The Secret of TSL: The Revolutionary Discovery That Raises School Performance - Rilegato

Virtually everyone who teaches in our K–12 schools is aware that most school districts today are run the way businesses were forty or fifty years ago: top-down, autocratic, and bureaucratic. Teachers and principals have to use books that are selected by someone in the central office who does not know their school; they must follow a daily schedule set by that central office; and all schools are assigned the same complement of teachers, attendance clerks, and so on—according to the central office formula. Students have to attend the “zone” schools to which they are assigned by that same central office. That educational straitjacket is widely disliked by families and by teachers, but until recently, there has been no alternative.

Now, however, a quiet revolution is under way. That revolution allows each school in some districts the power to make more and more of its own budgetary, personnel, and instructional decisions and permits families to decide which public school their children will attend. Power is being shifted from central office staffs to families, principals, and teachers, and the results so far show that students are doing better, parents and teachers are more satisfied, and school districts may never be the same. It may be too early in this dramatic period of change to declare that top-down management is dead. Most of our nation’s schools still report to strongly centralized staffs. The eight districts that have been pioneering this move to decentralization are inventing and learning as they go. Some of them have made costly missteps. Their story is not one of easy change—it’s a nuanced story of victories and of defeats. This book describes that quiet revolution, what it means, and how every school district can learn from the successes and the failures of the pioneers.

Most people know of at least one excellent public school, perhaps a school that they attended or one they worked in or that a child they know attends now. High-quality public schools offer living proof that public education can rise to the level of excellence, yet they also stand out as exceptions to the rule and thereby raise questions of incalculable consequence for American public education: Is it possible for a school district with dozens or hundreds or even a thousand schools to achieve high quality in virtually every school? Is there something about large school districts that inevitably kills the spirit of the teachers and principals, or is there a way to general excellence through fundamental changes in how we organize public education in this country?

The answers, as I will demonstrate in this book, are in the positive. Ask yourself what you believe is the single most important factor in the success of a school district. Ask anyone you know the same question. Ninety percent of the time, the answer will be “teachers.” Then ask how, as a practical matter, a school district’s student performance can be raised. Now the answer won’t be so clear. This book will demonstrate that the most important element to the success of a school district is management. Good managers will organize schools effectively and will attract and retain good teachers. Without good management, even talented teachers will fail.

I am a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, a graduate school of business. I have spent more than thirty years studying very large companies, such as General Motors, Toyota, Intel, and Macy’s. In the corporate world, it is considered reasonable to expect high quality throughout a company, even a very large company. After all, Toyota built its reputation by making every one of its plants a high-quality operation, not by having some good plants among several poor ones. McDonald’s built its reputation by making every one of its stores deliver quality service to every customer, every time—not by delivering high-quality service sometimes to some customers. If Toyota and McDonald’s can do this, why can’t large public-school systems? As I have suggested, the answer has to do, more than anything else, with the way public education is organized and managed in this country today.

More than a quarter of a century ago, corporations and scholars recognized that large size brings major negative consequences and that the chief antidote to these pathologies is to decentralize decision making down to the operating subunits. A fundamental flaw in public education in the United States is that this lesson has not yet been applied to school districts.

Over time, school districts have become very large. Since 1932, the number of students enrolled in public schools in the United States has more than doubled, from 24 million to about 50 million. Meanwhile, the number of school districts has declined from about 127,000 to about 16,000.1 This means that school districts today on average have fifteen times as many students as their predecessors did seventy-five years ago. Business organizations, functioning in a competitive world, long ago understood that they could not survive that much growth without decentralizing. In a competitive setting, the rule is decentralize or fail. But school districts, not living in a competitive world, have not changed their form. They remain about as centralized today as when they were one-fifteenth their present size. In fact, as a result of growth in the size of school districts, they are actually far more centralized today, in the sense that in each district, one central office staff now makes the decisions that affect fifteen times as many students as before.

Many districts think they’ve already tried decentralization and found that it did not work. For example, the nation’s three largest cities—New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—have at one time or another grouped their schools into “communities” of several dozen schools or have created subregions of schools and have delegated limited decision powers to the assistant superintendents who run each subregion. Invariably, these districts were disappointed with the results and soon abandoned the experiment. These ineffective approaches to decentralization were bound to fail, because they did not place decision making where it makes a difference—with the principals. If principals are under the thumb of bureaucrats, it does not matter whether the bureaucrats are in a regional office or in the central office. What matters is whether or not the principal has the executive power required to exercise the leadership fundamental to the success of educating children.

About twenty years ago, I became interested in helping public schools to improve. For many years, I volunteered in a local organization that gave advice to our local school district, and I couldn’t help but notice that more often than not the best schools were outliers and renegades, that they followed a set of principles that were in conflict with the desires and dictates of the school board, the superintendent, and the central office staff. That did not make sense to me. Why would any school district not celebrate its successful schools? Why would it not try to have all of its schools emulate them? I wanted to get to the bottom of these questions, so I’ve spent the past eight years organizing research teams and visiting a total of 665 schools across the United States.

In my first study (of 223 schools in nine districts), I wanted to find out if decentralized decision making—that is, giving power over the school budget to principals—would result in higher student achievement.2 The answer was a clear “yes.” In that study I compared the three largest centralized districts in the country to the three largest decentralized districts and to the three largest Catholic school districts. That study demonstrated that a school district can empower its principals with real, meaningful autonomy. But I did not know at that time what principals did with that freedom to make them successful.

By the time we launched the second round of research, eight large U.S. districts had begun serious decentralization—Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Paul—and we were able to study them all, drawing a total sample of 442 schools from these eight districts. To my knowledge, ours is the only large-scale study of school district decentralization. In all likelihood this reflects the fact that only in the past few years have any U.S. districts implemented true decentralization by giving principals substantial control of their budgets—as much as 87.2 percent of the budget in St. Paul, Minnesota, 85.0 percent in New York City, and 73.7 percent in Houston. Far more typical of the country as a whole are the cases of Los Angeles,3 in which principals control 6.7 percent of their school budgets, and Hawaii, where principals control about 4 percent, according to the Hawaii state auditor. Indeed, as recently as 2001, New York City principals controlled only 6.1 percent of their budgets, before the far-reaching reforms introduced by Chancellor Joel Klein during the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

None of this is to suggest that success requires only that districts grant a large measure of autonomy to their principals: that step, while necessary, has to be accompanied by four other policies—(1) school choice, (2) development of effective principals, (3) accountability, and (4) weighted student formula budgeting. Together, as we will explore in coming chapters, these Five Pillars of School Empowerment can produce dramatic improvements in achievement for all students, from those in affluent neighborhoods to those in i...