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OCR for page 163
6
De Facto New Federalism
and Urban Education
Robert Andunga
THE CONTEXT
Imagine, if you will, the situation faced by John
Smith, principal of a large urban high school, as school
begins in the fall of 1984. He is sitting in his office
looking glumly at a stack of reports and background pa-
pers issued by a host of district, state, and national
task forces and commissions over the last year and a
half. All of them begin with urgent warnings about
America's future, move on to detail the failings of
American students and schools, and conclude with broad
recommendations for reforming education and thus revi-
talizing a stumbling economy.
At a very general level, the recommendations make
sense: We should modernize the curriculum, improve the
lot of teachers, make teaching a more attractive profes-
sion, streamline school organization, make the principal
an instructional leader, and use technology more widely
and efficiently to take advantage of the current inter-
est in education expressed by business and industry.
The reports have generated great community interest and
have influenced Smith's state legislature to mandate
tougher graduation requirements, propose a merit pay
plan for teachers, and readjust the state's school fi-
nance formula.
Dr. Smith is an optimistic sort of man and is grate-
ful that so many people have become interested in educa-
tion. He can remember when he wondered if anyone cared
at all about what he was doing. For years he wrestled
with low pupil achievement, low motivation, high absen-
teeism and pupil turnover, violence in the halls and
classrooms, a rising tide of students speaking obscure
languages, teacher strikes, and weak community support
163
.
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164
And all he got was mounting criticism about declining
test scores. In the past 20 years he has had to blend
into his usual core program numerous pullout programs
for disadvantaged students, handicapped students, and
bilingual students; he has had to set up remedial
courses for teenagers who could not read, make special
arrangements for pregnant teens, establish parallel
athletic programs for women, and comply with the court's
desegregation mandates.
Nevertheless, Smith has managed to begin a modest
school improvement program over the past few years. He
has persuaded many teachers that their students are cap-
able of learning; he has raised their expectations and
tried to give them more control over their professional
lives; he has told them he is supportive of change and
wants to involve them in more in-service training. He
has read the Effective schools research and even vis-
ited some urban schools that have developed effective
new programs. If he can persuade the community that he
is already making progress toward revitalizing his
school, if he can get out from under his paperwork, and
if he can prevent the superintendent from forcing him to
start all over again in order to comply with all these
new recommendations, he thinks he may have a pretty good
year.
FEDERAL I SM AND TH E SCOWLS
This paper began with the imaginary principal in
order to place this discussion of federalism in the con-
crete context of school renewal and reform. Experience
over the past 20 years has shown that some arrangements
of local, state, and federal responsibilities can help
schools improve, while other arrangements can impede
school reform and impair the educational process. The
challenge for every urban community engaged in school
renewal is to find a mix of responsibilities that places
the greatest power to effect change in the hands of the
most appropriate people and provides the strongest in-
centives for them to act both in their own interest and
in the interest of renewal.
This discussion of federalism includes not only the
formal system of federal, state, and local relationships
in education but also the informal relationships among
different levels of the elementary-secondary education
system--i.e., individual schools, districts, intermedi-
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165
ate units, state education departments, state boards,
state agencies, and federal agencies and programs, in-
cluding, of course, the courts. Only elementary and
secondary education issues are discussed; changes in
urban policy for postsecondary education are equally
interesting but would require a much longer paper.
Finally, the focus is on urban school districts,
because they have been the proving grounds where numer-
ous federalist strategies have been tested and refined
over the years. Consider the following facts about
urban schools:
· Although urban schools serve only 11 percent of all
public school students in the country, they enroll al-
most a third of all minority children (Casserly, 1983).
The schools in 23 of the 25 largest cities enroll pre-
dominantly minority students--on average, about 70 per-
cent (Bencivenga, 1983).
· The Hispanic share of urban school enrollment has
doubled in the past 12 years. Hispanic young people now
constitute one-fifth of all students in urban schools.
Asian enrollment has tripled in the past decade. One-
third of all limited English-speaking students are en-
rolled in urban schools (Casserly, 1983:5,7).
· Largely for the above reasons, urban schools re-
ceive a disproportionate share of federal education
revenues. In 1972, they received 21 percent of all fed-
eral education revenues; in 1982-1983, the proportion
was 15 percent--more than double the average share
nationally. Currently, they receive about 21 percent of
all Title I-Chapter 1 appropriations (Casserly, 1983:42)
~ Two-thirds of the cities included in the Council of
Great City Schools underwent litigation or court-ordered
desegregation in the past 15 years. Many are still
under court orders involving such things as quotas, bus-
ing, human relations training, bilingual education, mag-
net schools, curricular changes, testing, compliance
monitoring, career counseling, school pairing, and staff
changes or reorganizations (Casserly, 1983:47-51).
