Dropout Nation‘s commentary on abandoning the fetish of scale has gained wide notice. One thoughtful response in particular came from Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk, who rightly points out that traditional education types have often underestimated the capacity for reform efforts such as the Knowledge is Power Program and Teach For America to grow. At the same time, I think he is mistaken in saying that one-off school operations can’t work in American public education.

If anything, when one looks at industries in the private sector, there are many examples of sectors dominated by a group of companies (search engines and advertising, for example) and sectors with wide arrays of competitors (clothing and supermarket retail). Yet both sectors serve their customers with efficiency and high quality. Even in sectors that have only a few dominant players — software, for example — there are a wide array of vibrant small-scale players. In fact, from a traditional economics perspective, diversity in providers is preferable over consolidation, largely because a wide array of service providers can meet the wide and various needs and demands of customers.

As I have mentioned, there are areas in education in which scale can work. Back-office activities such as information technology (including school data systems, for example, are best-handled on a large scale. Same for school transportation; the fact that districts can’t divert school-buses for other activities (such as providing mass transit) is one reason why those operations tend to be run inefficiently. School construction and property management is another ideal area for scale.

Then there are soft areas such as teacher evaluation, which districts currently bungle even within the rather restrictive rules (including prior notification of classroom observations and the inability to use value-added analysis of student performance data). One can see a situation in which school operators (including charter schools and private schools) form a consortium that handles random classroom observations by evaluators not working in a school, conducts the value-added analysis of test data, organizes peer review and manages the rest of the evaluation process.

But the key to that scale is that it cannot be handled by schools or even districts themselves. If anything, there will be a need to outsource those functions. For one thing, the traditional district model may be more effective at managing construction projects and running buses than at educating kids, but not by much. As I have documented in profiling California’s school data problems in A Byte At the Apple — and as Michael Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools has noted in his study, districts are far behind the times in managing information technology and basic operations.

As the nation abandons the district model of education to more of something resembling what I call the Hollywood Model of Education — with a variety of independent public  schools, public charters, private schools and charter management organization-managed schoolhouses — the need to outsource bus services, data systems management and other needs will only grow. For these things to work efficiently, you will need outsourcing firms that can serve a variety of schools. At the same time, this brings its own problems. Outsourcing is a complex activity; the contracts often involve dealing with such seemingly simple issues as which party will provide software to conduct business (and, if the school operator is providing the software, whether the software can be used by a third party without restriction). As any Pentagon official or executive in Corporate America can attest, a firm can end up paying too much for a service if they don’t structure contracts properly. This means there will also be a need for third contract management firms that can help schools and states keep providers honest.

American public education has fetishized scale for far too long. It is important to relegate scale to its proper place — in infrastructure and back-office operations — while focusing on standards and accountability to improve the quality of education our kids get every day in school.

——————————-

Philadelphia teacher Mary Beth Hertz also takes a stab at considering the question of scale in education. While she gets part of my argument that scale doesn’t equal quality, she mistakenly argues that “the more control the government wants to have over schools the worse off everyone is” Why is it mistaken? Not because government isn’t a problem in education (ideally, governments shouldn’t be running schools). It’s mistaken because her argument doesn’t square with the complex reality of the education governance landscape.

Although local control is largely non-existent, state control is incomplete. States now provide 48 percent of all school funding, and structure the conditions under which teachers contracts and teacher performance management is conducted. At the same time, thanks to the unwillingness of states to take over all education funding, school districts still have leeway to evade their responsibilities to their students and otherwise behave irresponsibly. As seen in Jersey City, districts can often behave with little accountability, declaring that they shouldn’t be subject to federal or state oversight (and accountability measures such as the No Child Left Behind Act) even as they become more dependent on the funds. Since the districts also still depend on local tax dollars, they can also justify opposition to school choice; after all, choice means loss of tax dollars to their coffers.

