Abstract
The state has experimented with a range of decentralized school organizations over the past half century, in part aiming to lift poor children. This movement stems from not only neoliberal ideology but also from the earlier “Third Way” of advancing public projects—severing local organizing from the state’s bureaucratic rules, while stopping short of atomized market remedies. This article first examines the economic and institutional forces that drive civic activists to advance decentralizing remedies, especially the spread of nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and client choice in the education sector. We then detail the uneven empirical benefits of three decentralizing segments of the education sector: preschools, parental vouchers, and charter schools. Finally we move beneath surface-level governance changes to highlight how particular social relations found inside decentralized organizations at times do yield discernible, even sizable, benefits. Comparative cases reveal a second generation of decentralists, who build from the lessons of their policy ancestors. Second-wave decentralists are keenly focused on a social architecture that motivates poor children and educators.
A long-running debate turns on the alleged advantages of centrally regulated hierarchies versus the benefits of unfettered markets. School reformers now invoke these institutional strategies to lift poor families and children. Yet when we look on the ground inside communities, we discover that neither ideal type of social organizing dominates the institutional landscape.
Instead, public projects are now largely carried out by a variety of taxpayer-funded, yet privately run, organizations. Even the mechanical or hierarchical control of private production now feels obsolete. Indeed, few Americans make anything anymore—be it cars, shoes, radios, or widgets—through standardized routines. So let us begin with the reality that few individuals or firms in the United States labor any longer within a classic hierarchy or neoclassical market.
Instead, we see a colorful mixed market of schools blossoming, lightly regulated and spreading rapidly in America’s cities, where parents eagerly seek options for their children. Take the kaleidoscopic diversity of organizations that now populate the education field. We see magnet schools, charter schools, teacher-run “pilot” schools that have broken free of downtown bureaucracies, private schools, virtual forms of schooling, and liberalized mechanisms that allow parents to shop across a marketplace of institutions. It is these organizations’ detachment from cumbersome hierarchies that is to spur inventive forms of pedagogy and richer relationships between students and teachers, lifting educational quality and all children.
One key feature of this feisty mixed market is that neighborhood schools are largely detached from the state and downtown schools bureaucracy. Decentralizing advocates—pushing policymakers and parents over the past half century—argue that the structuring of a mixed market (or a lightly regulated organizational field), populated by decentered nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and for-profit firms, will somehow be more motivating for kids and educators alike. We will return to how undertheorized the claims of the new decentralists remain. But this has not slowed their political progress.
This article first sketches why civic leaders now express rising faith in decentering earlier sources of institutional authority, and their logic in how mixed markets of locally run organizations are more likely to buoy poor families. We argue that decentralizing pressures, driven by long-term economic pressures on the state, will persist and perhaps intensify. However, neoliberalism is not the lone culprit. Many local activists on the political Left have come to question whether highly regulated mass institutions can motivate behavior change on the ground. We emphasize that the specific form that decentralization takes, especially the social ideals and human-scale relations found inside schools, remains highly contested.
The core of the article covers what is known empirically about the efficacy of decentralizing reforms in education, typically advanced by rather strange political bedfellows. Advocates have sparked the spread of preschools, portable vouchers, and charter schools over the past half century. But beyond redrawing the surface-level governance of schools, have these ambitious experiments advanced poor children or better equipped the educators who serve them? What are we learning about the organizational and motivational mechanisms that engage children and teachers?
Finally, our case studies of “second-wave decentralization”—drawing from field work for a larger project—help in describing inventive social relations found inside local organizations (both in education and other sectors) where practitioners do effectively lift their clients. What are we learning about this social architecture, crafted after local firms detach from central authorities, that does occasionally yield promising results for poor families and children?
The Demise of Central Authority and Regulation
The steady loss of manufacturing jobs has received ample attention, as the U.S. economy struggles to find its footing in the global economy. We focus here on the implications of this changing economy for how managers and policymakers conceive of social cooperation and encourage learning or behavioral change inside local firms. The organizational field of education—especially within urban centers trying to reduce achievement gaps—is one case in point. These shifts in how authority and social cooperation are crafted, along with the attraction of decentralized remedies, have swept across other sectors as well, including in health care and housing, and even in contracting out police or military services.
Few Americans make things
About 152 million Americans remained active in the labor force through 2011, as the economy tried to recover from the Great Recession. But less than one in six workers now grows or produces anything, a fact that stems from a longer-running structural shift that still besets the U.S. economy. In 2001, manufacturing industries employed as many people as did the education and health care sectors combined, about 16 million in each. These human services have created 4 million additional jobs since 2000, despite the recession, while manufacturing shed an equal number (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2011). Almost one-third of U.S. GDP growth since 1990 has stemmed from rising earnings by multinational corporations—firms that do not produce much stateside (Peck 2011; Spence 2011). In the goods-producing private sectors, employment barely grew over this same period, sharply contrasting job growth in publicly funded organizations.
The ongoing transformation of the labor structure is ordered by gender as well. Education, health care, and government sectors combined—operating as mixed markets of publicly funded and privately run firms and NGOs—now employ more than 42 million workers, almost one-quarter of the labor force. Three in four workers in education and health care are women. Job demand is projected to grow in these female-dominated sectors as baby boomers continue to age. The number of individuals turning 65 will nearly double from 47 million to 80 million in the coming two decades (Campbell 2011).