Urban schools have clearly received larger-than-
average proportions of federal and state money and, some
would say, larger-than-average proportions of headaches
related to that money. More important, it is in urban
districts that one can see most dramatically the stages
through which federal, state, and local relations have
moved over the past two decades and the positive and
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166
negative impacts of each stage on administrators, teach-
ers, and students.
Formal Elements of Federalism
The formal elements of educational federalism are
well known. There has always been a national interest
in education and a consequent federal role, from the
land grant ordinances of 1785 and 1787, through the
Morrill Act of 1862, the Smith Hughes Act of 1917, and
on into the past 20 years of very visible federal in-
volvement, which are of particular interest here. It
has been both inevitable and appropriate that over the
past 200 years the federal government has directly and
indirectly influenced where schools should be, what they
should teach, and whom they should serve. It has also
been both inevitable and appropriate that federal in-
volvement in education has sparked controversy and in-
tergovernmental conflict. As Richard Elmore (1982) and
others have pointed out, that is precisely what our fed-
eralist system was designed to do.
Our constitutional overlap of federal, state, and
local responsibilities guarantees both jurisdictional
disputes and a balance of powers enabling citizens to
use one level of government to redress the perceived
wrongs of another. With its overlaps and vagueness, the
system also forces a certain amount of collaboration in
the common interest, though this may take years of nego-
tiation and dispute before it materializes effectively.
Virtually all federal education initiatives have been
framed with an understanding that other levels of gov-
ernment would have to be involved in carrying out the
initiatives in some collaborative arrangement.
In the early sixties, for instance, the federal gov-
ernment took major steps to improve access to education
for unserved and underserved population groups. Federal
policymakers believed that states and communities were
not doing an adequate job, particularly with regard to
enforcement of civil rights. They believed that federal
legislation could both stimulate the necessary reforms
and at the same time eventually improve the capacities
of states and communities to deal with their own prob-
lems. The paramount example of federal Inducement leg-
islation~ was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA) of 1965.
The ESEA provided three programs designed to
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167
strengthen state and local education agencies' capac-
ities by providing money for library resources, text-
books, supplementary educational centers, research,
training, and leadership resources. The intent was
specifically to grant state and local agencies the
autonomy and flexibility they would need in order to
improve themselves in their own ways (Elmore and
McLaughlin, 1982). Thus, the framers of ESEA viewed it
as an intrusive or coercive federal move in the short
term, but as an intergovernmentally collaborative proj-
ect that would strengthen the lower levels of government
closest to the schools while it promoted national educa-
tion goals in the long term.
However, for a variety of reasons (see E1more and
McLaughlin, 1982; and Murphy, 1981), the original coop-
erat~ve spirit of ESEA changed gradually to a more coer-
cive, regulatory, and compliance-oriented approach to
states and locals. Whereas the act initially featured a
mix of assistance, incentive, and regulatory mechanisms
for promoting national policy, it became increasingly
regulatory as policymakers attempted to deal with imple-
mentation problems, interest-group pressures, f~scal-
accountability demands, and unresponsiveness or waste at
some of the local sites.
Over the years, various amendments expanded the scope
of ESEA and the government published numerous regula-
tions with respect to it. During the 1970s, further
regulations emerged, prohibiting discrimination based on
sex (Title IX of the 1972 Education amendments3 and dis-
crimination against the handicapped (section 504 of the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973). The Education for All
Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142), passed in 1975,
was a highly structured, very detailed act. Controver-
sial recommendations with respect to the education of
children with limited English emerged, the Vocational
Education Act was amended, the Emergency School Aid Act
was revised and expanded, and Titles I, IV, and VII of
ESEA were updated several times. Each new act or amend-
ment narrowed the focus of the legislation to improve
its effectiveness, but increased regulations and compli
ance demands at the same time.
Effects of Federalism
Many of these federal programs did eventually
strengthen state agencies, as intended. But uninten-
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168
tionally, they fostered state models that were also com-
pliance-oriented and used regulation as a vehicle of
reform (Murphy, 1981). This did not happen everywhere,
and where it did happen, it did not happen to the same
degree or with the same consequences. But in the early
stages of these federal and state programs, the net ef-
fect of so many laws, grant requirements, conditions and
regulations was to impose on some school systems several
more layers of bureaucracy, the cumulative weight of
which fell on the individual schools charged with carry-
ing out all the mandates. And although it may have been
possible to keep the various programs and regulations
apart at higher levels of the bureaucracy, it became
increasingly difficult to do so at the bottom of the
pyramid. Since urban schools were often the targets of
much of this activity, they had to struggle most strenu-
ously with the aggregate effects of it all.
