This article is excerpted from “Making Student Achievement the North Star of Our Education System,” an essay posted by the Education Futures Council at the Hoover Institution. Michael T. Hartney also wrote about school governance in A Nation at Risk +40, a recent Hoover publication.
In a recent white paper on school governance, I concluded that public education often fails to give adults an incentive to make student achievement the North Star of their work. Schools and systems are rarely held accountable for student learning outcomes, either by voters or in their employment contracts. Many K–12 leaders even acknowledge that student academic achievement is not their sole or top priority. Recent research by Ohio State University professor Vladimir Kogan demonstrates what many have long intuited: when adults are “distracted” by nonacademic issues, student learning suffers.
Since the COVID pandemic, this problem has metastasized. As former education secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview, “[Education] reform has taken a back seat in the COVID era, and now, we’re just trying to catch up.”
Public schools cannot make student outcomes their North Star when school boards encroach on management. As business icon Kenneth N. Dayton famously argued: “Governance is governance, management is management, and every organization must clearly distinguish between them if it wants . . . to achieve the institution’s mission.” In public education, the mission should be simple: to maximize student learning. Too often, however, boards wade into stakeholder politics by bypassing or blaming their superintendent when that superintendent makes unpopular decisions necessary to improve student learning.
The contentious issues of closing low-performing schools or removing ineffective educators are a case in point. In portfolio districts such as New Orleans, for example, the governance model succeeded there by empowering management to make critical decisions regarding school reauthorizations and/or renewals without board members’ meddling. But over time, even there, political pressure has slowly led lawmakers to re-empower school board members to overturn these decisions.
Seasoned school reformers recognize these troubling dynamics. Stakeholder politics rears its ugly head when weak-willed boards cower to the political demands of adult stakeholders. Having a clearly articulated mission grounded in student achievement and then respecting the line between governance and management would go a long way toward creating the macro-level conditions for districts to truly prioritize student learning.
Think twice, Superman
Michelle Rhee. Joel Klein. Geoffrey Canada. Eva Moskowitz. Jaime Escalante. Education reformers have long been enamored with dynamic leaders and educators who do extraordinary things. An entire era of reform was anchored by a documentary titled Waiting for “Superman.” But public education cannot wait for a handful of extraordinary individuals to singlehandedly compel schools to adopt an unrelenting focus on student achievement. Nor would such an approach work in the long run.
Decades of research in leadership outside of education show that individual leaders are not the sine qua non that sustains high levels of organizational performance. Indeed, the external constraints that surround teams, firms, and schools have far more impact than generational leaders with dynamic personalities. Although an important recent study by economist Sam Stemper finds that superintendent quality does boost student achievement, the sizes of the effect are, on average, relatively modest. Notably, environmental constraints shape the impact of leader quality on school performance. Specifically, Stemper observes that “top management matters most in districts where managerial flexibility is ex-ante largest: smaller districts and districts with weaker teachers’ unions.”
None of this is to say that school systems should shy away from choosing dynamic leaders. But often, the most important thing that leaders can do is to use flexibility that exists but is not used because of customary practices or political pushback.
Another overlooked element of the leadership puzzle is planning for continuity of the core mission: learning. We’ve long known that too many districts jump from reform fad to reform fad, inducing the “spinning wheels” phenomenon in many urban districts. Indeed, one of the lessons of effective portfolio district reform is the ability of boards and system leaders to quietly plan for succession that exhibits fidelity to the reform mission.
Effort isn’t nearly enough
There are also lessons from the COVID pandemic that abound concerning what it means to make student achievement a school system’s North Star. For example, researchers at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford found that the charter sector often displayed more dynamism and a willingness to prioritize academics during its transition to remote education at the outset of the pandemic. Since the CREDO study, surveys by the RAND research organization have shown that charter management organization (CMO) leaders were more willing to adapt in ways that prioritized core academic subjects and student performance.
In my own analysis of the RAND survey data, for example, I found that CMOs were four times as likely to eliminate noncore courses to focus on core academic subjects such as math and English language arts (ELA). They were also three times more likely to report adding instructional minutes in these vital subjects. Indeed, these same RAND surveys showed that CMOs were more likely to shorten the school day, but they were laser-like in their focus on student academic outcomes in core subjects. When we think about learning loss and efforts at learning recovery, this willingness to put an intensive focus on student outcomes on core subjects recalls an old adage attributed to Peter Drucker: “What gets measured, gets managed.”
If public school systems are to prioritize achievement, they cannot simply be compliance oriented when it comes to testing and accountability; they must embrace student academic outcomes, making them central to their messaging and self-evaluation. This happens all too rarely. As Richard Elmore and co-authors noted in an old Harvard Business Review essay from the mid-aughts: “The public education sector has long had a culture that values effort more than results.”
Alarmingly, even after significant pandemic learning loss, we see the same attitude in much of public education today. In the country’s fourth-largest public school system (Chicago Public Schools), for example, the mayor recently stated, “I personally don’t give a lot of attention to grades. . . . My responsibility is not merely to just grade the system but to fund the system. That’s how I am ultimately going to grade whether our public school system is working—based upon the investments we make.”
The best charter management organizations foster a culture of high expectations and relentlessly focus on quality instruction. These attributes—not school “wraparound services” or ancillary investments—are what have enabled these charter schools in New York and Boston to transform the lives of children. The lesson from decades of research in the charter sector appears to be lost in this effort to move away from high expectations and a narrow focus on student academic outcomes. As economists Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie found in their study of Harlem Success Academy charter schools, it was not wraparound services that moved the needle with these disadvantaged kids; it was access to these academics-first charter schools themselves. Unfortunately, today, even some in the charter sector appear to have been seduced into downplaying the emphasis on “no excuses” academic approaches that led to their ascendance.
Pushing through bureaucracy
Finally, policy makers and system leaders can demonstrate a true commitment to making student achievement their North Star by embracing sector agnosticism in education delivery. This shift in mindset would require political authorities (judges or elected officials), along with system and school leaders (superintendents and educators), to jettison the narrow existing definition of “public education” that had too often focused on adult concerns with procedural rules and oversight mechanisms and move to an expansive one that cares solely about providing effective teaching and learning opportunities for kids.
National Parents Union president Keri Rodrigues makes a compelling case for sector agnosticism in her own right:
Parents don’t care about governance models. We are here for outcomes. And the outcome we are looking for is economic mobility for our children. We don’t care if you call it a district school, a charter school, or Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. When the kids leave, we want to know that they are adequately prepared to access the jobs in the economy of the future, because we want our kids to have an easier life than we did.
State policy makers must boldly take ownership over the right of children to receive a high-quality education when local districts refuse to prioritize student learning in key decisions. For example, just as state governments routinely use their authority to push back on NIMBYism in zoning and land-use debates to require more and more-affordable housing supply, state leaders should similarly use their legal authority to ensure that districts prioritize student achievement when making difficult rightsizing or building closure decisions. There is a clear opportunity here to put students first given the current climate of pandemic disenrollment paired with longer-term, demographic-induced enrollment losses, especially in big-city districts.
While the devil is surely in the details and states lack the knowledge and capacity to themselves designate specific buildings for closure, neither should localities be left to their own devices to make these decisions without demonstrating how they are being made with student learning as the key criterion. The bottom line: as districts around the country grapple with rightsizing, states must ensure that districts demonstrate that these decisions are based on student academic learning rather than the sort of adult political considerations that too often drive them.
