Frederick M. Hess

An Innovative Look, a Recalcitrant Reality: The Politics of Principal Preparation Reform.

Concerns about the effectiveness of traditional preparation programs have yielded a wide-ranging debate about new approaches to recruiting and preparing leaders. The resulting policy debate features two general camps: those who wish to refine and bolster the existing system of preparation and licensure and those who advocate a move away from licensure and the attendant notions of leadership that hold sway today. The proponents of conventional preparation have shown a remarkable willingness to compromise, giving rise to modified training programs and blunting the political appetite for rethinking the gate keeping arrangements that regulate who can become, approve, or train future school leaders. Ultimately, both innovative programs and for-profit providers will acclimate themselves to the institutional arrangements in place, so the degree of real change depends more on statutory and regulatory change than the emergence of particular new programs.

Small Districts in Big Trouble: How Four Arizona School Systems Responded to Charter Competition

How do district schools respond to competition from charter schools? To explore this question, we examine four small Arizona school districts which lost from a tenth to a third of enrollment to charter schools in a short time period. Districts lost market share to charter schools because they did not satisfy significant constituencies, thus providing demands for education alternatives. District responses to market pressure depend on overall enrollment trends, the quality of the charter competition, the quality of district leadership, and the size of the district. Districts respond to competition in various ways, including reforming curricula, changing leadership, vilifying charter competitors, and attempting to absorb those competitors. Responses suggest that competition improves schools, but that markets do not work quickly or without friction and must be understood in context.

School Choice in the Real World: Lessons from Arizona Charter Schools.

Real World School Choice: Arizona Charter Schools (Robert Maranto, Scott Milliman, Frederick Hess, and April Gresham) Theoretical and National Perspectives And This Parent Went to Market: Education as Public vs. Private Good (L. Elaine Halchin) The Death of One Best Way: Charter Schools as Reinventing Government (Robert Maranto) Congress and Charter Schools (David L. Leal) Charter Schools: A National Innovation, an Arizona Revolution (Bryan C. Hassel) Social Scientists Look at Arizona Charter Schools The Wild West of Education Reform: Arizona Charter Schools (Robert Maranto and April Gresham) Why Arizona Embarked on School Reform (and Nevada Did Not) (Stephanie Timmons-Brown and Frederick Hess) Do Charter Schools Improve District Schools? Three Approaches to the Question (Robert Maranto, Scott Milliman, Frederick Hess, and April Gresham) Closing Charters: How A Good Theory Failed in Practice (Gregg A. Garn and Robert T. Stout) Nothing New: Curricula in Arizona Charter Schools (Robert T. Stout and Gregg A. Garn) How Arizona Teachers View School Reform (Frederick Hess, Robert Maranto, Scott Milliman and April Gresham) Practitioners Look at Arizona Charter Schools The Empowerment of Market-Based School Reform (Lisa Graham Keegan) A Voice From the State Legislature: Dont Do What Arizona Did! (Mary Hartley) Public Schools and the Charter Movement: An Emerging Relationship (Lee L. Hager) Whose Idea Was This Anyway? The Challenging Metamorphosis from Private to Charter (Jim Spencer) Lessons In Lieu of Conclusions: Tentative Lessons From a Contested Frontier (Robert Maranto, Scott Milliman, Frederick Hess, and April Gresham).

A Shrinking “Digital Divide”? The Provision of Classroom Computers across Urban School Systems

Objective. To determine the extent of the urban school “digital divide”—the varying provision of computer technology to students of different races and classes—and whether it has changed in the 1990s. Methods. Ordinary least squares and logit regression analysis is conducted on the 1995 Council of Urban Boards of Education survey, encompassing 72 urban school districts. Results. Districts with a higher percentage of African American students provided fewer computers per student, whereas community educational level, family income, and Latino enrollment had no effect. On the other hand, districts with more African American students reported recent decreases in the student-to-computer ratio, and comparisons with recent research suggest that the magnitude of this digital divide has decreased. Conclusions. Urban school districts appear to be addressing the digital divide, although inequalities in computer access remain.

Revitalizing Teacher Education by Revisiting Our Assumptions About Teaching

The state of teaching and teacher education is the result of more than a century of compromises and adjustments demanded by the exigencies of another era. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the teaching profession was designed to match the rapid expansion of schooling. It relied on a captive pool of inexpensive, educated female labor and assumed little in the way of a professional knowledge base. Teacher preparation and development were designed accordingly. Today, would-be reformers should recognize that the machinery and assumptions that once made sense may be ill suited for contemporary opportunities and challenges. Preparation programs are predominantly overseen by institutions of higher education that are constructed with the expectation that most aspiring teachers will decide upon a lifelong teaching career while enrolled in college. The job of a K-12 “teacher” has remained markedly undifferentiated and static over the past century, despite advances in technology and communications. If we unshackle ourselves from the legacy of once-reasonable but now-constraining assumptions and arrangements, what new ideas might guide smarter approaches to attracting talent to teaching?