This is not exactly breaking news. But the implications for how we conceive of work, or how social cooperation is organized locally, have received less attention. In many cases, the structuring of work and human activity inside formal organizations still remains tied to centralized authority, hierarchical roles, and top-down routines. Government reduces human learning into testable bits, didactically served through mechanistic pedagogy and gauged by multiple-choice exams (for example, under No Child Left Behind), just as fast-food companies train their workers to routinely stamp out burgers. Federal education policy remains in flux. Yet at the very same time that Tayloresque hierarchies have become anachronistic in the workplace, hypercentralized reformers seek to reinforce didactic, mechanical practices in America’s classrooms.
The steady demise of central authority
Beyond the shift in the nature of work, the decline of central authority and universal guideposts that once guided individual behavior represents the second consequential shift characterizing postindustrial societies. Rorty (1989) claimed that “no final authority” any longer operates to mediate moral disputes in the West, signaling the end of modern universals. Lyotard (1992) spoke of the erosion of “grand narratives,” such as the American Dream, or the notion that anyone can get ahead if they just work hard enough. Or, as Lemert (2004, 446) claims, we have witnessed over the past two generations the “ever-augmenting disappearance of the center into a sea of relativism.” Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1987) claimed that “there’s no such thing as society,” harking back to the neoclassical nirvana of atomized individuals advancing their own utility.
We argue that diminishing public capital, shifting demographics, and the crumbling social legitimacy of large institutions, such as government, have together fueled the rise of diverse, often decentralized, organizations.
Shrinking public capital
The central state’s declining fiscal capacity is inevitable, thanks to three gale-force winds that buffet political leaders, pushing them to offload public projects to less regulated, decentralized organizations. The first of these stiff winds is declining tax revenue relative to the rising costs of public entitlements. This tension now strangles the state’s fiscal capacity and ability to innovate, a secular trend that began long before the 2007 recession (Orzag 2011).
A collateral trend stems from America’s struggle to adapt to its emergent position in the world economy, a position that replaces manufacturing with value-added firms, often high-tech or design enterprises, that tend to hire well educated staff. At the same time, government is overextended (given current economic and political constraints) when it comes to entitlements, such as Social Security and Medicare health coverage for poor families, retirees, and the elderly.
One in six dollars spent in our economy goes to health care, a proportion that continues to grow. Under current law, federal health care spending will rise to 12 percent of GDP by 2020, while Social Security will make up 6 percent (Balz 2010). Growing federal spending in health care must be offset by cuts to school finance, higher education, and the tattered safety net for the poor.
The slow march of demographics
Should domestic employment return to historical levels, fiscal pressure on the government could ease, if not for the second stiff wind. Baby boomers are retiring at an accelerating rate, and the nation’s birth rate continues to decline. By 2030 the pension and health benefits of each senior citizen will be financed in part by just two workers; this ratio was seven wage earners to every one retiree in 1950. Unless Washington shaves spending on health care and old-age entitlements, public debt will rise from 62 percent of GDP in 2010 to more than 80 percent by 2035 (Congressional Budget Office 2010), further limiting the fiscal capacity of the state.
Fading social legitimacy
The state’s credibility further declines as its agencies continue to display high costs to taxpayers and uneven effectiveness—be it raising school quality, improving health, or retooling the economy. After all, per pupil spending tripled between the early 1970s and the 1990s across the nation’s schools (in constant dollars), yet test scores remained flat, inched upward in the mid-1990s, then flattened out again (Hanushek 1997). Spending on health care by government and families equaled 4 percent of GDP in 1950; today the health sector eats up 17 percent of the nation’s annual input. Americans spend two times more per capita on health care than do Germans, but our rate of preventable deaths is 23 percent greater (Orzag 2011).
Government is held in declining esteem. In 1979, about 25 percent of Americans polled said that more than half of every federal dollar was “wasted.” By 2009, that share had climbed to 45 percent. A year later, when asked, “how much confidence (do you) have in the Congress,” half of those polled said, “very little” or “none.” 1 In contrast, Americans retain strong affection for their local governments. In 2009, just 23 percent of those polled said that “you can trust government in Washington to do what is right most of the time,” even though President Obama was quite popular. 2 This holds direct implications for why a rising share of politicians and civic leaders now argue to de-institutionalize government bureaucracies, especially in the education arena, to build locally run, somehow more responsive, organizations.
The state’s rusty, regulatory apparatus
The appeal of a decentralized organization stems not only from the central state’s withering fiscal condition and social legitimacy but also from its dogged reliance on bureaucratic ways of regulating behavior. From the mid-nineteenth century forward, as government eagerly tried to look modern, it borrowed from the factory or military model of hierarchy to merge village or parish schools into unified national systems, and to build hospitals, highways, and postal services. But in contemporary times, as bureaucratic controls over routinized work fade into history (for most, not all, laborers), these forms also lose credibility in the public sector. And of course old labor and contemporary progressives, often working from NGOs, have long contested the alienating effects of industrial forms of social control, along with the conformity and cultural hegemony that result.
There is also the collateral problem that regulation from above does not necessarily motivate clients or practitioners, in our case students and teachers, to produce the learning or behavioral changes expected of them. Rhetoric has swirled inside the central state since the 1990s when Vice President Al Gore aimed to “reinvent government.” A leaner, more surgical state was envisioned, setting intended outcomes centrally—from a national curriculum in the schools to shared quality benchmarks for hospitals—and then incentivizing local organizations to innovate and craft their own means of reaching these goals. But factory-like regulatory habits die hard. So while the highly centralized No Child Left Behind Act has helped to raise student math scores in recent years, it has otherwise done little to elevate kids’ reading skills or narrow racial achievement gaps (Fuller 2008).
