If Allen County's four public school systems could save, or spend more effectively, another $13.9 million per year, why would anyone object?
I suppose we'll find out, now that IPFW Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership Jeff Abbott has concluded an 18-month probe into the effect of regulation and politics on public education - and suggested reforms he insists could eliminate more than $289 million annually in academically dubious expenses in Indiana alone.
Funded the by Dekko Foundation of Kendallville, the Ball Foundation of Muncie and the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, a conservative think tank, the report's sweeping recommendations will be difficult - if not impossible - to implement. That's hardly surprising: If reformation of the entrenched educational bureaucracy were easy, Abbott would have done it while serving as superintendent of East Allen County Schools from 1996 to 2005.
Even so, his analysis illustrates the degree to which progress can be impeded by arbitrary man-made barriers - barriers that, despite their obvious inadequacies, have developed constituencies dependent upon their survival.
If America could dump its horse and buggy-era public education model and start from scratch, what would the ideal system look like? Abbott answered that question in a Policy Review piece last year in which he outlined a framework for so-called “freedom schools.” Abbott proposes a single county-wide school district, governed by an appointed school board, with each school empowered within certain guidelines to establish their own management teams, curriculum, work rules, personnel policies and a host of other things now subject to a mountain of local, state and federal regulations. Parents would then be able to send their children to the school of their choice, with the pressure for academic excellence being applied by the competition for students, not expensive accountability bureaucracies like the federal No Child Left Behind act.
Abbott's new study takes his concept a step further by evaluating the savings and costs of implementing such a system in Indiana's 3rd congressional district. Citing state public record laws, he requested 2007 personnel and payroll information from all 28 districts, eliminating the central-office and school board jobs rendered redundant or obsolete by consolidation and deregulation and adding positions needed to accommodate a more market-based approach.
In Allen County, Abbott estimates administration savings of about $15.5 million and school-board savings of about $223,500. New positions costing about $1.8 million would be needed, however, making the net savings about $13.9 million per year. If the projected annual statewide savings is $289 million, one can only imagine the potential nationally.
Why, it might even be enough to pay for a few days' worth of Obamacare.
“Unfortunately, all of this regulation and control has an unintended consequence,” Abbott writes. “It squelches creativity and innovation at the school level . . . many (teachers and principals) have essentially becoming robotic compliance machines. Because state and federal legislators don't trust them to do the right thing for students, they pass more and more laws to control them. This has resulted in the de-emphasis of the professionalism of those who work closest with children.”
Abbott suggests that state and federal lawmakers track the cost of compliance and the impact of regulation and politics on academic achievement, with a limited number of pilot-project freedom schools established for evaluation. Abbott, who said he was overwhelmed by the size of the potential savings, plans to share his findings with legislators in hope of convincing somebody to turn his conclusions into tangible results.
There are legitimate concerns about Abbott's approach, of course. Many of the standards imposed on schools were the result of grade inflation and the lack of objective measurement tools, for example. Can competition and increased scrutiny by parents - too many of whom are not all that interested in their children's education - really be enough to keep schools honest?
Other obstacles are less legitimate, but no less real: Education unions don't want to give up district-wide collective bargaining agreements and tenure, and don't generally like merit-pay policies that reward good teachers while punishing bad ones.
Still, anyone who genuinely cares about education must be willing to think outside the underperforming, wasteful and seemingly intractable bureaucratic box that traps too many of our children. A little freedom is generally a good thing - even in school.
