An Educational Contrarian

Kristi Hassett, a trustee in Flower Mound Texas posed the following via Twitter: Many ed reformers want schools to run like businesses. @testsensejt, I wonder what an Industrial Engineer would say about our current testing & accountability regime. What would they look at to determine value? What would they conclude? My response is a smidge long for a tweet, but the question is a good one and the answer goes right to the heart of the matter: People in organizations are generally accountable for the quality and efficacy of their decisions, as judged by a supervisor. Organizations are generally held accountable via market forces, and failure via the market generally signals bad decisions by its people. This is true whether you’re a non profit or an engineering firm. Current school accountability pretends to have invented a competitive market by which to judge schools and then presumes that the position of a school in the market signals the quality of decisions. This is flawed ...

Policy makers continue to set forth choice and charters as the cure-all for what ails education. I can argue the fallacies behind that thinking until I’m blue in the face. However, in this blurb all I want to make clear are the simple economics of the thing. The economic argument alone, I believe, is enough to cause us to rethink the entire charter enterprise. Imagine within a community it costs five dollars a year to educate each general education student. That would be an average. Some students would cost more, and some would cost less, but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify the actual costs for a particular student. Now imagine you are someone motivated by profiting from public school dollars and you open a charter to do that. Like the public school, you would be given five dollars for each student who comes to your school. If all the kids who come to your school cost more than five dollars to educate, your business would fail—you would either spend what was...