Many civic activists on the Left—not only neoliberals or pro-market advocates—have come to decry central regulation and the state’s press to homogenize knowledge and cultural forms. Maybe the Summer of Love, the Grateful Dead, or John Stewart bears much of the blame. By the 1970s, the “Cultural Left” had split badly from the “Economic Left” (Rorty 1989, 76). While a robust state was once seen as essential to building a shared infrastructure and easing the excesses of capital, it is cultural liberalism and the erosion of uniform lifestyles that mark America’s increasingly pluralistic society. And the state’s hegemonic habits can no longer stand up to the particular identity politics, or the “politics of difference and recognition,” as sociologist Todd Gitlin (1996) has put it.
Finally, government does not directly run many services any longer, except for the military and police, postal service, and departments of motor vehicles. Since the 1980s, nearly half of all federal spending on goods and services has gone to outside NGOs or for-profit firms that manage these public endeavors (Donahue 1989). The state has embarked on de-institutionalizing how a variety of clients are served, from literally blowing up housing projects, such as Cabrini Green, to putting disabled adults back on the streets, to moving special-education children from isolation and into mainstream classrooms. Today, one of the major aims of President Obama’s health care reform is to keep patients out of hospitals, even to discourage nursing homes and doctors from referring individuals to costly emergency rooms. The old, bureaucratically run institution is now viewed as the problem, not part of the solution.
Faith in Decentralized Schools: But Do They Lift Poor Children?
Declining faith in bureaucratically ruled, monochromatic forms of schooling fuels support for three decentralized alternatives. Advocates for each have promised benefits for poor children and their families. These alternatives include (1) a rapidly expanding panoply of preschools since the 1960s; (2) smaller academic programs and schools—such as magnet schools with focused missions, charter schools that are publicly funded but legally detached from state codes and regulations, and pilot schools, which similarly sever relations with the state and downtown city schools office, while innovating with thin, flexible labor contracts; and (3) school vouchers and tuition tax credits that move public dollars into private, sectarian schools in a growing number of states.
In short, the organizational field of education has come to resemble a colorful mixed-market of differentiated forms, each animated by particular ideals and simple theories about how local or market accountability will lift quality overall. But have these large and costly experiments in decentralizing who runs local schools actually resulted in gains for poor children or the teachers who serve them? We show that the evidence is mixed at best and disappointing overall.
However, recent work—both qualitative and clinical trials—is beginning to point to social relations inside less bureaucratically encumbered forms of schooling that do hold progressive benefits for poor students. This leads to the second-order question: How might the state more effectively organize (or incentivize) work and social engagement on the ground in ways that motivate and integrate poor children and their families?
First-wave decentralization unfolds in education
Let us turn to the empirical literature on the effects of these specific forms of decentralization in education. We first describe these decentralizing movements, sketching their ideological goals and organizational forms. Then, we review the uneven benefits that local innovation (or allied market devices) has yielded for poor children. We place each form within the post-1960s period of first-wave decentralization, while noting deeper historical roots in the settlement-house movement, the mid-nineteenth century impulse to unify “common schools,” and resurgent neoliberal thought over the past generation (Fuller 2007; Tyack 1974).
Preschools
The nineteenth-century rise of childcare centers and nursery schools would eventually lead to a highly decentralized, yet stratified, set of organizations, split along social-class lines. The settlement-house movement, led by the likes of Jane Addams and Dorothy Day, provided organized childcare for lower-income families, while nursery schools spread in better-off communities, especially in the postwar period of suburban expansion (Beatty 1995). By 2005 the childcare and preschool field grew to become a $47 billion industry, taking into account family fees and public subsidies, the latter accounting for about two-fifths of total annual spending on early education. The best estimates place most children in nonprofit organizations, with many fewer school systems, equaling about two-thirds of all three- and four-year-olds now enrolled in center-based programs (Fuller 2007). About 131,000 nonprofits that operate preschools or childcare homes for pay reported 501(c)(3) tax information to the IRS in 2005.
The preschool field can be viewed as a vast, though locally rooted, mixed market—one that is powered largely by the purchasing power of families and maternal employment levels, along with the presence of NGOs. Examining the per capita distribution of preschool organizations among 9,179 zip codes, Fuller et al. (2004) found that much of the variance was explained by median household income, maternal employment rates, and ethnic composition (a higher supply in black communities). In addition, zip codes with more churches also hosted more preschools, suggesting that neighborhood infrastructure plays a role in attracting Head Start or state childcare dollars.
State government spending on early education, along with more intense quality regulation, is associated with rich supply overall. Still, per capita supply reaches twice the level in affluent zip codes, compared with preschool supply in low-income zip codes (Fuller and Strath 2001). Government regulation attempts to equalize the distribution of quality, such as teacher-training levels or class sizes, for preschools situated in affluent or poor communities (Fuller 2007). This helps to explain the discernible benefits felt by poor children in preschools that meet demanding quality regulation, even as day-to-day management remains in the hands of NGOs or local school districts (as reviewed below).