Blaming the feds also doesn’t wash. As influential as Race to the Top has been in fostering much-needed steps towards full reform, it has only been around for less than two years. It isn’t responsible for decades of abysmal, antiquated and obsolete education practices. Federal education policy didn’t create near-lifetime employment through tenure or seniority-based privileges; nor did federal law foster the racialist and misguided belief that only some kids can learn that fostered the comprehensive high school model and ability tracking.

And as my colleague, Steve Peha, eloquently pointed out in a back-and-forth with one critic this past week, many school districts failed to take the opportunity provided by the No Child Left Behind Act and its Adequate Yearly Progress provisions to improve instruction, curricula, teacher quality and school leadership. You can’t blame No Child for the fact that many districts — aided and abetted by ed schools — have continued the insanity of poor instructional practices.

At the end of the day, there would be no talk of school reform if American public education did the job right in the first place.

Back during my days as a reporter for Forbes, my boss at the time, the legendary Seth Lubove, offered an insight on the shifting leadership changes in the organization by stating that the wardens will always change, but the inmates will always be in charge. His adage proved true over the years as he and other editors left for comfier confines (along with a series of restructurings). Yet the essential nature of the magazine — set in the days of the great James W. Michaels and his deputy, Sheldon Zalaznick — remains the same.

The extraordinary Lubove’s adage for corporate change (and even my own turnaround work) came to mind while reading the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s tome on the poor results of school turnarounds (and the equally woeful unwillingness of education players to shut down failure factories). When it comes to any turnaround effort in any sector, the problem largely has less to do with finances or infrastructure or even roadmaps. Those matters are relatively easy to handle. Turnaround experts can even usually deal with forces and interests outside of their control; save for situations involving a sponsor such as the U.S. Department of State who pays the tab and controls the conditions under which an organization operates, the turnaround experts can win over those outfits with a little care and feeding.

The real problem ultimately comes down to the culture — the group of people and interests tied together by common traditions, work styles, group-think and behaviors. And it is the problems of culture that explains why just one percent of the dropout factories and failure mills surveyed by Fordham are ever successfully turned around — and why the better solution is to just start new schools outside of sclerotic institutions.

Culture, especially that which is toxic, will overcome any one individual’s effort to go against the grain and can even overcome the efforts of a rival culture to put it asunder; this is especially true in situations in which the methods by which one can easily remove the elements of culture cannot be used easily (if at all). It’s harder still if the turnaround artists involved don’t have the full support of the folks who brought them in; if a board or chief executive is unwilling to fully embrace the tough decisions that have to be made (including standing up to internal constituencies who like things as they are) then the turnaround artist is merely engaging in pantomime.

This is the typical situation in traditional public education. Individual school turnarounds are hard to do because principals usually don’t control budgets (which usually means teachers) or personnel decisions (also teachers) — those are governed by the central office, by state laws influenced by lobbying by affiliates of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, and collective bargaining agreements that protect veteran teachers regardless of their performance. The veteran teachers have been in the school for years, have seen principals come and go, and know that they don’t have to change their ways if they don’t want to do so. Even if a principal follows the abysmal performance review processes to the tee — from observations to corrective remediation — a teacher knows that the cost of removal is often far greater (both in money and time) than either a principal or central staff wants to pour into it.

This problem isn’t limited to poor-performing teachers. High-quality teachers with a mindset of autonomy in a school may not be willing to embrace change because the moves may interfere with how they want to run their classrooms. The fact that they work among laggards also allows them to hide in plain sight; once the poor performers are weeded out, the definition of high quality is raised; this can change their status and that may be a bridge they don’t want to cross.

For districts, the challenges of state laws and teacher contracts are great. But so is the culture change problem. Some of the central office administrators were once the laggard teachers and principals that perpetuated the district’s failure factory status. It is asking foxes to rebuild henhouses and guard the chickens too. The influence of AFT and NEA locals on the election of school board members also means constant (and often, losing) battles with governance; it’s why school superintendents generally last less than three years on the job.  Even for the veterans who want to advance any overhaul, there is the issue of subjecting your colleagues to the fire; the longstanding relationships can cloud personnel and operational decisions; the case of Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Eugene White (whose hamfisted reform initiatives have combined with his unwillingness to remove laggard administrators from his ranks) attests to this reality.

