The College of Education at Michigan State University initiated a series of education policy forums in October 1997. The series of five forums are designed to deal with a range of educational issues of importance and relevance to state policymakers. The first forum featured the research of professors David Plank and Gary Sykes, both of whom teach in the Department of Educational Administration. They discussed preliminary findings from two separate studies they are conducting on charter schools and school choice. The gave their talk on October 28, 1997.

David Plank
I’d like to offer a few prefatory remarks and then talk a little bit about the systemic effects of the introduction of expanded opportunities for choice, and then Gary (Sykes) will go on to talk about how choice might affect teaching and learning in schools and classroom. At the outset, though, I’d like to just note that this is obviously an exciting but also highly contentious issue and there are deeply held views and values on both sides of the issue. Many of you in this room are both well informed on choice policy and deeply committed to particular policy positions, and we have therefore reserved a considerable amount of time at the end of today’s presentation for discussion and debate. I think we as researchers have a great deal to learn from that debate. I guess I would be more modest than President McPherson. I think we have a great deal to learn from that debate simply in learning to ask the right questions; much less in presenting findings on the issue.

At this point, we’re going to offer a range of informed speculations about some likely effects, some likely consequences, of expanded choice in Michigan’s educational system. Unfortunately, we’ll be able to offer relatively few solid findings for two reasons. The first reason is that up to now, choice has had relatively few effects on Michigan’s education system. Key actors in the system including both new entrants to the system, whether those are directors of charter schools or current actors in the system, including local superintendents and school principals, are only now beginning to adapt their behavior to a dramatically changed policy environment. The second reason is that ours is a three-year study and we’re in the first year of the study, so it’s really too early for us draw firm conclusions from the data we have begun collecting. I’d also like to make it clear that we are neither advocates nor opponents of choice. I think it would be fair to say that the two of us started out in somewhat different positions with respect to the virtues and disadvantages of choice, but we have come to a sort of shared agnosticism about what choice is likely to bring to Michigan’s education system. Our goal at the present time is simply to track changes over time and to seek to understand the likely effects of expanded choice opportunities for schools, classrooms and students.

One final remark. There are two questions that we are not asking, which we won’t address to today and which we are not asking in our studies. These have to do with the achievement effects of choice, and second the stratification effects of choice. Achievement effects as all of you know is a profoundly vexed issue in traditional public schools, and more so when one tries to compare across traditional public schools and charter schools or choice schools. We simply got the data or, in this particular set of studies, the capacity to look in detail at those. And with respect to stratification effects, as you know the data the state collects that would allow one to address stratification effects are very limited at this point. There is clearly a need for more information on those issues. If the data were to become available we would certainly look at the questions. But at the present time we have no useful information on those.

I am going to talk about four main subjects. In the interest of time, I am going to focus on two of those. The first point is that the big changes in Michigan’s educational system over the past several years are really attributable to Proposal A rather than the introduction of school choice. We’re still trying to work out the consequences of Proposal A, still trying to figure what changes Proposal A has wrought in the system. One of those changes was to make expanded opportunities of choice possible, but to date the effects of choice and charter schools on the system have been considerably smaller than the effects that were brought about by Proposal A. The second point is that choice, interdistrict choice and the introduction of charter schools represent very different strategies for change and are likely to have very different consequences. Both expand opportunities for parents to make choices, but they effect the education system in quite different ways. The third point is that the introduction of markets or quasi-markets into the education system has to overcome some very powerful sources of resistance if it is to bring about significant change or improvement in the education that children receive, and we don’t have yet enough evidence that expanded choice will prove to be a sufficiently powerful instrument to address the most serious problems in the educational system. And the final point that I will make is that the specific rules governing schools and students matter decisively in evaluating the effects of expanded opportunities for choice. Policies that Michigan has adopted are quite different from the policies adopted in California or in Connecticut, and therefore it is wise to be cautious in attempting to draw general conclusions about the costs or benefits of choice.

