3Purge School Bureaucracy to Unleash the Human Spirit
America’s children hold the future of our society in their hands. We want them to learn, live, and enjoy the core values of American culture: Individual initiative, common sense, and responsibility for the greater good. Our schools must teach children the skills needed in the modern world, and must also display these values in daily school choices.
Bureaucracy is the enemy of responsibility. Educators today are crushed by accumulated bureaucracy, diverting time and resources and causing a plague of burnout. School culture can be a nasty pit of competing legal demands, fostering a culture of selfishness and making it difficult to balance competing needs.
Individual responsibility must therefore be a guiding principle for how schools are organized. Teachers are role models as well as instructors, and must be free to take initiative and use common sense in balancing different needs in the classroom. Principals too must be free to exercise the judgments needed to build a healthy school culture. Local communities should be encouraged to get involved, and to have a sense of ownership and pride in their schools.
Successful schools can be very different, but the common thread is individual empowerment and responsibility. There is no other effective model: Success in the classroom hinges on the skill, caring and personality of each teacher.
The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the need for adaptability in schools. Educators will need to redirect resources to new goals, including frequent disease screening and distance learning. Rigid work rules will block innovation and freeze resources in obsolete work models.
Remaking healthy schools requires a radical simplification of the organizational structure, based on these core principles:
Pandemic uncertainties place a premium on innovation and site-specific choices. Supervising authorities should avoid imposing new protocols unless and until “best practices” become clear.
Teachers must have authority to lead the classroom—including adapting to hold student attention for the classroom and for distance learning. Most regulatory compliance and reporting requirements should be eliminated, replaced by evaluations of teacher performance. Because disorder destroys learning, teachers must have authority to exercise day-to-day discipline and send disruptive students out of the classroom.
Principals must have authority to make management decisions, including about budget allocations and teacher effectiveness.
Most legal hearings should be abolished, and claims of unfair treatment by students or teachers should be reviewed by a site-based parent-teacher committee. The committees should have authority to veto decisions, but not substitute their own decisions. Courts should not accept lawsuits on school-related disputes unless on credible allegations of serious misconduct that would be unlawful in other settings.
Accountability should be judged by broad evaluations, not just test scores. Centralized dictates by government should be replaced by flexible systems of school-based accreditation that gives educators flexibility to run their schools. Offsite officials should intervene only when accreditation reviews identify performance below acceptable professionalstandards.
Competition is healthy, and public funds should be available for any public schools, including charter schools, that have an open admissions policy from the local community.