Public Education's Silver Bullet

[urbanlibertarian]

Interesting article on how information technology will reform K-12 public schools sooner than school choice or charter schools.  Here's an excerpt:

For instance, Florida recently enacted new laws that give every child in Florida a legal right to take all of his or her courses online, and the districts have a legal obligation to provide them to meet that demand. So they either have to have their own online schools within the district or, since that’s going to be inefficient for most of them, they have to contract it out, either to the Florida Virtual School [an online public school] or other schools.

The Obama administration’s approach is to give more schools more flexibility. First kids are going to be tested, and then those outcomes are going to say something about how well the schools are doing. The schools that are doing OK are going to be given a lot of flexibility, and the schools that are doing poorly are going to face real consequences. The Obama administration is really serious about doing something about those schools.

reason: Can you give me an example what they have done?

Moe: Reconstitution of the schools or having the school converted into a charter school. A good example is Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. The superintendent decided that since they couldn’t get any fast action out of the union to reform the school, he was going to reconstitute it, and that meant firing everybody. Now they can hire back up to half of the staff, but they’re going to bring in a new principal and a new staff and start over. That makes perfect sense.

The unions, of course, hate this, but Obama and Duncan both stood up and supported it publicly. I really have been surprised at how serious they are about pursuing change and reform and doing things that Democrats in the past had a very difficult time doing. Although Democrats, genuinely as human beings, want to make sure that disadvantaged kids are in good schools, they’ve literally been unable to do the right thing because unions have held them back. This is beginning to loosen and break down.

reason: On the other hand, this administration is also pumping money into the current system. It gave $100 billion in added funding to Kâ€"12 in the stimulus bill. You point out in your book that education spending has gone up 300 percent in real terms since the ’60s. So is the administration’s policy all that different from the Democratic orthodoxy?

Moe: I’m generally not in favor of pumping money into a failing system. I think that they did it now because we were in an economic crisis and there were going to be massive firings of teachers and this prevented that.

Putting that aside, I think that they could have used the budget crisis as an opportunity to force school districts to make very difficult choices about how to spend their dollars. They might have pushed schools toward more cost-effective ways of providing courses.

reason: Are you disappointed on that score with the administration?

Moe: No. I think things take time. Obviously they’re just sort of getting going on this. And this was not a fully baked set of ideas when the stimulus package was going through. So the timing I think wasn’t right, but we’re going to have budget problems for a long time to come. In the coming years, I hope they will begin to connect the dots and use the budget crisis as a lever of change.

Whole thing here: http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/21/public-educations-silver-bulle