As I say, I am going to focus on the middle two of those points. So with respect to Proposal A, I’ll just say two quick things. The first is that Proposal A radically diminished the importance of school districts in Michigan’s education system, and the power of local school boards. School districts no longer have an independent revenue base, but instead depend on the state for their funds, which greatly increases the state’s leverage over local schools and school district. Many of the policy issues that we think about and talk about on a daily basis are attributable to the shift in power from the local level to the state level: The issues of testing and assessment; curriculum guidelines; the issues recently of the school calendar and the opening day for schools; the issue of state takeovers of failing schools or school districts. The second main consequence of Proposal A was that it shifted the main determinant of school districts’ revenues from local property wealth to student numbers. The only way now that school districts can increase their revenues is by increasing enrollments. In effect, the consequence of that is that revenues belong to students rather than to school districts, and that makes students’ subsidies portable in a way that property wealth could never be portable. The ultimate consequence of that is that when we introduced choice options into the system, we made it possible to start charter schools or made it possible for students to move among school districts; that theoretical portability of state subsidies became real. It became possible for parents to exercise their options as to where to enroll their students. The fact that school districts no longer own their students or the revenues that attach to them became a reality. The consequence of that as a local superintendent here in the Lansing area told me the other day is that every student in the school system is a choice student whether they’ve moved out of their neighborhood school or not. Every student is a choice student and has the option to change schools.

The second big point is the differential effects of charter schools and interdistrict choice. Having gotten my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, I guess it is a sort of flaw in my character but I think about these issues as an economist thinks about them. And as a Chicago economist thinks about them, which is a particularly bad way to do so, I suppose. So I’d like to talk a little about the market consequences of the two kinds of reforms. As I’ve thought about giving this talk, I’ve tried to identify some analogies as to what we’ve done in the education system by introducing interdistrict choice and charter schools.

One way to think about charter schools is by analogy to the deregulation of other monopolies in the public sector, specifically the monopolies previous enjoyed by the post office and the telephone company. What we’ve provided is permission for new competitors to enter a formally protected market, but it’s an unusual market in education in that competition in price is ruled out. The cost to parents in the education system is effectively the same whether their children attend traditional public schools or charter schools. So new competitors in the system, i.e., the directors of charter schools, can only succeed by offering a more attractive package of services for the same price, and this raises two kinds of questions. The first question is: How can charter schools be more efficient than public schools so that they can provide more attractive services without additional revenues? And the second questions is: What kinds of services are they likely to offer to distinguish themselves from traditional public schools? There are a variety of answers to the first question. Some ways of accomplishing increased efficiency in charter schools include shifting cost to parents. For example, the cost of transportation or the cost of extracurricular activities. This is an option that is available to administrators at public schools as well, but, up to now at least, has been taken more advantage of by charter schools. A second way to be more efficient would be to pay lower salaries to teachers by either hiring younger or less experienced teachers, or by keeping teacher unions out of charter schools. There may also be some opportunity for economies of scale in the provision of charter schools as operations such as the Edison Project demonstrate, where the Edison Project aspires at least to provide a single, standardized model of the curriculum in schools across the country.

With respect to the second question, I think there are two different kinds of competitors that are likely to emerge in the market for public schools. The first of these would be more focused and relatively small-scale producers aiming at what you might call niche markets. These charter schools respond to parents who explicitly don’t want the standard package of services provided in traditional public schools. For example, African-centered schools in Detroit or here in Lansing, or Armenian-centered schools in suburban Detroit, or in schools that are oriented to other distinct value orientations. I was struck the other day when reading about the Million Woman March that one of the three demands that was consistently mentioned in the news accounts of that march was separate schools for African-American children. So it may be that the market for distinct value orientations in education has not been exhausted at all. I also have a couple of students who are very keen to start all-girl academies. They haven’t taken active steps to do that yet, but I think there is an active market there. It’s essential to recognize that these kinds of strategies aimed at niche markets are most likely to be effective in urban districts where the demand for schooling is highly diverse and where a single provider faces difficulties in responding to the expectations of all constituencies. In suburban areas, many and probably most have moved to the community to take advantage of the education provided in the public school system, and in rural areas the demand is simply too limited to support a broad array of providers. So what we see are some small-scale providers, both church schools and also often home schooling.

