For more than a decade, school choice has been a flashpoint in debates about our nation's schooling. Perhaps the most commonly advanced argument for school choice is the notion that markets will force public schools to improve, particularly in those urban areas where improvement has proved so elusive. However, the question of how public schools respond to market conditions has received surprisingly little attention. Revolution at the Margins examines the impact of school vouchers and charter schooling on three urban school districts, explores the causes of the behavior observed, and explains how the structure of competition is likely to shape the way it affects the future of public education. The book draws on research conducted in three school districts at the center of the school choice debate during the 1990s: Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cleveland, Ohio; and Edgewood, Texas. Case studies examine each of these three districts from the inception of their local school choice program through the conclusion of the 1999 school year. The three school districts studied did not respond to competition by emphasizing productivity or efficiency. Instead, under pressure to provide some evidence of response, administrators tended to expand public relations efforts and to chip holes in the rules, regulations, and procedures that regulate public sector organizations. Inefficient practices were not rooted out, but some rules and procedures that protect employees and vocal constituencies were relaxed. Public school systems are driven by political logic, according to Hess, and their incentives lead them to respond generally through symbolic and metaphorical gestures. Choice-induced changes in public school systems will be shaped by public governance, the market context in which they operate, and their organizational characteristics. Revolution at the Margins encourages scholars and policymakers to think more carefully about the costs and benefits of educational competition, to understand how competitive effects will be heavily shaped by the outcomes of more conventional efforts to reform schooling, and to reevaluate some of the facile promises of market-based education reform.
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"Hess states at the outset that he is 'not seeking to provide a definitive account of educational markets, but to launch a more useful conversation on the topic,' and he has achieved this goal... Hess succeeds in posing a challenge to those who see choice and competition- the manipulation of incentives, if you will- as a way of improving schools without getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty issues of providing a quality education." --Edward B. Fiske, Education Next, 7/1/2002 "Anyone interested in school choice ought to place Frederick M. Hess' 'Revolution at the Margins: The Impact of Competition on Urban School Systems' on their reading list... Mr. Hess successfully strives to be objective in his analysis... The result is a book that will increase the knowledge of anyone interested in school choice... Mr. Hess' excellent book will make anyone interested in school choice better informed about the history of vouchers and the changes vouchers have made in our schools." --Martin Morse Wooster, Washington Times, 7/14/2002 "[A] meticulously researched book... Reading 'Revolution at the Margins' will take most educators out of their comfort zone- the zone that deals with urban reform focused on teaching, learning, classroom practice, assessment, standards, traditional school funding options, and community involvement." --Terry Stirling, Northeastern Illinois University, Teachers College Record, 11/5/2002 "A nuanced study." -- Future Survey, 11/1/2002 "Hess's analysis [is] sound and moves the voucher debate helpfully away from the rigidities of the state-vs.-market debate... Hess's most important contribution is clarifying and redefining the debate." --John Gardner, Milwaukee School Board, Education Next, 7/1/2002 "[A] revealing and timely book..." --David Ruenzel, Teacher Magazine, 11/1/2002 "Hess explains very clearly why public education cannot compete effectively in a competitive education industry." --Myron Lieberman, School Reform News, 8/1/2002 "He has made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the context in which market based urban school reforms occur." --Michael Mintrom, University of Auckland, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
About the Author
Frederick M. Hess is the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He is the coauthor (with Michael J. Petrilli) of No Child Left Behind Primer (Peter Lang, 2006) and editor of Educational Entrepreneurship (Harvard Education Press, 2006).
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An educator, political scientist and author, Rick Hess studies K-12 and higher education issues. His books include Cage-Busting Leadership, The Same Thing Over and Over, Education Unbound, Common Sense School Reform, Revolution at the Margins, and Spinning Wheels, and he writes the popular Education Week blog "Rick Hess Straight Up." Rick's work has appeared in scholarly and popular outlets such as Teachers College Record, Harvard Education Review, Social Science Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, American Politics Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Phi Delta Kappan, Educational Leadership, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and National Review. Rick serves as executive editor of Education Next, as lead faculty member for the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program, on the review boards for the Broad Prize in Urban Education and the Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, and on the boards of directors of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and 4.0 SCHOOLS. A former high school social studies teacher, he has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Rice University, and Harvard University. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government, as well as an M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum, from Harvard.