Early research into the aggregate effects of those
programs on already overburdened schools established
that they did not make the job of education any easier.
A Rand Corporation study (Kimbrough and Hill, 1981)
found that the programs competed for scarce local funds,
imposed administrative burdens, and caused difficult
scheduling problems. At their worst, they interfered
with education and innovation by:
· interrupting core classroom instruction because
they pulled students out of classes, often for most of
the day;
· replacing the core program with a new program,
usually because scheduling problems made it impossible
for affected students to stay in the core program for
sufficiently long periods of time;
· presenting students with materials and teaching
methods radically different from those found in the core
program;
e causing staff conflicts, usually because of differ-
ences in teaching approach and the autonomy of the spe-
cial program teachers;
· imposing heavy recordkeeping burdens upon teachers
and administrators--especially in response to P.L.
94-142 and bilingual programs; and
· segregating affected students for large blocks of
time.
The Rand study also found that money and staff from
funded programs, such as Title I, were often diverted
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169
into unfunded programs in order to help defray costs.
More recently, a congressionally mandated study of
the cumulative effects of federal education policies on
schools and districts, conducted by SRI International
(Knapp et al., 1983), revealed more positive develop-
ments. The researchers found that the problems docu-
mented by the Rand study were being addressed success-
fully in many schools. Over the years, strong admin-
istrators have found ways to minimize interruptions of
core instruction that have tended to fragment the educa-
tional experience of the affected children. Turf jeal-
ousies have been worked out and many administrators have
learned how to deal with the paperwork efficiently.
The instances of serious burden seem restricted,. they
write, To particular roles and situations: locally
paid counselors who take on special education management
unwillingly; schools in which the principal has no extra
pal r of hands to help with the administrative detail;
hard-pressed districts facing major, nonroutine chal-
lenges attributable to federal policies (e.g., desegre-
gation). (Knapp et al., 1983:7).
The SRI researchers (Knapp et al., 1983:12) concluded
that federal and state policies for special populations
shave substantially improved and expanded the array of
educational services for the intended target students..
In doing so, they have increased the structural complex-
ity of schools and districts and caused problems ini-
tially, but over time, people have adjusted to the prob-
lems and found ways to make them more manageable. The
process has involved trade-offs: Schools are offering
more services and receiving more money to do so than
they would otherwise, but this has come at the expense
of some other programs and introduced an element of
inefficiency into the system that may not have been
Phere before Most of the educators interviewed by the
worth-
SRI researchers believed the trade-offs were
while. However, despite their generally positive find-
ings, the researchers (Knapp et al., 1983:12) did sound
a warning note: Tin the sites where strong service man-
dates are combined with strained resources, the percep-
tion of the burdensome aspects of federal policy seems
to be growing. Dwindling funds at the local, state and
federal levels create problems that are extremely hard
to solve..
Given the Rand and SRI research, it would appear that
the impacts of federal education mandates have changed
considerably over time and have been different for dif-
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170
ferent kinds of schools. The original intent behind
ESEA was both to induce change and to assist state and
local education agencies so that in the long run they
could generate and manage their own change. But in the
early stages that intent was not realized very often in
actually carrying out the program. Moreover, the sheer
logistics of establishing, administering, and monitoring
programs tended to bring technical and administrative
concerns to the fore: Where was the money going? Bow
was it being spent? Were target groups actually receiv-
ing new services?
These kinds of considerations called
for compliance incentives and paperwork having to do
with the process itself more than the intended product,
higher quality education for disadvantaged youngsters.
So, in the early years of these programs, schools
were hit with the problems documented by the Rand study--
largely process problems--and many people in the schools
responded in dismay. Many principals found their au-
thority and scope of action narrowed beyond reason as
the school environment grew more complex. The conserva-
tive stereotype of an overly intrusive and mindless fed-
eral presence did, for a time' have a basis in fact; so
did the liberal stereotype of local recalcitrance. But
tile beauty of the federalist system is that the federal
government cannot implement national education policies
by itself. Regardless of federal policymakers' suspi-
cions that state and local people will not carry out
their mandates, regardless of their efforts to institu-
tionalize that mistrust--they must nevertheless, in the
long run, adapt to state and local realities if they
want to see the policy implemented successfully. Coer-
cion must eventually give way to collaboration. AS
Elmore and McLaughlin (1982:192) put it:
The chief problem with compliance-dominant strat-
egi es in vast and variegated systems like the
United States is that, while they prescribe uni-
formity of behavior, they generate enormous vari-
ab~lity of response. . . . Because of its ten-
dency to treat all variability as suspect, the
compliance-dominant view draws federal policy-
makers into a steadily deepening quagmire of
increasingly detailed rules, exceptions, and dis-
cretionary judgments that deal with matters bet-
ter dealt with at lower levels of the system.