The second kind of alternative that charter schools present is to provide some space for focused and efficient production in head-to-head competition with traditional public schools. The examples of this would be the Edison Project and in the Michigan Education Development Corporation down in southwest Michigan. I would argue that both these enterprises are seeking to out do traditional public schools at their own game by providing an attractive environment for parents that features a safe, disciplined learning environment that focuses on the mastery of basic skills, and the generally very traditional common curriculum. In the case of Edison, at least, they also provided some additional services to parents, including an extended day and extended year and lap top computers which they sent home with parents. Thinking about charter schools and what effects charter schools are likely to have, we need to recognize that there are these diverse demands for different kinds of education, that there is space for niche marketing, for specialized producers in the education system. It is also important to recognize that the kinds of challenges that Edison and EDC represent are not niche marketing. Again, if you think back to the analogy with the post office and telephone company, these are not motorcycle messenger services or bulk mail distributors, these are MCI and Sprint, who are trying to take away the core customers of the previous monopoly. This is most likely to emerge in urban areas, but it is not likely to be restricted to urban areas over time.

With respect to interdistrict choice, the big change that interdistrict choice brings about is to put together formerly independent school districts into a single pool of students. Where in the past a school district could count on enrollment from its local student base, now the student base has to be shared with neighboring school districts. This brings some very new conditions for administrators in the public school system. The important thing to recognize about interdistrict choice as a strategy for bringing about change in the education system is that interdistrict choice is genuinely and truly as zero-sum game. The only matter that is at stake in the competition is market share because the size of the market is fixed. Competition on price is ruled by statute so that you can’t offer discounts to parents, and there is virtually no way to expand the market, to bring in new customers because by law all children of school-going age have to be in school. So there is no possibility to expand the market. Having said that, I’ll qualify it. The one way in which they could expand the market would be to bring in students from outside, which would mainly be from private schools. One of the things we’ve observed here in Lansing, at least, is that a substantial share of the parents who have taken advantage of interdistrict choice have been formerly private school parents who have moved back to the public system. But it is important to note that, in thinking about expanding the market that success in expanding the market, does not necessarily benefit the players in the game and may, in fact, penalize them because the revenue pool, at least in the short run, is also fixed. This means that if new students enter the system, the per capita subsidy from the state is reduced for all students.

From the point of view of school administrators, choice represents both a threat and an opportunity because it brings formerly independent school districts into strategic interaction for really the first time. The exemplar case to think about this is Mount Clemens, in Macomb County, where a couple of years ago the superintendent spent $7,500 marketing an new all-day kindergarten program, and enrolled 50 new students from neighboring school districts at $7,000 a head. You can do the math. It’s not a bad rate of return. In the longer run, it simply demonstrates the advantages of going first, of breaking ranks and taking advantage of the opportunities that choice provides because subsequent competitors necessarily, by definition, reap smaller rewards and the total net reward is zero. So the most important consequence of interdistrict choice as it works itself out in the system is likely to be a further sorting of students as parents choose the schools and school districts that provide the array of services closest to what they want for their children.

This could be positive if schools specialize in constructive ways. If schools or school districts provide services that are particularly well adapted for particular groups of students. But it can also be negative; either if parents make choices on invidious criteria, including race, or as schools attempt to shift away from providing services for high cost, difficult to educate students, or to recruit especially desirable students. An example of that would be promising student athletes. Encouraging schools to specialize in working with high cost rather than low cost students would almost certainly require additional state subsidies to support the education of those children. Moreover, positive effects from interdistrict choice would require diversification on the supply side. In other words, in the kinds of education services that local school districts provide. But there is little evidence as to how this would occur and even less that it is occurring except at the margins. There is some demand for African-centered education, for alternative education, clearly an intense demand for all-day kindergarten, which is clearly becoming the standard in Michigan’s public schools. Potential markets for other kinds of specialization, including arts academies, science academies, international baccalaureate academies. But there are obstacles to the implementation of these kinds of strategies. One is that admission has to be according to lottery, which might undermine the integrity of some programs. Moreover, traditional public school districts’ capacity to offer specialized programs that attract a specific clientele is often legally questionable. For example, in the city of Lansing it’s not clear that the Lansing public schools could offer African-center education because the likely racial balance would depart rather dramatically from the racial balance required by the court order.

