Full Text: School Days

Wilson: Here's the rub with both the Lubienski study and the finding you pluck from the Brooking report: Both compare student proficiency levels, not the growth in proficiency over times. When students arrive at the schools' door with widely varying skills, and where many suffer from years of educational neglect, growth in performance is the true measure of school quality. Even the Lubienskis concede in their report that "one cannot conclude from this analysis that public schools are more effective at promoting student growth than private schools." As for private entrepreneurial initiative and the inner city, the data do not support your conjecture that operators would concentrate on affluent, easy to teach students. On the contrary, most education entrepreneurs have opened schools in the inner cities serving children from economically disadvantaged families.

But I welcome your suggestion, George: Let's take the shackles off of our most capable public school principals. In exchange for holding them strictly accountable for results, let's give them the kind of flexibility that private sector leaders take for granted. That's the new bargain schools chancellor Joel Klein has proposed for New York City. Hundreds of principals have already stepped forward to lead the new "empowered" schools. Let's wish them every success.

Wood: Precisely. There is no need to privatize public education nor turn it over to private entrepreneurs. Rather, we should be looking for ways to strengthen public schools, not for ways to make a profit off of them.

There are many examples of such public efforts that have been successful. The schools in the Coalition of Essential Schools network, the Comer project in New Jersey, the pilot schools in Boston, the New York Performance Standards Consortium to name but a few. And then there are all those schools that communities tell us time and time again they like--their neighborhood schools that have served children so well for so long. I believe there is much we can do to improve our public schools, and am committed to doing my part. And the best examples of success are actually found in the public sector.

While we may agree on freeing up schools and their communities from onerous restraints, where I think we will continue to disagree is over the issue of turning them over to for-profit enterprises. To make a profit requires selling something for more than what it cost to make it. I don't think we really want to make a profit off our kids; which would require diverting some of our educational resources to profit rather than to teaching and learning.

Above all else, schools are a public good. We tax ourselves so that we can have the democracy and standard of living we enjoy through the provision of public services such as schools. While we may not always get it right, we are subject to public control and oversight that prevents us from "cooking the books" or hiding our mistakes. There is no evidence that abandoning this public commitment will get us better schools, or a better standard of living. But to do so could do irreparable damage to nurturing in our young the habits of heart and mind that make democracy possible.

Steven Wilson's book, Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools, was published in January by Harvard University Press.