Coercive diplomacy breeds its own collapse.
*
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171
Through the late seventies and into the eighties, a
number of factors coalesced to bring about that collapse
and mitigate the aggregate impacts of mandates on indi-
vidual schools. Some obvious ones are these. First, as
the SRI researchers discovered, people found ways to
simplify, combine, and manage the programs more effi-
ciently each year. Second, evaluations of the programs
identified problems and persuaded policymakers them-
selves to allow for more diversity and more local auton-
omy in dealing with implementation.
Third, because the
system forces collaboration and negotiation across dif-
ferent levels' even institutionalized mistrust began to
yield to a certain amount of necessary trust. And
fourth, the major long-term intent of the sixties legis-
lation--to strengthen state and local capacity--actually
began to find realization in more powerful, dynamic and
creative state and district agencies capable of dealing
with their own problems without federal inducements to
do so.
THE GROWING STATE ROLE IN EDUCATION
The discussion so far has dealt only with federal
mandates and their effects on districts and schools.
Many of these programs have operated through state
agencies created and sustained with a portion of the
federal grant money, and all have depended in some way
on other state agencies, entities, and networks. But
the states have not simply been vessels through which
other programs pass; they have programs of their own.
Moreover, the state role in education has changed con-
siderably over the past two decades. Partly as a result
of federal pressures and programs, but also as a conse-
quence of a host of social and economic factors, states
have exerted increasing control over schools. In many
states, authority has been centralized with respect to
such things as textbook adoption, competency testing,
and school finance equalization. Almost all states have
assumed a greater and greater share of the education
budget. In 1963, for instance, the average state share
of education expenditures was 39 percent (National
Education Association, 1964); in 1983 it was 48 percent
(National Education Association, 1984).
This nine-point average rise marks far more dramatic
changes in a number of states. California, for in-
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172
stance, was providing 38 percent of its school funding
in 1972; today, it is providing more than 90 percent.
Over the past decade, Idaho's state share has gone from
about half to two-thirds; Massachusetts' share has al-
most doubled; Washington State's share has gone from
half to four-fifths. Federal funding remained about the
same, as a percentage of all funding, but real expendi-
ture for education across the nation doubled from $56
billion in 1972 to $116 billion in 1982 (Doyle, 1984).
With this increasing state contribution has come an in-
creasingly active and sometimes intrusive scrutiny of
local schools and their programs.
By and large, the increasing state role in education
has paralleled improvements in state government and a
steady upgrading of states' capacities to deal with
matters they once ignored or left to the federal or
local governments. Legislators are now better paid,
spend more days in session, and are better staffed.
State education agencies have been strengthened. For
instance, in 1972, state education agencies employed an
average of 191 full-time professional staff; in 1982,
the average was 273 professionals (U.S. Department of
Education, 1983). Governors' terms have been lengthened
and their powers broadened. Consequently, states have
played much stronger roles in activities once dominated
by federal policy. We know a good deal about the im-
pacts of federal programs on the schools; the question
now is what will be the impacts of state legislation and
regulation on schools during this period of renewed in-
terest in education reform?
States have certainly been active in education over
the past few years.
~ · . · . .
Thirty-seven have developed school
or abstract planning or program review requirements; 47
have initiated new curricular development or technical
assistance initiatives; 15 have created state-level
Effective schools. projects 38 have mandated statewide
student testing; 20 have required competency testing for
teacher certification; 16 have raised grade-point re-
quirements for teacher certification; 10 have begun
requiring supervised internships for beginning teachers;
7 require new kinds of field experience for teacher
candidates; 44 now have state staff development programs
for teachers and 31 have them for administrators; 29
have developed new incentive programs for teachers; and
more than half of them have raised graduation require-
ments in the past three years alone (Education Commis-
sion of the States, 1983, 1984).
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173
All of the above measures reflect increased state
activity with regard to formal mechanisms for influenc
ing education. Many require a certain amount of cen-
tralization and varying amounts of recordkeeping, re-
porting, monitoring, and general communication about
what is going on. The 1984 legislative sessions made
1984 a banner year for state education legislation,
adding even more to the already impressive list of
activities.
Beyond these formal initiatives, states, like the
federal government, have dramatically improved their
informal means of affecting what happens in schools.
