Rick Hess opens his book, The Same Thing Over and Over, by asking readers to imagine the following scenario:
How would you respond if asked for a plan to transform America’s schools into a world-class, twenty-first century system?
Then imagine that there is one condition: you must retain the job descriptions, governance arrangements, management practices, compensation strategies, licensure requirements, and calendar of the existing system.
Hopefully, you would flee just as fast as you possibly could.
Red tape stifles innovation, dynamism, and entrepreneurship in public schooling, while creating a culture of risk aversion and defensiveness. These latter two are hardly the features of nimble organizations that can adapt to a changing world; rather, they are the marks of decaying institutions.
Here in Ohio, state leaders are taking note. On several occasions, both Governor John Kasich and Senate President Keith Faber have expressed their desire to “deregulate” public education. That is great news. Yet the task of deregulation is not a simple one. It requires carefully distinguishing the areas where the state has a valid regulatory role from those where it should defer to local, on-the-ground decision making.
The regulatory framework that we at Fordham have advocated is “tight-loose.” In a state policy context, this implies that the state, vis-à-vis districts, should be tight on districts’ results but loose on how they achieve them. In other words, Ohio policymakers should set rigorous academic goals for schools, assess whether they are meeting them, hold them accountable for results—and then back off in virtually all other realms.
In this piece, I analyze the deregulation proposals currently contained in House Bill 64 (HB 64), the governor’s budget bill, and Senate Bill 3 (SB 3), a high-priority bill recently passed by the upper house. The proposals are promising and could provide a starting point for more significant deregulation in the days ahead. Both HB 64 and SB 3 include provisions that would free “high-performing” districts from certain mandates without undermining accountability.
Comparison of HB 64 and SB 3
The bills are mostly similar in the exemptions that they provide, but they diverge on the criteria for identifying “high-performing” districts. For more details about the state report card measures referenced in the table below, see here or here. The table below compares the two proposals.
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The Pros and Cons
The big step forward is the permission to hire non-licensed teachers, which is contained in both bills. Teacher licensure is a classic “barrier-to-entry” regulation that shrinks the pool of potential teachers that schools may hire. With a smaller pool of candidates, a school’s ability to hire top-flight teachers, especially in harder-to-staff areas like special education, science, and math, could be impaired. Think of it this way: If talent acquisition is paramount in improving the performance of public schools, why should we bind schools’ hands when it comes to hiring? Especially if some of the licensure requirements, as a precondition for hiring, don’t relate to effectiveness?
The other provisions are praiseworthy too: For too long, regional Education Service Centers (ESCs) have been guaranteed state funding regardless of the demand for their services. The rigid class-size requirements infringe upon school leaders’ flexibility in classroom organization. For instance, one could imagine a high school class being taught in a 150 student lecture hall. Or as we discovered in our Right-sizing the Classroom report, principals could assign more students to highly effective teachers, while assigning fewer students to developing ones—and potentially lift overall achievement.
The downside of these provisions is their narrowness in scope. First, they signal that the state only entrusts a few high-performing districts—and, it must be noted, largely high-wealth districts—to have greater managerial discretion. (The governor’s proposal is especially narrow.) Why not allow a broader set of districts to have the same management rights—particularly if we think greater flexibility can lead to higher performance? Second, the bills only deal with a small number of regulatory matters. Many more regulations should be on the table for debate.
The bottom line is this: These provisions are an excellent start to what should become a broader deregulation discussion.
Looking Ahead
The responsibility of the state is to ensure rigorous statewide standards, assessments, and accountability systems—as well as basic health and safety rules and a certain level of funding and accounting for those dollars. Arguably, that’s about it. That means that the state should consider the many other areas where it interferes with local decision making.
If state lawmakers can maintain strict accountability for schooling outcomes, major deregulatory efforts could potentially unwind any number of laws and regulations that go beyond the scope of the “high-performing” district exemptions in HB 64 and SB 3. They include rolling back state mandates in matters like minimum instructional time; curricular requirements; governance structures (e.g., prescriptions on the number of board members and term lengths); principal, superintendent, and treasurer licensure; public employee labor law, including collective bargaining; teacher evaluation; teacher tenure (i.e., “continuing contracts”); teacher salaries; retirement and health care benefits; school bus specifications; disciplinary policies and dress codes; business advisory councils; and so much more.
A Chinese proverb states, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” The high-performing district provisions in HB 64 and SB 3 provide small steps—baby steps—forward. Ohio lawmakers should continue to examine state statute and regulation to uncover the areas deserving of “deregulation.”
