In 1991, the state of Michigan required each of the state's 563 school districts to devise intra district choice plans by April 1992. Wittmann and DeVore examine those plans and conclude that what could have been a bold new beginning for school reform in Michigan turned out to be a largely unproductive extension of the status quo. Genuine choice, competition and accountability in education require far more fundamental changes that will break the monopoly of the public education establishment and create a real marketplace for education. 57 pages.
Should parents be allowed to choose which schools their children attend?
In the past few years, the idea that they should has received an astonishing level of political and popular support. Since 1989, as many as twenty states have adopted some form of school choice, nine of which allow choice both within and between districts. The 1991 Michigan Education Poll (conducted for the State Board of Education) found that 61% of those surveyed favor choice within their local public school district, and 62% favored including private schools in a choice system.
The Promise of Choice
The popularity of schools of choice is partly due to its appeal to a variety of groups that often disagree on educational policies. Proponents argue that school choice:
introduces competition and market processes into education, which generates more learning at lower cost:
provides the disadvantaged with the power to choose better schools than may be available in their neighborhoods and thereby fosters racial integration in public education;
avoids the excessive bureaucratization and lack of responsiveness that presently characterize public education;
provides a variety in pedagogical styles and program options, which is essential to maximize learning, regardless of any other rationale for choice;
leads to greater accountability of school boards, school administrators and teachers to the taxpayers; and
serves as an early warning system that can alert school management to parental concerns before they become major problems.
In recent years, a body of research has grown up in support of schools of choice. Mary Anne Raywid, professor of education at Hofstra University, has summarized this research as follows in The Case for School Choice (published by the Phi Delta Kappa Foundation, Bloomington, IN, 1989):
A number of studies have shown remarkable improvement for low student achievers located in new or different learning environments: improvement in attitudes toward school and learning, in attendance and behavior patterns, and in achievement.
There is abundant evidence that public school parents are more satisfied with and have greater confidence in schools that provide choice; that parental choice increases the commitment and cohesion within those schools; and that these attributes combine to improve school quality and make schools more effective.
Numerous studies indicate that schools of choice have pronounced, positive effects on teachers and administrators, indicating higher levels of satisfaction, more opportunities for self-actualization, greater degrees of autonomy, better teacher/administrator and student/teacher relations and higher levels of accomplishment than in schools without choice.
Public School Choice Comes to Michigan
In September 1991, against this backdrop of growing support for schools of choice, the Michigan Legislature adopted an amendment to the 1991-92 state school aid act which requires that all school districts with more than one school at a grade level implement an in-district schools of choice program in the 1992-93 school year in order to be eligible for state funding. Key components of the legislation are outlined below:
School districts were required to form a schools of choice planning committee by November 15, 1991, of which 2/3 of the members were to be parents not employed by the district.
The planning committee was to develop and submit to the district board – for its approval or rejection by April 1, 1992 – an in-district schools of choice program which would include at least:
adequate information for parents and access to counseling;
a plan to transport all students to their school of choice;
a plan to ensure equal opportunity for enrollment through a random selection process (priority in placement was allowed for a sibling of a pupil already enrolled in a school); and
a plan to maintain all existing standards of racial and ethnic integration within the district.
Pupils could not be forced from their neighborhood school as a result of the program.
Districts could exempt themselves from the requirements oft he act only if the school board requested an exemption and district voters subsequently approved the district's request at a valid election prior to the 1992-93 school year.
The Legislature pledged to provide a 20% increase in funding for transportation in the 1992-93 school year;
The State Department of Education was required to provide technical assistance and administrative support to districts as requested.
Over the course of the last nine months, most of Michigan's 563 school districts have taken some formal action in response to the state's choice mandate, ranging from spirited efforts to develop comprehensive plans involving all district schools to seeking exemption from the mandate by local vote.
As early as April of this year, it appeared that the majority of districts perceived the schools of choice legislation not as an opportunity for genuine innovation and experimentation, but rather as another burdensome mandate for which the legislature was providing little or no funding.
Consequently, beginning in May we surveyed over 150) districts to learn what went wrong and what went right with schools of choice.
Statistics tell only half of the story, however. By assessing qualitatively the trends that have formed among the state's districts, we seek to discover why Michigan's attempt at choice fizzled and what can be learned from it.
What follows in Section 1 is a summary of the findings of our survey with commentary. Section 2 highlights exemplary schools of choice programs. and Section 3 recommends constructive changes for the schools of choice legislation.
Survey Methodology
A total of 153 school districts were surveyed. Schools were grouped into five categories: Urban, Suburban, City, Town/County, and Rural. Approximately two-thirds of the schools were selected from the Urban and Suburban groups, as it was thought that they offered the most realistic prospects for implementing schools of choice programs in the short-term. Selection within each category was random.
The survey was primarily conducted through telephone interviews and informal requests for information. (Quotations within the report without specific citations were obtained during such telephone interviews) In addition, a large number of newspaper articles were consulted.
For a more detailed explanation of survey methodology, please see Appendix 1.
Appendix 2 is a summary of school districts surveyed. It lists each school district surveyed, the county in which it is located, the extent to which it implemented the schools of choice concept, and the grade levels affected by the choice legislation.
It is important to note that while this study was underway, the schools of choice legislation mutated several times. Not only was the planned additional transportation funding for students exercising choice cut from the state budget, but districts were relieved of the requirement to provide transportation for choice students. In addition, the choice legislation has been amended to exempt districts which had adopted open enrollment policies as of October 1991. The schools of choice mandate has been postponed for one year as well.
It should be noted that some school districts may have altered their programs since this report was compiled. Such changes were sometimes prompted by amendments to the legislation.
An overwhelming majority of districts responded to the state mandate by merely formalizing their existing transfer policies. Such policies already allowed parents to send their children to different schools than they would normally attend. In essence, school districts equated transfer policies with schools of choice. Few districts not already operating formal magnet or choice programs developed innovative new programs as a result of the mandate. Several districts are planning to investigate more elaborate choice programs, but they are exceptions. See Appendix 2 for a summary of the extent to which each district surveyed implemented the choice concept.
In most cases, formalization involved few changes in districts' existing transfer policies. Previously, the transfer option was not openly advertised; now parents are informed that this option is available to them. Instead of dealing with choice applicants on a case-by-case basis, most districts now have application forms, and (as required by law) they all use a random selection process if the number of students requesting anew school exceeds the spaces available in that school. Under informal transfer programs, parents were often required to provide transportation for their children unless they could be easily serviced by an existing bus route; under the original choice mandate, districts were required to provide full transportation for all choice applicants.
Sample Districts that Formalized Existing Transfer Policy: A Survey
Most schools boards across the state have chosen the least disruptive course, that is, simply to affirm the current practice, which already allows parents to transfer their children to different schools within the district on a space-available basis.
- Editorial, Morning Sun (Alma Edition), April 26, 1992
After a few months of work, most local school districts have decided they already offer parents flexibility and choice within their limited resources and are not recommending any major changes ...
- Linda S. Mah, Kalamazoo Gazette, March 27, 1992
The Escanaba District's Elementary School Coordinator and Chapter I Director Terry Hampton indicated that the whole choice planning process succeeded only in putting the old transfer policy in writing.
Niles Administrative Assistant Douglas Law virtually echoed Hampton when he described the district's new policy as almost the same as before, adding that the district has always sought to accommodate requests. Executive Director of Curriculum Nancy Nimtz agreed. "We've always had a schools of choice program," she explained.
Hilde Corbet of the Chippewa Valley District echoed Hampton as well, noting that the formalization of the district's policy includes transportation, but nothing else changed significantly. In Forest Hills, where there has been some form of schools of choice for six years, the effect was "to make standard practice official," according to Secretary to the Superintendent Pat Schmidt.
One finds only minor change in the Lakeshore District as well. Reports the Herald-Palladium, "Hollywood School Principal Les Collins, who presented the [Planning Committee's] plan, said the new policy is a modification of the board's current transfer policy, which allows voluntary and involuntary transfers among the three elementary schools. "We just had to conform the way we do this to the law,' Collins said."
The Marshall District viewed the choice exercise as "making terminology," according to the Superintendent's office, as the district reportedly had choice available before the state made it mandatory. Melvindale's Administrative Assistant and Curriculum Director Donna Schmidt noted that the district's "new policy won't be much different from the old one." She added that the district has "always had informal choice." The Fitzgerald District finds itself in a similar position, as it previously granted transfer requests which were made for "legitimate reasons."
Saline's superintendent, Maurice Conn, described the district's choice policy as a "continuation" of its old transfer procedures. Southgate similarly codified its "unofficial policy" of entertaining student transfer requests, according to Superintendent Thomas Withee. The Sturgis District indicated that it has always filled transfer requests to the best of its ability but now has a formal Choice policy which explains the procedure, lists relevant selection and participation criteria, and provides more specific guidelines for determining space availability.
The Huron Valley District has had open enrollment for approximately 30 years, according to District Communication Coordinator Micki Marceau-Vemier. Choice in Huron Valley meant that informal "operational and procedural" guidelines were formulated into a cogent written policy. According to the Milford Times of April 2, 1992, she "told the board the committee was led by the belief that schools of choice was no more or less important than the district's policy of open enrollment."
In the Alma District, "According to school officials, the plan is quite similar to the way in which the district has been practicing student placement for years," reported the April 22, 1992, Morning Sun (Alma edition). "Always in the past, when we've received requests from parents, we've tried to accommodate their needs. We've really had schools of choice for quite sometime," Alma Superintendent William McKinstry told the Sun.
Not everyone, however, is willing to equate a schools of choice program with a formalized transfer policy. In a letter to the Delta-Waverly News Herald, Waverly District resident Kristine Prinz makes an important distinction between schools of choice and open enrollment. She writes, in part,
I take issue with the board's belief that the current open enrollment policy serves the community in the same way that "Schools of Choice" would....
While open enrollment does give a family the opportunity to place their child where they think the child's education is best served, the reality is that many of the open enrollment students in Waverly are in their particular building because of access to the family's preferred child care. I don't think this is what "Schools of Choice" is about.
"Schools of Choice" offers the community the chance to build into choice "magnet" programs, where curriculum can be innovative and address specific educational goals that parents are advocating; examples would be a basic skills program or intensive foreign language development.
Commentary:
The mere formalization of existing transfer policies is sufficient to comply only with a minimalist definition of schools of choice. Under such an interpretation, nearly all of Michigan's school districts can claim to have some form of school choice so long as they at least consider a parent's request for a student transfer. Even if the district approves only a minor percentage of these transfer requests, this can be construed as an open enrollment policy tantamount to school choice.
Such an interpretation is belied by the legislation itself: planning committees would not have been necessary had mere formalization been the Legislature's goal. It seems clear that the Legislature intended districts to move beyond the status quo and significantly increase the scope and quality of choices available to parents. Choice, acting in conjunction with other school improvement programs, would help transform district operations.
The huge gap between legislative intent and district compliance raises several important questions: Can districts, left to themselves, be expected to implement schools of choice programs? Was there some fatal flaw in the legislation itself which undermined its own intent?
1. Limited Space
One feature common to all choice programs studied is their adoption on a space-available basis. This is not surprising, given that districts were not required to adopt programs that would force pupils from their neighborhood schools. As a result, the availability of choice options depends on how many seats are available after virtually all other students have been placed.
In most districts, the reality is that very few seats (less than one or two percent of total enrollment) are available for choice options. Restrictive conditions included:
a recent increase in student population, which has left some school districts filled to capacity;
contractually-imposed class size limits, which inhibit districts from adjusting enrollment capacity within buildings or classrooms; and
individual schools' lack of substantial autonomy from the district's central administration with respect to their budgets, expenditures and managerial structures.
The choice mandate required districts to employ a random selection process when the number of applicants exceeds the number of available spaces in a requested building. Districts were left free to determine the duration of a granted choice request, i.e., whether it would remain in effect for the duration of a student's career or for only, one year. Most districts, in order to insure that the maximum number of choice seats would be available from year to year, opted to require annual lotteries for all choice applicants. Few students, therefore, are guaranteed placement beyond one year.
Commentary:
In addressing the question of space availability, Michigan districts have accepted existing open spaces as the definitive amount of available space while displaying little effort to determine what factors actually limit available space and how to address them. Few tried innovative strategies to increase space availability in order to accommodate enrollment shifts generated by formalized choice policies.
As a result of constraints on space availability, most parents have no more choice of schools now than they had prior to the state's choice mandate. The only effect of the legislation in many districts may be to engender greater competition for few available seats, thus creating more, not less, parental dissatisfaction.
Furthermore, districts' inability to guarantee student enrollment in choice programs beyond one year constitutes a significant disincentive to parents who might otherwise consider exercising choice. Few parents are likely to risk the emotional disruption to their children caused by changing school environments if the change is not assured for the duration of students' primary, secondary or high school careers. Once accepted into a chosen school, students should be treated as if they were neighborhood attendees. Such an assurance, unfortunately, limits the number of open spaces for others in subsequent years.
Limited space availability is not an intrinsic barrier to schools of choice. Programs of choice within schools are feasible, as are schools within schools (such as immersion schools). Greater financial and managerial autonomy might afford individual schools the flexibility to accommodate increased student enrollment.
2. inadequate Consumer Information
The volume and scope of consumer information that districts are providing about schools of choice vary enormously. Although all schools of choice plans (as required by law) include a provision for the dissemination of information to parents about different schools' offerings, they are often rather vague as to precisely what information will be supplied. Counseling and advice from a combination of personnel including principals, superintendents and counselors are usually provided, as are a variety of printed materials. These materials generally include schools' mission statements and philosophies in addition to brief descriptions of academic offerings. Parents are often encouraged to visit and observe classes in schools that they are considering as transfer possibilities. Several larger districts, such as Detroit, sponsor informational fairs about schools of choice.
Commentary:
Although numerous districts made a sincere effort to provide measured and detailed information to parents about individual schools, one very important piece of information was missing in all districts surveyed: measurements of each individual school's effectiveness.
No district that we know of developed any form of an indicator system to measure components of school quality. Information was restricted to descriptions of individual schools' missions, philosophies, programs, etc. While beneficial, such information tells but half the story: it measures input, not output.
If choice is meant to encourage competition, then information must be more relevant to parents. . It must include measurements of each individual school's effectiveness.
3. Standardized Schools
Public schools within districts and, to a lesser extent, between districts operate fairly standardized programs. Curricula are, for the most part, uniform within districts. Work rules governing teachers and support staff are uniformly established by contracts. Despite some recent movement toward site-based management, school governance is still centralized in most districts. Even districts that adopted innovative school programs long before the choice mandate was enacted usually did so on a district-wide basis.
In many districts, choice may conflict with certain prevailing educational philosophies, most notably, equity. By definition, public education must serve all students. As a result, administrators must be careful not to create conditions of inequity among schools. Any failure to provide all students with the same educational opportunities (whether or not every student in that group will benefit equally from a standard program) would almost assuredly expose administrators to charges of favoritism at the very least.
This apparent contradiction between choice and equity/standardization was recognized in some districts. Farmington Director of Building and Student Services Dan Cowan noted in a March 17, 1992 memo that the mere ability to choose among virtually indistinguishable alternatives does not constitute an authentic choice.
Kelloggsville's Assistant Superintendent William Zoller similarly reflected, "If schools were significantly different, there'd be a significant impact to choice," but as the district spends the same amount of money on each pupil and has teachers of basically equal talent, choice will make hardly a ripple in the community.
Alpena's "Questions and Answers" brochure entertained the question, "If 'choice' in Alpena is limited to the 10 elementaries, what are the differences between them?" It answered,
Each elementary has a different building, a different teaching staff, and serves a different neighborhood. Beyond that, there are no substantive differences. Each runs on basically the same program, teaches the same curriculum, runs on the same schedule, offers the same basic dollars per pupil education. For Choice to be real, there must be a real difference among schools. Among Alpena Public's 10 elementaries, there is no real difference.
For quite some time, many districts have sought to tailor instruction to individual learning styles and speeds. Such individualization, however beneficial, rarely enhances choice. In the great majority of districts, teacher or classroom choice is not allowed. Asked whether a more elaborate choice system might be established so that students could select specific teachers, Jefferson Assistant Superintendent Fred Sakel replied, "Teacher choice sets up one teacher against others. We like to see all of our teachers as equal." Sakel's attitude, without question, could be predicated of many administrators interviewed for this report.
Commentary:
Authentic choice exists only when there are distinct options. School districts with magnet or other alternative school programs provide some degree of real choice. In most districts, however, standardization inhibits meaningful choice.
In effect, the Legislature put the cart before the horse. In order for there to be choice, there must be real choices. Such real choices can either (a) be created prior to offering choice, or (b) be allowed to develop spontaneously as the result of choice. The Legislature failed to provide for the effective operation of either mechanism.
Choice, however, implicitly entails more than program diversity and theme schools; it entails competition among schools. Even where standardization is the rule, each individual school's effectiveness may vary significantly. Choice, by rewarding effective schools with new enrollment (and hopefully, increased resources) can act as a catalyst for school improvement. But, in the words of the Alpena District's question and answer brochure on choice,
Choice sounds tike a good word. This program was designed by the Legislature to create competition among schools, so that they would improve. But the Legislature limited the act to schools that do not compete with each other! Since it does not involve parochial schools, or schools in other districts, there is no competition. Alpena schools all get their share of the same dollars and do not compete for money or students.
