Andy Smarick, a partner in Bellwether Partners and a Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow at Fordham, dropped by Columbus last week to shake up the educational status quo, discussing his book The Urban School System of the Future.
The event, co-hosted by Fordham and School Choice Ohio, began with the premise that the century-old structure of the traditional school district is “broken” in large urban areas, leading to a long-standing cycle of poor performance for students and reform efforts that merely seek to “rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic” while retaining intact the flawed structure. In fact, Smarick argued that maintaining the district structure—and primacy—was often the starting point of many reforms. Charters were conceived as radical departures from the status quo—groups of teachers going off on their own to “reinvent schooling” outside the existing paradigm—but today are defined primarily in terms of how (and whether) they are better or worse than the district schools in their vicinity. Private school vouchers and tax-credit programs were born as “escape mechanisms” for families from failing district schools, without directly addressing the structural failings of the district that led to the need for escape in the first place.
Tens of thousands of students in Ohio, and many more nationwide have taken advantage of school choices and alternatives to traditional districts and yet very little reform of districts has actually happened despite the exodus occurring in every large city.
Smarick stressed the difference between the work of education and its “delivery systems,” using the evolution of technology as a metaphor. He sketched out a plan that would allow a diverse number of education delivery systems that would keep the focus on public education and on quality outcomes for students. The key, he said, is third-party accountability, which would set parameters for acceptable performance for all players and would be aggressive in supporting high performers to grow and expand while weeding out those not meeting high benchmarks for success.
While Smarick’s ideas sometimes sounded idealistic and even radical, he stressed that he was a conservative thinker and noted that many parts of the country have taken steps toward this type of urban schooling. Ohio, he pointed out, is much farther along than many states. Smarick urged his audience to actualize and accelerate efforts like those under way in Cleveland and those proposed for Columbus that put student success first and abandon old ways of delivering education, especially when they have proven to be ineffective.