Virtually every governor has mentioned education promi
nently in his or her state-of-the-state address the past
two years; many have declared that improved education is
their top priority. Some governors, such as Dick Riley
of South Carolina, Bob Graham of Florida, Lamar
Alexander of Tennessee, and Bill Clinton of Arkansas,
have stumped their states, speaking to hundreds of
groups and thousands of people in behalf of their edu-
cation proposals, bringing massive publicity to the
schools and engaging enormous public attention. It is a
rare principal or superintendent who can escape the pub-
lic pressure such campaigns generate.
By the winter of 1984, states had formed more than
240 task forces and commissions to address education
reform issues and make recommendations for improvement.
These task forces have brought new actors into the
drama--business and labor leaders, for instance--who
have changed the chemistry of policymaking. Although
task forces have no legal accountability to anyone and
meet for only brief periods of time, they have proven
capable of generating enormous publicity of their own
(witness the Texas task force headed by H. Ross Perot,
which recommended abolishing football') and of generat-
ing both state board action and legislation that pro-
foundly affect the schools.
Some of this state activity was stirred up by the
release of the federal government's National Commission
on Excellence in Education (1983) report, A Nation at
Risk. But much of the activity began long before that
report was issued and at least as much was stimulated by
the governors themselves, either acting independently or
working together on the Education Commission of the
States' Task Force on Education for Economic Growth,
initiated by Governor James B. Hunt, Jr. of North
Carolina. These recent federal and state commissions
-
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174
and task forces deserve special attention in this dis-
cussion of federalism because they represent a different
approach to educational reform than the approach re-
flected in the federal programs of the sixties and early
seventies. The most obvious difference is that Action
for Excellence (Education Commission of the States,
1983), the Hunt task force report, and the other state
task force reports are not pieces of legislation, they
are reports. They serve largely hortatory purposes: to
call widespread attention to problems, stir up discus-
sion, and generate activity. They suggest what kinds of
activities might be most productive, but they do not
mandate anything. Most of all, they suggest that people
at all levels get together, talk about their education
problems, and create their own solutions. The call to
action is framed in terms of a national problem, but the
proposed solutions depend on state and local activity.
Some will argue that this is exactly what the federal
government should do: exhort. Others will argue that
if there is a national education problem, there should
be strong federal action in response, not simply rheto-
ric. No one will argue with the proposition that this
jawboning has had a profound effect on public attitudes
toward education and has catalyzed the reform movement
even if it did not start it. The fundamental questions
raised by all this clamor are these: Will exhortation
alone improve the schools? What kinds of state legisla-
tion and programs will grow out of the clamor (assuming
that little federal legislation will be developed under
this administration)? Will the ensuing state legisla-
tion and programs benefit from the lessons we have
learned about federal programs and from the improved
capacity of state and local agencies to implement
changes?
OUTLOOK FOR THE STATE ROLE: GU~DED OPTIMISM
At this point the outlook is guardedly optimistic.
The need for caution derives from the observation that
many of the remedies suggested by high-level task forces
and commissions involve traditional ~top-down. mechan-
isms for inducing change. Two decades of research into
the change process in schools has finally crystallized
in the observation that, as John Goodlad (1983) says,
Hit happens one building at a time. and involves such
intangibles as leadership, a shared moral climate, a
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175
school ethos, and a host of idiosyncratic factors in
each school (Murnane, 1975, Edmonds, 1979; Rutter, 1979
Cohen, 1981; Sarason, 1982; Goodlad, 1983; Sizer, 1984;
to name only major works). Yet despite strong research
support for a ~bottom-up. model of school reform, and
despite the absence of research supporting links between
improvement and such things as stiffer certification
requirements, higher teacher salaries, or stricter grad-
uation requirements, many states may nevertheless ap-
proach reform too prescriptively, as if they were the
federal government in the 1960s. If states rely solely
on policy mechanisms that either do not touch the fac-
tors instrumental to reform or in various ways constrain
the creativity necessary for reform, the expectations of
so many new converts to the education renewal cause will
be disappointed. And if that happens, there will be
another backlash against the schools down the road, and
it will be harder than ever to muster the necessary
broad support for yet another effort in the l99Os.
Optimism must also be qualified by the observation
that most of the problems cited in the reform reports
are concentrated in urban schools, but the reports'
recommendations are not directly linked with either the
particulars of urban school administration or with urban
policy in general.