Charter schools
The late union leader, Al Shanker, learned of the idea of “charter teachers” in the mid-1980s—the notion that creative or effective teachers should be chartered (authorized) to work free of state rules and district regulations, although presumably within the provisions of a labor contract. But the related idea that gained more legitimacy was for the state to charter an entire school: taxpayer-financed, human-scale schools that would attract compelling teachers by operating as independent hothouses for innovation. The Minnesota legislature first authorized funding for charter schools in 1991; California passed a similar bill one year later. Over the ensuing 15 years, two-thirds of states authorized this mechanism of decentralizing the control of publicly funded schools. In 2008, more than 4,100 charter schools operated across the nation, serving about 1.4 million students, or 3 percent of all public school students (Allen and Consoletti 2010).
Since charter schools are taxpayer-financed, stratification stemming from unequal family purchasing power is not in play. Yet pent-up demand for some kind of low-priced alternative school is not necessarily randomly distributed. Parental support for these schools—and financial backing from civic elites and foundations—centers on building alternative schools in urban centers (see Fuller 2010 for the case of Los Angeles). Like the preschool field, neighborhoods with a stronger array of NGOs display a stronger capacity to bid for new charter schools (Renzulli and Roscigno 2007).
How charter schools are created and structured varies across states and metropolitan areas. Arizona has perhaps the weakest regulatory apparatus, so charter school births and deaths fluctuate wildly from year to year. Other states, such as Massachusetts, have tried to nurture fewer numbers of high-quality charters. Yet this was before President Obama pushed governors to lift the cap on the count of charter schools in 2010 (to qualify for new federal dollars), citing charters as a beacon of innovation and responding to the demands of low-income parents for safer, more effective schools.
Vouchers
The notion of portable payments to families, who then purchase education, housing, or health care within a transparent market, has long been attractive to neoclassical thinkers, going as far back as Thomas Paine in the late eighteenth century (Kirkpatrick 1999). Parental choice—where children are no longer required to attend their nearest school—took hold in the segregationist South during the 1950s. Then the Kennedy-Johnson White House turned to voucher experiments to give black families wider school options, although effects on achievement proved elusive. The conversion of federal college aid to portable Pell Grants in 1972 reflected a voucher-like mechanism, allowing students to select a public or private college. In 1990, the Democratic Congress cut a deal with George H. W. Bush to create national childcare funding, beyond Head Start, provided that states distribute these dollars to parents as portable vouchers.
Still, opposition to vouchers for the K-12 education subsector has been vociferous, especially in the wake of a major push during the Reagan era, both for vouchers and tuition tax credits for mostly affluent parents who sent their kids to private school. Black activists—harking back to the Kennedy-Johnson embrace—created municipal-based voucher programs in Milwaukee in 1989, then later in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. Large-scale experiments were funded by conservative foundations, although focused on widening school options within low-income neighborhoods. Florida remains the only state to sustain a statewide voucher-like program, and it only applies to schools that show persistent failure to lift student achievement.
On the other hand, many states now provide families with a state tax credit when they pay tuition at a private school, or donate money to such an institution (Welner 2008). Despite the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to permit Cleveland’s voucher program to continue, arguing that benefits for poor children outweigh compromising the Establishment Clause, charter schools and liberalized transfer policies have largely taken the wind from the sails of voucher advocates.
The uneven benefits of first-wave decentralization
So, what have we learned from these three cases of decentralized social action, efforts to create lightly regulated fields of alternative forms of schooling, often aiming to lift poor families and their children? We have seen the maturation of what Latin American activists first called the Third Way two generations ago (De Soto 1989), moving beyond hierarchies and the market to locally tailor public endeavors and hold them accountable to their clients (Blair 2011). Empirical work has revealed much about the uneven benefits for children and only occasionally illuminated the social mechanisms through which decentralized authority, less reliance on rules, and locally allocated resources may result in more engaging organizations on the ground.
Preschools that work for poor children
The work of decentralized NGOs and school districts has sparked one bright spot—especially for young children and poor families—amid otherwise dreary results from decentralization experiments.
First, this robust mixed market of private and public firms has taught us much about family selection processes. Better-off parents, who purchase childcare and preschool on the open market, show predictable selection patterns, enrolling their children in comparatively high-quality programs. Yet child development effects are low to nil, given that these children benefit from generally stimulating home environs (Bassok 2010; Loeb et al. 2007). Still, preschools that carefully organize classroom tasks and focus on language development do yield stronger effects, even for children from some middle-class families, where the parents recently acquired English (Fuller et al. forthcoming).
The strong benefits accruing to poor children who attend quality preschools offer a consistent finding over the past half century. Low-income families generally are situated in segmented markets, where the supply of Head Start and state-funded preschools—the bulk of which are run by NGOs—continued to grow until the 2007 recession. The early evaluation results coming from so-called boutique preschool efforts, such as the Perry Preschool or Abecederian Project, showed strong and persisting benefits for comparatively high-cost programs serving very small counts of low-income black children (Schweinhart et al. 2005). Yet in recent years, larger metropolitan or national probability samples, tracked over time and amenable to quasi-experimental analytic techniques, have shown positive effect sizes for preliteracy and math-concepts skills at about 0.25 to 0.35 of a standard deviation (Bassok 2010; Gormley et al. 2005). Effects on other outcomes, such as avoiding special education placement and graduation rates, have been impressive as well (for Chicago, see Reynolds et al. 2002). And NGO-run preschools appear to yield benefits at magnitudes that are similar to the results that stem from programs operated by public schools (Fuller 2007). While quasi-experimental designs get us closer to causal claims, the variables included in national datasets cover only a portion of unobserved confounders, possibly biasing estimates of treatment effects.