4. Transportation Costly
The most common objection voiced by administrators to the schools of choice mandate was economic in nature. The original legislation required districts to provide transportation for choice students; it also promised a 20% increase in state transportation aid beginning in the 1992-93 school year. Previously, districts with inform a] transfer policies often required parents to provide transportation for transfer students unless they could be accommodated using existing bus routes. Administrators worried that the requirement to provide transportation for students exercising choice would become destructively costly and divert much-needed funds from other endeavors, such as purchasing textbooks, refurbishing aging facilities and retaining crucial support staff. Their worry was not only that the state would subsidize only part of the increased costs of transporting students, but additionally that such reimbursements were not guaranteed in the future.
This latter concern proved to be justified when, in April of 1992, the Legislature cut the funding for transporting choice students from the state school aid act and lifted the requirement that districts transport choice students. Some districts will continue to provide transportation anyway; others had committed to providing transportation only tentatively, depending upon state funding, and now will not be providing it.
Apparently many citizens shared administrators' concerns over the potential cost of transporting new choice students, as evidenced by voters' approval of every district's exemption request (approximately 28 districts requested exemption).
Beyond the potentially disproportionate cost of busing one child across an entire district, administrators noted that transportation takes time. Under numerous choice plans, students using district busing will miss up to 30 minutes of class at the beginning and end of the day to take a shuttle bus between a transportation hub and their school of attendance.
Districts' Experiences with Transportation: A Survey
Alpena's director of K-6 instruction, Marilyn Frank, was angry about the legislation, as were others in the district, she said. The funds that Alpena would have to spend on new buses (which would be required for a more extensive transportation network) would come from the general fund. She deemed the opportunity cost of such an allocation far too great and hoped that area voters would exempt the district from the legislation. The district, which has 10 elementary schools spread throughout its 640 square miles, already has double bus runs. District transportation for choice students would assuredly exacerbate the district's awkward financial situation and add time delays, Frank said. Alpena's "Questions and Answers" brochure framed the district's worries this way:
Unfortunately, the many will end up paying for the few. Because choice does not affect the district's 3,000 junior high and high school students, only half of the district's children are even eligible for choice. And while some parents of elementary youngsters may opt for choice, most parents will want their children to attend their own neighborhood school, staying closest to home, with their own friends, and having the shortest possible bus ride. Still, funds to pay for transporting the children changing schools will HAVE TO COME OUT OF PRESENT PROGRAMS AND SERVICES. The district will not ask for millage to fund this additional transportation cost, which means that while your child/grandchild may not choose to change schools, money will come out of his/her education to pay for this program.
According to The Community Crier of April 1, 1992, the Plymouth-Canton district (which sought exemption by vote) had serious financial concerns about the legislation's original transportation clause. Said Board Vice-President Roland Thomas, "I cannot vote in good conscience for a program with an open-ended cost such as this one."
Saginaw Township complained that there has been no increase in funding despite increased state requirements which may well increase busing costs. Mona Shores Superintendent Kenneth Walcott agreed and called the legislation "faulty," largely for its transportation clause. Superintendent James Richendollar of the Van Buren district shared Walcott's opinion in part, noting, "The issue is not the [extra] work [that choice entails], but the cost." A conservative estimate of the amount the district would have to spend on transportation – beyond what the state could be expected to subsidize with its promised transportation dollars – is $300,000. Other districts, such as Petoskey, were unwilling even to formalize past practice in accordance with the choice legislation precisely because of the cost of providing transportation. The Planning Committee reported that "it did not find that the educational advantages of schools of choice outweighed the increased costs in transportation to the taxpaying public."
Grosse Pointe, which has had open enrollment since 1986 and where approximately 100 of the district's 7,500 students exercise choice, also sought exemption from the choice mandate. Parents of choice students provide their own children's transportation under Grosse Pointe's system, so the district saw no reason to increase its transportation expenditures by nearly $500,000 just to relieve parents of the transportation burden.
In Livonia, the reaction was the same. A May 14, 1992, letter from Livonia Board of Education President Richard McKnight to local citizens explained,
The Board of Education believes the Schools of Choice program is an example of another state mandate that is not needed in our district. We have an existing optional program entitled Open Enrollment that functions very well. Open enrollment has been offered for years to parents interested in enrolling their child(ren) at a school other than their home school within the district. Currently 416 students attend non-home schools in this district at no additional cost to the taxpayers. These parents are obligated to provide the transportation for their child to the open enrollment school.
Not All Districts Said Transportation Would Be Problematic
Several districts surveyed reported that transportation would not be a problem. Their reasons included:
an excess of busing capacity;
having elaborate busing system already in place as a result of desegregation efforts or existing transfer and/or magnet programs; and
the district's geographical smallness.
Only a handful of districts, however, shared the Legislature's belief that equal access to schools of choice obligated districts to provide full transportation for all choice students.
Commentary:
Uncertainty surrounding the additional cost of, and the commitment of the State to pay for, transporting all choice students generated significant local opposition to the choice mandate. This unfortunate development need not have occurred if the Legislature had shown greater flexibility on this issue. Since choice both presumes and is intended to promote greater parental involvement, it may be reasonable to require most parents to provide some or all of the additional transportation to choice schools. Many parents are apparently more than willing to accept this burden. Exceptions could be made for disadvantaged parents or special circumstances.
Choice is too important a school improvement policy to be held hostage to concerns about additional transportation costs.
5. Lack of Coherent Direction from State
Many districts found the schools of choice legislation, as well as the guidance subsequently provided by the Department of Education, ambiguous or confusing.
A memo dated March 17, 1992, from Farmington Director of Building and Student Services Don Cowan to Superintendent Flanagan and the Board of Education observes:
The enclosed recommendation to the Board of Education regarding a School of Choice policy was a difficult document to produce. The difficulties were not on the part of the committee. The difficulties stemmed from the lack of direction from the Legislature, especially in their definition of School of Choice and their lack of understanding the ramifications associated with their directive.
According to the April 2, 1992, Plymouth Observer, "Dick Egli, the district's community relations director, also served on the [planning] committee and found it a frustrating experience. '. . . I had considerable personal frustration when we tried to get information from Lansing about how this thing should go ... No one really knew. Here it was law – it had been tacked onto the state aid act – yet no one could give us the guidance we needed and wanted.'"
The Battle Creek Enquirer reported on May 2, 1992, "On April 1, the Battle Creek Board of Education adopted its plan for five middle schools, effective in the fall, with the understanding that it could expand the plan to include 16 elementary schools the following year. But on March 26, the state told school officials that a districtwide plan was required, said Gerry Mann, director of secondary instruction. At that point, school officials were unsure about what the new directive meant and were too far along with [the] plan to change it."
The same held we for the St. Johns District. A memo dated February 18, 1992, which was shared with the Board, reports,
Friday, the 13th, I received a call from the State Department of Education stating that our "Plan looks great!" and that she would be meeting that afternoon with the Attorney General to get more compliance information so that a memo could be sent soon from the State Superintendent
Monday, the 16th, I received call number two stating that, following her Friday p.m. meeting, she needed to notify me that we were not in compliance. The latest ruling is that the law requires that a plan must include all grade levels in the 1992-93 school year. How Frustrating!!
Apparently, the Office of Attorney General counseled Departmental staff to refrain from defining the parameters of schools of choice because local committees were authorized to do that. In March, the State Superintendent issued a "Questions and Answers" document in an attempt to provide guidance on many of the questions which the Department received via telephone.
Commentary:
Districts would have been better served by a clearer definition of schools of choice from both the Legislature and the State Department of Education. The Legislature, though correct not to mandate a specific program of choice, did not establish any minimum criteria. The Department of Education was given wide latitude to develop guidelines for districts, in part as a result of the legislation's vagueness, but the Department lacked adequate staff to do the job properly. It appears that the department would have benefited from clearer legislative direction as well. The resulting confusion contributed to many districts' minimalist responses to the legislation. Future modifications to the legislation should include minimum criteria which require more than the mere formalization of transfer policies.
6. Lack of Planning Time
Many districts reported that the amount of planning time allowed by the state was insufficient, and at least one district (Muskegon) reported that its school board recommended exemption because of inadequate planning time. Districts had barely 45 days after passage of the legislation in late September 1991 to begin complying with the legislation's timetable for establishing schools of choice planning committees. The planning committees had until April 1 of this year to develop plans, but many of them did not begin formally meeting until late January or February. This left little time for committee members to research and study their options adequately, identify impediments, gather public input and make detailed recommendations to their school board. The Legislature retroactively recognized this problem by voting in June to delay implementation until 1993-94, but by then districts had finalized their programs (or sought exemption) according to the original timetable.
Commentary:
Legislators could have anticipated that most school districts would not develop and implement elaborate schools of choice programs in less than one year. While one or two years may be adequate to develop choice plans, effective and complete implementation will require several more years in many cases. A more realistic legislative timetable is evidently in order.
Generous planning time is not purely a luxury – it is a prerequisite for successful programs of choice. A Study of the Program of Choice at McKinley Elementary in the Wyandotte School District explains,
The [popular and successful] program was well thought-out in advance, time was taken to prepare each learning module.... [T]he organization, staff development, administrative support, and teacher time to plan paid dividends and resulted in a very enriching experience for children. Programs which do not have the components mentioned in the last sentence, from our experience, tend to fail (p. 69).
1. Neighborhood Schools Preferred
The Legislature sought to preserve the neighborhood schools concept by preserving resident enrollment, i.e., by guaranteeing that neighborhood students would not be displaced to accommodate transfer students. Choice planning committees were quick to affirm their commitment to this principle. Parents, they claim, are comfortable with the convenience of neighborhood schools, and students prefer the shorter bus rides that such a system generally assures.
Center Line Superintendent Terry Follbaum spoke for many administrators when he told the Warren Weekly of May 13, 1992, that he "does not think a lot of people will take advantage of it [Schools of Choice ]. The local school concept is so embedded. Parents want to send their kids where their friends go to school."
Commentary:
The Legislature acted properly in affirming and preserving the primacy of neighborhood schools in the schools of choice legislation. Neighborhood schools and schools of choice are not mutually exclusive concepts, however. Given incentives such as greater autonomy and funding based on pupil enrollment, neighborhood schools may choose to welcome and even recruit new nonresident students without displacing resident students. Residents who prefer neighborhood schools above all else, moreover, may benefit from the stimulus for system-wide improvement provided by choice.
2. Loss of Local Control Feared
Despite the Legislature's intent that schools of choice provide an incentive for reform, some administrators and planning committee members complained that the mandate appeared as more of a threat than an offer. For many administrators, choice was an additional, time-consuming requirement that interfered with normal operations and intruded upon their autonomy.
For example, a number of administrators argued that the requirement that districts randomly select students when applicants exceed available space actually restricted rather than enhanced choice.
Percy Smith, Superintendent of Ironwood Area Schools, and Kelloggsville's Assistant Superintendent William Zoller both observed that, in the past, administrators could weigh parents' and students' reasons for requesting a transfer. For example, academic reasons for transfer requests may outweigh other reasons, such as convenience. Under the districts' new policies, however, students' reasons for requesting a certain school are irrelevant: the selection process is random.
In contrast, Eaton Rapids Administrative Assistant to the Superintendent Timothy Culver saw the district's new random lottery selection technique as "more fair."
Other administrators lamented the program as burdensome. One Fraser administrator explained that his district had formerly operated on a first-come, first-served basis. Now, he said, the process is slower and burdened with superfluous paperwork. Petoskey's Committee adamantly opposed the state mandate, partly on the grounds that it would be unwieldy compared to existing policy: "[T]he district would no longer be able to accommodate many of the day care needs of families, and there would be greater restrictions for students who are non-walkers (approximately 2/3 of the enrollment)." Patricia Murphy, Administrative Assistant of Classified Personnel in the Saginaw Township District, cited rigid deadlines for applications as reducing the district's flexibility.
Commentary:
District administrators and local citizens are rightfully protective of local autonomy in the face of state mandates. But the schools of choice legislation left it up to local districts to decide how to implement their own schools of choice programs. The Legislature even allowed districts to exempt themselves from the mandate. If anything, it appears that the Legislature erred by allowing districts enough local autonomy to substitute transfer policies for genuine choice programs.
Districts with space constraints understandably prefer having some discretion to differentiate legitimate reasons for requesting a transfer from less noble motives. Ideally, districts would seek to accommodate all choice requests. Unfortunately, most districts accept existing space constraints as a given, thereby necessitating rationing of choice seats. With greater flexibility from the state Legislature and district administrators, and a willingness to innovate, schools could find ways to accommodate enrollment shifts and thereby negate the whole issue of random admissions to choice programs. For example, Detroit's Bates Academy, an empowered school which directly controls over 90% of its budget, has decided to purchase a new building in part to increase its enrollment capacity.
3. Parents Don't Care
Some administrators observed that parents often remain uninterested in schools of choice, even after receiving information. For example, Coldwater's Sharon Franz commented that not even one parent attended a public forum the district hosted to discuss schools of choice. John Mills of the Westland district observed, moreover, that parents are doing little of the consumer investigation upon which choice is premised.
Many districts which informally approved transfer requests in the past reported that the majority of those requesting transfers did so for reasons of personal convenience rather than academics (e.g., an alternate school might be closer to a babysitter's residence). Huron Valley's District Communication Coordinator Micki Marceau-Vernier explained that about 40 of 9,000 pupils exercise their open enrollment option in a given year – 99 percent of whom do so for logistical reasons.
In Harper Creek, where formalization of standing policy was the order of the day, the broader dissemination of information about choice options resulted in slightly more interest in such options. Most of those inquiring, however, continued to do so for reasons of child care convenience.
Apathy, however, does not afflict parents in all communities. Tecumseh's Gary Lovett said, "People respond very well to choice." Currently, Tecumseh has space to accommodate approximately 300-320 choice students, he said, although the district receives between 450 and 500 requests per year. According to Lovett, the district only modified its existing practices slightly in reaction to the choice legislation because Tecumseh is already involved in cross-district choice within the county.
Although Lapeer Superintendent Jack McCauley agrees that there can be tremendous local inertia in favor of the traditional neighborhood school model, he observed that the state's choice mandate can be beneficial since "it helps overcome" local complacency. A district can motivate parents by telling them, "This is the way that the state is going," he said.
Commentary:
Many administrators routinely inferred that their receipt of relatively low numbers of transfer requests proves that parents are satisfied with the education currently provided to their children by their neighborhood schools. This logic is flawed, however, in that people may seem satisfied with their current situation only because they have nothing with which to compare it.
When the only substantive difference among schools is their location, it follows that educational choices will be based on geographic convenience: no competing values manifest themselves for consideration. Curricular and pedagogical diversity, combined with the dissemination of results-oriented information, would likely stimulate many more parents to consider choosing schools for reasons other than convenience.
4. Choice Is impractical for Small Districts
Greg Milkins, Assistant Superintendent of Business in the Orchard View district, typified the view of many small school district administrators: "For small districts like ours (we have only two elementary schools) this is just poppycock." Choice;, he said, "might have a major impact in a large district, but it's crazy for a small one," where money is a concern and the schools are essentially the same. Noting that he supported enhanced quality of education and increased opportunity, he concluded that choice in districts like Orchard View amounts to nothing more than "jumping through [the State's] hoops." Lapeer Superintendent Jack McCauley similarly observed, "In many [small] districts, choice is a joke," he said, because they lack the capacity necessary to offer a real choice program with authentically distinct options.
Commentary:
Building-level choice is clearly less feasible in districts with few schools and great distance between them. In these cases, choice can be enhanced by using distance-learning to diversify curricular offerings within schools. Alternatively, districts may consider consolidating one or several grade level programs into one building, as the Stephensville and Thornapple- Kellog districts have done, and allow for a choice of teachers and/or programs.
However, according to Kathleen Mayhew of the State Department of Education, the Office of the Attorney General is of the opinion that the legislative intent for the schools of choice language was that students and families would be able to choose among schools – that is, distinct geographical and architectural entities. It therefore appears that schools within schools or immersion programs would not qualify as schools of choice under a severe interpretation of this law. (For more information, see Appendix 3, Part 1, Interview with Kathleen Mayhew.)
A related issue is that few districts other than major urban ones have more than one middle or high school. Without interdistrict choice or schools within schools, public school choice may often be limited to elementary schools.
5. Miscellaneous Objections
In most districts, the degree to which choice is implemented depends heavily on administrators' attitudes toward choice – despite the Legislature's attempt to involve parents in the process directly. (Wyandotte's Director of Curriculum Robert Dunn discusses this point in Appendix 3.) As one might expect, these attitudes varied from outright hostility to enthusiastic support. A small sample follows.
Oscoda Superintendent Craig Douglas said that underlying the choice mandate, one finds "a typical Republican 'Lets compete and make everything better' mentality."