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Format:Paperback
Most of the research on school vouchers and charter schools is a matter of dueling statistics. Different authors study the same programs and come to opposite conclusions. Since they all offer elaborate defenses of their methods, making sense out the analyses becomes a matter of statistical nit-picking. Meanwhile, they don't say much about how or why educational competition works. This book approaches the issue from the opposite direction: it doesn't offer any statistical proof of anything, but it provides a challenging look at the reality of educational competition.
What I really liked about this book is that the author doesn't try to prove that school choice does or doesn't work. Instead, he dives into trying to understand how it affects the public schools in the community. Using extensive interviewing, research, and document collection, he offers the deepest look I know of into how school choice competition actually plays out. The reliance on interviews and historical narrative also has the plus of making it much more engaging than the standard analysis of school vouchers. The book also offers some important insights regarding urban schooling and the nature of urban school reform.
This is a book that is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in school vouchers, or even those who just want to learn more about school reform or urban schooling.
What I really liked about this book is that the author doesn't try to prove that school choice does or doesn't work. Instead, he dives into trying to understand how it affects the public schools in the community. Using extensive interviewing, research, and document collection, he offers the deepest look I know of into how school choice competition actually plays out. The reliance on interviews and historical narrative also has the plus of making it much more engaging than the standard analysis of school vouchers. The book also offers some important insights regarding urban schooling and the nature of urban school reform.
This is a book that is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in school vouchers, or even those who just want to learn more about school reform or urban schooling.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By Chris Brand
Format:Paperback
This book provides an evaluation by an educational and governmental researcher of the impact of several schemes of the 1990's setting up voucher and charter schools - paying poor parents if they withdrew their children from inner-city state schools and enrolled them in the private sector. As previous school reform efforts backed by liberal-leftists had failed children, and as court-propelled desegregation led to White flight, many of America's inner-city schools became so appalling that even Democrat-voting Blacks wanted the opportunity to seek private education - and linked up with Republicans to achieve that goal. Frederick Hess's concern here is with the argument of pro-choice campaigners that the new private schools, far from threatening public schools by creaming off brighter children, would actually stimulate much-needed reforms in the public sector; and his strategy is to interview heads, teachers and administrators in three public authority areas which allowed some degree of parental choice - Milwaukee, Cleveland and the Edgewood district of San Antonio, Texas.
Regrettably, Revolution at the Margins says rather more about educational research than about the impact of pro-choice initiatives. Essentially, Hess finds virtually no result at all from competition with the politically well-entrenched public sector. Bureaucrats occasionally mobilized themselves to a little mendacious propaganda (hanging banners outside public schools saying 'High Standards Start Here'), to teaching test-taking strategies to children, and to mounting legal actions to cramp the style of choice schools; but usually there was no action beyond verbal "lashing out" (for example at the "racist and rapacious" proponents of choice). Behind and explaining such inertness lie the 'education systems' of the (Black and Hispanic) slums with their low wages for, and high turnover of teachers. An area that *did* risk union wrath by sacking scores of teachers one spring found it had to re-employ them all, in different schools, by the autumn. Since only idealists and incompetents will work for low wages, yet need self-respect, state teachers would simply shrug off the arrival of competition and continue in their own favoured ("idiosyncratic", says Hess) ways - telling Hess "we have too much on our hands to worry about vouchers and charters" and "you're lucky we're here to provide this service" (even when 40% of state teachers had themselves stopped sending their own offspring to state schools). Quite often, because of high pupil turnover in slum schools, teachers had literally no idea that their school was indeed losing pupils to the private sector. In any case, the size of the challenge in the three schemes studied was slight. Hess concludes that only really large choice schemes will prove sufficiently "fearsome" to make state teachers change; and that, even then, change will be unlikely without background 'institutional reform' needed for the last thirty years but never adopted - notably, giving heads the power to sack weak teachers. State educators are in an impossible position, apparently, after decades of liberal-left misrule. "Imagine," Hess writes, "a private sector producer whose consumers disagree about what kind of product they want; who depends on the support of both consumers and nonconsumers; whose executives are largely unable to evaluate, hire, fire, reward, or sanction employees; and whose product is hard to judge. Any executive, whether Henry Ford, Jack Welch, or Bill Gates - would struggle in the face of such odds." Thus "there was no evidence that competition bulldozed away inefficiencies or forced systemic efforts to reform policy or improve practice, as officials had neither the incentive nor the ability to mount aggressive assaults on organizational culture or procedure."