Charter schools yield uneven effects, stronger for networks
A few review papers detail the uneven benefits of charter schools as this decentralizing movement enters its third decade (Fuller 2007; Gleason et al. 2010; Lubienski and Lubienski 2006). Three studies, drawing on two national datasets, have found that, on average, students attending charter schools do not outperform their peers enrolled in regular public schools, after taking into account prior family background (Braun, Jenkins, and Grigg 2006; Nelson, Rosenberg, and Van Meter 2004). One of the three found that students attending charter high schools actually performed below their peers in regular schools (Raymond 2009). Internal variability among the growing number of charter schools is, of course, wide, just like among regular public schools.
But studies conducted in certain locales have yielded encouraging results. Hoxby and colleagues (2009) tracked kids on charter school waiting lists in New York City, finding significantly steeper growth curves for students who entered charters, relative to their peers who lost out in the lottery selection and remained in a regular public school. They found that the mean charter school applicant came from a poorer family than the average regular school peer. Over nine in ten charter applicants are selected via lottery in New York, given excess demand; the observed attributes of students winning versus those losing showed no statistically significant differences.
Achievement differences were notable: between grades four through eight, the mean charter student gained about 0.12 standard deviation in math skills above peers in regular public schools each year, and a bit less in English language arts. Gains were also significant for charter enrollees as early as third grade. The investigators detailed how achievement benefits varied dramatically among different charter schools, opening up the question of how resource allocations or social relations inside help to explain such differing effects.
Similarly, positive results have been found for students attending charters in Boston and San Diego, and for particular charter school firms, such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. A study of the latter showed that black pupils from low-income families, tracked for three years and into middle school, gained about 0.9 years of schooling in reading for the top half of twenty-two KIPP schools, closing the racial achievement gap by one-third, compared with similar students who initially attended the same elementary schools but opted for regular public schools (Tuttle et al. 2010). Gains were, by definition, not so notable in the bottom half of the KIPP schools.
Children were matched on ethnic and family income attributes; data were not available to match on home environments or more textured confounders. It is important to note that the KIPP school day runs more than nine hours and often includes Saturday classes, and one-third of KIPP school funding comes from private sources. This brings us to the questions: What can be generalized from particular cases? Are benefits from decentralized organizations locally conditioned? And what are the social mechanisms that help to explain comparatively strong effects?
Furgeson et al. (2011) pushed deeper to estimate how specific features of charter schools help to account for student growth. They replicated the null effects observed for charter students on average, compared with students matched in their propensity to attend a regular public school. In schools run by a charter management organization (CMO), students benefited from smaller enrollment, more instructional time, steady discipline practices, and teacher-coaches who attempted to improve pedagogy. This nascent line of work pulls back surface-level governance changes to identify specific social relations, between teachers and students, that appear to yield gains for students. And the benefits of mature CMOs that can improve the quality of teachers hired or how they shape the social organization of their classrooms prompt fresh thinking about the utility of a resourceful center.
Detached from central bureaucracies, charter schools will theoretically allocate resources in a more cost-effective manner. But evidence is quite uneven on the spillover effects of market-like competition. Reviewing this empirical literature, economist Julian Betts (2005) concludes that when charter schools pull kids from nearby public schools, the latter set of organizations do respond but show only modest gains in student achievement. Survey results suggest that neither charter nor regular school principals have the time or inclination to share innovative practices. Nor is it clear that charter leaders know what features of their teachers or firms pay off, relative to their conventional peers—an institutional constraint that market theorists often ignore. Early evidence does show that charter schools are taking students from Catholic and other private schools, which are now unable to compete with taxpayer subsidized charters (Buddin 2012).
Vouchers fail to lift students, but at times alter school practices
Empirical results are similarly uneven for students who win a publicly funded voucher to attend a private or sectarian school. Even when generally pro-voucher scholars have tracked students over time, as in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. (two of the nation’s four taxpayer-financed voucher programs), the results have been tepid at best.
After following students into charter and formerly private (mostly “conversion” charter schools that serve voucher pupils), Wolf (2012) found that
When similar MPCP (parental choice program) and MPS [Milwaukee Public School] students are matched and tracked over four years, the achievement growth of MPCP students compared to MPS students is higher in reading but similar in math. The MPCP achievement advantage in reading is only conclusive in 2010–11. (p. 4)
At the same time, the mostly black students attending “choice high schools” were significantly more likely to graduate.
Wolf’s parallel evaluation of the D.C. voucher experiment—an effort that President Obama has tried to kill, but one in which Republicans in Congress have prevailed—was more upbeat. Kids sent to Catholic or other private schools after their parents won a voucher in the D.C. lottery showed small, statistically insignificant achievement gains. Voucher participants were 24 percent more likely to graduate from high school, compared with peers whose parents had applied for, but not won, a voucher.
Encouraging findings come from Florida, where a statewide program awards parents vouchers when their child attends a school that has failed to boost student test scores over several years. Rouse and colleagues (2007) found that schools under threat of being deemed a voucher school engaged in consequential organizational changes, such as lowering class sizes, lengthening school days, and engaging parents more vigorously—changes that helped to predict achievement gains. Similarly, Hoxby (2003) found that student growth was steeper in Milwaukee public schools that served large concentrations of children whose families were eligible to draw a voucher, compared with those attending schools with fewer eligible families.