Planning Committee Chairman Dave Collins of the Western district emphasized his fear that an elaborate choice system may lead to elitism and cause a "rift" or infighting among buildings and teachers. "People want nearby buildings," he said.
Riverview Superintendent Michael Krigelski observed that schools of choice neither posed notable problems nor entailed a significant change for the district. In his view, however, the exercise of choice could amount to escapism. Krigelski wondered how one could deal with a student trying to escape a disliked teacher; one cannot know whether a student's transfer request is for legitimate academic reasons or otherwise motivated. "In life, if I don't like my boss, I've got to deal with him. I can't escape," he said. We all "must learn to face our problems, instead of fleeing them." The provision of easy choice for any reason whatsoever encourages students to make a mountain out of minor concerns, he said.
Perhaps the most scathing words came from Kentwood's Superintendent Jerome A. Victor. "The new changes won't improve things," he augured. The choice legislation, in fact, is "the most backassward law" that he's seen in quite some time. Victor, a self-proclaimed moderate Republican who is upset with the Party for pushing schools of choice, said that he saw intra-district choice as a preparatory step toward the ultimate goal of an inter-district, comprehensive, public and private voucher system, a haunting specter which he "hate(s)." Broad-based choice, he suggested, would exacerbate "white flight and socioeconomic flight," both of which are "destructive to the kind of community we're trying to build."
"All it is is a political move to get away from ... what they should be doing – improving school financing," River Valley Superintendent Charles Williams told the February 19, 1992, Heraid-Palladium. "It's just a token thing," he added.
Some administrators, in contrast, spoke positively about choice. Clio Area administrators, for instance, thought that choice will increase contact and interaction between parents and instructors. "It breaks down barriers," one said.
The choice plan adopted by the Cass City district did more to clarify than broaden existing transfer policy, but Superintendent Kenneth .1. Micklash saw a positive side to his district's formalization of choice. "'The plan provides good clarification on transfers from one elementary to another," he told the Saginaw News on April 24, 1992. "Before, there were no governing rules and it was hit or miss in requesting a transfer.... This will provide structure and organization to the process."
Fitzgerald Assistant Superintendent James Edoff told the May 13, 1992, Warren Weekly, "It's positive anytime you provide another choice for people."
Not all those who favor schools of choice, however, are elated with the state's approach to instituting the practice. The Grand Rapids Press of April 23, 1992, for instance, summarized: "School officials [in Rockford] like the idea of schools of choice, but are unhappy with its being tied to the State Aid Act. 'This is regressive and punitive: it is not an incentive,' said Superintendent Michael Shibler[.]"
Commentary:
No amount of legislative prescription or departmental rule-making can produce effective schools of choice programs in districts where administrators do not value or routinely oppose choice. Many administrators operate from a deeply ingrained paradigm, a "tunnel vision" which does not look favorably on the idea of schools competing in an open marketplace. While this "tunnel vision" may not be the fault of those within the system, it is nonetheless real and can inhibit even experimentation with choice as a school improvement program.
Most of the reservations, objections and problems cited in this section merit serious attention. Many are not problems with choice per se, but rather peculiarities of Michigan's first statewide experiment with schools of choice, and most, if not all, can be overcome with improved planning, incentives and better legislative direction. These "problems" are not problems if we choose to learn from them and work to refine and improve Michigan's schools of choice program.
A. Getting Beyond Square One
Not all school districts opted for the minimalist course of merely formalizing existing transfer policies or seeking exemption from the choice mandate. Some districts saw in the mandate an opportunity for restructuring, innovation and school improvement. Others had begun their improvement efforts prior to or independently of the choice legislation. Such initiatives am perhaps some of the most encouraging steps that districts are presently taking toward expanding educational choice. The following section highlights several districts whose programs may serve as models for other districts.
Farmington
The Farmington District already had an elementary magnet program and early childhood centers, but it opened up the rest of its schools to choice as part of its plan. Unlike most other districts, Farmington's choice efforts did not end with the Board's formalization of its past practices, according to the March 23, 1992 Farmington Observer:
Superintendent Michael Flanagan called Tuesday's report and board action the first phase in the district's study of choice programs. "It does not end tonight," he said. "What I hope to bring is other legitimate choice options. But it can't be done overnight." In that vein, the district plans to form a second committee to study the future of other choice programs and schools within the district, which educators believe will be parent-driven in terms of what is offered. A year-round school -within-a-school will be piloted at Gill Elementary this fall.
Kalamazoo
Kalamazoo, despite its formalization of existing policy, has made notable progress toward installing a fine choice program. Although the district already boasts a magnet program, administrators hope to expand it in the near future after evaluating the Lincoln International Studies Center, which was initiated in 1991. That school features the regular district curriculum, but also places an emphasis on international studies and foreign languages. According to the schools of choice plan drafted by a subcommittee of the Kalamazoo Public Schools Redistricting Task Force, "The Lincoln International Studies Center is the only public open enrollment school in Kalamazoo County and the only school of its type in all of Southwest Michigan."
Several years ago, the district began a math and science center with a $2 million grant from a private company. The Kalamazoo Area Mathematics and Science Center (KAMSC) is a unique, ongoing partnership between area public and private sectors. Developed with the cooperation of greater Kalamazoo area schools, KAMSC welcomed its first class of 75 students in 1986. Funded with a $2 million grant from The Upjohn Company and administered by the Kalamazoo Public Schools, KAMSC reflects a creative continuing relationship involving public education and private industry.
Anchor Bay
In the Anchor Bay District, sixth grade students this year will have the choice of taking a "special class at the junior high. It will offer more homework, more structure and, possibly, more math and science," assuming that the district is able to fund the program, according to April 22, 1992's The Bay Voice. The Anchor Bay Beacon of April 23, 1992, notes, "Competitive opportunities will be stressed and parents of students involved will be required to commit ten hours a month volunteer involvement in the program."
Flint Community
Flint is increasing school autonomy and moving toward site-based management. Under the district's choice plan, schools will be given the freedom to develop special programs to attract students in the manner prescribed by Board of Education policies and procedures. Of the district's 32 elementary schools, 19 draw students from outside their attendance areas; of Flint's 4 middle schools, 3 do so; all three high schools do so as well. In addition to choosing from Flint's magnet and gifted programs, high school students can enroll in classes at several high schools in order to take classes that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Students, however, are required to provide their own transportation.
Lapeer
In its recommendation to the Board, Lapeer's Planning Committee wrote,
The committee recommends that we delay implementation of "schools of choice" in grades K-6 [grade 7-12 transfers endorsed] until our building/bond program is completed and at that time revisit the issue.. .. Additionally, the committee would like to recommend that the Board consider establishing (on a longer range basis than our April 1, 1992 deadline allows) procedures for exploring the possibilities of further restructuring to look at school year options, length of day options and facilities which might further extend the study of math, science and vocational subjects.
Superintendent Jack McCauley agreed with the committee's approach and emphasized that the Board as a whole is likewise in agreement with the recommendation.
From the mid-70s until the mid-80s Lapeer had a year-round school of choice that was very popular. Due largely to rising transportation costs, the rapidly growing district had to eliminate its school of choice program. In subsequent years, the district offered transfers but even though Lapeer formalized its transfer policy to conform with state law, neither the Committee nor the Board were satisfied.
The district is presently waiting on a $40 million building/bond issue to be used for upgrading its elementary buildings. After renovating the elementary buildings, the Lapeer district will "begin to look at unique schools or schools with unique programs," McCauley said. "The committee and the Board are interested in choice with legitimate options to choose from," he explained, adding that there is "no point to schools of choice if ... [the district is] not offering a choice in schools."
Wyoming
The Wyoming District glimpsed an important part of a full schools of choice vision as well. It is one of a few districts to understand choice as part of a larger reform process. According to a letter distributed with schools of choice information,
Wyoming public schools embraces this mandate because it supports the school improvement process that the District has been working on over the past several years. Site-based management has allowed principals and staff to develop programs and apply for grants that are unique to their building. While core curriculum is provided at each school, choice will encourage diversity within the system and provide programs, activities, and training that fulfill differing student needs.
The benefits of Wyoming's approach can be seen in its wide array of curricular offerings. According to district documents, East Elementary provides "staff members [who] are actively involved in improving their skills in areas such as: outcomes based instruction, mastery learning, thematic unit instruction, instruction with math manipulatives, Chicago math program, Math Their Way, Cooperative learning, and AIMS." The school has departmentalized the fifth grade and offers cross-ace tutoring as well. Gladiola Elementary, in contrast, "provides a computer lab for students that is organized and managed by a parent coordinator and sixteen volunteer parents." Parkview Elementary emphasizes computer literacy even more strongly and "is implementing the Quality Schools program by Dr. Glasser." Such variety characterizes the district as a whole.
Lansing
Developed in April 1992 by the Lansing District's Planning Committee, A Plan for Creating Schools of Choice in Lansing takes a measured, well thought-out approach to providing students with educational choice. "The committee was not satisfied with simply meeting the letter of the law. Its members maintained that choice is not authentic unless families have something different to choose from. Therefore, a substantial amount of time was spent on determining how Lansing schools could implement programs with diverse content, teaching styles, and educational philosophies," the report states.
Lansing's Committee also suggests that "Individual schools should be allowed to develop programming that best suits the needs of students and the characteristics of staff, facilities, and location; parents should be involved actively in the process to develop such programming.... In order to offer choice, there must be difference.... We believe that a controlled choice [program where] each school has special or diverse programming is the best choice option for the LSD, but it must be phased in gradually."
With the recognition that real choice means having distinct alternatives, however, came the realization that most successful choice programs have been constructed over a much longer period of time than was provided to school districts and planning committees by the Michigan Legislature. According to the committee, "[T]he members of the committee believe strongly that this plan is only the first step. Most choice plans that have been implemented around the country have taken three or more years to develop; this committee was given only three months." The committee recommended that a six-year plan be developed, and proposed a detailed preliminary timetable (which appears in full in Appendix 4).
An interesting recommendation – one made possible by the Lansing district's size – is that the district should be divided into regions, and students and parents should be allowed to choose among schools located within the region in which they live. Such an organizational feature can minimize the cost and logistical problems of transporting students and can minimize the time students spend traveling to and from school. One can easily envision such an approach being used even in smaller districts with decentralized populations. Such controlled choice can limit the variety of programs available to particular students, however, if the regions do not all offer the same options.
B: The Promise of Choice Fulfilled: Wyandotte's Program
In considering the viability of choice as a school improvement option, most district planning committees became so involved in minor questions about implementation that they never developed a grander vision of choice than mere transfer policy. It is a given that choice involves a significant disruption in the administrative status quo, but the benefits of implementing choice properly can be very significant, as evidenced in the Wyandotte School District.
Wyandotte began its Program of Choice at McKinley Elementary in the 1991-92 school year under a grant from the state for restructuring. With part of that grant, some teachers were sent out to look at different alternative programs. They were impressed by the Key Elementary School in Indianapolis, Indiana. After visiting the school, they got some parents involved in developing a similar program that made sense to all of them. That program was built on Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences and partly on Grace Pillon's Workshop Way. The program was developed over a year's time. Presently it operates not as a separate school but as part of McKinley Elementary. Its curriculum is no different from any other school in the district – it is distinct pedagogically, however. (For more detail on the program, see Appendix 3, Part 2, Inter-view with Dr. Robert J. Dunn.)
According to a recent study by Doyle and Associates entitled A Study of the Program of Choice at McKinley Elementary in the Wyandotte School District, (published May, 1992, p.68-69):
The Program of Choice was well organized, well administered, and well implemented. Sufficient time was given to staff development, teacher planning time, conferences with parents, enriching experiences for children and it had an ongoing evaluation system built into it where teachers met and critiqued their efforts when appropriate....
It is our considered judgement that the Program of Choice has been an enriching, - successful experience for children and teachers in the Wyandotte School District.
After just one year of operation, Wyandotte's Program of Choice registered reactions that speak for themselves. According to a Wyandotte teacher of 30 years who is now involved in the McKinley Program of Choice,
After having been a teacher for many years, sailing safely through charted seas, secure in the knowledge that I had traveled this way so many times, it was therefore with trepidation that I dared to venture into new uncharted waters. I had grown tired of the sameness of the scenery, day after day, year after year. This sameness had become extremely boring and no longer satisfying. The P.O.C. [Program of Choice] was in these uncharted waterways and I became excited when I Learned about this program. Here was a way to end all of this tiresome sameness and to learn all the new and exciting ways to teach. I would be part of a team and have a chance to make learning fun again! I took the challenge and what satisfaction it has brought! With a positive approach, I am once again sailing although through new waters, and I find teaching fun, exciting and new again! See the smile on my face ! Join us and be happy, too. (Doyle, et al.)
The attitudes displayed by such feedback from teachers in a thoughtfully designed choice program speak volumes about the effect that autonomy and direct involvement can have on teachers' outlooks even when, as in the McKinley program, the involved teachers are not paid more than their peers.
Wyandotte's program also fosters parental involvement in education, which has repeatedly been shown to contribute to improved student achievement. Unlike many parental involvement programs that are token in nature and make little impact on the learning process, the Wyandotte program requires a specific, active commitment by the parents (Doyle et al., p. 9). More specifically, the report explains,
Parents wishing to participate in the program filled out a form which included the child's name, age, and grade level.
Parents had to sign a written agreement that they were willing to give two hours a month to in-school support, would provide transportation to and from school, and would allow their child to be videotaped for portfolio assessment purposes.
Parents are expected to meet on a regular basis with the teacher to discuss their child's progress. If parents are unable to comply with the above agreement, the child could be placed back in the regular school program at the end of the school year....
The parent survey data is extremely positive regarding parents' perception of being actively involved in their children's education. Of the 61 parents surveyed about the McKinley program, "One hundred percent (100%) of the parents `strongly agree' or `agree' that the Program of Choice offered them a fine opportunity to become more involved in their child's education.... Ninety-three percent (93%) of the parents `strongly agree' or `agree' that their child is very pleased to be in the Program of Choice. Seven percent (7%) were not sure and checked the `neither' category. Parents say their children are enthusiastic, love their teacher, learned a lot, are not bored, etc."
McKinley student feedback was also overwhelmingly positive. Of the random sample of students surveyed for Doyle's report, all children, except one, stated that they liked the program. Other common comments included, "it is not boring," "enjoy parents in the classroom," and "I enjoy the special projects." In view of such findings, the report concludes that, "Children in the Program of Choice enjoy the experience and would recommend this educational experience to their peers."
Commentary:
Wyandotte District's Program of Choice at McKinley Elementary shows the power of choice. When teachers, parents and students are all committed to the educational process, the conditions for a dynamic learning environment emerge. District officials can expect and demand great effort and participation as a result. Everyone gains; no one loses. No amount of money or resources alone can transform schools in this same way.
C. Choice as a Paradigm Shift: Detroit Leads the Way
What most districts in Michigan lack in terms of vision for schools of choice may be compensated for by the comprehensive vision for choice being put forward in Detroit. Although the recent election defeat of 3 school board members leaves uncertain the future of these reforms, Detroit more than any other district has recognized the potential of the schools of choice concept. Rather than viewing choice as merely an add-on to existing school improvement programs, Detroit's school board and superintendent viewed choice as the centerpiece of a comprehensive plan which:
facilitates creativity by allowing teachers to design and submit proposals for new schools;
promotes school-level decision-making by shifting resource control from the central administration to individual schools;
stimulates diversity by permitting schools to design their own curricular and pedagogical approaches to educational improvement;
provides genuine autonomy through a chartering mechanism which would free schools from regulations of the central administration and from unnecessary work rules and labor practices;
seeks to expand the range of school options by chartering existing independent schools and new schools yet to be created into the Detroit Public School System; and
improves accountability by transforming the role of the administration from process control to being primarily responsible for assessing outcomes, ensuring compliance with Board legal requirements, and adherence to the District's educational mission and other objectives.
Facilitating Creativity
If choice assumes diversity, then diversity presupposes creativity. Of the districts surveyed, few took measures to encourage creativity on the part of teachers or principals independently of administrative control.
In Detroit, according to district documents, teachers have been allowed to write Letters of Intent which amount to proposals for innovative new schools of choice. Such submissions must address a variety of considerations, including the proposed school's theme, focus and curriculum. Teachers designing new schools of choice must also explain the need for the proposed school and define the target group i.e., those whom the program is intended to attract and benefit. These requirements help ensure that schools created under the rubric of choice are responsive to parents' and students' educational demands.
The teachers involved in creating new schools must include information on the school's enrollment area, proposed location, recruitment plans, student selection criteria, student application process, staff selection process and grades to be served. Plans for new schools are subject to committee evaluation and are evaluated in terms of need (what problem is being addressed), organizational plausibility, and likelihood of success. Teachers whose proposals receive initial approval are given grants for further refinement of their plans.
