Policy Debates on Education Reform

An issue that continually inundates the news, policy debates, and political elections is that of education reform. While most parties are in agreement that education reform is needed, the views on what is considered the appropriate method of reform vary across the gamut. Three areas of reform that appear to attract the most attention are reforms involving teachers, standardization, and school vouchers and charter schools. Within each area, there are many proposed solutions.

Each solution appeals to varying principles considered necessary for 'good public policy'. Often two solutions may appeal to the same principle but with different interpretations creating contradicting and sometimes opposing. How do we determine what are the appropriate interpretations and thereby, the appropriate solutions? Who should decide which are the appropriate solutions?

In Policy Paradox, Deborah Stone (2002) lays out key goals for public-policy making. These factors include equity, efficiency, security, and liberty. Equity can relate to who are recipients of a policy, what is to be distributed, and the social procedures for distributing the policy. Efficiency involves maximizing output for a given input, taking into consideration what is the output goal, the value of various inputs and outputs, and weighing opportunity costs.

To create security, one must determine what is deemed necessary for safety and survival and must create methods to evaluate resources and standards of comparison. Finally, America is built on the ideals of liberty, the freedom to do what one wants, but in policy-making the line must be drawn as to when and how liberty should be restricted for the good of the public.

Often times in policy applications these principles interact and sometimes counteract one another making the process of creating good public policy greatly complicated, as we will see in the case of education reform.

Further complicating the implementation of public policy, one must decide who should be making the policy decisions. In the case of education reform, many of the policies tend to apply to either the elitist model or the laissez-faire pluralism model. As Walker explains, in the elitist model,

Public officials acting as agents of the public at large would then carry out the broad policies decided upon by majority vote in popular assemblies...democratic systems must rely on the wisdom, loyalty, and skill of their political leaders, not the population at large (1966).

Contrasting with this view,

Laissez-faire pluralists reject the argument that the political system is dominated by a single ruling elite and instead insist that it is responsive to a variety of interests with divergent policy preferences. Like their laissez-faire counterparts in economics, they view the political arena as a competitive marketplace in which any entrepreneur can gain entry to merchandise his views (Keslo, 1978).

As we will see, there are subscribers to both theories within the realm of education reform.

Teachers

Most people agree to the fact that American schools need more and better teachers. How to solve this problem, however, is not so readily agreed upon. Some, such at Robert Holland (2001), believe that "Instead of screening candidates according to courses taken and degrees earned, school administrators should free principals to hire the most intellectually promising people." He then details a method of judging teachers based on their effectiveness at teaching rather than by seniority or degrees earned. Holland's proposal appeals to Deborah Stone's ideals of equity and efficiency.

Holland has created an equitable standard by which to measure teacher performance by redefining the process by which distribution of teaching positions is to be determined. Holland's standard also appeals to the ideal of efficiency by first establishing that the output goal should be to maximize teacher performance and then creating a method by which to value and compare teacher output.

Rather than focus on teacher performance standards, others prefer to propose changes to teacher education and certification requirements. In 1996, the National Commission of Teaching & America's Future proposed changes in teacher recruitment methods, as well as changes in teacher education and continued professional development during a teacher's career (Billitteri, 2000). The proposed changes appealed to equity and efficiency, but in substantially different ways from that of Holland. The equity the commission bases their proposed solution on, is equity of required qualifications to become a teacher. To create efficiency, they have decided that the desired output is better-educated teachers.

Yet another proposal to reforming the teaching quality is to remove tenure for teachers. Patrons of this policy claim that eliminating tenure will serve to increase competition among teachers thereby resulting in higher quality by weeding out incompetent teachers. The opposition from the National Education Association and other organizations, however, claim that tenure was established to protect the rights and security of teachers and therefore must remain intact.

From these various propose 'solutions' to education reform, we can see how variable interpretations of Stone's principles can overlap and contradict one another. Holland applies efficiency to determine that teacher performance should be the basis of teacher salaries while the National Commission of Teaching & America's Future prefers to claim efficiency should be measured by how well educated America's teachers are.

The argument for tenure pits security and efficiency against one another. Is it more important for teachers to have more job security or for tenure to be eliminated to create a more efficient system to weed out the poor-performing teachers?

Standards

In 1983, The National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) published A Nation at Risk, a report critiquing the state of American education and proposing methods of improvement. The NCEE takes an elitist point of view, claiming that the experts, meaning themselves and other government agencies, should dictate the standards for American schools. Essentially, A Nation at Risk claims that virtually everything in the American education system should be subject to standards such as set curriculums for students, testing and grade standards, time committed to education, and teaching standards. Others are in favor of the creation of standards, but would prefer to do so on a more localized level.