Still, after reviewing this line of research one analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute emphasized one lesson for the early decentralists. “Only by stepping back from the notion that ‘choice’ itself is a panacea,” said Fred Hess (2010, 43), “and instead embracing the contingent nature of choice’s impact, can we make sense of when and why choice ‘works.’” In other words, all the political battles over parental choice, vouchers, and charter schools—going back to the early 1970s—have yielded change in how some schools are financed and who runs them day to day. But all this policy talk and contention at the institutional surface fails to yield any consistent, deeper conversation about how relationships and expectations are changed inside the guts of these local organizations. It is second-wave decentralists who animate this bundle of questions.
Clarifying Causal Mechanisms: How Might Decentralists Engage Students and Teachers?
So, why have first-wave decentralists yielded such uneven results when it comes to lifting poor children? We argue that first-wave decentralists remain focused on the political battle of disassembling centralized hierarchies and wrestling control of public resources down to the ground. This remains quite distant from the task of rethinking social roles and human-scale relationships inside these novel forms of schooling. While a necessary challenge, these governance battles distracted earlier decentralists from attending to the micro-level social relations inside their local firms that either engage clients and practitioners, or fail to do so.
In addition, as reformers increasingly focused on tearing down central controls or spawning grassroots organizations severed from the center (such as charter schools and vouchers), they often failed to recognize the interwoven legitimacy and resource flows that travel between center and periphery. Scott and colleagues’ (2000) study of the shifting structure of health care organizations through the 1990s shows how organizational fields experiencing “destructuration” present complex challenges, since “these fields provide less support and guidance to social actors than in more highly structured fields,” while “allowing more autonomous and innovative behavior on the part of actors” (p. 27).
Sticky embeddedness at two levels
Within the decentering field of education, some innovative reformers do focus inward, finding ways to engage clients and practitioners and remake relationships with the center that supports new practices. Yet we argue that two forms of embeddedness help to explain the challenge of devising more engaging social relations inside local firms that break from historical hierarchies. These lessons from theory are not lost on the breakthroughs being made by second-wave decentralists—reformers that we have been studying through comparative cases in the fields of education, health care, and banking.
The first layer of embeddedness refers to the ways in which students or teachers are deeply situated in everyday contexts, still normatively and materially constrained by their formal organization (no matter how locally rooted). The Carnegie School, of course, came to emphasize the taken-for-granted premises that guide work inside firms, or tacitly shared premises that guide how “choices are made under conditions of ambiguity about preferences, technology, and interpretation,” as Powell and DiMaggio put it (1990, 20).
This perspective would come to guide the work of cognitive scientists who detailed how one’s interpretive lenses or schema, normative routines, and culturally proscribed scripts act to “bias” how individuals and groups interpret information (e.g., Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982). Behavioral economists now work within this frame to show how centrally manipulated incentives may alter behavior on the ground but only after passing through the individual’s interpretive lens (Ariely 2009; Thaler and Sunstein 2008).
One’s own tribe or proximal social network within the firm and beyond to the surrounding field is key, especially in casting how to behave as a member in good standing and to retain access to a flow of expressive benefits and economic incentives. Ethnomethodology’s founder, Harold Garfinkel (1967, 76), emphasized that one’s embedded action was conditioned by the “socially sanctioned-facts-of-life in society that any bona fide member of the society knows.” This notion that individual cognition is embedded in one’s immediate context(s)—from family or peer group to pockets inside a formal organization—harks back to Simmel’s early argument that “no thing or event has a fixed, intrinsic meaning; its meaning only emerges through interaction with other things or events” (Simmel 1971, xxxiii, paraphrasing from the German).
At the same time Simmel (1971, 143) pointed out that the individual does not really see his or her own culture as bounded or particular until stepping outside of it, perhaps when a stranger arrives who can see reality from a fresh vantage point. “Perhaps the ties between individuals are indeed often quite homogenous, but our mind cannot grasp their homogeneity,” Simmel (1971, 230) argued. “For culture exists only if man draws into his development something that is external to him.” Then, we perceive our self as a fish out of water.
Contemporary research on social networks reveals the pivotal importance of moving outside earlier tribal boundaries, when it comes to introducing novel information or strengthening weak ties. Small’s (2009) recent work inside preschools, for instance, shows how neighborhood organizations can generate fresh social capital, enriching the information, monetary resources, and expressive returns that flow through networks, which are no longer constrained by formal rules and roles dictated from above, nor by earlier tribal boundaries. That is, resourceful, oft-decentered organizations inside poor communities can advance weak ties, in Granovetter’s (1973) terms, invoking bridging forms of social capital (Bryk et al. 2010).
Taken together, the individual is embedded in an organization, and the organization is embedded in a field. Once liberated from bureaucratic rules or centralized uniformity, the individual teacher must acquire practices from the field. These inventive forms of teaching may be more engaging and more motivating, or not. The point is that the individual is still bound by forms of pedagogy and social forms of cooperation with students that persist within the organizational field. Innovative practices may arise within local organizations, but the sharing of inventive (even effective) practices may be discouraged by market competition or simply by time constraints facing busy educators. Furthermore, the center has been weakened by the decentralizing drift, rendering it less able to share efficacious practices.