Empowerment Allows Flexibility Through School-Level Decision-making
If diversity assumes creativity, creativity requires school-level autonomy. Many school districts are developing plans for some form of site-based management in accord with Public Act 25 (a state law passed several years ago to encourage school improvement through restructuring). But none boasts the magnitude and breadth of Detroit's empowerment plan, which outlines a dramatic paradigm shift that changes Detroit Public Schools (DPS) from top-down process control to school-focused control of educational programs, resource allocation, and personnel as well as expectations for student and parental support and community involvement. Specifically, Detroit's empowerment plan/paradigm shift:
increases the portion of DPS funds allocated to empowered schools using a per pupil allocation method;
increases spending authority for school budgets from 15 percent to nearly 100 percent for empowered schools;
empowers schools to buy support services on the open market rather than forcing them to rely exclusively on the central administration;
provides transition assistance to schools from the central and lower level administration and/or external sources (e.g., budgeting, financial accounting, computer information services, contracting/bidding, etc);
shifts administrative curriculum responsibilities from controlling decision making to a service support role for curriculum development; and
shifts personnel management authority from the central administration to individual schools with flexible work rules at the school site.
Chartered Schools: Diversifying School Management, Increasing School Options
In March of 1992, the Detroit School Board passed a resolution outlining its plan to offer charters to existing public schools and potentially to independent schools and new schools yet to be created. Broadly stated, charters are legal contracts providing individual schools autonomy in exchange for a commitment to specified goals and outcomes.
According to Detroit Board of Education members April Howard Coleman and David Olmstead, chartered schools would enjoy all the benefits of empowerment:
Charter schools would have different philosophies and different curricula, but they would all play by two rules: no tuition and no discrimination in admissions policies.
All decision-making power would be transferred to the individual chartered school. A school's charter would set forth its educational mission and its philosophy and establish the roles the principal, teachers and parents would play in governing it.
Once granted, the charter would free the school from the regulations of the school district's central administration. Teachers would be free to teach in a supportive atmosphere with an unusual degree of professional autonomy. The school would also be freed from unnecessary work rules and labor practices, while the collective bargaining process would be respected, and teacher salaries established in accordance with that process.
Chartering is critical because it would allow us to create private school conditions in public schools. (Detroit News & Free Press, February 23, 1992)
In the October 29, 1991 Detroit Free Press, then-President of the Detroit Board of Education Lawrence C. Patrick, Jr., explained that the empowering and chartering process would decentralize authority and increase schools accountability to their clients:
Essentially, our plan is to move authority, resources and accountability away from central administration to parents, teachers and principals in local schools. Our initiatives creating empowered and chartered schools will enable parents to choose the kind of education they deem most appropriate for their children in schools their tax money supports.
As Coleman and Olmstead correctly observe, families with sufficient money have always been able to choose private schools for their children, if they desire to do so, but less affluent families have seldom had any choice. Through chartering, the number of public schools that offer distinct educational philosophies or approaches could grow exponentially.
Although Detroit's chartered schools will not have to be schools of choice, it appears likely that they will open their doors to students from other neighborhoods, provided that they have available space or can design some way to accommodate them.
Chartering Private Schools to be Public
Perhaps the most revolutionary component of Detroit's charter program is the plan to offer charters to existing independent schools, in effect enabling private schools to join the public school system by declaring themselves public. According to Education Week of February 6, 1991,
In order to enter the Detroit public school system, Mr. Olmstead said, private schools almost certainly would be required to show that they will charge no tuition, have equitable admissions policies, and conform to public school policies regarding the First Amendment to the Constitution and its separation of church and state.
According to the board resolution, staff members of the newly chartered schools would be paid no less than equivalent personnel currently employed by the Detroit public schools. In addition, the chartering of such schools would not result in the reduction of resources available to children in non-chartered public schools....
"What we are trying to accomplish," Mr. Olmstead said, "is making the central administration and school board so non-intrusive that even a private school outside the system would be willing to come into the system."
The complicating details of such an extensive reform effort have yet to be resolved, however. As the same article noted,
The charter is still very much in its conceptual stage, and numerous legal, political, and labor-related questions need to be addressed before the first private school can be chartered as public, board members and experts on educational governance stressed last week.
"The first hurdles that they are going to have to cross are the constitutional hurdles," said Robert G. Hams, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Education, noting that the state Constitution prohibits the use of public funds at private schools except for transportation....
An amendment added to Article VIII, Section 2 of the Michigan Constitution in 1970 stipulates that no public money or property can be used "to aid or maintain any private, denominational, or other non-public, pre-elementary, elementary, or secondary school," with the exception of money paid for the transportation of students to and from school.
Momentum is building across the state, however, to reform Michigan's Constitution to allow school districts such as Detroit to build a more diverse mix of public schools in order to offer parents greater choice and stimulate more competition within the public school system. TEACH Michigan, a statewide coalition of business leaders, educators, parents and taxpayers, is planning to propose such a constitutional reform by initiative in 1994.
Per Pupil Allocation for Choice Schools: Stimulating Responsiveness and Rewarding Excellence.
A central feature of Detroit's long-range plan for schools of choice is to base the funding of choice schools on pupil enrollment. Each school would be eligible to receive the same per pupil allotment, approximately $4,200 in 1992; special needs students, would qualify for additional funding, depending upon their category of need. Schools would no longer receive lump-sum allocations irrespective of enrollment or performance.
The first benefit of this funding arrangement is to assure school managers and employees that the system for funding schools is fair and consistent, not arbitrary. Schools with the same enrollment would receive equal funding.
Secondly, and more importantly, schools would now see a direct relationship between enrollment and funding. Rather than losing (or gaining) only a marginal amount for each student lost (or gained), schools would lose (or gain) the full pupil allocation which accounts for both variable and fixed costs, whereas the marginal amount covers only variable costs. As a result, schools stand to lose (or gain) proportionally more when enrollment shifts occur. Moreover, the funding loss (or gain) is directly tied to pupil enrollment.
Schools would have a strong incentive to retain existing enrollment and to recruit new pupils. Schools would thus have a strong incentive to respond directly to parents and students and thus a powerful reason to improve performance (to the degree that parents and students base their enrollment decision on a schools performance).
Improved Accountability through Reformed Central Administration.
Detroit's vision for schools of choice includes a paradigm shift from central administration as a sole-source provider of support services to an administration structured as a vendor of support services competing in the open market to secure provider contracts with Choice schools. This shift defines a permanent outcome assessment role for the central administration, a responsibility to assure that district schools comply with state laws and board policies, and a duty to facilitate district planning.
The importance of this paradigm shift for accountability should not be underestimated: First, by separating a district's central administration from individual school management, the administration is no longer responsible for micromanaging each school's day-to-day operations. The administration's primary focus becomes assessment; its mission becomes clear and it has both the time and resources to accomplish it. Second, because the central administration no longer directly controls schools management, but rather acts in a support capacity, it can objectively assess school performance. Assessment, by definition, must be performed by a distinct entity from operational management if it is to be objective. A source of objective information is critical for both school boards and parents to hold schools accountable for their performance. A major deficiency of most choice programs is the absence of an objective source of information about school performance. Parents especially cannot be expected to make credible, well-informed judgments about schools without sound information.
Choice makes this separation of powers, i.e., assessment from operational management, more feasible by generating a new source of accountability within the system. Teacher, parent and student choice together provide a bottom-up form of accountability, thereby allowing administration to concentrate more fully on assessment and less on micromanagement.
Commentary:
Detroit's vision of school reform is noteworthy in both its comprehensiveness and its unity. Each of the reforms outlined above is a paradigm shift in and of itself, but each represents a critical element of a systemic paradigm shift. Choice is central to this systemic paradigm shift because it serves as the vehicle for empowering teachers, parents and students, thereby making them allies for school improvement.
Ultimately, however, what makes Detroit's vision of choice so progressive is its Willingness to reach out via charters beyond the educational community to tap into the entrepreneurial spirit in the broader community. In effect, Detroit is restoring the community focus to public education, and in so doing, returning public education to the public.
Detroit's recent experience with teacher union opposition to empowerment, however, indicates the near-futility of systemic efforts for choice within the present system, despite heroic leadership from Detroit School Board members. It calls for greater state leadership to break gridlock within the present system.
Forcing choice into the present system of public education inevitably holds choice hostage to the concerns of special interests. School officials are made responsible for creating the optimal conditions under which choice can function; choice therefore ends up being controlled, and cannot shift major decision-making power away from administrators, school boards and unions. Even choice experiments which empower principals and teachers to create new school conditions are rare.
Such a guarded view of choice is the norm: the existing paradigm of public education is rarely questioned, and Michigan's schools of choice mandate was ultimately too weak to force such questioning. Without a paradigm shift in what we, as a society, expect from public education, most administrators will continue to take a guarded view of choice. Change the incentive structure, however, and administrators, like anyone else, will respond constructively with a new paradigm.
If choice serves any purpose at all, it is to challenge the existing paradigm of public education which falsely supposes that one management team can be as responsive to a community's educational needs as can diverse managers competing with each other for student enrollment.
As a result, the Legislature and the Governor together must exert greater state leadership on behalf of school choice and a new paradigm of public education. While the provision of education is a local responsibility, the structure of the delivery system is the state's responsibility. The Legislature can act, consistent with the constitutional prerogative for the tradition of local control, to make greater choice a reality. This can be done while reducing mandates and interference, thereby providing local school officials greater autonomy and opportunity.
1. Replace Mandates with Incentives
If anything is clear from our survey of school districts, it is that mandates are not effective ways to advance policy goals. It is our reasoned conclusion that, even if the legislation mandating choice contained a clear definition of choice and more specific guidelines for implementation, it would have still failed to accomplish its goal. If anything, it may have drawn even greater hostility from district administrators.
School districts must have a reason to change. It is clear that, left to themselves, the great majority of districts will not encourage enough innovation to make schools of choice feasible in the first place.
The most important incentive that we recommend is to base state funding on a per pupil basis tied directly to the enrollment decisions of the parents and students. In other words, establish the policy that state aid follows students to the schools of their parents' choice, including schools in neighboring districts. This reform would create an immediate incentive for districts to implement schools of choice to the degree that parents demanded change. Moreover, once parents know that state aid flows only to the schools they choose, they will likely demand much greater change and choice as a result.
Second, we recommend that the Legislature expand the definition of a public school to include new school sponsors. In effect, authorize school boards to charter new school entities in order to diversify the district's offerings and maximize the range of choices available to parents. Teachers and others could petition school boards to create new schools or new programs. A provision allowing rejected charter applicants to apply directly to the state should be included as well. The broader the charter authorization, the greater the diversity of school programs that will result. The state's program to assist university-sponsored charter schools is a small step in the right direction, but needs to be expanded dramatically.
Third, we recommend that the Article 8, Section ? of the Michigan Constitution be repealed in whole or altered in part to allow parents to choose – with public resources – any private school which meets sufficient educational standards. Recognition of the contribution which the private sector could bring to K-12 education, as it does to all other areas of public service, is long overdue. Such recognition would encourage a host of new organizations to sponsor schools and create the genuine diversity necessary for choice.
2. Provide Districts Necessary Flexibility
Many structural barriers exist to diversifying school programs. Perhaps none is more obvious than the requirement that all school employees be subject to one single agency for collective bargaining. As a result of this statute alone, school districts (in particular, school board members and superintendents) are held hostage to a bargaining process that promotes rigid personnel compensation policies and work rules for school employees. No single policy alone contributes more to the standardization of schools. Were school boards able to negotiate contracts with separate bargaining units representing one or more schools, diversity and competition would surely result.
We therefore recommend amending the Collective Bargaining section of the School Code to authorize individual bargaining units within school districts.
Further flexibility could be afforded by providing regulatory waivers to schools of choice. While it is not within the scope of this report to review structural barriers to Choice within the School Code itself, there are surely many that could be identified. We recommend that the Legislature create a commission to review the School Code for impediments to choice and to recommend specific measures for regulatory relief.
In the meantime, the state superintendent and/or State Board of Education could review waiver requests from individual districts on a case-by-case basis.
3. Assure the Quality and Availability of Consumer Information.
A critical but often overlooked factor in the efficacy of choice programs is the quality of information provided to parents. Parents need more than just program information about schools; they need performance-based information about individual schools and, to the extent feasible, individual teachers. In most cases, individual school districts cannot be trusted to provide objective performance data, however. The state may need to assume this duty itself for the time being, although legislators should consider seriously the possibility of contracting with private testing agencies.
Many educators and scholars fear that poorly implemented performance indicators could ultimately be worse than no indicators at all. Despite inherent limitations in standardized student testing as the base of a system of educational performance assessment, no obvious substitute exists to give parents some basis by which to compare school quality. The key may be to evaluate school performance using a value-added indicator because it measures only the distinct contribution of schools to growth in student achievement.
We recommend that future schools of choice plans include a school performance indicator system which utilizes value-added indicators where possible. Testing programs must be expanded and improved, and serious consideration should be given to testing students at every grade level upon entry and exit. A school performance indicator system must be accessible to parents at the district level in an easily understandable format.
A. Data Collection
1. Selection of Districts
The first stage of this report, its district selection process, was based on the categories set forth in Profiling Michigan's School Districts, published by Public Sector Consultants in 1989. "Assignment to a group," the profile explains, "is based on the district's geographic size, total population, proximity to a major urban area, and economic independence as well as the population in the surrounding communities" (p.10). Of the five major district groups (urban, suburban, city, town and rural) that the profile distinguishes, the first two received special emphasis in this report not only because their policies generally affect more students than those of smaller districts, but also because such districts often have larger budgets, more (and often more elaborate) facilities serving multiple grade levels, and, presumably, the most potential for innovation and the implementation of elaborate Schools of Choice programs. In short, Group 1 and 2 districts have the largest populations and generally offer the most schools from which to choose.
The target figures for the number of districts falling under each category to be studied, and the actual number studied, are as follows:
Group |
Number Surveyed |
|
1: |
Urban |
32 |
2: |
Surburban |
67 |
3: |
City |
23 |
4: |
Town |
15 |
5: |
Rural |
16 |
An essentially random process was used to select those districts to be studied from each group. Having been grouped, in other words, districts were selected from within each category without taking any particular features into account. If a district turned out to be too small to be affected by Choice, another district was selected. Because this report depended heavily upon school districts to forward voluntarily the relevant requested information (explained below), it may not be the case that the respondent pool was truly random. Districts which responded with too little information to be of help and those in which it was difficult to contact someone knowledgeable about Schools of Choice were occasionally bypassed in the interest of efficiency. Districts with the most prominent and extensive (or at least accessible) Choice programs may be more prone to route inquiries accurately and respond promptly than districts which lack well coordinated programs.
2. Telephone Survey
The majority of the information collected for this report was obtained through telephone interviews and informal requests for information. Quotations within the main body of this report which are not cited as having appeared in a particular written document were obtained during such telephone conversations. These informal interviews generally included questions regarding the following:
how the district was responding to Schools of Choice legislation
the district's offerings under Choice
the kind of student selection process to be used for Choice
whether the policy was on a "space available" basis
whether any problems were encountered in the process of formulating a Choice policy
whether the district had major objections to the Schools of Choice legislation
whether the new Choice policy represented a significant change of past practices.
Conversations were intentionally allowed to progress naturally, with as little prompting as necessary, in order that interviewees could more easily discuss the idiosyncratic features of their districts.
Following this interview, information such as the following was requested:
drafts of the district's Schools of Choice Planning Committee's recommendation the district's formal Choice policy (as adopted by the district's Board of Education);
background information used by the Committee;
pamphlets or letters the district had sent out informing parents of the Choice policy;
minutes from board meetings or committee meetings which might contain information relevant to the district's handling of Choice policy.
Districts which indicated that formal Choice or Magnet programs had been in place for some time were additionally asked to supply information about these programs. Requests for information included a description of the research project being conducted and an invitation to include any additional information which seemed pertinent and might inform such an investigation.
Not every district supplied all of the requested information. The information herein reported is therefore only as accurate as the information that districts provided either verbally or vis-a-vis copied documents. In many cases, old drafts of the Choice Planning Committee's recommendation were not readily available, but minutes from board meetings were often accessible. The depth and scope of available reports and brochures varied greatly among districts.
Even when all of the requested information was provided, moreover, a variety of points sometimes remained unclear, such as the duration that a granted Choice request would remain in effect. In addition, not all committee recommendations included reviews of extant policies. When available, such information proved useful for judging the breadth and magnitude of districts' new Choice policies.
Some districts required formal, written requests before releasing the relevant documents. In these cases, Freedom of Information Act (FOI) requests were filed. Without question, those districts which were sent FOI requests provided the most complete information. On reflection, it seems that a combination of telephone interviews followed by formal requests and follow-up calls may have supplied more complete documentation. Such an elaborate procedure was not within the scope of this report, however. It is obvious that some verbal requests were incompletely recorded or incorrectly filled due to miscommunication.
3. Additional Sources & Follow-up Interviews
In order to gather more information, a large number of newspaper articles was consulted. Some of the information these sources provided has been incorporated into Appendix 1, while other selections are quoted throughout this report where applicable.
Appendix 3 contains a small set of interviews which were conducted after collecting the informational materials for this report. They provide a more thorough, in-depth commentary by various experts on districts' Choice policies, the Choice legislation, and the advantages and drawbacks to Schools of Choice structured in various ways. It should be added that not everyone involved in Choice at one level or another was willing to allow the publication of a transcribed interview.
