A funny thing is happening in the United States. Across the country, headless schools are opening. One opens this fall in Detroit: The teachers’ terms of employment are still governed by their union’s contract with Detroit Public Schools, but they will administer themselves on a democratic, cooperative basis. In just the past couple of years, schools run by teacher cooperatives have opened in Madison, Denver, Chicago, Boston, and New York. Milwaukee has 13 teacher-run schools.
These aren’t universities. They are elementary schools, kindergartens, high schools of the arts and humanities, high schools for budding scientists and programmers, high schools for social justice. Sometimes four or five co-operatively run and publicly-funded schools share the same building and grounds. Few of them operate in wealthy neighborhoods. Nearly all of them serve students who are struggling because English isn’t their first language, or because their homes and neighborhoods are scarred by poverty, neglect, substance abuse, and crime. They are generally successful by any measure, even the fatuous assessments of standardized testing. They are broadly popular with students, teachers, and parents.
Over the next few years, dozens–perhaps hundreds–of similar schools will open in Los Angeles: teachers will have control over curriculum, work rules, and every facet of academic policy. In every school, councils of students, teachers, and parents provide active, intellectual leadership. Every school has a student-, community- and teacher-centered system of governance imagined from the ground up by faculty and citizen co-proposers. They will all have at least one principal administrator, so they have not amputated the head, only shrunken it. Nonetheless it is clear that community leaders, students, and teachers will hire, evaluate, and severely circumscribe the authority of their (usually) solitary administrator in a self-conscious, explicitly distributed system of leadership.
The remarkable Los Angeles situation is a startling victory for grass-roots democracy in education. Less surprising is the fact that you haven’t heard about it. This victory has been ignored and misrepresented by the U.S. corporate media, many of whom also operate as for-profit education vendors. Leading national figures in both political parties, including the current Democratic administration, actively support the sectarian and profit-driven private management of public schooling.
One way to understand what’s happening in L.A. is as a crisis in teacher unionism, a subset of the near-collapse of unionism in the country after decades of hostile law created by politicians slavishly pursuing corporate interests. The immediate trigger for bold action by United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) was the determination by Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) that as many as 300 “poorly performing” schools would be opened to bid by charter or for-profit management over the next few years, with a first round of community “advisory votes” on bids scheduled for February 2010.
The district was already the site of more privately managed public schools than any other in the country; 300 more would essentially have broken the union.
Desperate for a new strategy and inspired by the usually union-supported headless schools springing up elsewhere, this time the behemoth UTLA declined to square off against giant LAUSD in the traditional all-or-nothing pitched battle.
Instead UTLA chose to throw its resources behind a series of grassroots actions, negotiating the right for teachers to submit their own bids. It sent money and personnel in active, energetic support of groups of teachers, parents and students, helping them to generate highly individual school visions.
Within weeks, in neighborhoods across the city, teachers and parents met to hammer out proposals–at least one for every school put out for bid, 36 in the first round.
The results of the February 2010 “advisory votes” conducted by the League of Women Voters were stunning. In every school up for bid, the grassroots and teacher-led proposal won decisively, averaging 87 percent over all alternatives, including rich politician- and media-backed national education-management chains already established in the city such as Magnolia, Aspire, and Green Dot.
“Advisory” or not, the parents’ vote was so overwhelming that it produced tangible political fear of electoral backlash, leaving the schools supervisor and district board little choice but to award the majority of the bids to proposals featuring workplace and community democracy. Of the 36 schools up for grabs, four were awarded to the Los Angeles mayor’s nonprofit management corporation, three to private charters and management corporations; 29 went to teacher-parent proposals.
If the grass roots win the same percentage of all those offered to bid in the district over the next few years, 240 democratically-operated schools will open. There would be 60 operated by politically connected nonprofits or profit-seeking corporations, though all of them would do so against the wishes of local parents.