I am going to talk a little about the obstacles choice must overcome if its going to bring about positive changes in Michigan schools. Two of those are especially important. The first is that parents already have lots of choice options. They have choices about where they are choosing to live, choices about the public schools that their children attend, for example in Lansing all of the schools in the Lansing public school system are choice schools, and choices about the tracks, about the curricula, about extracurricular activities that their children engage in. It’s not immediately clear that the addition of charter schools and interdistrict choice sufficiently expands the array of choices that parents already have to bring about dramatic changes.

The other key obstacle is the extreme turbulence of urban school districts, particularly the demographic turbulence and the weak incentive effects of choice for schools and teachers in existing school districts. Again, in the city of Lansing we now have the data on student turnover in public schools and most of the schools in the city. Twenty-five to 50 percent of the children will change schools over the course of a single school year, and that’s without taking into account the opportunities that they have for changing school districts or for attending charter schools. And just based on our interviews with charter school principals it appears that the level of turbulence, the levels of student turnover, are about the same for charter schools as they are for public schools. So it is not clear that adding new choice opportunities will send a clear message to educators who are already dealing with sort of amazingly high levels of student turnover in their schools. On the incentive side, the incentive effects of choice are quite different in traditional schools than in charter schools. In a district that I won’t name, if a school is successful in attracting an additional student the school gets $69 additional dollars to pay of Xeroxing and other services for the students. If a charter school in the same district attracts that student, the charter receives $6,100, so that the incentive effects are likely to be considerably more powerful for charter schools than they are in traditional public schools.

As I say, those are the two points I want to emphasize. I will simply say at the end that the key policy questions concern how the choice system is to be regulated. It is clear to us at least that choice is here to stay, so the debate is no longer about whether to allow parents to make choices or not. But it is equally clear that choice is not a panacea despite the claims of some of our academic colleagues. By itself, it will not solve the most serious problems of Michigan’s education system or any other education system. So the debate necessarily revolves around questions of how the choice system should be designed and what other complimentary education policies have to be in place to insure that the consequences of choice are positive rather than negative. I will stop there and pass it on to Gary.

Gary Sykes
Another kind of question we are pursuing in our work asks: Will the introduction of choice policy affect what happens inside of schools and classrooms? That is, would we believe that the nature of teaching and learning in schools of choice and regular public schools might change as a result of choice policy? Would choice be a stimulus around the nature of instruction? Certainly, at least some of the arguments in favor of choice have emphasized that that will happen, and I would just make four observations on that issue.

The first is that proponents of choice claim that it will stimulate innovation and the spread of good ideas or popular ideas and practices through processes of entrepreneurialism, competition and imitation. That seems to be a plausible point to make, but we’d refine it somewhat based on our observations to date by asking not whether this happens, but in relation to what kinds of innovations. Our hunch is: Certain kinds but not others.

In particular, our speculative point, our hypothesis, is that the kinds of innovations that choice policy is likely to stimulate are those that may be added on to the existing structure and functioning of schools together with those that are likely to attract a constituency. Examples would be, as you have heard, all-day kindergarten, sending lap tops home with children, having parent contracts for involvement. That is, various kinds of innovations that don’t penetrate to the core operation of teaching and learning, but instead in some sense may be added on to or mixed into the way schools have always functions. The kinds of innovations that choice appears unlikely to stimulate are those that require deep changes in the nature of instructional practice as such changes implicate teacher knowledge and skill, new norms, roles, and structures within classroom, the introduction of new instructional materials, whose use requires and places skill demands on teachers. All of those kinds of changes are unlikely, we think, to be stimulated by the introduction of choice.

But I think what is interesting about that observation is that it perfectly reflects the history of school reform in this country. That is to say, exactly that generalization has been made by historians concerning those reforms that have lasted in changing the American school system over its 180-year existence. In that sense then, choice operates as a stimulus for reform at the level of fundamental teaching and learning in about the same way that most other efforts have operated whether those be changes in the curriculum or efforts to decentralized or involve parents or incorporate progressive ideas about instruction into schools. The reforms that have lasted in the evolution of the American school system having been those that have been easy to add on and that have attracted a political constituency around them. An example would be special education, where the parents of special needs students constitute a powerful constituency for a set of reforms aimed at increasing resources for special needs children. Choice will be good at stimulating some developments within the schools, but not others. How one evaluates the impact of choice on curriculum and instruction depends a great deal on what you believe needs to change for improvements in learning to occur, and we can talk a little about that because that will provoke argument.