One reason for optimism derives from the observation
that we have 20 years of experience with the problems of
compliance-oriented reform strategies, overregulation,
and forced intergovernmental collaboration; we have
stronger state and district capacity; and we have usable
research findings about the change process. These fac-
tors have already altered approaches to school reform in
many states and may carry the day. If you look back at
the state activities described earlier, you will note
that many of them are not top-down mechanisms likely to
reinforce a compliance-oriented approach to school re-
form. Rather, they are assistance-oriented, capacity-
building activities, such as those envisioned in the
original ESEA. Technical assistance is designed to
empower people in the schools, not restrict their
freedom to maneuver. Effective school projects are by
definition school based, even if they are state spon-
sored. Internships, field-experience requirements,
staff development, and incentives programs all devolve
responsibility downward and imply a good deal of trust
that the people at the bottom will carry out the spirit
of the mandate, if not the letter.
1 ;
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176
Another reason for optimism is that many states have
now developed formal and informal mechanisms for greas-
ing the wheels of intergovernmental relations. Twenty-
one states now have intergovernmental advisory groups
modeled after the U.S. Advisory Council on Intergovern-
mental Relations; 15 more states are considering such
councils; a number of states--Iowa, New York, Minnesota,
Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, California, and
Connecticut--have conducted studies of the impacts of
their mandates on local institutions and governments
(Roberts, 1984).
So the picture is mixed: Some states are indeed
developing new regulations and depending on top-down
leverage to change schools; some states are deeply
involved in assistance and mechanisms for placing the
knowledge, responsibility, and trust in the hands of the
people closest to the problems; many states are involved
in both kinds of strategies and others as well. Final-
ly, we can be optimistic about the leaders in many urban
school districts who have shed any appearance of depend-
ence on federal or state initiatives to solve these
unique problems and have initiated broadly conceived
reform efforts on their own.
EFFECTI VE SCHOOLS
Through the seventies, considerable research was
devoted to identifying the characteristics of effective
schools, many of which were in urban environments not
thought to be conducive to optimal education condi-
tions. In general, the research shows that high student
performance results from many different policies and
activities, no one of which accounts solely for success
or is necessarily transferable from building to build-
ing. Student learning depends mostly on people, and
people differ greatly in their approaches to education
and administration. Nevertheless, effective schools
share a number of general characteristics:
high expectations for student performance,
strong instructional leadership,
an orderly school climate,
an emphasis on basic skills,
careful monitoring of student progress, and
a greater sense of control over the learning
ronment by both students and staff.
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177
Each of these suggests something about how an effec-
tive school is run and what kind of people work there;
and those factors--the how and the who--suggest some-
thing about the administrators' and teachers' freedom to
maneuver and make decisions, as well as their relation-
ship to people at higher levels of the bureaucracy.
Clearly, all of these factors can be heavily influenced
by the quality of the leadership in the school. Strong
principals are key. And it is axiomatic that a leader
cannot function as a leader in an overregulated environ-
ment--such environments appeal only to followers. Lead-
ers need the freedom to lead, which means the freedom to
be creative, to make mistakes, to follow through, to win
trust, to be flexible, to control resources, and to make
decisions without having to clear them with half a dozen
people on up the line. There is a sense, then, in which
effective schools are almost by definition those schools
that have found ways to make leadership possible and
ways to accommodate all that follows from the empower-
ment of leaders in each building at the bottom of the
bureaucracy.
Many urban school districts have made great strides
in this direction over the last decade. Outstanding
ones that come to mind are Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Seattle,
Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston, Milwaukee, New Haven, and
Houston, but there are many more. Each has found ways
to draw in community leaders and parents, to energize
administrators, teachers, and students, to apply re-
search on effective schools to its own particular situ-
ation, and to use its resources in creative and effec-
tive ways.
But urban schools still face formidable difficul-
ties. Achievement in many urban schools is far below
national averages. Disproportionately high numbers of
urban students are dropping out of school, and the
achievement gap between majority and minority young
people remains a deplorable educational and social prob-
lem. The burdens of poverty, violence, drugs, and de-
spair still fall more heavily on urban schools than on
any others. In the years ahead, the federal government
will be wrestling with its staggering deficit and is
unlikely to be in any position to offer more assistance
than it is already giving. Federal, state, and local
government will, nevertheless, have to find ways of eas-
ing the burdens on urban schools, for urban problems
have national, not just local, implications. As they do
so, they must find mechanisms, strategies, and relation-
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ships that do not stifle the very process of reform they
aim to promote. The key concepts in new intergovernmen-
tal strategies must be assistance, incentives, empower-
ment, trust, and devolution of responsibility to the
people in the best positions to make a difference.
