Perhaps hope for New York's public schools after all

The Economist has a far more favorable take on Mayor Bloomberg's efforts to open up New York City's expansive public school system.

New York's schools - The great experiment

With this kind of decentralization and choice and some healthy competition (and better teacher salaries, to boot), perhaps New York's school reforms might be more successful than the top-down model described in that New York Times article led me to believe.

If Bloomberg's strategy is take control to give it up, I'll all for it.

And that, and only that, as far as I am concerned, is likely, at all, to reform public education in New York or anywhere in America. I'm open to something different. But I've worked long enough in public education systems to know that the only thing likely to create the kind of ownership necessary to really dramatically improve American public schools is for the responsibility and the freedom to run those schools, and take credit or blame for them, lies squarely in the laps of teachers and administrators and parents and students who are responsible for them.

Everything else is, generally, people wanting all the power with none of the responsibility. And that, like most politics, is how school politics too often work, as is. And that will only change, I think, as the system opens up and day-to-day decisions are made by the people who are intimately responsible for schools and not people with the comfortable distance of ideological blinders and plausible deniability for responsibility for the problems of schools.

Teachers and schools will take more responsibility for the results produced by their schools the more they are able to live and die by the choices made on their watches of their own making and without the meddling of various agencies and bureaucracies for which noone is ever responsible in any meaningful way.

I have very little confidence in any other means of fixing schools, partly, because so many of the alternatives have been tried and failed. but, largely, because this is the only model that has really ever worked in every other important area of liberal democratic life.