Following the watershed Vergara case in California, last week an advocacy group filed the first “copycat” lawsuit, this one challenging teacher-tenure laws in New York City. According to the complaint, firing a teacher in New York can take eighteen months and cost taxpayers upwards of $250,000—and when layoffs become necessary, they are done with consideration for seniority rather than job performance. All of this, they argue, violates the Empire State Constitution’s guarantee of a “sound and basic education.”
A San Francisco–based design company called Ideo (best known for designing the first laptop computer) has been hired to design a network of low-cost private schools in Lima, Peru—which, in the three years since it was first tasked with the project, has grown to serve 13,500 students in twenty-three schools (at which 61 percent of second graders scored “proficient” in math, compared with 17 percent for the nation as a whole). Design companies are increasingly being asked to revamp complex systems for governments, nonprofits, and businesses, and this trend has gained a foothold in education. And indeed, there exists precedent for introducing private schooling into developing nations to serve poor families (see, for example, James Tooley’s excellent book The Beautiful Tree.) Interestingly, rather than being asked to design individual parts of systems as is more common, Ideo has been tasked with creating a holistic design for the entire system of schools, which is rather novel.