Denis Doyle (1984:8) frames the issue nicely when he
writes:
Policymakers should be concerned with the finan-
cial inputs that make good schooling possible and
the outputs that good schooling is meant to pro-
duce. How the school transforms those inputs
into measurable outputs should be the business of
the school, its teachers, and its community.
That is the real meaning of professionalism.
That is the nature of the practice of law and
medicine. It defines and describes higher educa-
tion. It should define and describe elementary
and secondary education.
SOME MODEST PROPOSALS
The following suggestions to urban policy planners in
state, county, and city agencies are meant to encourage
strategies that combine traditional policy levers with
grassroots initiatives:
· Clarify and dramatize those aspects of federal,
state, county, city, and district relations that inhibit
or frustrate school reform. Examine the unintended con-
sequences of program proliferation and accreted regula-
tions. It may be that a nonprogrammatic agency would be
useful as an overseer against the Babel effect. across
an urban district.
· Reshape policymakers' attitudes in the direction of
technical assistance, advice, empowerment of local lead-
ers, devolution of responsibility, and away from cen-
tralized control and overly constraining regulation.
That is easy to say, of course, but hard to do. The
best ways are still the old ways: building bridges,
developing trust, communicating, forcing people in
different spheres to collaborate on a common problem,
and so on.
· Create an informal Youth Forum in the larger cities
that meets monthly and that includes a lead person from
public and private education, law enforcement, welfare,
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youth service, the mayor's office, United Way, church
youth workers, and the like. Such a group would have no
bylaws, formal membership, or dues, but could perhaps
have a three-person program committee, including a
chairman, to plan the monthly dialogue. The purpose of
the group would be to build trust relationships, look at
life in the city from the perspective of youth, share
information, brainstorm ideas, and encourage collabora-
tive activities that could be developed outside of forum
meetings.
· Create incentives--financial or otherwise--for
intergovernmental or interagency collaboration.
· Develop contractual intergovernmental arrangements
to replace particularly intrusive regulatory arrange-
ments.
· Work for federal matching grants to city schools
for education-improvement programs. A city match could
come from any source outside the school budget or state
funds, and the federal government would match at more
than one-for-one. The point is that city revenue poll
cies, businesses, and foundations all need to generate
more money for city schools, and they should all have a
role in defining how funds could be used. The federal
role would be to provide the incentives without having
to invest huge sums that lead to many compliance regula-
tions.
o Accept Multiple sloppy measures. of progress and
accountability instead of looking for precise, quantita
tive standardized measures. Much that is important in
schools (or in life, for that matter) simply cannot be
measured exactly or quantitatively; attempts to do so
either drive people crazy or force them to ignore criti
Cal factors, or both.
· Develop ways of describing and analyzing the dif-
ferences between schools and communities as well as the
commonalities. There are many roads to school renewal;
insistence on only one is neither efficient nor produc-
tive.
Beyond the steps people in the formal bureaucracy
might take to improve interlevel coordination, much
might be done between the schools and other groups or
agencies in the community. For many urban young people,
school is only one of many ~agencies. that affect their
lives or offer opportunities for education and tra~n-
ing. And there are many nonschool things young people
can do for which they could receive school credit.
-
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Ernest Boyer's (1983) High School is only one of many
recent books to suggest that community service be a part
of the high school curriculum. Others have suggested
that entrepreneurs could help urban education by setting
up ~storefront. learning centers in cooperation with the
schools as a way of helping dropouts work their way back
in. As the economics of computer ir,struction become
increasingly competitive with the economics of school-
ing, we can expect more private sector initiatives in
education. Each such initiative will at the same time
broaden the educational opportunities of urban youth and
challenge the traditional structures by which federal,
state, and city governments have controlled education in
the past. As a consequence, federalist, interagency,
and interlevel relationships are likely to be changing
for some time to come.
The federal government still has a critical role to
play. It must, of course, provide strong leadership by
setting the agenda, gaining media attention, and conven-
ing leaders from many sectors. It must continue to help
states deal with special populations; it must vigorously
uphold and enforce basic civil rights protections; it
must continue to provide financial assistance to low-
income students desiring postsecondary education; and it
must continue to provide financial support for graduate
and professional programs aimed at meeting national
work-force needs. It should greatly strengthen its
educational research, demonstration and dissemination
efforts, and its capacity to provide useful information
about school improvement to states and localities. And
it must help states learn what federal policymakers have
learned about appropriate mixes of incentives, assis-
tance, and regulatory mechanisms.