4. Data Compilation and Presentation
All of the districts discussed in this report are listed alphabetically in Appendix 1 and rated with respect to:
Level of Innovation (Formalization)
Grade Levels Affected
Duration of a Granted Choice Application
An explanation of the assessment system employed appears at the end of Appendix l. Districts appear listed by group number in Appendix 1
B. Complications: Judging Choice in its Proper Context
If one can honestly say that "No man is an island," it might also be fairly said that no law is, either. The Choice mandate was not the state's first effort at educational reform by any means. Indeed, some have observed that without Public Act 25, which stipulated (among other things) that all Michigan school districts had to have core curricula (although each district can design its own core), public education would not have been in any shape to consider Schools of Choice. Some also note that, far from attempting to initiate a process of radical innovation, the Choice mandate actually represented but one stage of reform in a lengthy, ongoing process of public school improvement. In some districts, it is obvious that creative efforts have been initiated in recent years: the state, in addition to private sources such as the Midwest Education Partnership Program, the Business Roundtable and Michigan 2000 have encouraged renovation by providing helpful grants for planning and implementing important reform projects. School Report Cards are but one example of recent reforms. The scope of this report does not permit an analysis of the Schools of Choice legislation situated in a 10 or 20 year-long legislative context.
It begins, instead, with the more limited question, "How have Michigan school districts responded to the Choice mandate, section 23a of the State School Aid Act?" To critics who would deride such a "naively" framed objective, one might reply that, were legislative contextualizations truly the only way to understand the Choice mandate, one would expect that administrators would have consistently answered "naive" inquiries by saying, in effect, "In order to appreciate what the district did with Choice, you must first understand how we have handled various other laws." That is not how the vast majority of administrators surveyed responded, and when they did so respond, the context involved desegregation orders. Those who were questioned almost always tried to assess the Choice legislation in terms of its benefits and failings, i.e. by its own effects. If such a reaction is a failure of understanding by many administrators which has seeped into this study, then perhaps the reasons why so many misunderstood so much so often must be investigated. Perhaps to many it was not obvious that Choice was intended to be seen as part of a larger whole.
It should be noted, however, that this report identifies several praiseworthy reforms which were initiated by various districts prior to the passage of the Choice legislation.
Appendix 2: Summary of Districts Surveyed
The following table is a summary of the school districts surveyed for this study. N/A:lndicates that the relevant information was unavailable or not furnished. Sometimes the materials provided were unclear or ambiguous.
Group denotes the grouping outlined in Appendix 1: Methodology. The type of district is represented as follows:
1: Urban
2: Suburban
3: City
4: Town
5: Rural
Implementation denotes to the extent to which the district implemented a schools of choice program. This is represented as follows:
F: District's Choice policy considered a formalization of its past practice With respect to transfers, as described in Finding 1. The concept of formalization is not an objective standard against which all districts are to be measured, but rather a relative and somewhat subjective measure which assesses how much a district did in view of its existing transfer policy. It so happened, however, that the results of formalizatian in most districts are quite similar.
A: Additional innovation. District did something more than merely formalize its policy.
A*: Additional innovation, see description in body of report.
vote: The district sought exemption by vote. The information listed describes the district's planned policy should the vote fail t exempt it from the Choice legislation.
vote(F): The district sought exemption, but available documents make it clear that the policy that would be instituted, should the vote fail, would be a formalization of previous practice.
Grades denotes the class grades that were included in the district's schools of choice plan. The grades are represented as follows:
K: Kindergarten
E: Elementary (Note: Relevant grades vary slightly.)
M: Middle School (It is herein used as an umbrella term including Jr. High; district structure varies.)
H: High School
Stability denotes the extent to which students who choose a non-neighborhood school are guaranteed to attend that same school the following year. This is represented as follows:
1 : A choice is good for one year only. Neighborhood school is the yearly default.
1+: A choice is guaranteed for one year only, but the program offers placement preference to students in subsequent years. Methods vary, but are generally dependent upon student/parent preference and continued space availability.
+: Substantial stability/placement preference for returning students. For example, the chosen school becomes the default school unless or until a student opts for yet a different school.
On August 7, 1992, Adam DeVore of TEACH Michigan interviewed Michigan's Coordinator of the School Improvement/Professional Development Office Kathleen Mayhew. Mayhew has been in the Michigan Department of Education for 16 years and was a curriculum consultant when the Schools of Choice law passed. Prior to that, Mayhew assembled a position parer on School of Choice for the State Department of Education, per the 1989 School Aid Act. After completing her undergraduate study at Northern Michigan University, she earned her master's degree in education from Michigan State University. Mayhew also taught English at the high school level for 7 years.
DeVore: What role did you play in the Schools of Choice legislation, once districts received information and began acting upon it? Did you have any assistance?
Mayhew: After the legislation passed, I was the staff person designated to respond to Schools of Choice questions, calls, or requests for assistance. At the time, my position was that of curriculum consultant in the Curriculum Development Unit of this agency.
I was invited to make several formal presentations on the issue of Schools of Choice throughout this State. The Michigan Association of School Administrators, the superintendents' group in this state, has sponsored several speakers and meetings on the issue of Choice. Other groups have done likewise. Those sessions were held during the fall, prior to the passage of the State School Aid Act, which contained the Schools of Choice requirement. They sessions were conducted to familiarize people with the concept of Choice.
There has not been, other than my activity, as well as that of the state superintendent and the associate superintendent, much availability of technical assistance in the development of Schools of Choice plans. DeVore: So, if calls came in, you'd be the one fielding them?
Mayhew: Yes.
DeVore: About how many calls came in?
Mayhew: The telephone rang incessantly. Sometimes we received over 100 in a day. For a while, I kept a folder of messages that people left when they couldn't reach me; the folder was huge. That didn't count all the calls that I was actually present to take. It was tremendous. My secretary couldn't handle them all, so I put an answering machine on my desk that would take half of them. She took the other half, and I was continuously on the phone. That happened from mid-January through April 1, and then the calls tapered off, because as of April 1, the plan was to be sent to the local school boards.
DeVore: What questions were most common?
Mayhew: What do we do? Do we have to include all buildings? Is there a way that we can delay this? Do we have to do the transportation? It was like, the law was up there, they could read it, but they didn't believe what it said. They also asked, What are Choice programs? Is it alright to phase-in a program? Is it OK to start at the early elementary levels, and is it OK to do schools within schools? Those kinds of issues came up frequently, especially among districts that couldn't afford the transportation, were very small or had no buses. "Given our situation," they would ask, "what do we do?" The conversations would sometimes last half an hour or an hour because one statement would lead to another question. Basically, I think they wanted to know, What do we do?
DeVore: What do you think motivated so many questions along those lines'?
Mayhew: School people have been reacting to the lack of quality Schools of Choice models and the lack of research data. They seemed to want the Department to provide more technical assistance, or the legislation to provide them with more parameters in the design of Schools of Choice. I, personally, like the statute and its lack of definition, as it allows flexibility for local committees to design a program according to local needs and concerns.
DeVore: That's something that we were noticing about the legislation. It does not appear to define Choice. It doesn't give the legislature's vision of Choice. Perhaps the "Questions and Answers" materials, to some extent, circuitously describe the legislature's vision of Choice.
Mayhew: The Department of Education was authorized by the statute to provide technical assistance to districts requesting it. The Department attempted to define the Schools of Choice language in the context of Public Act 25 and ongoing initiatives with which districts were familiar. The suggestion came from the Office of the Attorney General that the Department refrain from defining the parameters of Schools of Choice because local committees were authorized to do that. The "Questions and Answers" document which was issued in March by the State Superintendent attempted to provide guidance on many of the questions which were received via telephone.
There is currently still some debate on what constitutes a School of Choice: Does it have to be a distinct building, or can it be a school within a school, or a program within a program, etc. The Office of the Attorney General, which was involved in much of the history of this legislation, is of the opinion that the legislative intent for the Schools of Choice language was that students and families would be able to choose among schools, that is, distinct geographical and architectural entities. It therefore appears that schools within schools or immersion programs would not qualify as Schools of Choice under a severe interpretation of this law.
DeVore: Even if it's a logistically and managerially distinct school'?
Mayhew: See, the East Harlem model comes to mind, and there they've got several schools within a school; sometimes they're differentiated by floors. I think that as we move toward the core curriculum, you can have programs within programs, or you can have science immersion programs, and that almost constitutes a school within a school if you offer it as an elective with parental agreement. I think that those are all Schools of Choice, but the attorney general, who was apparently privy to a lot of the legislative deliberations, believes that the legislature thought that Choice meant actual travel to a different building.
I would like to amend the language of the law to include several options, so it would not limit Choice programs to those options, but rather say that these are acceptable examples of Choice programs. There are a number of districts in this state – Wyandotte, Forest Hills, and a lot of the suburban ones around Grand Rapids, for example – that are very small and don't have any busing systems. But I don't think that because of that they should be exempt from creating Programs of Choice or should discriminate against kids who can't access those programs because they lack transportation. So schools within schools and learning style choices all seem to be legitimate means of offering Choice.
DeVore: If you had to distinguish your vision of Choice from the legislature's and, by extension, the attorney general's ...
Mayhew: I don't think any of these visions are opposed to one another. I think more detail and more technical assistance will provide more breadth and depth to that vision. Language changes to the statute or administrative rules may help define the vision for local implementation. This will take some time. I do believe that the Michigan Constitution limits the scope of Schools of Choice legislation due to the local autonomy provision.
My vision is that through the school improvement planning and core curriculum provision of Public Act 25, choices will result because once those processes are in place, districts will be able to offer distinct learning style and curricular choices. We won't be offering K-Mart high schools, where geography is the only choice. Rather, the merchandise will become distinct, over time.
DeVore: So the legislation, in a sense, is almost premature?
Mayhew: Yes. They did it, and I'm glad they did it, but now they've delayed it for a year. That's fine, because they couldn't pay for the transportation. That gives us another year to plan core curriculum and school improvement. That's fine. They did it and caused an uproar which needed to happen and raised the consciousness level, but then they delayed it. Questions such as, "Why can't I take my child across a district boundary?" and "When will that legislation be in place that would allow us to go somewhere else?" still come in from people who live on a district border and who want to go a different school district. I don't know if we're ever going to get them in this state, but I hope we do.
DeVore: Despite all the confusion that the legislation's lack of guidelines may have caused, you nevertheless think that leaving the legislation somewhat vague might have encouraged innovation?
Mayhew: I think that that was the plan, in addition to obeying the constitutional constraints. If we superimpose upon local districts a specific Choice plan, or the design of a certain type of School of Choice, it may not fit the needs of the local community. We are not as creative in education as we should be. I think the mason for the Schools of Choice legislation was to respond to a perceived need and to force creativity. It will work, as time goes on. Hopefully.
DeVore: What do you think undermines the creative impetus that one might otherwise expect to find among administrators? Is it the structure of the school system, vested interests ...
Mayhew: All of those as well as the fact that it is very comfortable to stay with the status quo. I think any kind of change – and we're faced with it in Public Act 25 – just causes more anxiety than people are able to deal with. In this state, and I think, in this nation, people have always looked for quick fixes and don't look at the long term and what we want kids to look like when they graduate, what the work force will look like, what the world looks like and how to prepare them. It's just easy to stay in an industrial mode of "factory schools" rather than looking beyond that and seeing how we can provide through technology, the community, internship experiences and other means what kids need. I don't think that the schoolhouse is the only way that kids learn, but it's often seen as too risky to get beyond that.
DeVore: Is there anything being done by way of follow-up to study Michigan districts to see what has been done?
Mayhew: Yes. We plan to collect some data and provide some technical assistance and relate it to school improvement planning and core curriculum planning. We'll do it, but it's going to take some time. And we do have that luxury a little bit now. The first thing I think we need is your research and the data about who's doing what. Then we need to conduct a survey to find out who did the election and what training needs are out there. There's a network of school improvement people at the intermediate ISD level who will be able to provide technical assistance; I plan to bring Choice to them and get them up to speed so that they can help the local districts. That should begin in the fall.
DeVore: Do you currently know how many districts state-wide have been exempted by vote?
Mayhew: No. But MASA had a call-in survey of superintendents in their newsletter asking them to call in if it was on the ballot and tell what happened. They might have done a formal survey as well.
DeVore: My focus has been on districts that have done something with Choice. I've seen papers from around the Lansing and Detroit areas, but I haven't researched how many districts sought exemption overall.
Mayhew: Several middle cities districts received an exemption from the electorate. They're going to continue their Schools of Choice program. It's just that they didn't want to do the transportation. The law now allows anybody who had a Schools of Choice (or any kind of an enrollment options plan) in place before October, 1991, to continue without modifying it.
DeVore: Do you have any idea how many districts that affects?
Mayhew: There are a lot of them. Probably all middle-cities districts have some sort of Choice in operation. We need to find out what that looks like, too. There's never been a survey. That's a problem I had, too, when I was doing the State Board Position Paper on Schools of Choice because this department has never collected any data on what kind of enrollment options exist out there. So, we don't know what exists. Take Vocational Education is that a school of Choice? Schools all over the state offer programs like that.
DeVore: What I've found is that a lot of districts simply formalized their old transfer policies in order to comply with the law. That might mean adding in transportation, it might mean using a random lottery selection process rather than a subjective case-by-case approach, or the assembly of informational materials
Mayhew: That's the thing I've argued significantly with many superintendents who told me that they had a Schools of Choice program already and that parents could call them if they wanted to select an alternate school. That's the problem: parents didn't know it. So, my contention was that you don't have Choice if everybody doesn't know that they have Choice, and so the information campaign, if districts do that, will go a long way toward making sure that people have Choice. But the subjectiveness of all that is a problem, too.
DeVore: Only a few documents that I've obtained actually provide much detailed information about what information districts will provide. The Choice policy will generally state that information of such-and-such a kind will be provided from specified district sources. Only a few districts provided school profiles and school comparison grids.
Mayhew: I think that's neat, and we can get to that point through curriculum reform, but very often people aren't making choices of curriculum. They're making choices of distance, teachers, discipline, babysitting. I think we've got a lot of work to do in that respect so that people make educational choices. But I haven't heard that on the phone when people – parents especially – call me. They don't like a principal, or they don't like a building. We've got a lot of educating of the public to do. The annual report that's required through Public Act 25 I think can eventually become the vehicle or the catalogue because all districts, building by building, are required to publish an annual report and to present it to their community at a building-level meeting. So that can become a nice document for making choices as time goes on, but we're not there yet.
DeVore: Another common barrier, I've discovered, at least in certain parts of the state, is space availability. Given the legislation, neighborhood students cannot be bumped for the sake of someone else's Choice. Many districts reported that they simply don't have much space to juggle people around, considering local demographic trends. Do you have any ideas as to how districts might innovate to overcome that obstacle?
Mayhew: I've heard that, too, and I don't believe it. Number one, there's declining enrollments all over this state. But, number two, even if schools are full, administrators don't know if any kids in a given building want to get out. They have not done that survey, and so I don't buy the argument that, "We don't have space to do Choice." If you have five kids who want out of a given building, you can then take five new kids into that building.
If you have a given number of chairs and there are districts who are full people can switch chairs from here to there and vice versa. But that question-who wants to move--hasn't been asked. Why don't the) just do the survey and find out how many people want to move before they make the statement, "We can't do Choice because we don't have room?" They don't know that they don't have room until they ask that question. It may be that for a three-year period, there will not be room in some buildings until students graduate from that building, chairs become available, and the new kids who would attend that building have choices of other buildings also. So I think it's going to be gradual; it's going to take an amount of time. But I don't think "There's no space available" is an adequate response.
DeVore: Detailed planning and sufficient time for it are surely important as well. One can't wake up Monday and have real, meaningful Choice by Friday.
Mayhew: I don't think people realize that either. I'm not even sure that the legislature recognized that when they passed the bill. You really need to plan this in a concerted fashion, you know, you can't do it by Friday.
DeVore: Do you think that the timeline should have been longer?
Mayhew: A planning year would have helped, and perhaps some pilots. You know, have every district required to do one School of Choice, then phase the rest in over a five-year period. That would have linked it indisputably to the school improvement legislation. A lot of districts already are into strategic planning. If they threw Choice into the hopper, they could tell their people that they're into strategic planning, and that they have a five-year plan. I don't see what the problem is with phasing-in Choice programs, as long as everybody in their district knows that during year one, it's this, year two, it's that, and by the sixth year, every student will have Choice. I didn't see anything in the legislation that would prohibit that. The attorney general said that it was in there, but I couldn't find it.
DeVore: I know of districts that expressed some frustration and confusion over that very point about phasing-in programs of Choice. St. Johns is an example.
Mayhew: Well, I had a lot of conversations with St. Johns people; they were on the phone constantly, and [ did give them that interpretation early on, and then I told them what the attorney general said, but [ didn't tell them that they had to change. I think that if districts are making a good faith effort to comply, we're not going to do anything to them.
The legislation allowed the committees to define Choice and build a plan. And if the committee built a five-year plan, it seems like the district would be violating the trust of the committee by not implementing its plan. In fact, they must implement the plan the committee develops, according to the law. Administrators are not allowed to juggle it and implement it in pieces at administrative convenience. So it seems like it would be a violation not to implement a five-year plan if that's what the committee recommended.