The second observation concerns the ideas that influence curriculum and instruction and the sources of influence on those ideas. Within the choice movement, parent and community preferences appear to play a more prominent role than professional judgments, and given the documented split between popular and professional views about education, and now I am thinking particularly about the surveys the Public Agenda group has made that have shown that there are deep divisions within our society between public and professional views of schooling. It appears that popular view are likely to more prominent in choice and charter schools. Roughly this translates to a tendency in schools of choice toward more traditional approaches to teaching and learning that might be expressed concretely in such things as phonics-based approaches to literacy, more traditional approaches to mathematics rather than the avant garde NCTM mathematics standards, more traditional approaches to the teaching science rather the so-called constructivist approaches. That is to say, choice is likely to stimulate an instructional regime in schools that is traditional because that accords more closely to the preferences of parents and communities to what they want to see going on in terms of teaching and learning in classrooms.

At the same time, it also appears that charters and choice give expanded scope for particular and specialized approaches to instruction and to curriculum that are culturally tuned to societal subgroups, that seek schools representing their particular approaches. Those might be curricula that are tuned to particular ethnic or linguistic preferences, to women-only instruction, and other themes of that sort. Everything might come into play except instruction that is overtly religious in its orientation because, although there would be strong segments in many communities that seek more religiously oriented instruction, those are explicitly forbidden to enter publicly funded schools, say through the charter movement. And in our observation of conversion charter schools, which had a former religious base, those schools are bending over backward not to retain a religious orientation in their instruction because that would result in the revocation of the charter if that were discovered.

If this observation is correct, how should we regard it? Is it generally a positive thing to have a reform movement that appears to underscore traditional approaches to instruction, and that appears not to support more professionally oriented and progressive reforms such as academics and business elites and others are pressing in our society. How do you regard that as a policy outcome? Needless to say, opinions will differ on that matter. It does depend on what kinds of teaching and learning we want in our schools, and quite naturally there is a continued debate in our society over those matters. There is a great debate over reading. What kinds of reading instruction do we want in our schools? It looks to us as though charter and choice schools will represent one strain within, say, debates about the best kind of reading instruction to employ for children. That, too, we may want to talk a bit about.

A third observation focuses on two competing ideas about school reform that are in play within schools of choice. Again, the focus is on choice as a stimulus for promising ideas to improve teaching and learning. These two reform ideas might be roughly characterized as pre-planned versus improvised approaches. That is to say, one line of thinking about how to create better schools in our society is to create a powerful design for the school of the future based on expert and other opinions and then, in effect, franchise that design across many, many schools. Bring together the best minds in the country and create a powerful design for a school, and then spread that design across schools. Of course, the prime example of that approach would be the Edison Project of New School Development Corporation, where pre-planned designs have been developed and then they are to be implemented faithfully with high fidelity across many schools that would in effect accept those. The other approach to reform is to create a mechanism by which entrepreneurial visionaries can start a very idiosyncratic school based on all kinds of ideas and if they can attract teachers and parents and kids to those schools that will produce a kind of engine for innovation. Typically, the entrepreneurs who have started charter schools based on idiosyncratic visions don’t have all of their ideas worked out in advance. So they have to be improvising their ideas as they go in the course of trying to start up and develop new schools.

Now, what is interesting about those two approaches from the perspectives of policy analysts is: Which one of those is likely to produce the best results? Within something like the charter school movement, both kinds of reform are available. That is to say, under Michigan’s charter law you can have Edison Schools that started up, but you also have the opportunity for local entrepreneurs who have their own vision of what is a good school, how to start a school, how to attract students to it, and how to try to work that vision out. We see both visions operating, and I think in terms of the long term reform of American education trying to understand how each of those two kinds of reform are working out will clearly be one very important analytic task in the coming years and not only in Michigan.