Second-wave decentralists recognize this tension between understanding the “indigenous” cognitive frames and cultural scripts, and extending out social networks that import novel practices, inviting in a “stranger who stays,” as Simmel put it. The analytic advance here by second-wave decentralists, which we observe in our organizational case studies, is to first recognize the tribal embeddedness of individuals and their local surroundings, then to reach out for new forms of social architecture, along with pedagogical tools, that vigorously engage their students and their staff at the grassroots.
How social theory informs the new decentralists
The work of second-wave decentralists can be described along three social-organizational dimensions, stemming from our own work inside education, health care, and banking institutions: surgical regulation of fields by the state, clear normative signals and incentives for behavioral change, and building up and out from the tribal ties and interests of the client.
Selective coupling, surgical regulation
Public authorities run a diminishing range of economic firms or services. Even the exceptions—schools, as well as transportation, housing, and police services—are increasingly contracted out or lightly regulated by public authorities. By this we mean that the state regulates the goals or performance targets and then lets local firms and managers figure out how to reach these publicly defined goals.
Education is a ripe example of this rendition of “reinventing government,” going back to Al Gore’s deinstitutionalization campaign in the 1990s (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). State governments set the learning objectives, common curriculum, and student-growth targets expected of local schools. But ideally, the state then deregulates inputs or pedagogical practices; that is the localized means by which schools pursue the performance expectations set above. The Obama administration is aggressively advancing national curricular standards, while encouraging states to expand charter schools and mixed markets of alternative forms of schooling.
Digging into one of our organizational cases—an inventive network of four charter schools located in low-income communities—we discovered a lean and strategic organizational center that selects inspiring principals and teachers who share a commitment to lifting blue-collar kids and buy into inventive pedagogical tools. Managers at the headquarters of Envision Charter Schools push core ethics and coach principals and teachers on the ground. They watch to ensure that new teachers fit with the Envision Charter School’s network-wide conception of kids and how to engage them. But central staff avoid regulating the everyday work of teachers. The center forges the pedagogical tools employed by teachers, templates for hands-on, multimedia projects, and public exhibitions of students’ accumulating portfolios of work. So the student’s role becomes an active one, coached by teachers who offer structure and novel sources of knowledge.
Clear signals, incentives for behavioral change
In concert with surgical regulation, the state often tries to pair monetary incentives with the achievement of centrally set performance objectives. So the Obama administration is currently pushing states and school districts to incent (or fire) teachers based on the “value-added” performance of their students. Health care reforms include monetary payments to clinics that deliver preventive care and keep patients out of emergency rooms (Starr 2011). Behavioral economists and fellow advocates of material incentives assume that carrots induce a discrete behavior change in the individual. Yet remember that practitioners are deeply embedded in a thick organizational culture.
How do individual teachers view merit pay, and with what effects on social relations? Decentralists remain mixed on whether individual incentives strengthen or undercut shared normative commitments that intrinsically motivate teachers. Policy signals can also be hazy, for example, when government decentralizes the control of the budget but there is little understanding from school districts or school principals about who is to enjoy greater control and for what purposes (Fuller et al. 2011). Second-wave decentralists—at least across the organizational cases that we study—tend to use a mix of individual and collective incentives, rewarding local units that meet centrally negotiated goals. This method takes advantage of the embedded nature of work and social relations in local organizations, rather than undercutting these local ties and normative commitments.
Tribal ties and porous social networks
The likelihood that distant collective action—from the state, professional guilds, or private managers—actually moves behavior locally is severely constrained by the embeddedness of clients and practitioners alike. Their local tribes, if you will, offer a sense of belonging and immediate resources, material and expressive, that likely shapes expectations and behaviors more profoundly than incentives and mandates from afar. Work inside educational institutions has contributed much to the allied literatures on the architecture of social capital (Lin 2002; Loury 1977) and, more recently, on the variable structure of social networks inside formal organizations (for a review, see Daly 2011). This literature varies on the extent to which highly embedded tribes or networks act to conserve dominant expectations and behavioral norms, or host novel impulses to innovate or accept relative strangers into the fold. Coleman (1990) and like-minded scholars talk of the strength or tightness of social capital, that is, how steady reciprocity, trust, and resource flows and the legitimate capacity to normatively sanction errant members manifest healthier networks. But other scholars have advanced the utility of weak ties and bridging forms of social capital, where formal institutions, such as preschools or school district reformers, emit novel ideas and practices that may widen options beyond those afforded by strong “cultural” ties within the immediate tribe (Small 2009), or host heterogeneous role models or cultural scripts within low-income neighborhoods and networks (Harding 2010; Holloway and Fuller 1997).
These differing theoretical frames hold implications for the logic of how the decentering of resources, say in the education field, may spark innovative organizations and social relations, or how it simply acts to conserve dominant power relations, local norms, and taken-for-granted cultural forms. Head Start and charter school advocates, for example, often claim that they will root their organizations in neighborhoods, but they often ignore the cultural milieu in which children are being raised, promising to “compensate” for poor parenting. Therefore, how decentralized organizations are nested in their communities, drawing from or advancing a priori social networks, remains poorly articulated.