DeVore: I notice that Lansing put out a very, very comprehensive . . .
Mayhew: Yes. I saw the plan. I believe that they hired Public Sector Consultants to help with it, along with the committee.
DeVore: It had a very thorough timeline and seemed well-organized.
Mayhew: I liked it a lot. In fact, I called the superintendent and told him that I liked it a lot. They weren't going to start anything next year, and I thought the legislation required that something begin to be in place starting next year. I said that before the legislation passed to delay it for a year. Now it doesn't anymore. The superintendent said, well, he was cognizant of that, but he liked their plan a whole lot and they would just go ahead with it.
DeVore: When I last spoke to somebody from Lansing, the district was undecided, but would probably go forward. They were certainly exempt for a year, they said, because they don't have June elections.
Mayhew: Lansing was exempt from implementation due to the fact that they did not have a June election. They were therefore required to begin implementation during the 1993-94 school year under the original legislation.
DeVore: It seemed like a few districts' committees said in their reports, "This isn't as complete as we'd like, we wish we'd had more time."
Mayhew: Now they've got a year. Hopefully, districts will reconvene those committees and use the year to plan. There was nothing in the law, but I think they should have put a provision in there that made a standing committee locally to make sure that the plan gets enacted. A lot of districts, I think, disbanded their committees, and I don't think they should have.
DeVore: One objection that some folks have made to the actual structure and timing of the legislation to what extent Public Act 25 is relevant here is an open question in that it 'put the cart before the horse' in the sense that there were no incentives for districts to diversify course offerings before offering Choice, and so you end up with districts saying, in effect, "Fine, pick. But because of efforts to assure equity, the offerings of the schools are as nearly identical as we can manage." So students get choices among apples, no oranges.
Mayhew: A lot of districts are saying that. I think the legislature in this state is really frustrated at the scores and the performance of students. In their haste for reform, they're just demanding it. I like what they've done with Public Act 25, and I like what they've done with Schools of Choice, but I think they didn't realize that what's out there is very similar and there aren't any choices. Now I think they might realize that in hindsight and know that as a result of Public Act 25 there will be choices. But it's not going to be tomorrow. But maybe John Q. Public just wants the choice of distance. I don't think that's a choice. It's going to take a long time. In my life time, I hope to see some differentiated curriculum, enhanced equity, all of that, then Choice.
DeVore: Do you think that if schools were given more autonomy . . . there's an irony here : if you require districts to give autonomy to schools, then in a sense you're constraining the district's administration but do you think that Choice, instituted vis a vis autonomy, could or would provide curricular and pedagogical diversification? Instead of saying that step number one is to diversify and step number two is Choice, what if the legislature said that step number one were to loosen up the constraints on buildings and teachers, and step two were to allow variety to develop as each building gains unique features. Then Choice follows naturally.
Mayhew: By and large that will happen in the more affluent areas of the state and in the districts that are large enough to diversify and then have curriculum resources and instructional diversity. That won't happen in every district in this state, so I think you have to mandate first, and then provide technical assistance to help them get to the vision. Right now, what all of it looks like from this vantage point Public Act 25, as well as Choice, is chaos out there.
But there's a lot happening. It's just going to take some time and a lot of assistance to iron it all out. Currently, I'm working on a five-year plan for this agency for curriculum development that was my old job, but 1'm still working on it because of the tie-in with school improvement. Getting that plan in place would take some restructuring of this agency, too, and I think that we're going to do it. I have a lot of hope for this plan. It's a systematic, methodical move toward the vision. Choice is part of that vision. We can do that, but there's been too much of a laissez-faire attitude about school districts and I think there needs to be more state control, but more state assistance also.
This department is about 95 percent federally funded. And those are initiatives from the federal government – not that the state does not agree with those initiatives – but our reason for existence has primarily been the monitoring of those federal programs, rather than a pro-active technical assistance role to change curriculum. So we're moving, we're changing. And I think it's because of the Michigan Constitution and the local issues that I think you'll find that other states which have more state control are further ahead in terms of curriculum development than we are in terms of change.
DeVore: How about an alternative such as chartering? Do you think that chartering will only be feasible in larger or suitably structured districts?
Mayhew: Well, the governor wants to initiate some chartered schools. Although they didn't have the money to fund them this year, I think that they will be funded in time. I think you have to be very careful with those because they can become very elitist and non-equitable. I think a charter idea, if it's equitably established, is another way to get to Choice, and a great idea. I'd like to start a school myself. But I don't want to see people "creaming" the kids off the top and just doing "gifted" or "talented" schools; what about the low-achieving kids? What chartered schools will they be able to attend? And are they only going to be able to get into the ones for low-achieving kids? I don't want that to happen.
There's an equity issue, too: Are girls going to be exempt from getting into math schools or science immersion programs? I think that you have to be very careful with that, but providing some seed money for innovation is a great idea. I really wanted some seed money to do some innovation with pilot programs and Schools of Choice to begin with, before we went full scale into implementation, but we did it backwards.
DeVore: Are there other ways in which you think the legislation could have been improved, in addition to those you've already mentioned?
Mayhew: I have a whole folder on that. [Laughs.] Yes.
DeVore: If you have a document prepared on it we could run it as an appendix. Mayhew: No, it's an internal document.
DeVore: Would you then describe some of them?
Mayhew: There's a couple of them:
Schools within schools, learning style choices, pedagogical choices and curriculum magnets should be allowed as methods of compliance; that needs to be included in the law.
We might have to do guidelines instead of amending the law to do all this, but I think the relationships among Choice and other ongoing initiatives like school improvement, strategic planning, the annual report, phasing-in all those things need either to be put in the legislation or spelled out in guidelines. The State Board is allowed to issue guidelines. I don't know if they will; there's always been hesitancy about that because it takes two years. First you have to do administrative hearings all over the state, so I don't know if they'll do that, but if we get some resources we probably will.
Allow districts to develop alternative enrollment systems and procedures to allow for a stratified random sample. That currently isn't allowed, it's only the random selection, a lottery, if you will, that's allowed. But for districts who are trying either to maintain integration or enhance integration, that random means is a problem.
I suggested that the transportation requirement should be deleted for out-of-formula districts or they should be allowed to collect the 20 percent increase that's proposed in transportation without the increase, being subject to the recapture that districts are currently subject to.
Pilots; we need another pot of money to create some pilots. If we need to create a recipe, then we could at least take some steps in that direction, especially because people seem to be having a lot of problems with that.
We need to collect some data about what's going on.
Some language to ensure that the local Schools of Choice planning committee shall work in conjunction with the school improvement team and the core curriculum team to ensure coordination with school improvement planning and core curriculum and reporting to the community through the annual report.
I would also like to see something in the legislation to define what the "open enrollment period" is. Now I'm getting calls from people saying, "They had the open enrollment from midnight to two o'clock one day." That needs to be strengthened so that there is really an official open enrollment period that everybody knows about.
I think the "adequate information" needs to be defined also, so that districts do in fact provide parents enough information so that they can make an adequately informed choice, if they care about real choices like personal choices. You could define it in terms of the annual education report.
Partial implementation or the phase-in approach should be included in the law.
I think the transportation requirement – I haven't thought this through yet – needs to be put back; this current law took it out. It took the money out and it took the requirement out. Poor kids, and kids who don't have access to transportation, are not going to be able to avail themselves of Choice if we don't put that requirement back in. I know that it's a Headlee issue, because if you require it, them you have to pay something toward it, and I don't know how to get around that. Maybe we have to bite the bullet and pay for it. If we want Choice, then maybe we have to pay for transportation.
So that's about it, for now. Probably in another couple weeks I'll have 20 more suggestions.
DeVore: If you come up with any more by the time I send you a transcript of this interview, certainly feel free to include those.
Mayhew: It's going to be great to have a person here to sit down with and not only design surveys to find out what's going on out there, but once the person gets out there, to find out what technical assistance districts really need in order to do this. I hope not every district in the state passed the referendum not to do Schools of Choice.
DeVore: It's my impression that not all that many did.
Mayhew: But most people who put it on the ballot did pass it.
DeVore: True, but I think that the districts putting it on the ballot compose a small subset of Michigan districts. But for all I know, the 350 or whatever districts I didn't contact all put it on the ballot. [Mutual laughter.] My perception is that most districts went ahead and did something, however slight. What I'm calling the "problem" is that it seldom involved much innovation. But maybe that goes back to space availability in many districts.
Mayhew: I think that's part of the information. You say, "We only have three slots this year, but when more people avail themselves of this opportunity we'll have more slots available." And maybe for the first couple of years, they have to have two open enrollment period during the year, in September and then in January. I don't think that we want to allow kids – as I've told many districts – to run all over the district all yearlong. I think that the committee should have said, "This is our enrollment period, and once you're in a building, unless something dire happens, you're in that building for the year, but you don't have to stay in that building for the duration of your career."
DeVore: We took a look at that aspect of the different plans. The vast majority of districts said that students get one year enrollment stability. After that, you have to reapply.
Mayhew: See, I don't think that's fair either.
DeVore: It's a tremendous disincentive, I think.
Mayhew: It is.
DeVore: I mean, you're not going to put your kid in a building ...
Mayhew: if it's too risky. I think what they should have done- is provide an option every year to sign up for a different building, but once you're in, you're in if you want to stay.
DeVore: That's something we'd recommend. That way you provide stability to those . . .
Mayhew: who took the risk. And I like the sibling piece. It only says "may;" well, I guess that's permissive.
DeVore: A few schools bounced the other way on the stability question, and said, Once you're in, you're in. If you opt into this high school, you're in it for four years.
Mayhew: I don't like that either. You know what that is? It's administrative convenience. That's keeping the status quo.
DeVore: Is there anything you'd like to add, any other topics you'd like to cover?
Mayhew: No, not for the record.
Wyandotte Public Schools, located in Wyandotte, Michigan, south of Detroit, recently began an alternative elementary education program at McKinley Elementary School. That program, which is discussed in this report, received a very complimentary review in A Study of the Program of Choice at McKinley Elementary in the Wyandotte School District, published by Doyle and Associates (Northville, Michigan) in May, 1992. On June 28, 1992, Adam DeVore of TEACH Michigan interviewed Dr. Robert J. Dunn, director of curriculum for Wyandotte Public Schools. Dunn, who holds a Phd. from Michigan State and has done post-graduate work at Eastern Michigan University and Harvard, has been involved in educational alternatives for over 20 years. Dunn also taught mathematics at the secondary level for five years.
DeVore: How did the Wyandotte district react to the Michigan legislature's Schools of Choice mandate?
Dunn: There were a couple of reactions. One was, "It's more legislative stuff coming down from Lansing," and the other was, "How can we use this to expand what we're trying to do'?" So there were those two types of thinking. Part of my thinking is that it's more legislative stuff that's not going to help us very much, and as a matter of fact has put some controls on us. We've tried to make our system more flexible for people, but the law is not flexible, and it created more of a bureaucracy for us.
DeVore: More specifically, what kind of controls did it impose?
Dunn: Well, we already had a committee for Choice. The legislation put some stipulations on it how many people, what kind of people, all that sort of thing. I understand why the legislators did it they wanted community involvement and were afraid of what would happen without some guidelines. But since we were already doing it, I just had to make the committee larger and do some other things. Was it major? No.
DeVore: When did the McKinley Choice program begin?
Dunn: Last year, 1991.
DeVore: That's obviously prior to the legislation. What concerns motivated it?
Dunn: We obtained a grant from the State Department for "restructuring." With part of that grant, we sent some teachers out to look at different alternative programs. They went to the Detroit Open School, they went to the Farmington program, and they went to Key Elementary School in Indianapolis. 'Mat last one lit their eyes and they came back and said, "We've got to have our own place like that." There were two of those teachers, and then we got some parents involved in developing a program that made some sense to all of them. That program was built on Howard Gardner's work and Grace Pillon's Workshop Way. Gardner says that people have seven intelligences and must have flexibility to make some choices about what they're really interested in. The Workshop Way says that kids have to be responsible. You have to give them some choices and set some timelines and let them do whatever they want to do, but they're responsible for their time and how they use it. So you give them some options. There are some other dynamics that go with McKinley's program, but that's pretty much the philosophy.
DeVore: How long did it take to plan the Program of Choice?
Dunn: A full year.
DeVore: So, in effect, you sent teachers to several locations to see a variety of schools, and even after they came back, it took quite a while to plan McKinley's program?
Dunn: Yes. We had a lot of educating to do of the board, of teachers and of parents. DeVore: How was that done, and how important was it'?
Dunn: Politically, it was very important. If the board wasn't going to be supportive, we weren't going to get any place. That education took up about two months.
DeVore: The report emphasized the importance of administrative support. I gather that after the education process took place, the support was fairly stable and widespread'?
Dunn: The support was pretty stable beforehand, otherwise the program never would have gone through in terms of the superintendent being supportive. The superintendent was critical in terms of support. If we hadn't had his support, nothing would have happened. In terms of myself, although there wasn't a problem, there was the need to work on elementary principals and other professionals who did not want to see it happen. We had a number of grievances filed by the union against us.
DeVore: Really? On what grounds?
Dunn: Any number of grounds, anything they could think of.
DeVore: Was there any educational outreach to the community in general?
Dunn: We sent out brochures, we had a number of meetings about the program, and once we were set to enact it, we found out how many people would be interested. Last March or April, we sent out a survey to see how many students/parents would be interested in such a program and with the survey we learned that about 75 people said they would be interested. That was enough for us to proceed because we needed 100 and we thought we could get another 25 without any problem and we did. We've got a waiting list now.
DeVore: Was any information in addition to the brochures supplied to parents?
Dunn: We had three general meetings where we gave an overview and parents could ask questions.
DeVore: How was the attendance? Some districts have reported that only a handful of parents attended their informational meetings.
Dunn: At one meeting, it was standing room only. We had over 100 people. We had a lot of people show up to all three meetings. There were no less than 50 people at any one meeting.
DeVore: You mentioned a waiting list for the Program of Choice. Is the capacity still 100?
Dunn: It's 125, because we expanded the program this year to include fourth grade. We put 25 students in each grade, so we kept to the district average.
DeVore: Are there any plans for expansion in the future?
Dunn: The proposal was to increase it every year: fourth grade this year, fifth grade next year, and sixth grade the next year.
DeVore: We've talked about educating administrators and members of the community, but what about teachers? How did they get involved?
Dunn: Those teachers who initially wrote the grant proposal became involved with the project. They were automatically involved because they designed it. The parent and teachers designed the program, so they were part of it, and then it was opened up to any other teachers who wanted to get involved. They went through an interview process that included the personnel director, and then the decision was made by the committee, myself, the teachers and the parent.
DeVore: How important do you think it is to have the teachers design and plan the program they'll be working with?
Dunn: It's critical. They've got to live with it. You and I don't have to live with it. They have to live with it day in and day out. They're the ones who have to sell it to the parents, and they're the ones who have to sell it to the kids. If you live somewhere for eight or so hours a day, it must fit you. Those teachers come in during the summer, they meet after school (they never leave before S o'clock) and this is all without a contract. We haven't had a contract in the district for four years.
DeVore: How autonomous are the teachers who run the program?
Dunn: Pretty autonomous. That's mainly due to the leadership of one teacher who drives it and keeps it going and fights for every little thing. I say that we administrators are there to be supportive and facilitate it. (That's how I see our role with all the schools, by the way.) But they're much more willing to try things, innovate and experiment, so it's easy to work with them. You make a suggestion, they can say "no," but they may come back around later on and say, "Yes, but we can't do it right now, we're just too tired." So these type of things happen. But they pretty much decide. They meet every Wednesday. We have a longer school day, and they take half of Wednesday to meet and plan as a team.
DeVore: For their general approach? For particular classes'?
Dunn: Well, they're all combination grades 1, 2, 3 so they all have to share in what's going on. And they try to be as consistent as possible about what's going on. And they have some flexibility within that because they're different. If you go into any one of the three classrooms, you'll see them all teaching with somewhat different methods, but they all run in the same general trends.
DeVore: What distinguishes McKinley from other schools in terms of its curriculum and pedagogy?
Dunn: The curriculum is the same. It's the way that they teach the curriculum that's different. The question is how much control you have over the curriculum and who has control over it.
DeVore: According to the report on McKinley, students' math scores did not regress and English skills improved significantly. Are parents informed of this? Is the program outcome-based?
Dunn: Not regressing in math basically means that they kept improving at the same rate as before. It's probably more outcome-based than any other program around because the report card says exactly what's going on, what students are achieving, and what is expected of them.
DeVore: How is the portfolio grading system working?
Dunn: They're good. I don't think that we've had one complaint about grades in there: parents got the information they wanted about their children; they know what they're doing and what they're not doing.
DeVore: How is the program funded? Is it on a per-pupil basis? Does the funding come from the grant?
Dunn: The funding comes from the general fund, just like any other program. We've still got a little of the grant left, but that just keeps educating some people and supporting some different things.
DeVore: How does the per-student cost compare?
Dunn: About the district average.
DeVore: It's not especially expensive?