And, finally, a fourth point concerns the questions of whether the ingredients that comprise successful schools of choice might in fact be created in regular public schools. That is to say, what is it about schools of choice, charter schools, that make them more attractive, or more successful than regular public schools? Some of those factors might more or less easily be applied to regular public schools. Therefore, an important consequence of choice and charter movements would be to identify factors that the public schools could adopt, and I think of that sort there are roughly three factors that are going to be important to understand. They are these. School size. It’s very clear based on the national charter school study that charter schools are smaller on average than regular public schools, and one powerful criticism of course of American school making is we just got it wrong in the ‘50s. We went after economies of scales and produced schools that were too big. You can’t have elementary schools of 800 kids. You can’t have high schools with 2,000 and 3,000 kids. They produce massive bureaucratic, alienated environments for teachers and students alike. And one great structural advantage of schools of choice is that they are going to get the scale right. They are going to create small, intimate learning communities that will appeal to teachers and to students, and that create a structural circumstance that makes the possibility for an educational community much easier. So size may be a critical factor, and it’s what parents want. Well, if that is the case, then in theory at least we could resize many, many public schools by going to something like schools within schools, and its been done. So one structural advantage of choice school is clearly size.

A second is autonomy. We know what the criticisms are. In many districts, schools operate at the bottom of an organizational hierarchy that is stifling, and hierarchy does do two things simultaneously: suck resources up into central offices and constrain the autonomy of individual schools. So one kind of criticism about how systems have gone wrong in this country is that they’ve created massive and bureaucratic operations that fail to support necessary autonomy at the school site level, and charter schools have the advantage of avoiding that sort of thing and those sorts of complications. But again, if that criticism of the evolution of the public school system, particularly in the cities, has some truth to it, it’s quite possible to develop governance and structural reform that begins to correct that problem.

Probably exhibit A along those lines is Chicago. There is a decentralizing experiment underway in Chicago in which authority is driven down to the individual school level, and the power of a large centralized bureaucratic operation has been decisively weakened. That could mark a trend across many large school systems.

The third factor is strong value communities within an individual school. How is it that a school creates a strong community of value that unites students, parents and teachers in a set of shared values. I think there are basically four factors that underlie the creation of strong value communities in schools. They are: selection, socialization, involvement and exclusion. That’s how you do it. You select people on values, you socialize in a particular setting to a set of values, you create mechanisms of high involvement, and you exclude from those settings those who prove not be compatible with your value system.

Now, how do charter schools operate on those criteria? Well, they are prohibited by law from selecting. They have to take who comes. They are able to socialize as regular public schools are. They probably have an advantage around involvement with the primary mechanism being parental contracts that many charter schools are using to increase levels of parental involvement, and I think they have somewhat more flexibility in utilizing exclusion. That is to say, they can kick kids out and right now they can kick kids out with somewhat fewer of the due process guarantees that would allow regular public schools to kick kids out. It may be that a charter school enjoys certain advantages to regular public schools on this dimension of creating a strong value community. But there , too, it might be possible to adopt certain policies that make it a more explicit goal particularly as parents clearly want such a school for their children.

Those are a set of questions and observations at the level of teaching, learning and school community that we advance for your thinking.

Gary Sykes

Another kind of question we are pursuing in our work asks: Will the introduction of choice policy affect what happens inside of schools and classrooms? That is, would we believe that the nature of teaching and learning in schools of choice and regular public schools might change as a result of choice policy? Would choice be a stimulus around the nature of instruction? Certainly, at least some of the arguments in favor of choice have emphasized that that will happen, and I would just make four observations on that issue.

The first is that proponents of choice claim that it will stimulate innovation and the spread of good ideas or popular ideas and practices through processes of entrepreneurialism, competition and imitation. That seems to be a plausible point to make, but we’d refine it somewhat based on our observations to date by asking not whether this happens, but in relation to what kinds of innovations. Our hunch is: Certain kinds but not others.

