what's needed to fix U.S. public schools?

First, Kill All the School Boards (The Atlantic, Matt Miller) makes the case that local control is bad for schools.

While it's easy to cherry-pick data to make this case, Chicago Public Schools are much less locally controlled than suburban districts and CPS hasn't produced great results. Although, CPS is kinda an odd case to include in the debate because the district has a hybrid system of strong central control combined with elected Local School Councils that can exert some influence.

Back to Miller's article.

But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.

The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.

In Bowling For Columbine Michael Moore analyzed violence in the United States by comparing it to Canada, especially levels of violence and rates of firearm ownership. As I understood the film, Moore at least suggested that U.S. attitudes and traditions of violence were influenced by the history of racism and bigotry (against Native Americans, Blacks, certain religious groups, immigrants and descendants of non-European immigrants).

So, it seems possible that local control is not the only uniquely American attribute contributing to our public schools being different and inferior to other countries' public school systems.

Many reformers across the political spectrum agree that local control has become a disaster for our schools. But the case against it is almost never articulated. Public officials are loath to take on powerful school-board associations and teachers’ unions; foundations and advocacy groups, who must work with the boards and unions, also pull their punches. For these reasons, as well as our natural preference for having things done nearby, support for local control still lingers, largely unexamined, among the public.

Would District 88 (Bellwood and Stone Park elementary schools) be better off if bureaucrats appointed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich controlled the district? (FYI D88 just fired its fourth superintendent in four years. Three of the four were not allowed to even complete the academic year.)

Would District 209 (Proviso Township High Schools) be better off if state bureaucrats controlled the school district? Let me rephrase that, would students and taxpayers get better educations with more efficiency in spending if the State of Illinois was calling the shots?

I would give a relatively high probability to things improving if the state controlled these two districts.

But how would Oak Park do? Would Oak Park and River Forest High Schools (District 200) improve? Would District 97 (Oak Park elementary schools) improve?

Which community has more clout: Oak Park or Proviso? Oak Park has succeeded in preventing I-290 from being widened to four lanes causing traffic to bottleneck.

Back to Miller's article. He lists two problems facing local school districts and then writes:

Incompetent school boards and union dominance. “In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” Things don’t appear to have improved much since Twain’s time. “The job has become more difficult, more complicated, and more political, and as a result, it’s driven out many of the good candidates,” Vander Ark says. “So while teachers’ unions have become more sophisticated and have smarter people who are better-equipped and -prepared at the table, the quality of school-board members, particularly in urban areas, has decreased.” Board members routinely spend their time on minor matters, from mid-level personnel decisions to bus routes. “The tradition goes back to the rural era, where the school board hired the schoolmarm and oversaw the repair of the roof, looked into the stove in the room, and deliberated on every detail of operating the schools,” says Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University. “A lot of big-city school boards still do these kinds of things.” Because of Progressive-era reforms meant to get school boards out of “politics,” most urban school districts are independent, beyond the reach of mayors and city councils. Usually elected in off-year races that few people vote in or even notice, school boards are, in effect, accountable to no one.

Thoughts? Reactions?

Miller also lists the inequalities in education funding as being interrelated with local control of education. I have shown in the case of Proviso Township High Schools that lack of resources is not the problem. Per student Proviso spends less that Oak Park-River Forest, but a comparable about to Lyons Township and Riverside-Brookfield. The following local high school districts spend less and get better test scores: Elmwood Park, Leyden, Morton and York.

The beginning of Miller's conclusion poses a good question.

I asked Marc Tucker, the head of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (a 2006 bipartisan panel that called for an overhaul of the education system), how he convinces people that local control is hobbling our schools. He said he asks a simple question: If we have the second-most-expensive K–12 system of all those measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but consistently perform between the middle and the bottom of the pack, shouldn’t we examine the systems of countries that spend less and get better results? “I then point out that the system of local control that we have is almost unique,” Tucker says. “One then has to defend a practice that is uncharacteristic of the countries with the best performance.

Miller comes down on the side of federalizing public education. To respond with a cheap shot, do you want the guys who decided to invade Iraq (and can't get us out) to decide how to fix Proviso Township High Schools?

I found Kevin Drum's entry (Washington Monthly) more persuasive than Miller's article in The Atlantic Monthly.

[Emily Bazelon's article about school integration in [the] New York Times Magazine is] basically a review of many decades of research showing that the most important way to improve school performance is to eliminate high concentrations of poverty: other things equal, it turns out that academic achievement for all races shows dramatic gains when the proportion of low-income students in a school falls below 50% or, even better, 40%. This finding, says UCLA education professor Gary Orfield, is "one of the most consistent findings in research on education."

Drum notes that many districts don't have the ability to dilute students from families in poverty with students from more affluent families.

But to bring it back to Miller's way of questioning the status quo, what do other countries with high levels of poverty do to deliver education?