Skip to main content

Is Effective Education Reform Even Possible? The Answer is “Yes.”


Education Reform. Every time a legislature meets in this country, education reform is a topic of discussion. It’s easy to see why. Our schools, especially when you consider the amount of money we spend, don’t do a very good job. It’s really not that hard to casually look around the internet and find that the U.S. ranks in the top five of all nations, year after year, in average per-student spending in public education. Unfortunately, that does not translate into results. Many nations that spend a fraction of what we do outperform us in international academic comparisons. China’s students outperform ours by four grade levels. Oklahoma’s performance is below the national average.

Anybody who knows one or more active public school teachers also knows that most of them work hard. Yes, they get longer holidays than most, and there are those relatively few who do the minimum, but there are the many who are conscientious. The problem is, they are swimming upstream in an institutional system that automatically flows to the lowest common denominator and frustrates efforts at attaining excellence.

Teachers and students (and their parents) actually work outside of education’s iron triangle – a triumvirate of organizations, companies, politicians, and professionals whose personal interests are interlocked to perpetuate the public education system as it is, regardless of how it performs. One side of the triangle consists of lobbyists, including unions and the people who work for various education-related associations, who know and understand the current system and want to preserve it in order to preserve their own worth. Another side of the triangle consists of education’s bureaucracy, especially state agencies and school district central office administrators, who stand between policy makers and teachers, and can frustrate reform efforts before they get started. And then there is the side with elected officials – school board members and legislators – whose political fortunes are often tied to the other sides. Teachers, students, and parents are generally too busy to have a real voice and serve only to camouflage the selfish motives of those who are part of the triangle.

The iron triangle is why reforms delving into the minute details of teaching, testing, curriculum content, spending, and personnel have not worked. And this is why the only reforms that have a chance of working are those that at least weaken the iron triangle. This is the intent of seven reforms, listed below, that are recommended and more fully explained in 1889 Institute’s new publication, Education Reforms to Make a Difference, first in a two or three part series of publications recommending institutional reforms for education. 

Allow for Teacher Charters – trust teachers by allowing them to independently establish charter schools on the strength of their experience and ability to assemble the financial support necessary to do so; a new concept. 

Move School Board Elections to November – end obscure, shifting election dates so voters without a financial stake in the system will show up.

Make Moving into Teaching Seamless – remove logistical obstacles to obtaining the training necessary to enter the classroom where doing so means changing careers.

Provide State-funded Teacher Professional Liability Insurance – teachers who just want liability protection should not have to pay extra dues to radicalized organizations to get it. 

Promote the Conversion School Option – inform school board members of the option to convert schools to the rough equivalent of a charter school where schools are failing; allow the State Board of Education to sponsor conversions of certain failing schools.

Reform the State’s Funding Formula – remove perverse incentives in the funding formula and require auditable contact-hour funding for students needing extra help.

Stop Requiring Superintendent Education Certification – they’re business administrators, so emphasis should be on hiring people with business administration skills.

Each of these changes would contribute to creating the kind of positive disruption of the education system that can lead to the softening of the ossified, tempered, and hide-bound education iron triangle. If we keep attempting the old reforms, depending on the goodwill of members of the iron triangle to violate their own selfish interests, those reforms will continue to shatter against a solid barrier of entrenched interests whose main interest in education is how they can profit from the system.

Byron Schlomach is Director of the 1889 Institute and can be reached at bschlomach@1889institute.org.



Popular posts from this blog

Insider Dealing: Car Dealer Protectionism Run Amuck

Imagine you wanted to open a restaurant. Imagine you were allowed to cook the food yourself, but you were prohibited by law from serving it to customers yourself; instead, you were forced to hire a waiter. Next, imagine that the waiter wasn’t pulling his weight, but you weren’t allowed to fire him unless you could prove you had good cause, and the people you had to prove it to were the waiters friends, who also happened to be employed as waiters. Finally, imagine that you had to get permission from the waiter before you could hire another waiter. If he refused, you could appeal his decision… to that same group of his waiter friends. Each of these imaginary scenarios is a close analogy to the very real laws that hinder the distribution of new cars.   Car manufacturers are not allowed to sell directly to consumers. They can make the vehicle, but then must hire dealers (a.k.a. waiters) to interact with consumers. These state-mandated middlemen will surely want a cut of each s...
Read more

Even If Pandemic Models Were Right, Were Covid Lockdowns Wrong?

1889 has been quite critical of pandemic modeling that government officials have relied on for their Covid-19 response. We have also criticized shutdown orders in light of flaws in the models. But let’s assume for a moment that the worst predictions really would have come true if nothing was done. Even in those worst case scenarios, it’s fair to ask if our governments did the right thing. Were involuntary shutdowns justified, or would people have found a way to both limit the contagion and maintain some level of productivity? Was putting healthy citizens under house arrest acceptable even if they were willing to risk infection?   While large groups of people are often compared to herd animals, we are not sheep. We don’t behave like animals. We can, have, and will step up when our communities are in danger. When government and journalists give incomplete or false information, people will act irrationally. Depending on the situation, some will blindly follow the first aut...
Read more

OKC Public Schools Elevating a Privileged Elite over Oklahoma Taxpayers

The hypocrisy of the Soviet Union’s pretense of egalitarianism was well known enough to be the subject of mockery and parody. Ronald Reagan never tired of the jokes . Soviet communism espoused equality, but the reality is that party apparatchiks and government officials enjoyed special perks that no one else had access to. This special class wasn’t officially paid much more than the average skilled worker, but enjoyed privileges like dachas on the coast or countryside, special stores with imported goods and without the endless lines that were commonplace everywhere else, and more advanced medical treatment. For all their talk about eliminating class distinctions, the Soviet nomenklatura —those “doing the people’s work”—could feather their nest with the best of ‘em. Apparently, a similar attitude reigns in our government schools. Our friends at OCPA report that Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) will not offer in-person instruction to students for the first nine weeks of school this ...
Read more

Oklahoma Elections: For Insiders Only?

When is election day? Most people probably assume it’s the first Tuesday in November. That makes sense, since that’s the date for statewide elections, and, in even numbered years, federal elections as well. Would it surprise you to learn that there is an election scheduled in Oklahoma every single month in 2019? That is not to say that every district has an election every month. That would be a hassle - the well-engaged citizen would have to make it to his local precinct every 4 weeks to make sure his views are adequately expressed. The slipshod way local elections are scheduled is far more shocking and less predictable than that. One would be forgiven for thinking, on first glance, that Oklahoma allows government bodies to change lawmakers and raise taxes through oddly scheduled, poorly noticed elections on (almost) whichever Tuesday they want. However, in reality there are “only” 15 days per year when local elections can be scheduled. Still, this means that the party in p...
Read more