INDEPENDENCE ISSUE PAPER Issue Paper #6-91 June 1991 PARENT CONTROL OF SCHOOL: DENVER FLUNKS THE CHICAGO TEST Will CDM mean ‘Can’t Do Much’ or ‘Consumers Demand More’? By Edward L. Lederman J.D. ES INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE 14142 DENVER WEST PARKWAY, SUITE 185 GOLDEN, COLORADO 80401 (303) 279-6536 FAX (303) 279-4176 ;,and the authors speak for 1e Independence Instt attempt t0 inFor Immediate Release Contact: John Andrews June 28, 1991 303/279-6536 - 0 303/770-8215 - H POLICY STUDY: DENVER SCHOOL EXPERIMENT FATALLY FLAWED Collaborative decision-making, the system of committees that will run each school under Denver's new teacher contract, is unlikely to deliver more parental control or better learning performance. Parent Control of Schools: Denver Flunks the Chicago Test, Independence Issue Paper No. 6-91 by Ed Lederman, draws this < concluston-The paper was published this week by the Independence Institute, a Colorado think tank specializing in education reform. Lederman concludes that the CDM plan in Denver, devised by Gov. Roy Romer to avert a teacher strike, seems destined to fail where local school councils in Chicago are succeeding. Apparent similarities between the two decentralization efforts are outweighed by differences in how the reforms originated political ly and how they share power in the community. The author points out that the Chicago reform was demanded by a parent-business- minority coalition, gives parents a voting majority on each council, and lets a council fire its principal. He says the Romer scheme for Denver, by contrast, springs from no broad movement, puts educators in the majority, and relies on unrealistic hopes of consensus and goodwill. Researcher Lederman is @ businessman and attorney, past candidate for school board, and Denver Public Schools parent. A previous paper he wrote for the Independence Institute, How Union Contracts Block School Reform, prepared the way for the school board's August 1990 contract proposal that would have decentralized management and empowered principals, the proposal whose rejection by teachers led to Romer's intervention and the CDM plan. The new paper tells how the school board and CDM committees themselves could exercise their legal and contractual discretion to make the decentralization experiment work better, and it recommends formation of a community watchdog group to monitor signs of progress. A companion article by John Andrews, chairman of the U.S. Intergovernmental Advisory Council on Education, argues that only a voucher system can ultimately improve Denver's education system. Parent Control of Schools can be ordered by mail, or phone, or fax at $5.00 per copy from the Independence office, 303/279-6536 (fax 279-4176).ANDREWS: YELTSIN AND ROMER - Continued their child's goals and abilities, and which gives best evidence of genuine results in the classroom. It will not give mom and dad direct control over a lousy principal or a lazy teacher. When demanding educational value for Billy or Susie, they still have only the weak leverage of an occasional election, not the strong leverage of an immediate financial cutoff. Sure, CDM lets schools differentiate themselves to meet a range of consumer needs. It lets schools drive themselves to meet the tough global competition. But it does not make them do those things, because their enrollment and thei funding will just keep rolling along regardless. Anyone who thinks a few glitzy committees are going to make thousands of bureaucratic employees begin knocking themselves out for improvement, when mediocrity doesn't hurt then in the wallet and excellence doesn't reward them in the wallet, isn't dealing with human nature as we know it in the real world. Wrong Travel Destination It's too bad that the Governor's itch for travel took him to Tokyo, where he seems to have overdosed on participative managenent theory, instead of to Moscow, where he could have tasted the tonic of market forces, incentives, competition, and choice. Boris Yeltsin could have told Romer that the only way to really improve education is to desocialize the learning industry. That means a voucher system to let parents shop and make educators compete. And guess what: the federal judge in Denver has even suggested that vou- chers may be the only remedy that would get him to lift his wasteful and counter- Productive busing order. Come on, Roy, wake up and smell the coffee. Thank goodness my parents made the sacrifice and paid to put us kids in a good independent school. There we learned the wise words of G.B. Shaw, who Said that socialism won't work because all those committees eat up everybody's evenings, and Northcote Parkinson, who said that the last act of dying organization is to rewrite its rulebook. I'm afraid these cold truths provide the epitaph for DPS and CDM. It's a pity, but perhaps the coming disillusionment will serve to hasten Colorado's Ultimate turn toward vouchers. John Andrews, president of the Independence Institute, was a candidate for Governor of Colorado last year and is President Bush's appointee as chairman of the Inter- governmental Advisory Council on Education.