Making Families Consumers — and Kings — in Education

Choice is no panacea. But as seen in the consumer products market, choice can help spur innovation. Let's try this in education.

If Calif. State Sen. Gloria Romero succeeds in allowing  parents in the state to to replace administrators and teachers at their schools (or convert the schools into charters), it will be an amazing step. Same is true if discussions in New Jersey about expanding its inter-district choice program come to pass. And the  federal Race to the Top initiative could provide even more options to parents — especially those stuck with sending their children to the worst urban school systems.

At the same time, these events offer an opportunity to consider what education policy — and America’s education system itself — should look like in the next half-century. And the answer is: Similar to the markets for consumer products everyone enjoys.

Few sectors in the American public or private sector are as dominated by experts, technocrats and lobbyists as education. From the development and approval of curricula to the kind of schools children can attend, the decisions are based, much consideration is given to what some adults want, how some adults want to be paid, national economic and social priorities, and occasionally, what children actually need. Every now and then, what children and their parents want does come into play. But this a rare event.

But imagine if children (and to be honest, their parents) actually could choose the kind of schools they want to attend, select the curricula that they will learn, even whether they will attend a neighborhood school or a manicured campus in suburbia? It would be difficult to figure out the direction of education at that point; after all, parents use schools as much for social-climbing and instilling their own values as they do for providing the most-rigorous education possible for their children. But it would be interesting: Perhaps “education villages” — where hipsters-turned-parents and single mothers can stay in the city and still gain the best of suburbia — would spring up in the heart of Atlanta. Or children otherwise deemed troublemakers in the traditional public school settings of today will learn in classes where the instructional day is compacted for more efficiency (and thus, less time for having to sit in class wasting time as likely to happen for students in Chicago).

These thoughts come as the Wall Street Journal presents its chart on the 25 largest companies in the world at the end of this decade. As pointed out by William Easterly (who spends his time criticizing foreign aid), only eight of the top 25 companies at the end of the 1990s kept their places by the near-end of 2009. Only six tech firms made up the top 25 versus 13 at the end of the 1990s; the tech firms on the list range from old-school software crossing into videogames and consumer wares (Microsoft) to handy cloud computing and search (Google), to a company that managed to switch gears and helped complete the personal technology revolution began by the Sony Walkman (Apple Computer).

Certainly, many of the companies knocked off the list had merged into other companies or went bust altogether; others just seen declines or stagnation in their market value. But mergers and market value losses represent a reality that these companies didn’t cater to their consumer markets. Notes Easterly: “Creative destruction is one of the triumphs of the market. The consumer is king: in 2009… The radical uncertainty of how to please consumers is an argument FOR free markets.”

At this moment, American public education is undergoing its own peculiar form of creative destruction, as education reformers and a smattering of parents — armed with data, research and political power — are forcing defenders of the status quo (teachers unions, schools of education, and school districts) to accept the need for effective change. As Fordham’s Checker Finn points out, reformers are slowly being forced to admit that their longstanding conceits also need updating (and more often than not, ditching altogether).

Yet, as I’ve pointed out over and over, the reformers must also rid themselves of their faith in expertise. They must begin to embrace the grassroots and, more importantly, accept that children and their parents must have more than just a seat at the table of decisionmaking. They must be the decisionmakers, period, and anything less just won’t do.Why? Because the nature of the reforms being proposed, promoted and legislated — all of which  involves choice, consequences and accountability — requires active participation from parents, and therefore, their support.

Choice begats choice; this is true when it comes to cellphone plans and this is also happening in education. The advent of Milwaukee’s school voucher plan in the early 1990s didn’t foster widespread development of vouchers. But the program, along with the charter school movement, has spurred the interest among parents in the kind of choice initiatives being considered in these states (and may likely become reality in the Los Angeles Unified School District). Once parents are exposed to having real power and engagement in school decisionmaking, they will not want the traditional expert-driven approach. This is a good thing.

Now, I’m not advocating for an education system that is fully free market in orientation. The reality is that the underlying infrastructure for such choice — easy access to useful information through guides, organizations or Web sites; actual mechanisms for exercising choice that exist outside of home purchases — is only coming into existence. Parents are just beginning to realize that the old concept of education — that the school can educate every child without active engagement of families that goes beyond homework and field trips — has gone by the wayside; they will make mistakes along the way.

Poor parents, in particular, need guidance; yet the current public education system treats them as even bigger nuisances than the middle-class families (who can exercise enough influence to just be merely ignored) and wealthier households (who ditch the public school system altogether). Assuring equality of opportunity in education, no matter one’s income, should not only be of paramount importance, it would be a more-effective form of economic policy than stimulus plans and tax cuts combined; the evidence largely clear that dropouts cannot be contributors to economic and social life.

But giving parents power, choices, options, advice and information should be the governing credo of education reform for the next half-century. It can be done.

