who work in them, have a choice – if they can leave and take the money with them. Not just some of them, all of them. As Mayor Bloomberg himself was quoted as saying, once he realized it, only 20 percent of New Yorkers actually care about the quality of the schools, and the Mayor is accountable, as well, to the other 80 percent and they have different concerns. The same may be said the City Council, the state legislature, and other elected officials. The smart political move is to create charter schools and gifted programs to provide a quality education for those who are organized and active, and use the rest of the school system as cash cow to pay for other services, lower taxes, richer pensions, etc., and this is exactly what has happened. For most politically active New Yorkers, it is fine for the city’s schools to be the educational equivalent of the Titanic, as long as there are enough life boats for the first class passengers.
Nearly 20 years of experience in government, and many more as a consumer, have convinced me that monopolies always rip you off, whether they are corporate, non-profit, union, public – or political. Even organizations run by selfless saints are unlikely to improve without the example of other organizations in similar circumstances doing a better job. Without that comparison, and given human nature, it is too easy to conclude that the existing level of performance is good enough, or as good as possible given circumstances beyond one’s control. Low funding, and a large proportion of high needs students, provide many such circumstances for the overseers of New York City’s public schools. In the short run, a monopoly that is accountable to the Mayor may be preferable to an unaccountable monopoly. In the long run, however, mayoral control simply turns future mayors into apologists for, rather than critics of, the city’s public education system. Once put in charge, an elected official could hardly be expected to criticize his or her own performance.
For those who want to be teachers and to work in New York City, the city’s public schools are a near monopsony (sole buyer) as well as a near monopoly (sole seller). Since the advent of Mayoral control, there have been increasing objections to the top-down, one-size-fits-all approach of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein. Many teachers, parents, and education theorists have objected to their rules or curricula. They feel powerless about something that most concerns them – their career, or their child’s education – because unless a teacher can accept a much lower parochial school salary, or a parent can afford private school tuition, they have no choice. For parents this frustration is legitimate. For teachers, a reminder is in order that their union insists a situation in which the teachers themselves deny choice to parents. With the exception of those who would not be chosen, it would be better for everyone to have a real choice. The time to provide it is when Mayoral control is up for renewal in 2009.
I propose that the city be served by competing public school districts. One would be run by an appointee of the Mayor, as it is now. One would be run by an appointee of the Borough Presidents. And one would be run by an appointee of the City Council.
Each student would be zoned for three public schools at each level, one run by each organization, and would have the right to choose among them. Teachers would be permitted to move among school systems as well, with no loss of seniority, pensions or other benefits. The existing schools would be initially allocated so that, on average, the test scores and building conditions of each school district were equal. Each would receive equal funding per student, adjusted for those with disabilities. Each would have schools in every neighborhood. Each would have its own labor contracts, with differing provisions. Each would make its own choices on education methods, curricula and spending priorities.
Since their situations would be directly comparable, if the quality of education in one of the school districts started to lag, if parents started pushing to keep their children out of it, if qualified teachers were unwilling to work for it, there could be only one reason – poor management. For example, a relatively high level of non-teaching staff would lead, in a very visible way, to higher class sizes, lower teacher pay, or both. A school system that did not hold bad teachers accountable would attract them and repel students; one that harassed rather than supported good teachers would lose them and also repel students.
And there would be real accountability. In every neighborhood, the Mayor, the Councilmember, and the Borough President would be personally identified with the relative quality of the local schools in their system, and people would vote accordingly. Those politicians would be unable to point in a circle. In such a situation, good ideas would be quickly copied, bad ideas rapidly discarded. The flight of good teachers, or of students, from a school for better alternatives would lead to dismissal for the administration and layoffs or transfers for other staff. With that kind of accountability, the ongoing, incremental improvement that leads to real results would become both possible and necessary.
In addition to providing comparability and accountability, competing school systems would drastically alter the power relationships in education. The people who matter least today are children who want to learn, and competent teachers who care about them. With multiple school districts, both would become free agents, able to move to whichever district provided them with the most supportive and rewarding environment. Choice would give them at least some leverage; today they have none. Let’s face it: only by putting a dollar sign on the foreheads of poor children can other people be influenced to care about them.