Any current description of federal, state, and local
roles in education must be only a snapshot, and a
blurred one at that. The federal government is taking a
strong rhetorical approach to school improvement, while
simplifying its regulations and passing more responsi-
bility for the implementation of its programs to the
states. The states are extremely active in school
improvement initiatives and are clearly at a transi-
tional point in the ways they approach education
problems: Some are moving more toward centralized solu-
tions, some are moving more toward decentralized ap-
proaches, and many are centralizing with respect to some
solutions while decentralizing with respect to others.
There is a danger that what we have learned from the
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1960s and 1970s has not been learned well or broadly
enough to prevent some people from repeating past mis-
takes with overly rigid, abstract, standardized, and
constraining regulation or legislation. But there are
also signs that some people have learned from history
and are taking steps to see that it is not repeated.
Moreover, this most recent surge of school improvement
efforts was a grassroots movement to begin with; the
federal and state hue and cry about education came only
after many districts and schools had already built
momentum toward positive change. That momentum is the
final guarantee that traditional federalist arrangements
and interlevel relationships are going to change. They
are going to change formally because they have already
begun changing informally.
In the last analysis, the keys to improved education
lie in leadership, creativity, and having the opportu-
nity to explore alternative solutions to problems. The
best solutions are the ones people at the local level
have worked out for themselves, not the ones imposed on
them by outsiders. This is what research and observa-
tion tell us about how children learn. It is what ex-
perience has taught us about how schools improve. And
it is what we must keep foremost in mind as we struggle
to make multilevel systems responsive to the tides of
change.
REFERENCES
Bencivenga, James
1983 Huge minority enrollment challenges public
education. Pp. 5-6 in Susan Parkas, ea.,
Changes and Challenges: City Schools in
America. Washington, D.C.: Institute for
Educational Leadership.
Boyer, E.
1983 High School: A Report of the Carnegie Founda-
tion for the Advancement of Teaching. New
York: Harper and Row.
Casserly, Michael
1983 Statistical Profiles of the Great City
Schools. Washington, D.C.: Council of Great
City Schools.
Cohen, Michael
1981 Effective schools: what the research says.
Today's Education 70:46-49.
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182
Doyle, Denis
1984 De Facto New Federalism. Speech delivered at
the annual meeting of the Council on Founda-
tions, Denver, Cola.
Edmonds, Ronald
1979 Effective schools for the urban poor. Educa-
tional Leadership 37:15-24.
Education Commission of the States
1983a Action for Excellence. Report of the Task
l
Force on Education for Economic Growth.
Denver, Cola.: Education Commission of the
States.
1983b Three ECS surveys: an overview. State Educa-
tion Leader 2(Fall):4.
1984 High school graduation course requirements in
the 50 states. State Education Leader
3(Winter):1.
Elmore, Richard
1982 Education and Federalism: Doctrinal, Func-
tional and Strategic Views. Paper prepared for
Seminar on Law and Education, Institute for
Educational Finance and Governance, Stanford
University, Calif.
Elmore, Richard, and McLaughlin, Milbrey
1982 Strategic choice in federal education policy:
the compliance-assistance trade-off. Pp.
159-194 in Policymaking in Education. ~ighty-
first Yearbook of the National Society for the
Study of Education. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Goodlad, John
1983 A Place Called School. New York.
Kimbrough, Jackie, and Hill, Paul
1981 The Aggregate Effects of Federal Education
Programs. Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand
Corporation.
Knapp, Michael, Stearns, Marion, Turnbull, Brenda,
David, Jane, and Peterson, Susan
1983 Cumulative Effects of Federal Education
Policies on Schools and Districts, Summary
Doctr inal . Func-
New York. McGraw-Hill.
Report. Menlo Park, Calif.: SRI International.
Murnane, Richard
1975 The Impact of School Resources on the Learning
of Inner City Children. Cambridge, Mass.:
Ballinger.
Murphy, Jerome
1981 The paradox of state government reform. The
Public Interest 64:124-139.
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183
National Commission on Excellence in Education
1983 A Nation at Risk. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office.
National Education Association
1964 Estimates of School Statistics 1962-63.
Washington, D.C.: National Education
Association.
1984 Estimates of School Statistics 1983-84. wash-
..
ington, D.C.: National Education Association.
Roberts, Jane
1984 States and localities in 1983: recession,
reform, renewal.
tive:1010-1023.
Rutter, Michael
1979 Fifteen Thousand Hours:
-
Their Effects on Children. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Sarason, Seymour
1982 The Culture of the School and the Problem of
Change. Second Edition. Boston: Allyn and
Bacon.
Sizer, Theodore
1984 Horace's Compromise.
Mifflin.
Intergovernmental Perspec-
Secondary Schools and
New York: Houghton
U.S. Department of Education
1983 Educational Governance in the States. Washing-
ton, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
federal education
