Student achievement has fallen to its worst levels in two decades. Throughout public education, we see blaring sirens that our students deserve better.
At the same time, states across the country – most recently Idaho and Texas – are embracing increasingly expansive policies to give parents direct control of public education funding.
This latter trend has the potential to turn around the former.
The reason is simple, but it cuts against the conventional wisdom about school improvement.
Systemic improvements are the key to better results. The legendary management guru, W. Edwards Deming, estimated that 94% of organizational productivity is determined by the systems within which people work. Hiring better people will not improve productivity if workplace systems do not also improve.
Imagine the world’s best NASCAR driver enters the Daytona 500 driving a car with a top speed of 90 miles per hour. Despite being the best driver on the track, this driver will lose. The system, in this case the car, is not designed to give the driver any chance to succeed.
Our low-performing systems in public education undermine the productivity of our teachers and students. The question is: how can we build higher-performing systems?
Four decades of improvement efforts led to public education’s third era
The idea that public education needs systemic improvements is not new. The 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, led to several decades of education reform initiatives. But as the most recent NAEP scores indicate, these efforts have generated mixed results.
Performance improved during the decade from 2003 to 2013, when the nation’s average fourth-grade math scores increased by seven points.
This period roughly coincides with the implementation of No Child Left Behind, perhaps the most ambitious top-down education improvement initiative in our country’s history.
But that improvement proved politically and practically unsustainable. Observers like Tim Daly argue that since the high-water mark of 2013, students and teachers have been living through an “education depression.”
I’m optimistic about a new generation of efforts to improve public education. They have a higher probability of being successful and sustainable, in part because they are rooted in larger societal changes, such as the rise of digital networks, mobile computing, and artificial intelligence.
These changes are transforming all aspects of our lives, including where and how we work, communicate, consume media, and educate our children.
These larger societal changes are pushing public education into what I call its third major era.
Shifting power to parents and educators
In this emerging third era, public education aspires to provide every child with an effective, customized education through an efficient public education market. This requires redistributing power from government to families and educators.
Money is power. A growing number of states equip families with flexible spending accounts, commonly called education savings accounts (ESAs), that enable families to use some of their children’s public education dollars to buy the materials and services they need to customize each student’s education.
In Florida, the families of over 500,000 public education students are spending more than $3.3 billion this school year to meet their students’ educational needs. This level of spending is giving Florida families power they have never had.
It is also empowering Florida’s educators to create innovative learning environments such as microschools, hybrid schools, virtual schools, tutoring programs, and homeschool co-ops, because families, including lower-income families, are now able to pay for them. School districts and charter schools are also strengthening Florida’s public education market, expanding options for students and even providing classes and other learning opportunities to ESA families.
This virtuous cycle between supply and demand has never existed in public education markets because the system’s primary customers — families — have never controlled public education dollars.
The rise of public education markets
Across the country, 21 states have created some form of ESAs or robust individual tax credits that allow families to participate in their states’ increasingly robust public education markets.
Many of these newly created programs differ from the earlier voucher programs in two important ways. First, they are open to all families, not just small, targeted groups, such as low-income families or students attending underperforming public schools.
Second, they allow participating educators to create a wide range of diverse learning opportunities for students, some of which look nothing like conventional schools.
An earlier generation of voucher programs largely served as an extension of top-down school accountability. They provided states with an extra “stick” to punish low-performing public schools, giving unsatisfied parents an opportunity to choose private schools instead.
Charles Barone and other critics are right to point out that those policies are unlikely to produce transformational improvements in public education.
Those earlier voucher programs did not work because they were too limited to produce a functioning market for education services. Families had limited flexibility in how to spend the money. They could select only conventional private schools, so educators were limited in their ability to offer new, different or better learning options. And only a small number of families were eligible, so there wasn’t enough demand to unleash the virtuous cycle of the market.
Creating state public education markets in which families are free to choose from a variety of learning options and educators are free to create new ones increases the chances that more educators will design the educational equivalent of new racecars with higher top speeds.
These systemic improvements are more likely to be sustainable because market-driven innovations do not require top-down coercion.
When NAEP scores rise again — and they will — the increased productivity enabled by well-functioning public education markets will be the primary reason.
