More Than Choice

Accuracy in Academia ^ | May 6, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

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More than Choice

Bethany Stotts, May 6, 2010

At a recent book forum at the American Enterprise Institute, AEI scholar Frederick Hess argued that education reform should move beyond whole-school conceptions of school choice and focus on the dynamics of “supply.”

“Now, like I just said previously, opening new schools is only one part of the solution but they’re a useful part of the solution and they’re an important part of the solution but choice doesn’t tell you anything about what’s gonna happen to the supply,” said Hess, discussing his new book Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling.

He criticized the current climate, which, he argues, encourages education entrepreneurs to go found a charter school rather than invent something new.

He also noted at the lecture that school reforms at the district level happen often but teachers wait them out. “A decade ago, in a book titled Spinning Wheels, I reported that the typical urban school district had launched at least 13 major reforms in a three-year span during the 1990s—a new reform every three months!” he writes in Education Unbound.

Hess compared public schools today with General Motors and post-Gorbachev Russia. “If you think about when President Obama last year approved the federal takeover of General Motors, it wasn’t like President Obama’s economics team had any particularly unique insights into the problem of General Motors,” he said. “Everybody, everybody knew General Motors’ problems and the not-so-secret truth is everybody had known General Motors’ problems for thirty years.”

“None of [the problems were] new and it wasn’t that GM didn’t know what the problem was,” he argued, continuing, “It’s that GM’s leadership was hamstrung.”

He continued, saying,...