For the turnaround artists  in education, the solutions are, well, difficult: You either have to accept that you will be working at the school or district for a short time and go for drastic change quickly; after all, the long knives will eventually come. Or you have to work the long-term, which means compromises that will weaken reform efforts; success will be yielded, but you will always have wanted to go further and realize more could be done. Either way, the culture problem isn’t fully addressed.

This is a problem that $3.6 billion from the School Improvement Grant program cannot solve. And it’s a problem that isn’t limited to schools and districts. Based on the work conducted by the National Council on Teacher Quality and by former Teachers College President Arthur Levine, the same culture problem will plague efforts to turn around low-quality university schools of education; in some ways, it will be worse because the  governance structure of universities, the tradition of academic freedom and the nature of (increasingly rare) tenure gives faculty plenty of leeway to do as they please. As seen in the failed tenure of former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, faculty displeasure leads to the ouster of administrators.

One solution for the culture change problem lies with the use of objective data in evaluating school, teacher and principal success. If all the players in education know they will be held accountable based on student performance, they may grumble, but they will get in the game. This goes to the long-term work of improving school data systems and implementing the use of value-added assessment and perhaps, (despite my skepticism and historic evidence that it doesn’t work) even peer review. Based on the low levels of success in school turnarounds, it is probably better to just shut down the schools and districts and start over.  As I’ve said this week on the Dropout Nation Podcast, we must treat American public education like an Etch-A-Sketch and shake it up from its foundations.

When you think about Microsoft, Apple, Google, Proctor & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, you think about the leading corporations in their respective technology and consumer products markets. You think of high-quality products and services that have helped their respective consumers live better, become more-productive and engage in entertainment and media on their terms. You think of recruiting processes in which entrepreneurial and savvy talents are brought in to innovate and improve products and services. And you think of high standards for developing products and services, delivering them to the public and improving them once they get customer feedback.

What you don’t think about is scale. You don’t expect Apple or Microsoft to duplicate the others governing philosophies. You won’t see either company embracing Google’s throw-it-up-against-walls technique for service development. You wouldn’t be surprised that Proctor & Gamble’s product management approach is in many ways dissimilar to that of Colgate-Palmolive. In short, these companies are as dissimilar in their proprietary methods as they are uniform in their high standards and rigorous approaches to running their businesses. And we should look at institutions within American public education in the same way.

One of the few fetishes shared by both defenders of traditional public education and the school reform movement is the pursuit of scale. The idea is that a new solution to the nation’s education crisis — usually an organization — will only be workable if it can be expanded from small scale to regional and (usually) national scope. Such thinking, borrowed from industrial companies of the 20th century, made sense at a time in which inputs and outputs were more important than outcomes, and the quality of education was hardly measured or even measurable.

But we don’t live in a world in which scale applies much to education anymore. Certainly there are elements of education — namely transportation, construction and school lunches — in which scale is critical; after all, the more students served, the easier it is (in theory) to bring down the cost of these back-office functions. But the nation’s education crisis isn’t a problem of operational scale; it’s a quality problem with its roots in low-quality instruction, abysmal curricula, shoddy academic standards and mediocrity in expectations for students, teachers, principals and parents alike. You can’t simply hire more teachers in order to solve the problem; the class size reduction-driven hiring boom of the past decade has already proven that. Nor can you solve the problem by building more schools or authoring more certification procedures. The fact that we now live in a world in which technology allows for instruction to be tailored to the needs of individual students also renders scale moot.

This isn’t to say that scale can’t be used in improving quality; expanding school data systems and applying Value-Added Assessment to teacher and principal evaluations are two examples of using scale to improve quality. Even the expansion of school choice (through the expansion of high-quality charter schools and voucher programs) can address some aspects of quality. But for the rest of the problems in American public education, scale is not the answer.

