Department for Education and Skills, UK
2001
Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has published a 74 page "white paper" that sets forth the direction it intends to move British primary-secondary education during Blair's second term. The emphasis is on high schools. The rhetorical and policy thrust-this may not surprise you-is a blend of standards, accountability, flexibility and diversity, including the creation of distinctive new schools, some of them religious. But the main controversy centers on the government's plan to outsource failing schools to private operators and to encourage other schools to outsource various services. Not bad for a Labour Government, one is tempted to say. Yet there may be less to it than meets the eye. When a school voluntarily teams up with an outside organization, for example, its staff must remain government employees. Even when a failing school is involuntarily "outsourced" to a private operator, its staff, again, may opt to remain public employees rather than employees of the private operator. And while a successful school can gain some freedom with respect to teacher pay and working conditions, there will be no individual contracts, i.e. the group-think collective-bargaining framework remains intact. In sum, there are many good ideas here but in almost every instance the government seems to have begun its journey with one leg intentionally broken. Still, we wish them well-K-12 education in Britain needs improvement as badly as in the U.S.-and will be watching with interest. To get a copy of Schools Achieving Success, the fastest route is to surf to http://www.dfes.gov.uk/achievingsuccess.
