The Weight of Scale
Small Can Still be Beautiful
I recently reviewed a book about the early history of Teach for America for the Journal of School Choice. It’s an interesting book, even though I have some disagreements with the framing. One thing I noticed from that book was that the history of TFA:
“…actually parallels the past few decades’ history of education policy reform reasonably well: Optimistic, with a lot of hope placed in new kinds of reforms in the late 90s/early 2000s, to an interesting alliance between leftish reformers and red state policymakers a few years later, to a fracturing of that alliance as TFA (and so many other organizations) focused much more on identarian issues from the mid-teens to the present.”
The history of education reform is an interesting thing. Andrew Coulson’s 1999 book Market Education: The Unknown History is a really good one on school choice, and Rick Hess has a more recent but different sort of one on education reform, but the broader “reform” movement and its evolution over the last 20-30 years could use another deep-dive. I have been working on various aspects of school choice/education reform for a long time. The discussions there really have evolved over time. For example: Some requirements most organizations (both public and private) held, say 15 years ago, were that education reform proposals from potential startup schools/networks needed to do two things:
Increase test-based student achievement, at least as well as the conventional public schools; and
Be scalable, to grow to serve as many students as possible.
This was very much the consensus among education reformers. And having come out of a context/time where there was functionally no choice in most places, and a whole lot of new data collection going on thanks to NCLB and just better data systems, this was not such a crazy attitude to have. Supposedly the phrase “the only way out is through” sort of comes from Robert Frost, but Virgil basically says it to Dante too. And that seems to have been true here. As a society maybe we had to go through the collective experiences of implementing test-based accountability and scale in order to get past them. It’s not that the country needed to experiment on kids, but that it needed to learn how those theories, which again many, many people held as rational next steps, worked in real life, and that lesson could only come from real life implementation. (As is often the case, read your Burke!)
Large-scale testing is a story for another day. How we even think about “accountability” for hybrid schools and microschools, whether they’re getting some kind of state funds, or whether they’re charter versions, or some other arrangement that people think needs some kind of accountability beyond parental choice is another project I am interested in working on. But it’s closely tied to the other phenomenon – scale – that I really want to talk about. A lot of school choice projects couldn’t get off the ground in the past unless they promised or showed some ability to beat existing schools on measures of test-based accountability. But that’s pretty straightforward. And it’s become passé. Scale, on the other hand, is something we still talk a lot about.
I wrote a paper about the underlying conflicts between scale, “college and career readiness,” and school choice a few years ago:
“Schumacher counteracted the idolatry of gigantism with the beauty of smallness. People, he argued could only feel at home in human-scale environments. If structures – economic, political or social – became too large they became impersonal and unresponsive to human needs and aspirations. Under these conditions individuals felt functionally futile, dispossessed, voiceless, powerless, excluded, alienated (Pearce, 2006).”
People care less and less about test scores when choosing schools. But people are less likely to want as-large-as-possible-scale solutions anymore either. And the people we’ve been asking to deliver those large-scale solutions weren’t going to be able to, anyway. We really did do a lot of waiting for Superman from about 2000-2020.
That’s not sustainable. There are only so many people who can manage to startup and run charter schools or creative private schools, and then spin off new sites. And there’s only so much money to seed the big organizations such an approach calls for. And, once someone cracks the code for the big dollars, others are going to have stronger incentives to copy them in lots of ways. This is the kind of constraining I wrote about in that college and career readiness paper, and why too much emphasis on scale is ultimately counterproductive for the school choice movement. The startup founders are in too-short supply. Funders can become (and should be!) somewhat nervous about betting too much money on the wrong person or organization. Other issues like Founders Disease can crop up and can be a real problem when financial support grows. One way to avoid making the wrong seven-figure bets, and to contain Founder’s Disease, is to keep things small and decentralized.
The Vela Education Fund has done a great job of adjusting to the problem of scale in a post-COVID landscape full of hybrid schools and microschools. Vela hands out much smaller grants than schools of the past would expect, to many more groups. (And they’re not asking for proof of high-flying accountability measures). Yet we’re still seeing something of a “scaling” of these kinds of schools around the country with this approach, but they’re cooking at a slower boil. These startups are a lot smaller and a lot more local. This may be a strange-feeling approach in modern America, but it is probably a healthier way to get lots of creative schools off the ground and serving more kids than is making bigger bets, with lots of assumptions about what schools should look like baked in.
“But isn’t this just a too-chaotic way of doing education reform?” Well, I will write about that soon.