SCHOOLING AND SOCIETY

Ideal School Systems

How community-administered and state-
regulated school systems best serve
purposes of schooling and public
education

Contents
Introduction........................................................................................ .....................2
Purposes of Schools....................................................................................... ..........3
Ideal School Systems......................................................................................... ......5
An Alternative?.................................................................................... ....................9
Conclusion............................................................................................ .................11
Works Cited............................................................................... ............................12

Jason J. Wong

4/6/2009
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Introduction

On a typical school day, the American education system educates almost

49 million students in approximately 100,000 public K-12 schools.1 Including

private schools, the American education system includes almost 55 million

students. The public education system is perhaps the most direct way that the

government influences the lives of thevast majority of its citizens. In terms of

social services, only Social Security and Medicare come close to the level of

interaction with individuals that schools have. For many students, this system is

failing. In some states, the high school drop-out rate hovers around 60%— or

worse.2 My outline for an ideal school system attempts to maximize the

strengths of both state-supported and community-oriented school systems to

address each other’s weaknesses and provide a meaningful, responsive,

efficient, and equitable school system for all students.

This paper beginswith an analysis of the many different purposes of

schooling that people have hoped to achieve. Then, I explain how the ideal

public school system should function and address these goals and objectives. I

look at alternative school systems and explain where they fall short, and how a

state/community hybrid school system addresses those weaknesses. Finally, we

conclude with the idea that although a state/community hybrid school system is

1
http://www.localschooldirectory.com/
2
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/education/20graduation.html
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imperfect, and difficult to carry out in practice, it is the best system

administratively, socially and economically for our time.

Purposes of Schools

The purpose of schooling revolves around the development of two ideals:

1) the development of the individual (private goals), and 2) the development of

the citizen (public goals). Ultimately, I believe that these two goals can address

most if notall of the purposes of education that many theorists, including Friere,

Hofstadter, Galston, Counts, Lazerson, and Grubb all espouse. The purposes of

schooling have been continuously contested among intellectual heavyweights,

and ideas have also changed over time. Since the early twentieth century, the

goals set out for education have been many and varied, and have taken to

account ideas of social justice, economic considerations, the benefits of being

“educated,” etc.. Many of these goals and visions for a proper school system

are valid and not inherently wrong. Why shouldn’t we expect a public school

system address social, economic, and individual goals at the same time?

History has shown that it is difficult to meet all these goals at the same time, but

that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t. The ideal school system should

adequately strive to fulfill high standards, and be satisfied with nothing less.

During the Civil Rights era, George Counts wrote about the idea of social

justice, and the ability for schools to educate students about how to change

society to become more just (). Three decades later, Richard Hofstadter wrote

about how qualities of intelligence different with qualities of intellect, and that it

is the goal of schools (or that it should be the goal of schools) to develop their

students’ intellect. Whereas intelligence “seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order,

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adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines.” ()

Education, then, becomes a means and an end unto itself. Paulo Freire went

further, and wrote about education as a form of liberation (). Freire writes that

the ideal of education is that “the teacher-student and the students-teachers

reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this

reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and

action.” () Simply, in Freire’s view, a great education transcends power

relationships and allows the world to be analyzed and thought about without

deceit. People such as William Galston believe that schools should teach

citizenship and educate students on how to flourish in a democratic state ().

Recently, Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson have written about the economic

purposes of schooling, and try to balance the ideas of vocational education for

economic benefit, and the need for a minimum standard for knowledge that all

individuals should obtain ().

There is no reason that a proper school system cannot address all or most

of these goals. Most of these goals are not mutually exclusive, and many are

mutually supportive. For example, a more equally educated society might

correlate with a more just society, and a more egalitarian education system

might promote economic and social equality. There is an argument that conflict

exists betweenpublic goals and private goals. Even if this were the case, private

goals largely benefit from the development public goals. Take public safety and

my individual quest for financial security, for instance. While it is my private

goal to acquire wealth, I benefit by having rules and regulations in place that

limit my ability to take shortcuts to acquire that wealth. This also affords me
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protection against others who would seek to overpower, cheat,or swindle me.

Therefore, maintaining the public order supersedes, and even supports, my

private objective of obtaining fortune, as long as the economic system considers

both public objectives (law and order), and private objectives at the same time.

Similarly, a proper school system takes both private goals and public goals into

account, and maximizes the harmonious development of both.

Ideal School Systems

The best system for organizing a school system revolves around

accountable community autonomy, which takes into account the strengths of

both community-centered school systems and state-regulated school systems. A

similar idea was also espoused by Archon Fung in his book, Empowered

Participation. In it, Fung writes about how accountable autonomy manages the

complicated task of balancing discretion versus accountability, and how “school

systems can become more responsive, fair, innovative, and effective by

incorporating empowered participation and deliberation into their governance

structures” (). Empowering communities requires a level of decentralization to

give localities meaningful decision-making and administrative power, while

holding these communities accountable also requires a level of centralization of

power in order to regulate. Thus, the ideal school systemscombines a bottom-

up and top-down approach to simultaneously check each other’s weaknesses

and take advantage of each other’s strengths. An accountable community

school system utilizes the local community of teachers, parents, students,

administration, and other community members to make the majority of

meaningful decisions about a school, and yet also utilizes a strong central and
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national educational organization to give guidance, ensure equality across

schools throughout the system, and ensure compliance to relevant regulations

and public goals.