Quality, Race, and the Urban Education Marketplace

A key issue in urban education policy is the potential impact of market-based reforms. Using a data set encompassing 50 urban school systems, the authors investigate the market reform hypothesis by assessing the impact of perceived school performance, race, and religion on private school enrollment. Previous work in this vein has relied on statewide data, generating findings that may not generalize to the urban districts at the center of the school choice debate. The authors find some evidence that perceived public school quality may affect enrollment, consistent with claims that competition spurs improvement. Consistent with previous work, the results also suggest that religious and racial considerations influence school selection.

The opportunity to engage: How race, class, and institutions structure access to educational deliberation

Educators have long discussed the value of community engagement in schooling, especially in troubled urban systems. However, most attention has focused on either the consequences of engagement or the willingness of groups or individuals to take existing opportunities for participation. The questions of whether and why there may be systematic variation in how open school systems are to community involvement have been largely overlooked. Using the Council of Urban Boards of Educations 1992 survey and U.S. census data, the authors examined these questions using a sample of 57 urban school districts. It was found that urban communities with larger percentages of African American students provide increased avenues for participation, whereas poorer districts and those in the South offer fewer avenues. These findings have important implications for educational equity and the promise of community participation in school governance.

“But the Pension Fund Was Just SITTING There …”: The Politics of Teacher Retirement Plans

The tension at the heart of pension politics is the incentive to satisfy todays claimants in the here and now at the expense of long-term concerns. Teacher pensions, in particular, pose two challenges. The first is that political incentives invite irresponsible fiscal stewardship, as public officials make outsized short-term commitments to employees. The second is that incentives hinder modernization, as policy makers avoid the politically perilous task of altering plans ill suited to attracting talent in the contemporary labor market. The alignment of the political stars has helped some states and localities to address the first challenge, but far too few have demonstrated a willingness to tackle the second. We illustrate the political dynamics through discussions of pension plans in New Jersey, Oregon, and San Diego, California, and suggest several political strategies that could make pension challenges more tractable and encourage public officials to be responsible fiscal stewards or to revisit anachronistic retirement systems.

Learning to Succeed at Scale.

Dynamic new ventures like the Knowledge is Power Program, Teach For America, and New Leaders for New Schools, are increasingly being asked to step in to assist struggling school districts. While promising, these ventures have thus far typically been characterized by “one-off” examples of success that are extraordinarily reliant on talent and passion, philanthropic funding, and exhausting work schedules. For many funders, practitioners, and policymakers, scaling up the most successful ventures has become the sine non qua of successful reform. The appeal of growth by “best practice” imitation is undeniable, but narrowly following such a course is unlikely to deliver large-scale educational reform. Markets are local, clienteles differ dramatically from one place to the next, and the challenges and availability of facilities, staff, and other resources vary enormously. A primary reason these organizations initially “work” is the uniformity of their approach to organizational systems and culture or their “organizational career imprint”—the set of capabilities, connections, confidence, and cognitions that individuals share as a result of working for a given organization at a particular point in time. But the factors that strengthen imprinting and early success in new ventures, such as creating stretch assignments and hiring in cohorts, can become flaws if left unchecked. Drawing on lessons from the biotechnology industry, this article examines how successful new ventures in the education sector might revisit and reorganize original (internal and external) arrangements to facilitate more sure-footed growth.

Resistance in the Trenches: What Shapes Teachers' Attitudes Toward School Choice?

Choice-based reforms are the most controversial proposals to improve American education, yet little is known about how teachers view choice. The authors present the first systematic analysis of the factors that determine teacher attitudes toward school choice. Using a 1995 national mail survey of 900 public high school teachers (325 responded, a 42% response rate), we found that more experienced teachers and those who identify themselves as Democrats, majored in education as undergraduates, or who have never worked in a competitive educational environment are more likely to oppose public school choice. More experienced teachers and those who identify themselves as Democrats are also more likely to oppose private school choice, as are union members and teachers who teach in school cultures they deem negative. These findings are significant because teachers, both as classroom implementers of public policy and as political actors, help determine the impact of changes in education policy.