Ability Tracking: Outmoded Idea in the New Education Paradigm

Education policy wonks can sometimes be like executives at telecom giant AT&T’s cell phone unit: Even as the world has changed — sometimes radically so — thanks to such disrupting technologies and practices as the iPhone and charter schools, they continue to hold on to old paradigms that no longer matter.

This came to me just as I was reading a satirical commentary on Fake Steve Jobs (run by my former Forbes colleague Daniel Lyons)  in which the guise of America’s favorite ex-hippie-turned-computer industry icon/phonemaker gives its partner AT&T the business for offering incentives to iPhone users and other high-volume data customers to use less data. After reminding the executives that music giant EMI didn’t ask teenage girls to stop buying Beatles albums, Fake Steve pretty much tells them that they should do everything they can to expand network capacity and increase data volume.  After all, the better for AT&T to gain more customers, sell more iPhones and put lie to all those hilariously stinging Verizon ads. Essentially, AT&T needs to embrace change before esubscribers leave for Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile.

This can also be said for the  Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a report that essentially calls for the return of ability tracking. Ability tracking? Yes, that hideous system of grouping children based on what “experts” (i.e. teachers and guidance counselors) perceive as academic ability and potential which, along with the advent of the comprehensive high school, has done more damage to more American children with so little effort.

The report essentially states that high-achieving students are being ill-served by schools — especially dropout factories and the academic failure mills that feed into them — because they have decided to stop tracking student abilities and focused more on helping their most-disadvantaged children reach grade level. In order to help high-achieving children, Fordham suggests a return to ability tracking, albeit in an amended, less-racially (and ethnically discriminatory form.

Fordham and Tom Loveless, the author of the study, should be commended for researching the effects of ending ability tracking. Fordham research czar Mike Petrilli’s nuanced argument for Fordham’s position, admirably sensitive to the historic use of ability tracking to discriminate against blacks and immigrants, is also appreciated. All that said, Fordham is following AT&T in making the same mistake: Dusting off outmoded concepts for use in a new day and age.

Although you can understand Fordham’s longstanding concern for helping high-achievers reach their potential, there are also plenty of reasons to shake your head at its suggestion. There’s the historic use of ability tracking to deny high-quality education to blacks and other minority students; on this fact alone, ability tracking should be banished along with the comprehensive high school. Then there’s the fact that the teachers and guidance counselors being asked to make the decisions often lack the subject-knowledge competency to even make such judgments in the first place.

Ability tracking is also lacking as a fine-tuned instrument; the lack of homogeneity even within a group of students with similar levels of ability can throw off tracking methods. If you want, you can also use any outliers such as Albert Einstein: If not for his wealthy parents, he would have likely been guaranteed a second-tier education because teachers struggled to distinguish his ability from his generally dismissive attitude towards academic instruction.

The most-important reason why Fordham’s embrace of ability tracking is wrongheaded is because it is reflective of an old-school paradigm in which public schools are black boxes that magically turn out students who can work in factories and behave as good citizens. This paradigm — and the concepts spawned from it — is being replaced by an evolving one, largely based on providing as much contextual data as possible to students, parents and stakeholders for individual and community decision-making.

This is emerging through the expansion of the charter school movement; inter-district choice programs such as those in New Jersey and California (for students in the worst-performing school districts in their respective states) and even homeschooling. Through these forms of school choice, a child’s educational path to be made bywell-informed  parents (who are likely to have a good, if not perfect, sense of their child’s academic capacity) than by  “experts” who may be blinded by their own biases or lack discernment needed for such decision-making.

It also means that decisions can be tailored for each type of student. A high-achieving 9th grader could then double-up on classes in order to graduate early and attend college, while a similar child may attend more AP classes and stay in school until the official graduation day. Students considered low-achieving in traditional tracking systems, on the other hand, may actually have skills needed to do higher-level work; it may just be a question of changing courses or even assigned teachers. Charters, private schools, community foundations, even Kaplan tutoring programs may even emerge in order to give parents a wide array of options depending on the needs of those students.

This isn’t to say choice is a panacea. As I’ve said elsewhere, school reformers need to think about how to provide parents — especially the urban poor — with resources they can use to guide their decision-making. There are some groups such as the GEO Foundation, which operates charter schools and offers resources to parents seeking out educational options; but more-neutral third party players are needed. State-level school data systems are still underdeveloped, still geared to meeting compliance with federal rule-making, and measures few of the data-points most parents need to care about in order to inform their thinking. School reformers should work harder on developing data systems and standards that make information useful for parents and everyone else. Fostering educational entrepreneurism, as Frederick Hess has pointed out, is also crucial to making all of this work; there is more than enough room for schools, curriculum suppliers, data providers and others who can give parents power.

But it is clear that the solutions to educating children of differing abilities lies not in reviving useless theories of the past that stand in the way of children achieving (and exceeding their potential). All players in education, including reformers, must break with old ways of thinking and embrace the new.

Ability tracking is an ashbin concept in this century. And like old an Motorola StarTac, should be placed back in it where it belongs.