In particular, our speculative point, our hypothesis, is that the kinds of innovations that choice policy is likely to stimulate are those that may be added on to the existing structure and functioning of schools together with those that are likely to attract a constituency. Examples would be, as you have heard, all-day kindergarten, sending lap tops home with children, having parent contracts for involvement. That is, various kinds of innovations that don’t penetrate to the core operation of teaching and learning, but instead in some sense may be added on to or mixed into the way schools have always functions. The kinds of innovations that choice appears unlikely to stimulate are those that require deep changes in the nature of instructional practice as such changes implicate teacher knowledge and skill, new norms, roles, and structures within classroom, the introduction of new instructional materials, whose use requires and places skill demands on teachers. All of those kinds of changes are unlikely, we think, to be stimulated by the introduction of choice.

But I think what is interesting about that observation is that it perfectly reflects the history of school reform in this country. That is to say, exactly that generalization has been made by historians concerning those reforms that have lasted in changing the American school system over its 180-year existence. In that sense then, choice operates as a stimulus for reform at the level of fundamental teaching and learning in about the same way that most other efforts have operated whether those be changes in the curriculum or efforts to decentralized or involve parents or incorporate progressive ideas about instruction into schools. The reforms that have lasted in the evolution of the American school system having been those that have been easy to add on and that have attracted a political constituency around them. An example would be special education, where the parents of special needs students constitute a powerful constituency for a set of reforms aimed at increasing resources for special needs children. Choice will be good at stimulating some developments within the schools, but not others. How one evaluates the impact of choice on curriculum and instruction depends a great deal on what you believe needs to change for improvements in learning to occur, and we can talk a little about that because that will provoke argument.

The second observation concerns the ideas that influence curriculum and instruction and the sources of influence on those ideas. Within the choice movement, parent and community preferences appear to play a more prominent role than professional judgments, and given the documented split between popular and professional views about education, and now I am thinking particularly about the surveys the Public Agenda group has made that have shown that there are deep divisions within our society between public and professional views of schooling. It appears that popular view are likely to more prominent in choice and charter schools. Roughly this translates to a tendency in schools of choice toward more traditional approaches to teaching and learning that might be expressed concretely in such things as phonics-based approaches to literacy, more traditional approaches to mathematics rather than the avant garde NCTM mathematics standards, more traditional approaches to the teaching science rather the so-called constructivist approaches. That is to say, choice is likely to stimulate an instructional regime in schools that is traditional because that accords more closely to the preferences of parents and communities to what they want to see going on in terms of teaching and learning in classrooms.

At the same time, it also appears that charters and choice give expanded scope for particular and specialized approaches to instruction and to curriculum that are culturally tuned to societal subgroups, that seek schools representing their particular approaches. Those might be curricula that are tuned to particular ethnic or linguistic preferences, to women-only instruction, and other themes of that sort. Everything might come into play except instruction that is overtly religious in its orientation because, although there would be strong segments in many communities that seek more religiously oriented instruction, those are explicitly forbidden to enter publicly funded schools, say through the charter movement. And in our observation of conversion charter schools, which had a former religious base, those schools are bending over backward not to retain a religious orientation in their instruction because that would result in the revocation of the charter if that were discovered.

If this observation is correct, how should we regard it? Is it generally a positive thing to have a reform movement that appears to underscore traditional approaches to instruction, and that appears not to support more professionally oriented and progressive reforms such as academics and business elites and others are pressing in our society. How do you regard that as a policy outcome? Needless to say, opinions will differ on that matter. It does depend on what kinds of teaching and learning we want in our schools, and quite naturally there is a continued debate in our society over those matters. There is a great debate over reading. What kinds of reading instruction do we want in our schools? It looks to us as though charter and choice schools will represent one strain within, say, debates about the best kind of reading instruction to employ for children. That, too, we may want to talk a bit about.

A third observation focuses on two competing ideas about school reform that are in play within schools of choice. Again, the focus is on choice as a stimulus for promising ideas to improve teaching and learning. These two reform ideas might be roughly characterized as pre-planned versus improvised approaches. That is to say, one line of thinking about how to create better schools in our society is to create a powerful design for the school of the future based on expert and other opinions and then, in effect, franchise that design across many, many schools. Bring together the best minds in the country and create a powerful design for a school, and then spread that design across schools. Of course, the prime example of that approach would be the Edison Project of New School Development Corporation, where pre-planned designs have been developed and then they are to be implemented faithfully with high fidelity across many schools that would in effect accept those. The other approach to reform is to create a mechanism by which entrepreneurial visionaries can start a very idiosyncratic school based on all kinds of ideas and if they can attract teachers and parents and kids to those schools that will produce a kind of engine for innovation. Typically, the entrepreneurs who have started charter schools based on idiosyncratic visions don’t have all of their ideas worked out in advance. So they have to be improvising their ideas as they go in the course of trying to start up and develop new schools.