Many of the proposed standards contradict one another. For example, many advocates of standards promote both curriculum standards and standardized testing to gauge performance. While both separately appeal to the principle of equity by implementing a standard form of measurement, their bases of efficiency may not coincide. While the advocates would like certain curricula to be taught, when you add standardized testing there is incentive to stray from the curriculum and focus solely on skills required to achieve high test scores.

This phenomenon has been a hot topic of debate in the my home state of Massachusetts, after the introduction of the new statewide MCAS test. In this case the conflicting outputs are well-rounded curricula and high standardized test scores. Some parents are advocating the MCAS as a graduation requirement while other parents are "concerned that the test is watering down their schools' creative classes (Greenberger, 2001)."

The implementation of standards also has created a debate in regards to educational liberty. Some argue that schools and teachers should have more freedom to choose curricula, while others advocate progression towards standardization. Those that oppose such standards apply a more pluralistic view that equity should not be measured by a same-across-the-board-for-everyone approach, but instead, parents, teachers, and schools should determine what curricula is necessary based on student's needs and learning abilities. Thereby, parents, teachers, and schools should be given more liberty to choose an appropriate curriculum rather than those in state and federal governments.

School Vouchers and CharterSchools

Over the past few years, a great debate has unfolded in regards to both school vouchers and charter schools. Those favoring school vouchers, claim they serve the purpose of allowing children of low-income families to have the same opportunities in education as other students. Advocates of vouchers claim that students should not be forced to attend failing public schools but should be allowed the freedom of choice that middle and upper-class students possess. They also claim that the vouchers will serve to improve the educational system as a whole by creating competition for students.

Those opposed appeal to the principles of equity and security. The opponents question the equity of only making the vouchers available to the poor, and they also point out that there is not enough room in private schools to allow all students to even utilize the option. Instead, the opponents claim that we need to work on improving the quality of public schools so that vouchers are not required. They claim that American students should have the security to know that the public education system will provide them with a satisfactory education. (Hoxby, 1994)

The Charter school debate follows similar debates of liberty verses equity. Charter Schools are not required to adhere to state and federal curriculum regulations and can therefore teach what they deem appropriate. Parents and educators that support this pluralistic approach espouse the idea that not the government, but rather the parents and teachers should hold the liberty to decide what their children should learn. Those disputing charter schools generally appeal to the elitist model that the government should create equitable standards of education that all schools public or private should be required to adhere to. This would include charter schools. (Bettinger, 1999)

Pluralism and Elitism in Education Reform

As previously mentioned, in addition to the general principles of equity, efficiency, security and liberty at work, there also is on going struggle between the laissez-faire pluralist model and the elitist models of how appropriate education reform should be determined. The laissez-faire pluralist model is based on the concept the individuals form into interest groups to promote the introduction of what they consider to be necessary public policy, therefore in the laissez-faire pluralist model, the people are the impetus and the government serves as a referee between interest groups (Keslo, 1978). The elitism model, however, holds that policy making is left to the experts, thereby making government and government consultants the impetus of policy implementation (Walker, 1966).

Groups such as The National Commission of Excellence in Education and conservatives in Congress appeal to a more elitist model of education reform, promoting the government institution of standards of education. Others, however, propose more pluralistic changes: "Intuitively, it makes sense that teachers, school administrators, and parents--those closest to children--are best positioned to craft educational strategies to meet the needs of their particular students (Shields, et al., 1995)."

While there are many other issues and proposed solutions up for debate in the education reform forum, they reach far beyond the scope of this paper. The examples given are a small insight into the many issues and conflicts of implementing public policy to education reform. Many conflicts remain to be settled; conflicts between the definitions of equity, efficiency, security, and liberty; which of the four principles if any, is of superior importance; is a market model or polis model more appropriate; and should policy be determined through pluralism or elitism?

Bibliography

Billitteri, Thomas J. (1997) "Teacher Education," CQ Press (Washington D.C.: CQ Press), 1-19.

Holland, Robert (2001) "How to Build a Better Teacher," USA Today, Vol. 130, 30-32.

Koch, Kathy (1999) "School Vouchers," CQ Press (Washington D.C.: CQ Press), 21-39.

National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983) "A Nation at Risk."

Reich, Robert B. (1988) The Power of Public Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1-53.

Sheilds, Patrick M., et al. (1995) Improving Schools from the Bottom Up: From Effective Schools to Restructuring (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education), 1.

Stone, Deborah (2002) Policy Paradox (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company), 1-130.