'Undistricting' Creates Top Quality
Q. Organizing
schools into districts seems like a smart management policy that dates back
many, many years. But have we outgrown that model, in this era of
computerization that should be replacing bureaucracy? Would we get better
educational quality if we shed the district bureaucracy? Should we do away with
school districts as a management structure, in order to get out from under the
massive nonteaching school bureaucracy and all its related counter-productive
regulations and burdensome non-classroom costs?
In rankings of the top
high schools in the United States, a growing portion of the list are
"undistricted" schools - schools that aren't limited to drawing students only
from within a defined geographical area, and don't have a lot of bureaucracy
and regulation impeding school operations from the district level, as most
public high schools do.
Consider
the State of Arizona, which has less than 2% of the nation's K-12 students, but
recently placed three schools on the "Best 100 Public High Schools" listing by U.S. News and World Report. Those three
high schools are all "undistricted" schools:
·
University High School in Tucson, a magnet school
·
Basis Tucson, a charter school
·
Northland Preparatory Academy in Flagstaff, a charter school
None of the state's
traditional public high schools made the list. And Matthew Ladner of the
Goldwater Institute thinks that's important to note.
Ladner is an advocate of
school choice, and he points to the honor given to those three nontraditional
high schools as a prime example of the quality that separating students from a
district-level bureaucracy, with all its imposed rules and excess costs, can
create.
Ladner also pointed out
that, based on standardized test scores, nine of the top 10 public schools in
Maricopa County, Phoenix, are charter schools.
While neither charter
schools nor traditional public schools can use admission tests or other
admission criteria for enrolling students, the fact that the teachers in
charter schools have more freedom, and students can choose to go there, are key
factors for why charter schools excel over traditional public schools, where
you are forced to go by district rules.
Ladner writes: "Here's a
little food for thought: with charters and magnets doing so well, what is the
point of having school district administrative bureaucracies at all? They're
not helping produce top 100 national or top 10 local schools and they divert
quite a bit of funding away from the classroom. Maybe all the talk about
"redistricting" schools should really be talk about
"un-districting."
For more about school
choice and Ladner's ideas, see www.goldwaterinstitute.org
Homework: One
of the best high schools in the country is Lowell High School in San Francisco.
It is "undistracted" in the sense that students don't have to live within any
geographical confines to be admitted. The richly diverse student body all are
selected for their high standardized test scores, grades in middle school, a
writing sample, and diverse extracurricular activities. Lowell has produced an
incredible number of leaders in all walks of life, in all skin colors and
creeds, from all income levels. It appears that the fact that you apply to get
in is this school's competitive edge. You don't HAVE to go there; you WANT to
go there. High schools that operate solely within a school district don't have
that aspect. For more about Lowell, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Francisco)