Now, what is interesting about those two approaches from the perspectives of policy analysts is: Which one of those is likely to produce the best results? Within something like the charter school movement, both kinds of reform are available. That is to say, under Michigan’s charter law you can have Edison Schools that started up, but you also have the opportunity for local entrepreneurs who have their own vision of what is a good school, how to start a school, how to attract students to it, and how to try to work that vision out. We see both visions operating, and I think in terms of the long term reform of American education trying to understand how each of those two kinds of reform are working out will clearly be one very important analytic task in the coming years and not only in Michigan.

And, finally, a fourth point concerns the questions of whether the ingredients that comprise successful schools of choice might in fact be created in regular public schools. That is to say, what is it about schools of choice, charter schools, that make them more attractive, or more successful than regular public schools? Some of those factors might more or less easily be applied to regular public schools. Therefore, an important consequence of choice and charter movements would be to identify factors that the public schools could adopt, and I think of that sort there are roughly three factors that are going to be important to understand. They are these. School size. It’s very clear based on the national charter school study that charter schools are smaller on average than regular public schools, and one powerful criticism of course of American school making is we just got it wrong in the ‘50s. We went after economies of scales and produced schools that were too big. You can’t have elementary schools of 800 kids. You can’t have high schools with 2,000 and 3,000 kids. They produce massive bureaucratic, alienated environments for teachers and students alike. And one great structural advantage of schools of choice is that they are going to get the scale right. They are going to create small, intimate learning communities that will appeal to teachers and to students, and that create a structural circumstance that makes the possibility for an educational community much easier. So size may be a critical factor, and it’s what parents want. Well, if that is the case, then in theory at least we could resize many, many public schools by going to something like schools within schools, and its been done. So one structural advantage of choice school is clearly size.

A second is autonomy. We know what the criticisms are. In many districts, schools operate at the bottom of an organizational hierarchy that is stifling, and hierarchy does do two things simultaneously: suck resources up into central offices and constrain the autonomy of individual schools. So one kind of criticism about how systems have gone wrong in this country is that they’ve created massive and bureaucratic operations that fail to support necessary autonomy at the school site level, and charter schools have the advantage of avoiding that sort of thing and those sorts of complications. But again, if that criticism of the evolution of the public school system, particularly in the cities, has some truth to it, it’s quite possible to develop governance and structural reform that begins to correct that problem.

Probably exhibit A along those lines is Chicago. There is a decentralizing experiment underway in Chicago in which authority is driven down to the individual school level, and the power of a large centralized bureaucratic operation has been decisively weakened. That could mark a trend across many large school systems.

The third factor is strong value communities within an individual school. How is it that a school creates a strong community of value that unites students, parents and teachers in a set of shared values. I think there are basically four factors that underlie the creation of strong value communities in schools. They are: selection, socialization, involvement and exclusion. That’s how you do it. You select people on values, you socialize in a particular setting to a set of values, you create mechanisms of high involvement, and you exclude from those settings those who prove not be compatible with your value system.

Now, how do charter schools operate on those criteria? Well, they are prohibited by law from selecting. They have to take who comes. They are able to socialize as regular public schools are. They probably have an advantage around involvement with the primary mechanism being parental contracts that many charter schools are using to increase levels of parental involvement, and I think they have somewhat more flexibility in utilizing exclusion. That is to say, they can kick kids out and right now they can kick kids out with somewhat fewer of the due process guarantees that would allow regular public schools to kick kids out. It may be that a charter school enjoys certain advantages to regular public schools on this dimension of creating a strong value community. But there , too, it might be possible to adopt certain policies that make it a more explicit goal particularly as parents clearly want such a school for their children.

Those are a set of questions and observations at the level of teaching, learning and school community that we advance for your thinking.

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