Moreover, widespread school choice could increase satisfaction even if there were no difference in quality among the school systems, simply because different people prefer different things. If there were three different school systems with three different teacher contracts, curricula, and regulations, more people could get what they want. And teachers, parents, and students who get what they want are more motivated, improving the learning process. Take the issue of cell phones in school, for example. Some parents and teachers would prefer a ban, some object. Why not provide the possibility that each could get what they want? There is no reason to go back to having every teacher decide what they do and do not want to teach, with no consideration of what came before or after. A school system, to an extent, needs a top-down set of standards to work together. Competing systems could provide both standardization and diversity.
I would go further still, and add a private choice to the mix. By itself, a voucher system is just another lifeboat for the few. As part of an overall choice package including three public choices, however, it expands the competition for teachers who care and students who want to learn. And having that choice is fair, since those who send their children to private schools are also people, and are also taxpayers entitled to community support.
Vouchers, tax credits, and other programs raise the possibility that education funds may be distributed to other, sometimes religious purposes. And there is the possibility that private schools will take public money without taking public burdens, the greatest of which is an obligation to try to education un-socialized, disruptive, even violent children. The idea is to give parents and children a choice of schools, not school a choice of children to educate, with all preferring those who are easy to teach. So I would not endorse a voucher system per se, and a tax credit doesn’t provide a benefit to the least well off unless it was reversible.
The state, however, already provides textbooks and education services to private and parochial schools. I would expand on that practice to the biggest educational cost of all – labor. If a state-certified teacher were teaching a state-required, non-religious subject, for an organization that agreed to accept and retain all students, I believe their salary, health insurance and 401K should be paid for – directly up to a per child limit comparable with the public schools – by the government as well. The more certified teachers a non-public school had, the bigger the share of its labor bill would be publicly funded. According to my state aid suggestion, the subject of a prior essay, state funding would be phased out for the highest-spending private schools on a dollar-for-dollar limit over a soft “maximum.” But otherwise by funding teachers, not buildings, administrators, and other expenses with potential duel religious-educational purposes (or pensions where public funds could be mixed with that of non-eligible employees), the government could pay for education without paying for anything else.
Unless the government provides financial assistance as described above, the city’s parochial school system is going to collapse in a vice between the inability of less well off parents to pay, and the inability of the system to pay decent wages to its teachers. The public schools will become more crowded, and what will be left otherwise are non-public schools affordable exclusively to the affluent. Few politicians would claim that as their public policy objective. But if the above policy were adopted, parochial and other private schools would have an incentive to improve by hiring certified teachers, and their existing teachers would have an incentive to obtain certification, since that certification would presumably command a higher salary. And a fourth source of choice would be maintained and expanded, not just for students, but also for teachers, who would have another set of organizations competing, and paying more, for their services. Why would a union object to that if it represented those who were working, not just those who were retired? Indeed, under this proposal if the teachers’ union itself were to set up schools and could convince parents to pay for the cost of space, administration, and incidentals, it could access public money for its own schools under this proposal. So could groups of certified teachers who wanted to set up their own schools.
I would also expand the geographic scope of this proposal to include other large declining cities in the state – Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, etc. There, perhaps two public systems could be created, and could compete both with each other and with non-public schools. These cities are dying, in part, because parents are driven to exercise the only choice they have in education — choosing a school for their children by choosing the suburb where they will live. Even as Upstate regional population stagnates, the state and local government is faced with funding new infrastructure on the suburban fringe while trying to maintain some semblance of public services in dying communities with shrinking tax bases. Those who worry about suburban sprawl ought to ask young couples with choices who are making their home purchase decision why a city location is not being considered. Lack of school choice within the city is a driver of environmental negatives like suburban sprawl, and socio-economic negatives like economic segregation, both of which are present in Upstate metropolitan areas. More on those areas in a later essay.
Providing a choice of competing public school districts, and funding for teachers in other schools, would attract both parents concerned about their children’s education and ambitious and motivated educators to New York City, a place that has for the most part repelled them for the past 30 years. And it would give people a reasons to live in the state’s other cities, instead of outside them. Charter schools and tax credits would provide more choices to those who already have them. But if the state is to have real choice, then choices would have to be available to those who have no options today. Once such options began to be exercised, and only then, would New York City would have real accountability for its schools.