Part 1 of an essay for the National Day of Action to Defend Public Education, October 7, 2010. Originally composed as the introduction to the forthcoming Occupation Cookbook. Read Part 2
x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com
8 Responses to Off With Our Heads! Schools Without Administrators
bphil - October 6, 2010 at 7:09 am
The blurb that drew me to this article said that in it, “Marc Bousquet asks whether college faculty can follow the lead of schoolteachers who govern “failing” schools democratically.” But he doesn’t ask this even once (perhaps that’s in part 2?). But let’s assume that the question is somehow implicit in the essay (as it is published in the Chronicle, after all). The question begs for analaysis of the differences and similarities between beseiged k-12 schools and universities (very few similarities, significant differences), and for some discussion of the necessary preconditions for democratically run higher ed (take the money out of it, focus on mission, etc.). Finally, administrators in higher ed often come from the faculty and are not part of a for-profit takeover which is what the teachers were fighting in LA. So other than stoking fears based on slender analogies, what does this essay contribute to thinking about higher ed?
what4 - October 6, 2010 at 9:13 am
Universities: Add up the cost of top administrators. Use that to calculate how much released time that will buy among faculty. See if that’s enough to run the place.I’ve observed several universities that had extended vacancies at the level of president or vice president. They seemed to run just fine. What if the vacancy just continued…?
willynilly - October 6, 2010 at 10:06 am
Just sit in on a Faculty Senate Meeting for ten minutes. Do nothing but listen. After the ten minutes is up, you will be convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the answer is NO.
frankschmidt - October 6, 2010 at 10:58 am
willy: Faculty senate meetings are the way they are because the faculty have no power. If faculty had real power the meetings would clearly be more businesslike (in the good sense). The politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
cwinton - October 6, 2010 at 11:44 am
Note that the idea is to reduce the role of the head of the achool, not eliminate it. It is hard to manage a large organization without resorting to an administrative hierarchy, which apparently will inevitably inflate its own importance to the organization over time, leading to administrative glut, excessive compensation of administrators, and bureaucratic rules hamstringing the organization’s ability to function effectively. I think it was Ross Perot who made a statement to the effect that if you encounter a snake you kill it, not appoint a committee to study snakes. That in a nutshell illustrates the problem with entrenched hierarchies, which plague the private as well as the public sector. Sometimes the best way to proceed is to just reinvent the wheel, which is what these folks are doing, and in the process demonstrating they have a more effective approach (at least until they begin adding administrative hierarchy).
dboyles - October 6, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Universities were originally groups of scholars that banded together around common intellectual interests. At some point in time they hired individuals to do tasks seen as distractions to their primary intellectual interests. As time progressed administrators and administrative functions came to dominate the university. Scholars and scholarly functions were subordinated to administrative missions, accrediting agencies, student opinions, public calls for accountability (often lacking in nuanced appreciation of the more salient aspects of scholarly activities), performance appraisals, and the panoply of distractions which constitute the so-called “educational enterprise” we know today, be it at the K-12 or university level. That which first brought dignity–hiring administrators to free ourselves from distraction in order that we maintain focus on purposes wholly our own–later came to entrap us as well as the entire “educational enterprise.” Signs of rectification, however radical as Marc relates, are occuring. While they are unlikely to take hold and sweep the nation at several levels, they serve as signs, symptomatic markers that those who have ears to hear must hear if downward trends are to be reversed. Classroom education isn’t rocket science. If it can occur in a one-room schoolhouse where the word of knowledge is authority, it is time it re-occurred in the United States in the universities and grade schools.
dank48 - October 6, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Frankschmidt, I doubt that giving faculty power would simultaneously bestow either genius or virtue. Lord Acton famously said, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and somebody else said, “Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power.”Honestly, do you want your professional lives run by the English department? The School of Education? Any of your colleagues?We humans are fallible critters, given to pride, anger, gluttony, greed, lust, envy, and sloth. I think Cwinton has closed with the proper caution: under the best possible immediate outcome, we could still expect things to eventually slide back to where they are now, if not worse.
more_cowbell - October 7, 2010 at 2:02 pm
Sorry, but the thought of faculty running a university scares me. I have yet to meet a faculty member who has the skin thick enough for it, let alone any administrative abilities (hint: they are learned in bureaucratic and corporate settings, not in grad school). The thought reminds me of a Simpsons episode where the smartest people in Springfield formed the local government. The town promptly fell apart.