We already have a successful model of a scalable operation in education: The traditional public school district. It is successful in the sense that districts persist in existing and in the ability to raise large sums of money to build schools and buy buses. But based on the woeful data system problems within districts and  the fact that just 69 percent of school buses are kept in operation throughout the school year, according to Michael Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools, you can say that schools barely succeed in that arena. More importantly, districts fail in their ultimate purpose: Providing high quality education for all kids. This is the kind of scale we don’t need.

Another example of scale: Collective bargaining agreements and state laws that essentially protect laggard teachers and fail to reward high-quality teachers. These laws and contracts — artifacts of industrial-era thinking and a time in which teacher performance could not be measured — also amount to the kind of scale we don’t need. All in all, American public education has been extraordinarily well-scaled to fail our kids.

Yet traditionalists and school reformers continue to argue about which solutions are scalable, with debates as to whether such successes as the Knowledge is Power Program, Green Dot Public Schools and Teach For America can be replicated en masse, either by the organizations themselves or startups with similar goals. Certainly, KIPP, Green Dot and TFA have continued their success as they have expanded. But not every reform model will reach those levels of scale.  The Harlem Link charter school in New York City has an approach that is unique to its roots and environs. This is also true for every successful traditional public, private and parochial school or system.

The obsession with scale, both among traditionalists and school reformers, fails to consider what actually happens in the private sector.  Companies rarely do the same exact thing as their competitors and this is especially true when it comes to the most-successful firms in their respective markets.  Proctor & Gamble is as different as Colgate-Palmolive, as Apple diverges from Microsoft.  All are successful in the space in which they compete and satisfy the needs of their customers. They share similarities in terms of their success in talent development, and clear focus on product, service and customers. What each company does that is particular to its corporate culture and historical development will not work for others.

What does happen in the private sector is the creation of standards, the rules, regulations, principles and concepts that organizations accept in hiring practices, design principles and product safety. When it works (and it often does), these standards and expectations ensure that consumers get high-quality products and services. It is up to the companies to find ways to meet those standards. Companies that do meet those standards rise in esteem among customers and their peers; those that don’t lose standing — both in market position and reputation — in the marketplace.

This should be the same for the institutions in American public education. Rigorous standards in curriculum, in talent management and in performance should be applied to all. For K-12 schools, it’s recruiting, developing and retaining high-quality teachers and principals who are entrepreneurial, have strong subject competency and care for kids; rigorous and challenging curricula; and cultures of genius and high expectations in which the capabilities of kids to handle high levels of learning is not only recognized, but cherished. For ed schools and alternative certification programs, it’s recruiting high-quality aspiring teachers and developing rigorous courses for teacher training. How they innovate in getting there and meeting standards is up to them.

Essentially, it isn’t important for every alternative teacher training operation to look like Teach For America; what is important is that they all provide high-quality teachers. It isn’t necessary for every school to function exactly like Urban Prep; it’s important for them to improve student achievement and make sure that all their students graduate. What we need are a thousand flowers of high quality to bloom, not for all to look exactly alike. There will be different ways of getting there (even though there might be general concepts of what it should look like), but what is important is that the goal is met. Those goals should be guided by objective data. A high-quality teacher should be able to boost student achievement by at least 150 percent above expected growth (or 150 percent above a student’s previous growth level) and the same should be true for a high-quality school and principal; and students should be reading and comprehending above grade level by third grade.

This is why keeping and expanding the No Child Left Behind Act’s Adequate Yearly Progress accountability measures is critical to reform. AYP provides a guide to developing standards and can help schools focus on what is needed to improve education for all children; it also serves to make school performance transparent and keep schools and teachers honest. It is also why Value-Added Assessment and standardized testing are also critical; they provide benchmarks for standards and accountability. It is why teacher evaluations must be based on student test score performance; you need objective data for objective standards. It is also why collective bargaining agreements and tenure must be ditched; you can’t achieve a culture of genius in education and high standards with contracts that treat all teachers as widgets with no regard to performance.

It’s time to end the focus on scale. Instead, we must address quality.