That many of our vast public school systems are all but ungovernable doesn't stop the powers that be from searching far and wide for messiah-like figures to lead them. Philadelphia's latest quest for the perfect executive led the City of Brotherly Love to select Paul Vallas, who rides in from Chicago to see whether he can lead another troubled urban system out of educational perdition. As The Philadelphia Inquirer said, "It's hard to imagine a person with better credentials...to lead a radical academic makeover of an urban school system." The less reverent Daily News, however, warned him that "Philadelphia's education problems are much harder than the Windy City's. To paraphrase a famous Chicago saying, Philadelphia might not be ready for reform."
The paper noted some inhospitable features of the local scene: a mayor who doesn't want to be responsible for education, state officials who don't mind being responsible but will be out of office in January, a famously intransigent teachers union, even a separate union of school principals.
The point, of course, is that it's possible to surround even the finest leader with crippling constraints. Despite what looked a few months back like the brightest big-city education reform opportunity in the land, Philadelphia may be greeting its new public-school CEO with the kiss of Judas.
Up the turnpike, New York City is the scene of another leadership drama. Mayor Bloomberg is auditioning candidates to run that city's sprawling school system, over which he has now wrested effective political control-at the cost of agreeing to a generous teachers' union contract that contains no reforms whatsoever. He's being secretive and coy, prompting much speculating. Will he go with a minority woman? Black or Hispanic? A proven administrator? A newcomer to Gotham or one who knows his way around the city's Byzantine politics? Why didn't he pluck Vallas from Philadelphia's fingers?
It doesn't help that hizzoner has divulged nothing about his own plans and priorities for the school system-assuming he has such. Because there are no policy initiatives to appraise, the chancellor search gets invested with even greater drama.
But one doesn't have to be a New Yorker to be a wee bit cynical about it. As Anemona Hartocollis recently wrote in the Times, "In the annals of the maddeningly frequent quest for a...chancellor, there are a few examples of the unconventional, let's-really-shake-things-up candidacies. They always fizzled."
As in Philadelphia-and as Roy Romer has painfully learned in Los Angeles-pure leadership doesn't equal effective education reform. If the deck is stacked against the CEO-if the mayor or school board isn't solidly behind him, if the unions are hostile, if the business community isn't united, if there's no strong team of second-tier executives at school headquarters-nobody can lead effectively. That's even true in far smaller systems, such as Dayton's, which has just promoted deputy superintendent Percy Mack to the top job. One can only wish him-and Vallas and New York's ??-well as they embark upon these mostly thankless missions.
Speaking of CEO's, as the markets gyrate and Congress frantically seeks a legislative mechanism for making corporations and accountants clean up their acts and tell the truth, the education parallels struck me hard. No Child Left Behind could fairly be seen as the federal government's effort to make K-12 education clean up its act and tell people the truth. (So, in a way, is the pending bill to overhaul the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.)
There's not a lot of outright fraud in education (except for some sleazy Internet operations advertising cut-rate college degrees based on one's life experience) but there's plenty of shading the truth and an acute shortage of truly independent audits by truly objective outsiders. Parents told that their child (or school) is "at grade level" are seldom told what that means (simply an "average" score on a normed test taken by others in the same grade, no matter whether that average is laudable or awful). Taxpayers and voters told that "seventy percent of this state's fourth graders scored at or above the 'proficient' level on the state test" are told nothing about who decided what cut-off denotes proficiency or how this compares with other states' (or the National Assessment's) expectations. When SAT scores sagged, the College Board responded by "recentering" them, which had the practical effect of adding a hundred points or so to everybody's scores. Such shenanigans make people feel good but deny them the sometimes-harsh truth.
The underlying problem is that most education standards are set, tests administered and scores reported not by objective outsiders but by those running the education system itself or with a stake in how it looks. In other words, there's no meaningful external audit. Or if there is the semblance of one (e.g. a testing company hired by the state to administer and score its assessments), as with Arthur Andersen's relationships with Enron and WorldCom, the auditor depends for its future business on whether it pleases its client, which is the organization that wants to look good on the audit, not the more nebulous and distant constituencies that crave the truth.
Until recently, local school systems chose their own tests-thus giving rise to the notorious "Lake Wobegon" effect-and when it came time to report the results, it was the local superintendent spinning the data in his own press release, which was usually all that the media could understand or report. Much of this persists today, but the advent of state standards and tests (foreshadowed by older examples like the New York Regents' exams) began to create a semblance of an external audit. This, however, put enormous pressure on state test givers and test contractors and, at the end of the day, they, too, have often succumbed to the need to look good, to ensure that a politically acceptable fraction of children get promoted and graduate, etc.
Enter Uncle Sam. For a decade, he trusted the states to get it right. That was the thrust of federal education reform in the 1990's, including the Goals 2000 program and the 1994 E.S.E.A. reauthorization. Washington admonished states to set standards, give tests and create accountability mechanisms, but it pretty much left them to do these things in their own ways.
That didn't work very well. Lots of states faltered, dithered or opted for non-confrontational, feel-good arrangements. Student achievement remained flat. Gaps did not narrow. Many schools lingered on the "unsatisfactory" list. It's not unlike Washington's prolonged period of trusting corporate America and the accounting profession to do the right thing, with the Securities and Exchange Commission monitoring. That hasn't worked so well, either, and for much the same reason: because a system built on trust depends on the veracity, rigor, conscientiousness, courage and public-mindedness of those being trusted. And sometimes those qualities turn out to be in short supply.
Now Congress is rushing to crack down on dubious corporate accounting practices and to ensure that outside audits are truly independent and honest. No Child Left Behind does much the same thing to K-12 education. It manifests Washington's discontent with the education system's own truthfulness-and greater discontent with the system's capacity to reform itself. Now, therefore, we find all sorts of federal rules about how tests will be given, scored and reported, about what will be on school report cards, about what should be done to faltering schools, and so forth.
This isn't easy, either. We've identified many ways in which states (and perhaps schools) can fiddle and finagle the NCLB requirements. No doubt corporate CEOs and accounting firms will also devise ways to ease the pinch of whatever new rules Congress finally lays upon them. At the end of the day, in a free society with a relatively light-handed government, all these federal requirements do is boost the odds that people and institutions will do what they should. Those bent on duping others will still manage to misbehave. The sad fact is that we don't have any fully satisfactory way of compensating for the erosion of trust, integrity and truthfulness.
"Vallas in Wonderland," Editorial, The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 11, 2002
"A Welcome to Paul Vallas," Editorial, Philadelphia Daily News, July 11, 2002
"Search for New Chancellor Loses a Leading Candidate" by Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times, July 10, 2002 (available for a fee at http://www.nytimes.com)