On its own, a community-centered school district is a powerful tool for

addressing the local needs and diverse characteristics of different communities.

The strengths of a community-centered school system are many. Community-

centered school systems are flexible, and ideally can take advantage and/or

more directly address local educational objectives and needs. Furthermore, in

an ideal community-centered school system, the community at large is engaged

with the responsibility of educating the next generation of citizenry, helping to

establish social relationships and engaging more citizens in political

process/civic governance. As Fung noted, the community-centered school

system model “emphasizes the positive and constructive face of autonomy—the

capacity, indeed responsibility, of groups to achieve public ends that they set for

themselves—as much as the emancipatory aspect of shedding centrally

imposed constraints and demands.” ()

Therefore, the majority of decisions in an ideal community-centered

school system, and our hybrid system, should be made by a locally elected body

for each school which includes parent, teacher, administrative and student

representation. The school site council’s responsibilities should be clearly

delineated from the school administration’s responsibilities to prevent

interference and muddled school leadership. In effect, each school would act as

a miniature school district. The school site council will have a say in the hiring

and firing of the school administration, shaping the overall school budget, and
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crafting school policies, much like a school board, but the school principal should

be tasked with all of the administrative responsibilities of running a school,

including creating teaching schedules, ensuring school compliance with district,

state, and national goals, etc., much like a district superintendent.

On the other hand, a community-centered school district, when not held

accountable to a more centralized power with a system-wide view, can

propagate inequality. Some communities may have higher, or different,

standards than other communities. Furthermore, communities that are

predisposed with greater resources, types and levels of expertise, etc. will be

advantaged over other communities. In comparing urban and rural school

districts with suburban school districts, Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan

Scovronick referred to discrepancies among different school systems and

communities as “nested inequalities” (). A strong centralized power can work to

address these inequalities.

Where the community-based school system fall short, districts, states, and

the federal government should step in to ensure some form of minimal

standards and achievementacross all schools across the nation. Accountable-

autonomous school systems necessarily rely on a larger institution to ensure

that public priorities are being enacted, and that school systems are constantly

improving and evolving to address student needs. The idea of a state-centered

public school system was also espoused by Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan

Scovronick in The American Dream and the Public Schools. The idea of a state-

centered public school system is to strengthen and maintain social order and

upward social mobility. Essentially, the state will look at the performance of
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schools overall from a more global perspective. At the same time, local

communities are tasked with handling administrative details, but are also given

the freedom to utilize resources to best address local needs that may be

different from other communities. The state can step in to interfere with local

community schools and school systems only when their performance

meaningfully and/or significantly lags behind their peers, and the state should

only be involved with managing the local school or school system until it is

stabilized, and given the resources, and/or expertise, to perform on par with

other schools and school districts.

In that regard, an institution with a perspective across all school systems

is important because this national body will be able to more accurately ascertain

which local school systems are falling behind as well as disseminate information

quickly system-wide. Furthermore, as Finn noted, there is an information

vacuum with regards to student performance and what is happening in schools,

therefore preventing various stakeholders from being accountable to increasing

student performance (). By utilizing a standard yardstick, a state/national entity

can increase transparency across the country and across different school

districts to measure relative performance.

In sum, a public school system ideallyutilizes the strengths of community-

centered school systems and state-school systems to enhance public education

and resolve or minimize the shortcomings of the other. For states, a great

shortcoming is that bureaucracies can have a slow response time, and be

unresponsive to local needs and situations. On the other hand, communities,

where these problems can be noticed immediately, and be noticed directly, can
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address the concerns of a slow and unresponsive bureaucracy. A great

shortcoming for community-centered school systems is that the academic

standards and rigor across school systems can be highly diverse, and students

in comparatively lax school systems can be left behind. There may be cases in

specific communities where experience in, for example, parliamentary

procedure and balancing a budget, may be lacking. In these cases, it is

important that a central authority step in to 1) provide the training, and/or 2)

take over until a capable local governing body is organized. Although he

espouses community control, Fung writes that schools and districts, when “left

to their independent devices, some would surely flounder while others excelled

at problem-solving due to their superior wealth, deliberative capacity, or brute

luck.” () Therefore, Fung is also a proponent of some form of centralized control,

that can step in when necessary to equalize achievement and performance gaps

().

The idea is that schools will mostly be run by local governing and

administrative bodies, such as school site councils and principals. Participants

will be doubly accountable both to the expectations of the community, and the

expectations of the centralized authority. The larger state and national

governments will ensure that each local community is meeting a set of minimal

standards, and will step in to run and train the bottom rung of school systems

until they are on the path to improvement, as well as be a medium for spreading

useful information across the entire school system at large. This vision is

different from what is currently available because currently there is little

collaboration between communities and states in educating young children, and

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furthermore very few school districts empower local school site councils to

provide meaningful input and influence in school decisions.