Our case studies, appearing elsewhere, suggest that second-wave decentralists are thinking quite explicitly about the kinds of activity structures in which teachers build on and extend the embeddedness of students, and how children find membership and meaning. Ecocultural theorists, descendants of Vygotsky, similarly speak of “activity structures,” the daily, scripted interactions that pattern taken-for-granted beliefs and behavior expected of members (e.g., Weisner 2005). This perspective overlaps with Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992) focus on the individual’s enveloping context or habitus. That is, how the individual, nested within a particular cultural milieu (structured by wider class or status boundaries), manifests particular cultural scripts and ritualized interactions that define him or her as a legitimate member of a group. At the same time, according to ecocultural theorists, the economic and normative demands placed on the individual’s social context may change as the wider social environment evolves.
One distinctive feature of the second-wave decentralists is their curiosity about the tribes and networks in which their clients are embedded. For example, charter high school teachers in some cases become familiar with the dialect, cultural icons, and interests of their adolescent students. The teachers within the Envision firm quite consciously advance their own collegial relationships, often held together by the cultural or developmental mission of their particular school. Teachers, like other practitioners attempting to move or lift clients, are strangers in a sense. But these grassroots decentralists can orient less to the agenda of the state or the far away center, and instead bridge to the everyday cultural routines of their clients.
Indeed, part of this project of decentralization is to rethink the forms of social relations that will allow clients, like students, to experience membership in a tribe that is encased in a formal organization, while stretching their network and avenues of knowledge far beyond their immediate milieu. In a sense these second-wave decentralists are strangers who stay, who come to understand the culture and social supports of their clients, while offering novel information and experiences that otherwise would not be available. In other words, these are settings and activities in which learning occurs.
Conclusion
We have witnessed over the past half century vibrant interest in what some have called a “third way,” somehow moving beyond hierarchies and markets when organizing meaningful work and human services. This shift has pleased neoliberals and behavioral economists who have long argued that market mechanisms—competition among organizations, consumer choice, and “getting the incentives right”—would alter behavior on the ground and lift the efficiency of firms that advance public projects. Many economists and neoliberals have deployed similar arguments to promote everything from charter schools to health maintenance organizations to vouchers for publicly subsidized housing.
It is true that the NGO sector is booming overall and likely to grow further as the state’s capacity to run anything continues to diminish. This shift is backed by the growing, rather odd, coalition of neoliberal conservatives and progressive localists. The persisting problem, however, is that the decentralization of publicly financed authority and resources, at least in the education field, has yielded uneven results. We have seen how quality preschools and top-of-the-line charter schools do effectively lift children’s learning in low-income communities. But the mean effects of charter schools are unimpressive, as are the benefits for middle-class children attending preschool. The key in advancing the efficacy of decentralized organizations is first to acknowledge that the accrued benefits for children and families in poor neighborhoods have been mixed, after a half century of sizable financial and organizational investments.
This leads to the question of why—via what social mechanisms—decentralized organizations often fail to lift poor children and their families. Thus far, research is rudimentary, but promising avenues are opening up. Clearer theory building within and across sectors is sorely needed, both in the academy and in the minds of activists and reformers.
Eager decentralists might think more theoretically about how local control of resources, tools, and ethical authority will actually lift their clients. Selective regulation, incentives, stronger social networks, and more caring and respectful dyadic relations offer theoretical frames for identifying efficacious social mechanisms.
Some decentralists are working on a more effective social architecture, one that rigorously engages clients and practitioners alike. Preschool activists are pushing deeper into what qualities of their human-scale organizations most benefit their young charges. Our glimpse into the California charter school firm reveals inventive pedagogical practices that do animate restless blue-collar teens. The Obama health care package encourages firms to experiment with case managers inside clinics who figure out what motivates their patients and who in the support network can lend a hand. These new decentralists are eagerly focused on how patients—often with chronic conditions remedied in part through behavior change—are embedded in their immediate social context.
The decentralizing of organizations that advance public projects offers a hopeful extension of democratic pluralism. And the rise of NGOs and localized firms does represent a third way for the kinds of organizations that now hold legitimacy and public resources—they are neither run from afar by centralized bureaucracies, nor simply host market competition among atomistic clients. The pressing next step is to shape life inside these human-scale organizations in ways that lift poor children and their families. Otherwise, the alleged commitment to greater equity and membership in civic organizations—proffered by decentralists over the past half century—will remain an empty promise, simply a hopeful ideal.
Footnotes
NOTE:
This article was first discussed at the University of Chicago conference, “Rethinking Urban Poverty in the 21st Century: Institutional and Organizational Perspectives.” Many thanks to Scott W. Allard and Mario Small for inviting this analysis. Appreciation also goes to Rachel Gordon and Robert Kaestner for inviting a revised presentation at the Seminar on Social Science and Policy at the University of Illinois, Institute of Government and Public Affairs. The article stems from a book project with Mary Berg and Lynette Parker. Support is gratefully acknowledged from the Spencer and Hewlett foundations and Berkeley’s Institute of Human Development.
Notes
Bruce Fuller is a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as a sociologist at the World Bank and taught at Harvard University. He studies tensions among the central state, advocates for decentralizing institutions, and the press of cultural pluralism. His books include Government Confronts Culture (Taylor & Francis 1999), Inside Charter Schools (Harvard 2001), and Standardized Childhood (Stanford 2007).
Danfeng Soto-Vigil Koon is a PhD candidate in the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on the function of law in education reform and its impact on the educational lives of low-income children of color.