Dunn: Oh, no. It's the same cost. That's what our commitment was to make sure it's the same cost as any other part of the school district. People from the community have asked us about that because they think that we're showing favoritism, but as a matter of fact, the McKinley program might even be a little cheaper because the teachers who are involved are not at the high end of the pay scale; yet some are older teachers. We've got one who's been teaching for four years and another who's been teaching for over 30 years. Age is not a question if people want to do something different. Did you read in the report on McKinley's program that one comment a teacher made? [Takes a copy of report, reads] "After having been a teacher for many years, sailing safely through charted seas, secure in the knowledge that I had traveled this way so many times, it was therefore with trepidation that I dared to venture into new uncharted waters. I had grown tired of the sameness of the scenery, day after day, year after year. This sameness had become extremely boring and no longer satisfying. The P.O.C. [Program of Choice] was in these uncharted waterways and I became excited when I learned about this program. Here was a way to end all of this tiresome sameness and to learn all the new and exciting ways to teach. I would be part of a team and have a chance to make learning fun again! I took the challenge and what satisfaction it has brought! With a positive approach, I am once again sailing although through new waters, and I find teaching fun, exciting and new again! See the smile on my face! Join us and be happy, too." That's after teaching for 30 years. See, you've got to be committed to alternatives for them to work. If you don't want it to happen, it's not going to happen. If you want something to happen, then something will happen.
DeVore: Many districts have cited transportation costs and complexities as barriers to implementing Choice.
Dunn: We haven't had a problem with transportation. When we enacted the program, we said that it was the parents' responsibility to provide the transportation. We're pretty much within the 1 1/2 mile guideline, so it has not been an issue.
DeVore: Looking at the report on McKinley, I notice that parents are required to sign a written agreement with various stipulations, including a requirement to provide two hours of service per month to the district.
Dunn: Two hours is a minimal figure. Some parents spend 20 hours a week.
DeVore: Voluntarily and spontaneously?
Dunn: Oh, yeah. We've only had one or two parents who have had a problem with it. Parents enjoy it, kids enjoy it 1 think that everybody enjoys it. I mean, everybody gets to know everybody. Parents get to see other kids and they understand why some teachers get frustrated, they understand why some kids get frustrated, and they understand a wide variance in kids-so all the more information they have-but it takes some time.
DeVore: Overall, how would you assess the McKinley experiment?
Dunn: I don't think that it's an experiment. I think it's innovation for these teachers. We know the Workshop Way works. That's 20 years old. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences makes sense. Is that experimental? We're getting to know more and more about the brain, yet there is much that we don't know. That's the experimental part how the brain functions. We have a much better idea of what's compatible with schools, so in those terms it's not experimental. It's experimental only in that it's this community that's taken on the program and the teachers who have taken on the program. So it's this community that's taken on the program and the teachers who have taken on the program. So it's been just super. It's been super for the community; it's given them a lot of things to talk about. It's given the teachers something new to think about and it's given administrators some different options if they want some options.
DeVore: How do you think other districts could learn from or emulate the McKinley model, in principle?
Dunn: You know, there are all kinds of alternative models. They've been out there for a while. It depends on whether folks are committed to them or not. If they're committed to them, then get out there and look at some. But the folks in the central office – and other folks as well – have to get out there and be supportive if it happens. Once again, you know, I've done a number of presentations now, and they're just going through the motions in terms of saying that they've done something. So the question becomes, if folks really want to do something, then find a couple of key people and see if they're willing to do something. Then see what it looks like. We started with three people. We started with two, actually, and it has grown to five. The parent group is growing. So, the key is to find some people who want to do something different.
DeVore: Do you have any ideas about how to motivate that?
Dunn: I think that if folks don't know how to find those teachers, then they aren't looking.
DeVore: So, they're out there?
Dunn: They're in every district. I mean, we're only 5,000 kids, K-12. So, if we can find them, and there are districts three to four times larger than we are.
DeVore: How similar is the McKinley program to a chartered school?
Dunn: Chartering is nice in theory, but schools are like a spider web. It works both ways. Schools and teachers need support from central office, and central office needs to support them. It's got to be a two-way street. I think chartering will create some islands out there – private islands – without much of a connection, because once you say that schools are free and can do whatever they want to do, then who has got commitments from central office to support those people? What's in it for them? They're not going to spend any time with them. If they told me that McKinley was totally autonomous and that we didn't have anything to do with it and we weren't responsible for it, that's like telling me that it has become like another district. I don't have any commitment to them, except the general sharing of practices and educational ideas, but I'm not going to spend any time for them. So why would somebody want to go and spend time at McKinley if it's completely autonomous?
DeVore: So, you believe that it is important to maintain some link with the administration in order to keep administrative support"
Dunn: Oh, I think it is. I think it's got to be a two-way street. When you look at almost everything that's happened in the past, it's been one-way. It's generally been from central office to schools and not schools to central office, throughout the district and throughout the country.
DeVore: Would you say that there's anything unique about the district that makes a program like McKinley's possible?
Dunn: I can't think of anything "unique" other than that Wyandotte is a unique community because it has kept its culture and values for so long. People don't move from here. People who grew up here stay here. You don't find that in a lot of places any more.
DeVore: Nothing in terms of the district's structure, however, makes a program like McKinley's uniquely possible here?
Dunn: No. It has always been a community school. We were somewhat concerned that people wouldn't be willing to leave their community schools. The research is pretty clear: about ten percent of any population want (and are willing) to try something different. So that's what we set it up for. We have a higher demand than that right now, but we'll work on that for next year. I'll probably meet with the parents of students who didn't get in and see what we can do to help them, because they have a need. Can you imagine 22 customers at a car lot not being able to get a car? The dealers would get cars for those people. If there were a waiting list for a certain car, they'd get it. They'd find it somewhere. I think that we ought to do the same thing for our customers.
DeVore: Is there anything you would like to add?
Dunn: We're asking professionals in education to do a lot of changing, and folks have not been expected to change very much. It's like trying to turn a great big ship when all the parts are rusted because teachers have not been expected to keep up or expected to keep up with what's going on. Administrators have not been expected to keep up with what's going on. So it's going to be challenging to get everything lubricated and turned around. And the folks who stayed in shape will be doing that by way of alternative programs. So, I guess my message there is that folks have got to do a lot more, in terms of training and working with teachers and administrators, so folks can change.
On August 4, 1992, Adam DeVore of TEACH Michigan interviewed Finance Chairman of the Detroit Board of Education David Olmstead. Olmstead has been intimately involved in school finance reform efforts since 1967, when he did the original research establishing the basis for attacking State Aid Fund allocations in the name of equal education opportunity. He was on the Harden commission in 1987 and wrote the Quality Report, along with Brian Malone, who has been the editor of the Ann Arbor News, and Peter Eckstein, an AFL-CIO economist. That report, which was widely praised across the state, focused on public education reform vis a vis empowerment and Choice. He was later recruited by Lawrence C. Patrick to run for the Detroit School Board in 1988 under the slogan "Empowerment, Diversity, Choice." Although his first efforts were directed toward getting the district "fiscally resurrected," his focus has been on chartering and school empowerment. Olmstead was defeated in his re-election bid in November 1992. The key to having successful Schools of Choice programs, Olmstead believes, is having tuition dollars follow students.
DeVore: How long has the Detroit Public Schools district been involved in Schools of Choice in one form or another?
Olmstead: I think people would say that we've always had Schools of Choice in Detroit. It depends on what you mean by Choice. A School of Choice generally means "a theme school with open enrollment." That generally means top-down managed schools. We've had those kinds of Choice schools for decades, and we might have even had some small increase in the number of those schools in the early 1980s, perhaps at the rate of one or two per year. All those schools had long lines formed of people who could not get in, and there was absolutely no mechanism to deal with the people still waiting in line-without even taking on the initiative of reaching out to people who hadn't even though about standing in line. So, there have always been Choice schools, but they've always been the exception rather than the controlling ethic or organizational strategy of the district.
In 1988, we ran on the slogan "Empowerment, Diversity, Choice." The administration, in my judgement, did everything possible to thwart and confuse that slogan for a couple of years. Our next gasp at it, as we brought in a new superintendent in 1991, was the concept of chartered schools.
Let me just say this: What we're really talking about is moving from a command model, or a public school model, to a market or private school model. That's what we're talking about, when you strip it all down.
The essence of that is what we call the per-pupil budget allocation. We adopted a program last year on chartered schools. We essentially commanded an unwilling administration to come up with a mechanism so that schools could budget according to a per-pupil budget allocation. We insisted that each school that so chose would receive 95 percent of whatever our guaranteed membership amount was, per the state formula, for each student it enrolled. Not only would they get and be able to budget that amount, but they'd be totally free to procure goods and services from whomever they wanted, so they didn't have to go to the company store anymore. The central administration thereafter would have to function as an enterprise on a competitive, as-needed service basis.
The point then was that once schools organized themselves within the public system and got that much freedom, then schools that were private – several Afrocentric schools, several schools that we'll call "value-laden" – that could survive a stringent reading of the First Amendment might also be willing to come in as public schools.
We had a great debate. The president of the teachers' union asked rhetorically, "Why would any private school want to join the public school system?" I said, "John, you're absolutely right. But if we could identify the reasons why they might not want to join, they may be the very reasons why public schools aren't succeeding. So we're going to offer it to them so that we can get into a discussion with them about the things that they think are wrong with the system."
At this juncture, we've been proceeding on three fronts:
First is to free up our existing public schools.
Second is to let educators, ministers, universities-any interested groups out there-organize new schools, knowing that they will get budgeted on the number of their enrollees.
Third, we haven't lost sight even of the notion of chartering schools that heretofore have been private schools to convert them into public schools.
DeVore: How essential is bringing in private schools, which are "outsiders," as opposed to schools that are currently public?
Olmstead: I don't think that it's necessarily critical, just as in the end I'm not sure that Choice is critical as a first step, even though it can drive the change and mean that you really do get the market model. Let me go at this a little bit differently. I'm being somewhat simplistic, but there are four freedoms that a school needs to have. Unfortunately, given the mentality of the typical public school educator, they don't even realize that they've lost these freedoms.
Schools want to have, in my judgement, freedom from the administration itself. They want support from the administration, not control. They might be, and should be, willing to be monitored and assessed as to results, but they shouldn't be controlled.
Secondly, they should be free from the work rules and the labor contracts. By work rules, I also mean things like staff selection.
Thirdly, they should be free from Board policies that cut into their freedom, like whom they can contract with, enrollment policies, and things like that – provided that they are open and non-discriminatory in their enrollment, unless a school like Cass Tech is chartered, or unless we say that the school is for gifted students, etc. But otherwise, they'd have to offer open enrollment.
The fourth freedom that they need is to be free from this legislature, a legislature that says you've got to tell kids how to get abortions and other sorts of things that legislators regard as within their purview of control. This, by the way, is a concern that I also raise to people who say that they want vouchers. I tell them that they want to be sure that whatever they get has no strings attached to it. They want that as much as they want the money; otherwise the money doesn't do them any good. It may be that vouchers is the way to do it in the end, and it may be that the public school model with the per-pupil budget allocation and all the four freedoms I talked about is the way to do it. We're not really sure, but I think that by interacting between those two initiatives, we'll get to where we want to be.
To come back to your question, I think that the reason why you want to entertain private schools is because, frankly, I think that there's more initiative and leadership out there in the private sector right now than there is in the public sector. I think it'd be helpful to bring that leadership inside to help the lethargy that's in the public domain. Secondly, I think those people would be very sensitive to helping us fight off the legislative and the board intrusions. It's also a means of fairness, too. I think what's happened over the last hundred years – as the public educators have dominated public education and allowed it to sink to the lowest common denominator – has essentially been, "If you want anything other than what we have, pick up the tab."
My thinking changed when I read about the three Afrocentric schools that we have on the northwest side of Detroit, and that's what really inspired me to move with this chartered schools initiative. At those three black, Afrocentric schools, all the faculty is composed of people who left the Detroit Public Schools system in disgust and impatience at not being able to implement a curriculum that they thought was responsive to their students. The schools are attended by students who left the public school system. The only differences now are that teachers get paid half as much, the parents have to dig into their pockets and pull out $3,000, and we lose the state aid. Why shouldn't those schools be public schools, if we would say we'd support that? They wouldn't be charging any tuition in that situation, but that would be good. Once you accept that notion, then you see that this is what's happened all the time. It's what went on a hundred years ago when the Southern and Eastern Europeans came over here. I'm sure the Anglo-Saxon establishment said that they had a great school system, and if you didn't like it, pick up the tab. That's where the pick up the tab tradition came from. And it has just gotten more forceful as that establishment has fought fairly easy pedagogies, like Motessori schools, religious schools and Afrocentric schools.
The third reason why you want to invite private schools into the public sector is that, frankly, it's discriminatory against private schools to disallow them the funding. On the other hand, I'll also say that vouchers are discriminatory, too, if you do it in the sense that dollars go to some schools that do not have free tuition, where some kids are favored over others. This is a hard thing to sell out there, and you have the right wing and the left wing and here Larry Patrick and I are just trying to sashay through the middle and tell people that there's a consensus that can be forged out there.
DeVore: One of the documents that Dr. Gibbs' office sent me mentions teachers founding their own schools or at least giving proposals for new Schools of Choice.
Olmstead: Yes. You've got several different things that are going on, and I'll break them dawn into empowerment, diversity, Choice, and then I'll come back and talk a little bit about the compacts. Empowerment, obviously, I dwelt upon. That's my piece. The diversity piece essentially comes about in schools that wanted multicultural curriculums or a foreign language, or you could even say that single gender schools or Afrocentric schools fall under that rubric.
The Choice initiative is essentially Dr. McGriff's, and I give her credit on it. Her point is that Choice schools basically are schools that have a theme and open enrollment. They might still have the same governance structure; they might still be controlled by the central administration, as far as dollars flowing and expenditure of monies. But I think her thought is that those schools will take on a self-identity and that could very well lead to chartering. Finally, of course, you've got the compact initiative out there from the business community, which is something that is endeavoring to give students certain attitudinal incentives. But anyway, Dr. McGriff is very disposed toward Choice, and that's fine. That's not the predominant reform we're seeking, but that's fine. On the other hand, I have to say that the teachers seem to relate a lot more to that; they're not used to thinking about taking on budgets and things like that, so they relate very well to Choice. It was a very inspiring day when all those Choice schools came in to plead for their budget funding for this coming year. So, between the 14 empowered schools that we currently have, our 20-some Schools of Choice, and a similar number on compacts, you've got all these initiatives going at once. It may tend to be confusing to someone who is a little distant and maybe doesn't understand the subtleties. On the other hand, they're all starting to interact, and they all tend to be mutually supportive.
DeVore: It certainly seems like one of those initiatives could essentially initiate a dynamic that another could overtake or refine further. What other dynamics is the Board encountering as it seeks reform?
Olmstead: The absolutely critical thing that's coming up for us right now is the collective bargaining. Again, coming back on these four freedoms, the first freedom we want is to liberate schools from excessive administrative control. That was the one thing that we could control the most as a board. The second thing is the collective bargaining. I'm being a little simplistic on this, but the heart of it is the work rules. We're not saying anything about salary at this point, though that could be a factor looming down the road. Right now it's work rules.
Compare big city school districts like Detroit with companies like Ford Motor Company. In the auto industry, contracts are negotiated company-wide, but work rules are on a plant-by-plant basis. Of course, this caused some tension with the Willow Run/Arlington, Texas episode. In the school system it's different. Economics are are system-wide, and work rules are system-wide. Why is that? Because the union leadership does not want teachers in one school working harder or longer than they do in another school. To my way of thinking, that's antithetical to professionalism.
By work rules, I think we're also starting to get into staff selection and peer group evaluation and some other things that lead to accountability. But that is the critical piece in this year's collective bargaining. We've always been a little bit shy, we haven't been quite ready, but this time (I'm not saying we're as ready as we'd like to be) we cannot duck the battle; we have to take this on.
DeVore: What, in particular, do you think will be some of the most difficult obstacles? What sort of concessions or agreements?
Olmstead: I remember joking a couple of years ago that the way to conduct the collective bargaining that year was to tell the union to make a list of everything it wants. They'd make a list, and we'd say, "Yes, on this condition: you accept what we want. And what we want is empowerment." Actually what's happened is that we thought that we were getting some agreements on empowerment, with a nice collaborative basis, and then we were profoundly disappointed to find out that there were embargoes, they won't waive work rules, and so on. The way it is now, the notion is that a school could vote to get empowered, but then if it wanted a work rule waved, it had to go to the union to ask for a waiver of the work rule. Well, I'll tell you who's empowered in that situation – the president of the teachers' union has all the power. I'm not anti-teacher; I think we've got to be able to give the rewards to recruit and retain people in the classroom. And that means two things: 1t means that we're going to have to pay more money generally, but secondly, we're going to have to break up the lock-step salary sequence that we have right now. You have to pay your best teachers more than they would get being in the administration to get them to stay in the classroom. Anything we can afford to pay the teachers this year, I'm all for paying them. It may well be that if they they'll take full scale empowerment, try this thing out, and it seems to be working, we'll even go out and get a millage increase next year. Of course, I'm all for school finance reform. But it's critical that they be willing to focus on the quality aspect, the product, the outcome, and what structural changes need to be made in conjunction with the salary issue.