An Alternative?

Aside from the concerns mentioned above, there are also poignant

concerns brought up by people such as Milton Friedman, who believe in the idea

that the best way to improve public education practice is to rely on free-market

principles. The idea is that a market oriented system is more flexible than most

other systems to respond to parents’ and families’ demands. A market oriented

system, they argue, will also offer a plethora of choices for parents to choose

from, as long as there is a demand for those services, and by schools competing

against one another for students inefficient organizations will go out of business

and further competition will bring about better performance.

In a privatized school system, however, there is no mechanism to ensure

that students will receive an education that responds to social objectives rather

than individual objects. Simply put, individual goals and social goals can come

into conflict, and when that is the case this school system is heavily influenced

by individual goals because choice will be left to the individual. A privatized

system can alsoincrease economic inequalities more than a state-centered

school system or a community-focused school system. The best private school

organizations may attempt to choose the best students, and/or the cheapest

students to educate, potentially leaving students who can’t supplement their

school vouchers, have learning disabilities, are ELL students, or aren’t the

easiest students to teach (i.e. have personality disorders or who don’t conform

to cultural expectations of the school) behind. A public school system full of

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high achieving schools inherently is more egalitarian than the selection

processes for private schools, and therefore, a choice between a high achieving

public school system should be preferable to a high achieving private school

system that is not held accountable to the public at large, but just to smaller,

more distinct and potentially homogenous, communities.

Friedman points out that the state up to now has been relatively incapable

of running a high achieving school system and that furthermore, the current

situation is already inequitable because some families already have easier

access to the capital required to access the very best institutions and education.

School vouchers may give students of lower income backgrounds better access

to elite institutions that previously had been reserved for the rich and the elite.

A public school system that shares principles with the private market economy

should also inherently be more susceptible to innovation due to competition,

and furthermore will be held directly accountable to each of its consumers, the

students and their families. If private schools are unsuccessful in this model,

they will close, and schools with successful/popular practices and

accomplishments will flourish. On the other hand, private schools have

incentives not to share best practices with other schools in order to maintain

their competitive advantage. In this manner, a private marketplace for schools

can also discourage innovation and collaboration system-wide. Furthermore, if

schools are not held accountable to a more centralized authority like the state

government, then private schools can still propagate inequality as well as have

their interests be influenced by special interests.

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For example, in certain areas of America, schools that teach creationism

over evolution might have a market. Friedman states that it is acceptable for

the government to intervene when there are “neighborhood effects,” ()but in

this case it would be difficult to argue that slight or meaningful differences in

academic curriculum are equivalent to polluting a stream. In these cases,

students who attend schools such as those that teach creationism will find

themselves at a disadvantage in college admissions and perhaps job

opportunities. Thus, a private school system can also propagate inequality. A

public school system not based on profit-maximizing institutions better takes

public goals into consideration, even if a private school system may respond

better to individual goals and objectives.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that a community-based school

system cannot also achieve some of the benefits of a privatized school system.

Schools can be crafted to the specific needs of the community of students (or

the neighborhood community) that it serves. Parents, if frustrated with their

local community schools, are empowered to change the administration or

change the focus of the school, and states are empowered to take over failing

schools to try to make them more successful. What the free-market model

doesn’t address, that communities and states emphasize, are the development

of the social goals and public objectives of the country, in addition to the

individual goals and private objectives of students and families. It is also harder

to address inequalities in private school systems, because there isn’t an

envisioned common yardstick, by which to measure student performance and

achievement system-wide.
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Conclusion

In spite of the weaknesses presented in this paper concerning community-

centered school systems and state-run school systems, and the strengths

espoused by Milton Friedman concerning the free-market school system, a

school system that utilizes both communities and states to run schools is the

most ideal. While not entirely perfect, communities and states can form a

symbiotic relationship that works off each other’s strengths and helps address

each other’s weaknesses. A privatized school system, even a partially regulated

one, is inherently problematic where the product is a public good and some of

the objectives of schooling are broader than just serving individual goals and

objectives to also serving the goals of society. A community/state-based school

system can fulfill public objectives, ensure a minimal amount of standardization,

and address individual objectives that a privatized school system cannot, and

therefore is the best option.

Works Cited
Cardinal Newman, J. H. (1923). The Idea of the University. London: Longmans, Green and Co.

Counts, G. S. (1932). Dare the School Build a New Social Order? New York: Arno Press.

Finn, J. C. (1991). We Must Take Charge. New York: Free Press.

Freire, P. (1970). The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Friedman, M. (2002). Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Friedson, E. (2001). Professionalism: The Third Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fung, A. (2004). Empowered Participation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Galston, W. (1989). Civic Education and the Liberal State. In N. Rosenblum, Liberalism and
the Moral Life (pp. 89-101). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Grubb, N. W., & Lazerson, M. (2004). The Economic Gospel. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
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Hochschild, J., & Scovronick, N. (2003). The American Dream and the Public Schools. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Hofstadter, R. (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage Books.

Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering Toward Utopia. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.