Education Reform at the Margin: Two Ideas

Abstract

Parents and teachers seem increasingly alienated from their own schools. Here are two proposals for giving individual parents and teachers power to determine how small but significant portions of the school budget will be spent. I am convinced that we need much more experi mentation with true decentralized control over the spending of educational funds; not the creation of minidistricts or the adoption of school-site budget ing, but rather decision making at the individual teacher and individual family levels. I recognize the power of the entrenched bureaucracies: school boards and administrators on the one hand, teacher organizations on the other. For some time to come they will exercise hegemony over most public education dollars. But perhaps there is an oppor tunity for innovation at the margin. This opportuni ty is limited because there are few new public dollars available for education beyond those in evitably committed to cost-of-living increases in employee salaries. Yet this makes all the more important the desirability of trying out bold alterna tives with those funds. The past few years of experience with more centralized decision making with respect to new (or extra) money ? federal Title I funds and similar pots or large increases in general state aid brought about through school finance reform ? have shown us that this route typically results in either 1) in creases in employee salaries or 2) the hiring of more personnel ? either aides or specialists (usually read ing specialists), plus bureaucrats. In a few places these expenditures are thought to be educationally quite successful. If nothing else, they may be viewed as medium-scale public employment and guaran teed-wage programs or, to the extent that school volunteers are being converted into paid workers, an inventive income transfer scheme. Yet it is not clear