Free Enterprise for Schools

When a baseball team finishes last, the manager is usually fired. If no one buys Edsels, no more are made. But one of the nation's biggest enterprises --education--is virtually unaccountable when it fails its customers. As a result, reformers across the U.S. have begun a series of novel experiments aimed at making teachers and even whole schools responsible for their performance in terms of dollars and cents. The idea is already meeting resistance from teachers' organizations, which see a sharp threat to their jobs and power.

This fall, the 800 students at all-black Banneker Elementary School in Gary, Ind., will be turned over to a private company, Behavioral Research Laboratories of Palo Alto, Calif. The company, which has already been a consultant to the system for a year, will put the school staff on its payroll, take full charge of curriculum planning and administration. In turn, the city will pay the firm $800 a year per student, the current school outlay in Gary. As a key condition of its contract, BRL must refund the entire fee for any student who is still below the national achievement norm after three years in the program. The Gary teachers' union is keeping a close watch on the plan.

New Rewards. In Washington, D.C., last month, the school board voted to subject the entire system to the test. Under a plan mapped out by Psychologist Kenneth B. Clark's Metropolitan Applied Research Center, every school will concentrate on bringing the reading ability of its sadly lagging pupils up to nationwide standards. The original plan would have ranked and rewarded teachers not for their seniority or degrees, but for their ability to teach, as measured by the progress of their classes. The best teachers would have been paid as much as principals. But the plan provoked the local teachers' union into accusing the board of trying to "dupe" the community by a "criminal action." Faced with the threat of court action, the board now seems almost certain to keep the focus on reading, but to back down on the plan's pay standards.

All the same, accountability will not be easily stopped. The Office of Economic Opportunity is spending $6.5 million next year for similar contract programs in 21 school districts across the country. Just to break even, the six firms involved will have to more than double the previous average yearly improvement of their pupils.

Gary's education contractor, BRL, has negotiated a guaranteed reading-performance agreement with the city of Philadelphia that will reach 23,000 students and cost as much as $920,000. New York's Educational Development Laboratories (a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill) and Science Research Associates of Chicago (part of IBM) have contracted to raise the reading scores of 15,600 students in San Diego schools. Performance contracts have become so widespread that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare has asked the Rand Corporation to study their implications.

Satisfying Customers. The OEO is preparing to foot the bill for school systems that try out the most radical experiment of all. Developed by a team headed by Harvard Education Professor Christopher Jencks, the plan would give parents complete freedom to send their children to whatever school they considered best--private as well as public. Placed on an equal footing in an open market, schools would have to satisfy their customers or go out of business.

The Jencks plan is now being considered by school boards in San Francisco and Hartford, Conn. Pittsburgh and Milwaukee have also expressed interest. The scheme would operate by giving parents of school-age children a voucher equal in value to the cost of educating each child in their district's public schools. The parents would give the voucher to the school of their choice, and the school would cash in the voucher to get its Government funds.

A local voucher agency would police the system, making sure, for example, that schools accepted at least a fair share of local minority groups. Conceding that poor children are often more expensive to teach than middle-class youngsters, Jencks would give their parents bonus vouchers, thus making the kids more attractive to school admissions directors. If a school were oversubscribed, as the best ones might well be, Jencks would try to ease the pressure by having the school select at least half of each class by lottery.

Fads and Hucksters. Jencks argues that voucher agencies could avoid racial discrimination, while raising academic standards. He may be overly optimistic. Jencks admits that giving parents a greater choice about their children's schooling does not mean that they will choose wisely. Some might flock to schools specializing in easy courses, or plunge into untested fads. The plan might encourage overly narrow specialized schools or fly-by-night educational hucksters.

The voucher idea also shares the most significant danger of the other plans for making schools accountable: it could overemphasize profit-ensuring test scores at the expense of good teaching.

The most prominent early experiment with financial accountability revealed this problem vividly. Last year the twin cities of Texarkana, Ark. and Texas used an Office of Education grant for a performance contract with Dorsett Educational Systems of Norman, Okla. Dorsett awarded students free time, transistor radios and a portable television set for outstanding achievement. At year's end Dorsett had earned $100,000--as much as $900 on a single student--and student test reports were correspondingly rosy. The only problem was that Dorsett slipped some of the questions on the final evaluation test into the exercises its students were taught.

"It isn't easy to measure many of the purposes and objectives of education," says former U.S. Commissioner of Education James E. Allen Jr. Should parents be dismayed at a private contractor's cram-school approach or delighted when it boosts their kids' test scores? Whatever the answer, parents and taxpayers are legitimately fed up with the failure of many large public school systems to demonstrate anything but Byzantine bureaucracy and underachieving pupils. Making schools responsive to the relentless pressures of economics and competition may be a harsh way to force improvements--but stricter accountability is clearly needed to fill the present vacuum.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.