Back in 1988 during dissertation research in Washington, I had one of those inside-the-Beltway moments.
While interviewing a career executive from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a fellow I'll call Bill, I saw something at once familiar and unexpected. In a prominent place on his wall, Bill had hung a large photo of the HUD complex where I lived, Cedar Square West in Minneapolis.
It turned out Bill had played a role overseeing the construction of Cedar Square West, one of the "new towns in town" HUD built back in the 1970s. Bill took pride in his work, and was delighted that I lived in a place he had spent years helping put together.
Unfortunately, by the late 1980s all was not best in Cedar Square West. The complex was not financially solvent. Systems faltered. One Minneapolis winter, residents lost heat for a few days.
Bill said the problems came as no surprise since contractors had built the complex with "shoddy construction materials." Asked how this happened, Bill explained that "everything was legal," so as far as HUD was concerned, all was right with the world.
There in a nutshell, is a central problem of government. Politicians pass laws and cut ribbons to save the world and get their pictures in the paper. Competent bureaucrats write regulations and do enough oversight to assure some semblance of legality. The media howl when someone breaks a rule, at least when reporters receive a leak about it.
Yet on a day-to-day basis, no one asks if a given regulation actually helps public servants serve the public.
Nowhere is that more true than in public education. For years, I've heard public school administrators complain that over-regulation hampers their efforts to educate kids. When I looked into the matter back in 2010, I found that traditional public schools must send the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) more than 70 reports annually. Supposedly "unregulated" public charter schools had ADE monitor 165 practices regarding resources, personnel, curricula and buildings.
So do all these regulations improve education? On the whole, are schools that break rules worse schools?
Earlier this year, assisted by former teachers Kaitlin Anderson and Alexandra Boyd and several graduate students, I decided to see. We used data measuring how much students learned in math and language arts in the 2009-11 school years, that is, school value added, for 1,006 Arkansas public schools. We also coded the level of student achievement, though this may reflect a student's background.
Then we coded the Arkansas Department of Education school sanctions lists for the 2010-11 school year, long removed from the ADE website but graciously provided by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Of the 930 schools in the sanction data set, 179 were sanctioned for licensure issues, 99 for financial variances (typically inadequate reserve funds), and nine for curricular matters. Though most sanctions are symbolic, as any principal will tell you, they can affect a school's reputation.
Our key question was whether any relationship existed between student learning and school sanctions. No matter how we sliced and diced the data and no matter what we controlled for, the answer was none or almost none.
Our strongest relationships, obtained when all three sanction variables were combined into one measure, found a minuscule -0.06 correlation between sanctions and the level of student achievement; -0.09 between sanctions and school value added. In other words, paperwork seems almost unrelated to whether a school's teachers do great work, or copy the shoddy foundations of Cedar Square West.
More red tape does not a great school make.
In administrative matters generally and education in particular, incoming Gov. Asa Hutchinson might copy Bill Clinton. Back in the 1990s, President Clinton had teams of public servants reinvent government purchasing and operations, improving service and by some estimates saving over $140 billion.
Governor Hutchinson and Education Commissioner Tony Wood should appoint a committee of our most innovative principals, superintendents and ADE officials to make recommendations about how to cut red tape to better serve kids. The committee's goal should be to make the average school's paperwork weigh less than the average teacher.
If some recommendations require new state legislation or requests for federal waivers, go for it! Isn't that what political leaders are for?
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Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and has two children in Fayetteville public schools.
Editorial on 12/22/2014