Yet, as if all this were not depressing enough, Hess's method of arriving at his conclusions will make grown men weep. It is not just that Hess's 'research' involves none of the normal listings of subjects interviewed, questions asked, percentages favouring different answers, etc. Hess is content to provide the kind historical record of developments that could be, and probably was culled from local newspapers - supplemented by a few conversations of his own. This method results in pages littered with dollar signs, numbers and capital letters as the various outlays are made, as votes are taken, and as unions express outrage; but even this is not the worst.
Regrettably, Revolution at the Margins says rather more about educational research than about the impact of pro-choice initiatives. Essentially, Hess finds virtually no result at all from competition with the politically well-entrenched public sector. Bureaucrats occasionally mobilized themselves to a little mendacious propaganda (hanging banners outside public schools saying 'High Standards Start Here'), to teaching test-taking strategies to children, and to mounting legal actions to cramp the style of choice schools; but usually there was no action beyond verbal "lashing out" (for example at the "racist and rapacious" proponents of choice). Behind and explaining such inertness lie the 'education systems' of the (Black and Hispanic) slums with their low wages for, and high turnover of teachers. An area that *did* risk union wrath by sacking scores of teachers one spring found it had to re-employ them all, in different schools, by the autumn. Since only idealists and incompetents will work for low wages, yet need self-respect, state teachers would simply shrug off the arrival of competition and continue in their own favoured ("idiosyncratic", says Hess) ways - telling Hess "we have too much on our hands to worry about vouchers and charters" and "you're lucky we're here to provide this service" (even when 40% of state teachers had themselves stopped sending their own offspring to state schools). Quite often, because of high pupil turnover in slum schools, teachers had literally no idea that their school was indeed losing pupils to the private sector. In any case, the size of the challenge in the three schemes studied was slight. Hess concludes that only really large choice schemes will prove sufficiently "fearsome" to make state teachers change; and that, even then, change will be unlikely without background 'institutional reform' needed for the last thirty years but never adopted - notably, giving heads the power to sack weak teachers. State educators are in an impossible position, apparently, after decades of liberal-left misrule. "Imagine," Hess writes, "a private sector producer whose consumers disagree about what kind of product they want; who depends on the support of both consumers and nonconsumers; whose executives are largely unable to evaluate, hire, fire, reward, or sanction employees; and whose product is hard to judge. Any executive, whether Henry Ford, Jack Welch, or Bill Gates - would struggle in the face of such odds." Thus "there was no evidence that competition bulldozed away inefficiencies or forced systemic efforts to reform policy or improve practice, as officials had neither the incentive nor the ability to mount aggressive assaults on organizational culture or procedure."
Yet, as if all this were not depressing enough, Hess's method of arriving at his conclusions will make grown men weep. It is not just that Hess's 'research' involves none of the normal listings of subjects interviewed, questions asked, percentages favouring different answers, etc. Hess is content to provide the kind historical record of developments that could be, and probably was culled from local newspapers - supplemented by a few conversations of his own. This method results in pages littered with dollar signs, numbers and capital letters as the various outlays are made, as votes are taken, and as unions express outrage; but even this is not the worst.
A specialist volume like this should present, first, a testing of whether choice schools produce better end-of-the-year results for pupils than could be expected from their children's starting IQs; and, secondly, a testing of whether such value-added results occur with increasing frequency in state schools after the arrival of private school competition. How else could one possibly say whether either set of schools had truly been doing a good job? Yet test results are scarcely mentioned in this volume, and value-added calculations not at all - and this despite the book being endorsed on its dust jacket by half-a-dozen worthies from the world of educational research. OK, since Hess believes test scores are largely determined by socio-economic circumstances (and never mentions education professor Arthur Jensen), it might have been less problematic for him to ask the children and their parents if they became *happier* as school choice was expanded; but Hess does not even consider, let alone use this humdrum route. Frankly, one wonders what hope there can be for America's children when even a sympathizer with 'choice', as Hess apparently is, cannot imagine and discuss a reasonable way of evaluating the experiment that has been underway in the cities. Hess is right as far as he goes: "So long as school systems are governed by rickety bureaucracies, run by managers bereft of data or tools, staffed by employees who have little motivation beyond the intrinsic, charged with producing ill-defined and ambiguous outcomes, and faced with few penalties for poor performance, efforts at substantive improvement - whether market driven or not - will be stifled." But educational research, too, turns out to stand in similar need of data and re-tooling. One thing is sure: experiments in allowing parental freedom will continue by popular demand so long as educators and educationalists persist in the dismal set of attitudes and practices that this book casually reveals.
1 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Hess explores these issues in a unique and interesting way.
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