Last night, at University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy, I listened to Professor Paul Hill describe his new book, Strife and Progress: Transforming Public Education in Big Cities, to be published this fall.  

Professor Hill reported that 25 school districts are successfully raising student achievement by putting school principals in charge. These districts include New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, Denver, Baltimore, and Hartford.  Under this system the central bureaucracy stops micromanaging schools, instead acting as an administrator of a portfolio of independently run schools. Schools are allowed autonomy over the way they run their schools, in exchange for meeting agreed-upon goals and targets for improving student achievement.

Putting the principal in charge and holding him or her accountable for student learning is Washington Policy Center’s key recommendation for improving schools.  We have brought these prominent researchers and practitioners of this policy to speak in Seattle:

2009:  Professor William Ouchi, expert in organizational management from UCLA’s Anderson School of Business, spoke about his visits to 600 schools whose principals were allowed control over the actual dollars in their budgets and over their programs.  These principals reduced student loads on teachers and raised student achievement significantly.  His excellent book describes this work:  The Secret of TSL (Total Student Load):  The Revolutionary Discovery that Raises School Performance (Simon and Schuster 2009).

2010:  Rob Stein, principal in charge of Manual High in Denver, Colorado, described how having the freedom to design an educational program with his handpicked staff, and having control over the actual dollars in his budget, allowed his team to successfully turn around a high school for poor and minority children. 

2011:  Dr. Andres Alonso, CEO of Baltimore City Schools, gave his school principals control over the actual dollars in their budgets and is holding them accountable for performance.  Student achievement is up significantly, and drop-out and crime rates are down. 

2012:  Paul Pastorek, former superintendent of public instruction in Louisiana, created the Recovery School District, a district of autonomous schools whose principals are held accountable for student achievement.  Eighty percent of New Orleans schools are charter public schools, many of them home-grown charter schools.  Student achievement in New Orleans has doubled in the five years since Katrina.

The states of Michigan and Tennessee are in the process of implementing this reform. 

In Washington state, where multiple levels of bureaucracy typically micromanage and stifle the energy and potential of talented school principals and teachers, the Public School Accountability Index for 2011 shows that 41.9% of our schools are rated as “Fair” or “Struggling,” the lowest two tiers of performance. 

Washington’s schools are stuck in the past.  Many in Washington appear committed to the mistaken idea that more money, more programs will improve the schools.  Defenders of Washington’s central control model, exemplified by the flawed McCleary court decision, offer up the same old tired ideas for new spending, such as reducing class size.  Initiative 728 directed $1.9 billion to reducing class size, professional development and after school programs, with little effect on student achievement. 

HB 2261, passed in 2009, sets Washington state on a path to spend $3.4 billion in reducing class sizes and other programs.  This plan will not improve student achievement, as it is based upon the cherry-picked research of Picus and Odden, as shown by Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in his article The Confidence Men, Selling Adequacy, Making Millions.

Chasing down new dollars to reduce class sizes and other programs will not fix the schools. Writing a bigger check will not solve the problem of poorly managed schools---it just makes poorly managed schools more expensive.  It is like putting your foot to the gas when your car is stuck in the mud.  It gets you nowhere but deeper in the mud.    

Washington state can get out of this rut by listening to people like Professor Paul Hill of UW, Professor Bill Ouchi of UCLA, Principal Rob Stein in Denver, CEO Andres Alonso in Baltimore and Paul Pastorek in Louisiana.  These  agents of real change have shown that improving student achievement in public schools requires putting the principal and his teachers in charge and holding them accountable for student learning.