New Hope for America's Schools

This issue of the RAND Research Review focuses on America's schools. In the lead article, Paul T. Hill argues for sweeping changes in the way public education is governed. Hill, a senior RAND analyst, is the author of High Schools with Character and a long-time champion of reforms aimed at helping inner-city schools. He looks at the system through the eyes of one who has seen decades of reform efforts fail to improve the lives of poor, minority and immigrant children trapped in decaying urban schools--institutions that in the words of Secretary of Education Richard Riley "should never be called schools at all."

Hill's diagnosis is that nothing will change until local schools are freed from the heavy hand of a many-layered bureaucracy that has become divorced from public needs and incapable of renewing itself. His prescription: Allow each school to be its own unit of governance--that is, let it be operated by an independent organization, based on a school-specific contract that would define the school's mission, guarantee public funding and ensure accountability.

But other studies reported in these pages are more cautious about the need for a radical overhaul of the public school system. Rather, their findings suggest that many schools may be doing at least some things right because, contrary to common perceptions, student test scores are on the rise, the achievement gap separating minority and white students is narrowing and the productivity of American workers--themselves the product of the nation's education and training system--is still the highest in the world.

However, there is another, subtler message in these studies: Beware the assumptions that give rise to reforms. If they are flawed, then the reforms aimed at correcting the perceived problems will miss their mark, undermining the credibility of future innovations and exhausting the willingness of schools to undertake them.

As one author notes, it may be trite but it is true that education is a "complex mix of successes and failures . . . what works in one context or for one group of students may fail for another." In the early 1980s, when people were reasonably concerned about falling test scores, they asked for wholesale changes in policies without first asking which policies most needed changing or which students or schools most needed new policies. We must ask those questions now.

Roger Benjamin, Director
The Institute on Education and Training

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Articles

• Contracting: The Case for Privately Operated Public Schools
• The Decentralization Mirage
• The Family and Student Achievement
• Test Scores and the School Reform Debate
• Is Education to Blame for U.S. "Economic Decline"?
• Institute on Education and Training Brings a New Brand of Research to School Reform
• Recent Education Publications

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