1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
-
-
Email Event
-
-
On July 24, 2009, President Barack Obama introduced the Race to the Top, an initiative to promote successful public school innovation. On the heels of the $100 billion in education stimulus funds targeted for states and localities, it is essential to take a hard look at the systems charged with
Listen to Audio
play
pause
Download Audio as MP3
spending all this money. In a timely contribution, William Ouchi, influential management thinker, professor, and creator of "Theory Z," has penned a new volume, The Secret of TSL (Simon & Schuster, September 2009). Ouchi reports on his research in eight decentralizing urban districts where principals have the freedom to control their budgets and tailor expenses to fit their schools. This freedom has enabled these districts to decrease their teachers' total student load--the number of papers teachers must grade and the number of students they must get to know each term--and increase their students' achievement by more effectively allocating the resources at their disposal. This approach expands on the reform agenda of his 2003 book Making Schools Work (Simon & Schuster, September 2003). Is Professor Ouchi right? Is his strategy a recipe for transformation?
Please join us as AEI resident scholar and director of education policy studies Frederick M. Hess hosts Professor Ouchi and panelists Eric Nadelstern, chief schools officer for the New York City Department of Education, and Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in a lively discussion of these questions and how education leaders can leverage new school management practices to best serve K-12 students.
| 8:45 a.m. | Registration | |
| 9:00 |
Introduction: | Frederick M. Hess, AEI |
| 9:05 |
Presenter: | William Ouchi, University of California, Los Angeles |
| 9:30 |
Discussants: | Chester E. Finn Jr., Thomas B. Fordham Institute |
| Eric Nadelstern, New York City Department of Education | ||
| 10:30 | Adjournment |
|
WASHINGTON, SEPTEMBER 23--With the ongoing public education crisis in America's cities, urban school leaders must remove the bureaucratic burdens by decentralizing districts and empowering principals to serve students better, said University of California, Los Angeles professor William Ouchi at a panel discussion at AEI. Mr. Ouchi, author of the new book The Secret of TSL: The Revolutionary Discovery that Raises School Performance, was joined by K-12 experts Eric Nadelstern, Checker Finn, and AEI's Frederick Hess to discuss Ouchi's proposed solutions for urban schools.
With AEI's director of education policy studies Frederick M. Hess moderating the discussion, the panelists engaged in a lively discussion of Ouchi's plan to reduce teachers' Total Student Load (TSL) by decentralizing school management practices and allowing principals to have greater discretion in allocating schools resources. The impact of principal empowerment has never been studied empirically, so Ouchi and his team of researchers surveyed 442 schools in eight decentralized urban districts to discover if these schools were benefiting from lowered TSL. According to Ouchi, these decentralized districts had significantly lower student-to-administrative staff ratios and were thus able to excel while avoiding the diseconomies of scale from which many large schools suffer.
Eric Nadelstern, chief schools officer for New York City Schools, echoed many of Ouchi's points and offered several helpful examples from his leadership in establishing Empowerment Zones in his school district, where principals were given power over their budgets and subsequently lowered the number of students each teacher was responsible for over the course of a school day. The key, Nadelstern said, is to develop quality leadership and to instill management with accountability measures so that school leaders are held responsible for student performance. Other important steps to improvement include reforming the operations of central offices, building smaller schools, and closing the lowest performing schools since, as Nadelstern pointed out, "failing organizations don't reinvent themselves."
Thomas Fordham Institute president Checker Finn acknowledged the timeliness of Ouchi's work and its accessible summary of many key education management strategies; however, he also voiced several concerns over the theory and implications of the TSL solution. Finn pointed out that Ouchi's theory is based strictly on management models instead of pedagogy or curriculum study, and as such, he may have overlooked the role of these and other variables (longer school days, uniforms, discipline standards, etc.) in the success of schools with lowered TSL. By relying so heavily on school principals operating with little oversight, Finn noted, Ouchi's plan is also susceptible to weak leadership, lowered standards, and ineffective curricula which will hurt students. Finn also piqued the interest of many in the audience and on the panel by suggesting that school districts and brick-and-mortar buildings are things of the past. Whispers among the crowd followed Finn's proposal that such entities are actually detrimental to education reform, and that the future of American schooling could be strengthened by embracing new leadership structures and technologies instead.
