Follow the Boston pilot schools

By William G. Ouchi  |  May 21, 2005 | Op-Ed

IN LATE 2003, I reported the results of a study of 223 schools in six cities in my book ''Making Schools Work." My research team had visited 5 percent of the schools in the three traditional, centralized districts of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. We had also visited 5 percent of the schools in three districts (Seattle, Houston, and Edmonton, Alberta) that have implemented district-wide the sort of local school empowerment that now exists in the 19 pilot schools in Boston. The results of our research were striking: local school empowerment produced both dramatic gains in student achievement and a reduction in the achievement gap between white and Asian students on the one hand, and black and Hispanic students on the other.

The decentralized districts had in common several practices that can be summarized as their ''seven keys to success." Here, in brief, is what they are:

1. Every principal is expected to be an entrepreneur who has the flexibility to design the staffing, schedule, and teaching methods that will best suit the needs of each and every unique student in their school.

2. Every school controls its budget, because without control over the budget, the idea of local empowerment is a sham.

3. Principals are held accountable for student achievement gains, for budget control, and for satisfaction among teachers, students, and parents, as measured by annual questionnaires.

4. Everyone, from the school board to the principals, delegates authority to those below them in the hierarchy.

5. All schools have an intense focus on student achievement based on an intimate knowledge of data.

6. Every school is small enough and autonomous enough to become a community.

7. With local school empowerment, each school becomes unique in some way, with the result that families have real choices among a variety of schools, and school choice within the district is simple and user-friendly, not bureaucratic nor cumbersome.

The ideas pioneered in these three successful districts have begun to take root elsewhere. This district-wide implementation of local school empowerment is now in its fifth year in San Francisco, and St. Paul, Minn., and in its first year in Oakland. All three districts are reporting success. In New York City, a 29-school pilot program began last September, and in Hawaii, the legislature has passed Act 51 mandating implementation of local school empowerment statewide. The California State Assembly Education Committee has unanimously approved a bill to enable 15 districts to implement local school empowerment, and the idea has the backing of the governor (the state Senate Education Committee and the full legislature have yet to take up the bill). School districts in other states are preparing implementation plans as well.

The leaders of the Boston Teachers Union have raised objections to expansion of the 19-school pilot program. One hopes that they will come to terms with those who favor expansion. In California, the Hewlett Foundation sponsored a poll of 1,000 teachers across the state, virtually all of them members of a union. They were asked if they would support or oppose implementation of the seven keys to success. By a ratio of 4 to 1, teachers in every region of the state said that they would support these changes.

It is also worth noting that Edmonton, where this new form of decentralization was invented in 1976, has perhaps the strongest teachers union in North America. Even as I conducted my research in that city, the teachers went on strike for two weeks over wages and benefits. Nonetheless, the teachers of Edmonton and their union leadership, after initial skepticism more than two decades ago, are among the strongest supporters of local school empowerment. San Francisco, St. Paul, Hawaii, Oakland, and New York City have famously strong teachers unions, too, yet all have embraced this new approach to the management of schools.

One final note: In Seattle, the public school district has won back eight percent of all students from the private schools since implementing this system. In Edmonton, where it all began, the public schools are so popular now that there are no private schools left. Three of the largest private schools voluntarily became public schools and joined the Edmonton District a few years ago. Not only that, but all of the charter schools of Edmonton have voluntarily become regular school district schools. In a district of empowered local schools, every school has as much freedom and as much flexibility as any charter school, and in addition they have access to greater financial stability, to superior teacher training, and to first-class principal selection and training programs.

The pilot schools in Boston should really be the lead schools in what could and should become a district-wide implementation of local school empowerment. If that were to happen, it would place Boston on the forefront of what appears to be a national trend in the universal goal of improving student achievement.

William G. Ouchi, author of ''Making Schools Work," is a professor in corporate renewal at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.