DeVore: So, who ends up getting empowered, ideally?
Olmstead: You get into a lot of interesting issues here. When you talk about empowerment, there's a lot, of confusion out there. Everybody assumes that the power going to a school means the power goes to the principal. That's not necessarily so, because where the power ends up is something to be worked out at the school level – whether it rests with the principal, the faculty, the parents and/or community.
A watchword in places like Detroit for 25 years has been community control of schools. They've also said that they want more money spent at the schools. The only way they're ever going to achieve those goals is through empowerment.
I don't happen to believe in community control of schools. I don't think I'd believe in community control of a doctor's office or a lawyer's office. But if some people want that, and they're agreed, and they can hire some teachers who are willing to work there, I'm not going to fight that. That's fine, but they'll get their money on an enrollment basis. If they can attract some students, that's great. That's sort of what's going on in Chicago to a certain extent. But to me, the real critical issue of the empowerment piece is whether it's going to be professional control or community control. You can have either one of those models, and we would leave that up to the individual schools.
DeVore: In terms of data and information, what do you think parents have to know in order to operate within a system like that? What kind of outcome scores and measurements need to be available?
Olmstead: There are different views out there on a lot of these subjects. I think that it'd be unfair and unfortunate to have schools feel that they are competing against other schools, comparing those grades one school to the next. I think in the early stages what's much more important is for each school to show its progress against a base year. I think that's really all you can ask, so that there's no trickery going on, trying to change the composition of the student body. It may well be that schools that have the least-achieving students at some point might have some advantage, for all I know. Maybe it's possible for kids who are behind to gain more quickly than those who are already achieving at grade level. But 1 think it's that kind of information. Contrary to what gets reported in the papers, I don't think that if we put that into effect, the Board of Education wouldn't have to open or close any schools. All we would do is put a sign up on the school that says, "The Board of Education determines that this school is hazardous to you child's educational development. See such-and-such report." If people want to send their kids there, fine.
I know this gets into touchier ground, but I'm not even opposed to a school being an athletic school and having a dream team that can beat every other school in town. Maybe nobody else would want to play them at that point, but I'd even keep out of that. I'm pretty much laissez-faire.
But on the reporting, I think that's the critical thing. We talked about empowerment; that's not carte blanche empowerment. They have to report so that we can assess fiscal integrity and academic performance of students. There might be some other factors you would want to put into a model, such as volunteerism .
Another thing that we're doing right now-and a lot of this is technical, too-is setting up a data management system. You've got to have one. We are spending $60 million to revamp our data management, so that we can audit, after the fact, all those schools that have control over their budgets. We're not going to have them come downtown to get prior approval, but we'll be able to assess fairly readily whether they seem to be cruising along within budget constraints or if something about where the money is going looks a bit strange.
As a society, we have a lot of work to do on the two vital questions, "What shall our children learn?" and "How shall we measure it?" We have a lot of work to do on those, and I don't think it should slow us down.
DeVore: Let's go back to the importance of funds following students and the dynamic that it can install. What about the critics and skeptics who are afraid of having the system degenerate into rabid competition? They don't take the Austrian line that competition, in some form, is the modem form of cooperation. They'll argue that competition inevitably degenerates into in-fighting and is, on the whole, counter-productive ...
Olmstead: Do you want to get philosophical about it? If you compare America as a market against Japan or Germany, two staunch national competitors, they've got a very homogeneous society. We have a very diverse society. We've got to use that to our advantage. I think it's to our advantage. Frankly, I think the market, if you will, is the best way to play to diversity. So I would argue that philosophically. When you get into this realm, that's where the discussion ought to be. Don't get me wrong – I’m not saying that 1 know for sure that this system will work; I'm saying that we certainly ought to try it. In Detroit, for example, nobody is trying to force this system on anybody. All we're saying to the union and to others is, "Let those schools that want to be free be free." It could turn out that, as we move from what we'll call the melting pot theory of public education to the accentuating and facilitating of compatible diversity, the whole thing gets politicized and we lose certain aspects of the melting pot that we discover we need. I think that when we get to that, if we get to that, then we'll deal with it as a separate issue – and it's an important one. But I don't think that anybody should be against competition for its own sake. If anybody thinks that the telephone companies are worse than they were a couple years ago, or thinks the airline business is different, if anybody likes the Post Office vesus Federal Express, let them argue for the existing system. On the other hand, if you say that education is something special, and there are some concerns that we have to address out there, I'd agree; let's not switch the system overnight Let's just put a new possibility into play. Problems are going to occur, and we'll deal with them. But let's not allow the parade of imaginary horribles to stop us from taking a first step.
DeVore: A different criticism I've heard of charters depends upon how much autonomy you grant – how far you take the charter idea. It goes like this: You've got to have a two-way street. There has to be some responsibility on the part of the administration. If you make the school completely autonomous, then you loose that linkage; there's no incentive, and no need for the administration to work with the school. One rejoinder might be, "Who says you need the middleman?" What do you think?
Olmstead: That's really one of the points that people within the Detroit school administration are making right now. You always have to watch that argument; it really amounts to their still wanting to exert some control over the schools. My point is, look, give them all the money; if you've got a service to provide, they'll come and buy it from you. The only people who are going to be assured of some position is the people who are going to do the audit or the assessment functions. There's still a need for some small group, but even there you've got to be doggone careful that that power is not being abused and shifted over to a control mechanism. So, I just say that if buildings want services provided by the central administration, they'll make it known. If service providers within the central administration are trying to hang on to their power or jobs when they don't perform up to snuff, then giving buildings control over their resources will help solve those problems. Give schools the money and they'll probably take care of themselves.
We also have a problem right now because educators haven't been trained to do this. Also educators seem to feel that this throws a lot more work on them; this is an argument the unions use. You're going to be working your tail off doing these budgets and doing the procuring. But that misses the point. Right now, those schools pay at least 30 percent off the top to people who take the money and say, "We're going to supply a service to you." With that 30 percent, they may be able to go out and purchase contract management from people who can provide that service more responsively, more effectively, more efficiently and more cheaply. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what'll happen.
DeVore: What about other districts? Do you think they could look at what Detroit is trying to do and model some reforms on that, or is it just a question of economies of scale, where Detroit has the "luxury". . .
Olmstead: [Laughs] I've never heard of that size being a luxury. Part of this gets back to all those Marxists back in the early 1920s. They said, "When and where is the revolution going to occur?" Well, there's a revolution in public education right now. Where is it going to occur? Frankly, it's ultimately going to occur across public education. No public education system is doing the job. But I think in cities like Detroit, predominantly the black populations are desperate to get their kids educated. The plus side of that is that people are realizing that the opportunities are there, especially in the wake of the civil rights legislation, if they can just get their kids educated.
Public Sector Consultants (based in Lansing) had a poll last year asking who wanted radical change – it was something like 50 percent or 40 percent across the state; it was two--thirds in Detroit. We've obviously been rousing the crowd a little bit, but I think that the feeling was there and helped get us elected in the first place.
Right now, I'm sort of talking not-for-profit competition. I think those people who have the notion of for-profit competition might be thinking a few years ahead. In 20 years, I don't think public education will look anything like it does right now.
DeVore: I'm not terribly familiar with the transportation system in Detroit, but I know that many other districts, faced with the mandate to provide Choice students with transportation, cringed at the likely costs.
Olmstead: Well, we have a little bit of an advantage, or a disadvantage, depending upon how you want to see it. Going back to the desegregation cases of several years ago, we have a lot of transportation equipment which we would have otherwise phased-out. So it's nice to be able to use that for another kind of transportation. I think it is a legitimate concern. I do feel that in the Choice mechanism you really do have to provide equal access; equal access, I think, does warrant transportation. That's one concern that districts raise that I look at as legitimate. But, on the other hand, probably a better way to do it is just to do it first and then see what the bill is. The state probably should give some assurances on that. By the way, I don't think the state has done all that great a job in terms of providing thoughtful leadership or a program.
DeVore: That raises another complaint I've heard. Some have said that there was a lack of legislative direction in the Choice mandate and that it offered no cogent vision from the legislature ...
Olmstead: ... and the governor. Again, I come back to what I said before: empowerment, diversity, Choice. Don't worry so much about the Choice aspect right now. That'll come. Focus more on the site-based management and empowerment which will lead to Choice. It's probably also the best way to get some reconsolidation of school districts. You'll find that people aren't concerned about the size of the district; they want to know whether they'll have influence in their own school. That could lead to some economies of scale, too. So, there's no crystalized thinking going on up in Lansing. It's mostly gibberish and more regulation.
DeVore: How about parental involvement? What's Detroit's situation with respect to that?
Olmstead: I think it will improve. I think every one of those things we just talked about – empowerment, diversity, Choice – every one of those leads to more parental involvement. As a matter of fact, with regard to the empowerment piece, one of the decisions that would go down to a local school, even though it has to provide free tuition, is whether it makes parental involvement a condition of admission. For example, a school could say to parents, "You must acknowledge or participate in homework assignments, you must be there for teacher conferences..." And then again, this is where we come up against the lowest common denominator syndrome. People say, well, not everybody in Detroit has a parent. Well, that's a sad truth, and it absolutely has to be addressed. But there's a situation where we can really use mentors and volunteers to work just in that area.
We've already seen, with regard to the diversity, the number of parents who immediately identified with the male academies. They get involved because they're interested. One turn-off for parental involvement is if there's no decision-making actually going on at the school. And Choice supports parental involvement, too, because people who choose to be somewhere will be more involved. So every one of those initiatives supports more parental involvement, which in the end is one of the things you're really looking for.
DeVore: A recent article in the Detroit News noted that many of the schools aren't to capacity yet. Other districts, however, are finding that they don't have a whole lot of space available.
Olmstead: Once again, Choice doesn't go far enough. It just doesn't get to the heart of the matter. You've got to have a mechanism for organizing new schools or schools within schools. Granted, if you've got four schools in a particular school district and they're all filled to capacity, it's going to be pretty difficult to set up a dynamic where people are able to select and opt into educational programs whose philosophies suit them. Now, Detroit has a certain advantage there – we’ve got some closed-down buildings, and we've got some buildings that are not fully enrolled, so that gives us a lot more flexibility. It's a luxury, as you called it earlier. But the critical thing is how to organize these schools, and Choice doesn't tell you anything about that. But I think that empowerment and per-pupil budget allocation tell you what you need as far as organizing your schools.
DeVore: Is there anything that you'd like to add, any other topics you'd like to cover'? Olmstead: Sure. I know where you're coming from philosophically, and I have a split political identity these days. I'm arguing against the liberals and the conservatives. But we're talking about restructuring public education. That can be frightening to all of us when we have to go through that process. It seems to me that if you're asking people to take on the risks and responsibilities of change, then two things:
There probably should be some opportunity for personal reward, just like there is in the private sector.
Secondly, you should be willing to say that we are going to fund the enterprise until it has some chance of success. There's no crueler hoax out there than the Sisyphus thing-where you have to keep working but you're not going to achieve anything.
Right now, people like me and Larry Patrick get caught in that cross-fire. We get caught in the cross-fire of the John Elliots of the world who say, "The system is fine, send more money," (by the way, this year for the first time he's saying the system isn't fine anymore) and what I'll call the business roundtable (and to a certain extend they've got the governor there, too), which basically says, "Change the system first, and then we'll send more money." Now some teachers are afraid of change, and they were messed around with, until they got unionized. Unfortunately they got off on the wrong track by starting an industrial union rather than a professional union. You've absolutely got to link the two. If you're trying to drive change, you've got to drive it with the stick and the carrot. There's got to be some linkage of more funds, and I really would call on your organization and other organizations to look at the governor's tax cut proposal that's out there right now as a dreadful and dishonest tax cut proposal. It's a horrendous shift of resources that's going to occur as the governor sends a billion dollars out to the wealthiest areas of the state in the form of property tax relief. Maybe the people should have tax relief, but they shouldn't have state-subsidized tax relief. It's those dollars that are going to flow in that direction which could have been linked to change in the poorer school districts. I don't ever miss an opportunity to get the governor called out on that. I like this governor, he helped us get elected, and he's been with us, but he's absolutely off-track on this proposal.
Again, I'm for tax relief, but you have to cut back rates. A "cut and cap" does not reduce millage rates. It just says that everybody gets their taxes reduced across the board. In effect what it says is property valuations are 30 percent less than they are. So it's a phony premise. It's only calculated for political appeal. It doesn't have any policy justification whatsoever.
But if that passes, I stop, because I don't have any way then of arguing to teachers that they've got to change to get more money, because the state will have mortgaged its future.
The following is the text of the Lansing School District's (LSD) Schools of Choice Planning Committee's recommended time line. It begins on page 28 of the committee's report. The abbreviation LSACC stands for the Planning Committee's official moniker, "Lansing Schools: A Capital Choice."
IMPLEMENTING THE SCHOOL CHOICE PLAN: A TIMELINE
Clearly, the many recommendations made by the LSACC committee cannot be implemented overnight. School choice is a complicated issue to understand and even more difficult to implement. The committee urges the Board and district staff to proceed slowly and take great caution during the implementation phase.
After reviewing the considerable tasks at hand, the committee recommends that the plan be put in place gradually over a six-year period; oversight of the process should be the responsibility of a committee comprised of parents, building staff, and central administrators. It is recommended that the implementation steps listed below be completed within the suggested time frame.
STEP ONE: The LSD should develop a detailed six-year plan to implement choice and a variety of program options in elementary schools. This plan should include a strategy for communicating regularly with and involving parents, students, teachers, administrators, and the general public.
STEP TWO: The entire 1992-93 school year should be used for planning and fine-tuning the program options plan, the enrollment guidelines, and all other elements of the LSACC's proposed elementary school choice plan.
STEP THREE: In fall and winter of 1992 an aggressive information/outreach effort must occur so that parents know that school choice will be implemented for elementary students in 1993-94.
STEP FOUR: All parents of elementary children should be offered choice for the 1993-94 school year, enrollment should be conducted spring 1993 to determine building enrollments for the following fall (1993). At this point, program diversity will not be an issue; choice will be offered among elementary schools as they currently exist.
STEP FIVE: During the 1992-93 school year, all schools should use their school improvement teams to develop a building plan that includes the comprehensive core curriculum and diverse program options. Current building staff should use their expertise to formulate unique plans for their own buildings based on the needs of students and the characteristics of staff, facilities, and location; parents must be active participants in the process. The process of program development also should include visits to districts and/or school that have successfully implemented choice and/or presentations by people with experience and expertise in the field.
STEP SIX By no later than May 1993, a districtwide selection committee of building administrators, teachers, and parents should be formed. (Because of its unique composition, the LSACC committee could be the committee.) The charge of the committee should be to evaluate and select building core curriculum and program diversity plans for implementation. Specific selection criteria should be developed, including guarantees that a balanced number of programs will be selected for each region.
STEP SEVEN: In June 1993, all buildings must submit their plans for a comprehensive core curriculum and diverse program options to the selection committee.
STEP EIGHT: In October 1993 at least six building core curriculum and program diversity plans will be selected for implementation in the 1994-95 school year.
STEP NINE: The process outlined in step eight should be repeated each year until all buildings have implemented their core curriculum and program diversity plans. (The plans submitted by June and selected for implementation must be in place by October of the following school year.)
During the 1993-94 school year, the districtwide committee should develop an annual evaluation procedure that uses annual reports and other identifiable tools and indicators to guarantee that we are offering the best programs possible and that our choice system is serving our community well.
The evaluation process should take place at both the building and district level. Within a building, information from administrators, teachers, parents, and students should be used regarding their satisfaction, concerns, achievement, and so forth. For example, an exit survey could be completed by those parents and students who leave a school to determine what they like, what they did not like, what caused them to move, and what would encourage them to stay. The information could be very valuable in determining what people want and expect from schools.
The district's evaluation should look at all the information compiled by individual school buildings to assess how well choice is working in the overall system. For evaluation to be successful, the LSD must develop appropriate instruments and processes that take into account more than test scores and staff feedback. This development process should involve parents and building staff in addition to central administrators.
The committee believes ongoing evaluation and feedback are essential to determine how successful or functional various programs are and whether there are students whose special needs are not being met within the existing program. The Lansing Schools: A Capital Choice Committee should be invited to continue its participation in the process of establishing and evaluating schools of choice for the Lansing schools. Over time its membership should continue to be two-thirds parents.
If the Board follows the schedule above and evaluates the program, it will increase the chance for school choice to be successful in Lansing.
Robert J. Wittmann is President of TEACH Michigan Education Fund, a Lansing-based organization which conducts major research and public educational projects pertaining to schools-of-choice in Michigan. He is co-author of Rebuilding America's Schools (Heartland Institute, Chicago, 1990) and has served as a consultant to numerous state educational reform efforts. He has a BSBA degree in finance and accounting and has done graduate work in philosophy and theology.
Adam DeVore is editor-in-chief of The Michigan Review, a campus affairs journal at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He is currently a senior majoring in Spanish and honors philosophy at the University.