Following the individual presentations, Hess led the panelists in a question and answer session on many of the contentious issues surrounding the TSL model. Ouchi acknowledged that his management approach did sidestep pedagogical concerns and that his theory was based on assumptions of strong state standards and a sustainable pipeline of quality leaders. Nadelstern also voiced concerns over sustainability, by conceding that the New York City programs could not guarantee that good principals would materialize. However, by continually investing in new leaders and establishing valuable community ties, city education officials could help build a stronger pipeline of talented principals. Many audience members from education associations were skeptical of the TSL theory in practice, especially in regards to special education, poor schools, and rural districts where teachers operate under unique conditions. Overall, the discussion highlighted innovative approaches and provided thoughtful critiques of school reform in the nation's most challenging school districts.
###
Chester Finn, Jr. is a scholar, educator and public servant who has been at the forefront of the national education debate for 35 years. A senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and chairman of Hoover’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, Finn is President of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. He has served, inter alia, as a professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt, counsel to the U.S. ambassador to India, legislative director for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and assistant U.S. secretary of education for research and improvement. He also serves on the board of several other organizations concerned with primary-secondary schooling. The author of 16 books and more than 400 articles, Mr. Finn’s work has appeared in publications such as The Weekly Standard, Christian Science Monitor, Commentary, The Public Interest, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Education Week, Harvard Business Review, and Boston Globe. Mr. Finn has received awards from the Educational Press Association of America, Choice Magazine, the Education Writers Association, and the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge.
Frederick Hess, AEI's director of education policy studies, is an educator, political scientist, author, and popular speaker and commentator. He has written such influential books as Spinning Wheels (Brookings, 1998), Revolution at the Margins (Brookings, 2002), and Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). A former public high school social studies teacher, he has also taught education and policy at universities including Georgetown, Harvard, Rice, the University of Virginia, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is executive editor of Education Next, a faculty associate with Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and serves on the board of directors for the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and also on the review board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education. At AEI, Mr. Hess addresses a range of K-12 and higher education issues.
Eric Nadelstern is the chief schools officer for the New York City Department of Education, overseeing instructional and operational support to the city's 1,500 schools. Mr. Nadelstern has also served the New York City Public Schools as chief executive officer for Empowerment Schools, a citywide district reform initiative serving 500 schools; supervising superintendent for the Autonomy Zone; chief academic officer for New Schools; senior instructional superintendent for school improvement and restructuring; deputy regional superintendent for a region in the East Bronx; and deputy superintendent for New and Small Bronx High Schools. As the founding principal of the International High School at LaGuardia Community College, he created an innovative public school for English language learners that has been widely replicated. During his tenure with the New York City Schools, Mr. Nadelstern has served in institute leadership roles at New Visions for Public Schools, Stanford University, Teachers College at Columbia University, and Bank Street College of Education. Mr. Nadelstern has been recognized for his contributions in the classroom by the New York City Schools, Angelo Patri School Award for School-Based Management, the Anti-Defamation League, and the International Partnership Award. Mr. Nadelstern has been the author and the subject of numerous articles and interviews on his recent work creating a critical mass of new small schools to increase student performance, establishing school-based autonomy as a school district reform strategy to foster greater accountability for student achievement results, and reforming central office operations in the largest school district in the nation.
William G. Ouchi is the author of the New York Times bestseller Theory Z: How American Management Can Meet the Japanese Challenge (Addison-Wesley, 1981). Theory Z has been published in 16 foreign editions and was the seventh most widely held book of the 12 million titles held in 4,000 U.S. libraries. His book Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need (Simon& Schuster, 2003) demonstrated that the schools that consistently perform best also have the most decentralized management systems. Mr. Ouchi’s newest book, The Secret of TSL (Simon & Schuster, 2009) reports on a new study of 442 schools in eight decentralizing urban districts. Appointed to the UCLA–Anderson faculty in 1979, Mr. Ouchi teaches courses in management and organization design, and conducts research on the structure of large organizations. From 1993–1995, he served as advisor and chief of staff to the Los Angeles mayor at that time, Richard Riordan. Mr. Ouchi founded the UCLA School Management Program and is chairman of The Riordan Programs, which serves high school, college, and post-collegiate young people from inner-city Los Angeles. He holds a leadership role in The Los Angeles Alliance, which operates 14 charter high schools and 2 charter middle schools in South and East Los Angeles, and last year he was appointed to serve as a member of the Governance Committee of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education.
