Purposes of Schooling: How State and Community Hybrid School Systems Best Achieve Student Learning Objectives

Schooling and society

Ideal School Systems

How community-administered and state-regulated school systems best serve purposes of schooling and public education

ContentsIntroduction.................................................................................................................................................2

Purposes of Schools.....................................................................................................................................3

Ideal School Systems...................................................................................................................................5

An Alternative?............................................................................................................................................9

Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................11

Works Cited...............................................................................................................................................12

Jason J. Wong

4/6/2009

Wong, JasonSchooling and Society

Jal MehtaPage 2 of 12

Introduction

On a typical school day, the American education system educates almost 49 million students

in approximately 100,000 public K-12 schools.1 Including private schools, the American education

system includes almost 55 million students. The public education system is perhaps the most direct

way that the government influences the lives of the vast majority of its citizens. In terms of social

services, only Social Security and Medicare come close to the level of interaction with individuals

that schools have. For many students, this system is failing. In some states, the high school drop-

out rate hovers around 60%— or worse.2 My outline for an ideal school system attempts to

maximize the strengths of both state-supported and community-oriented school systems to address

each other’s weaknesses and provide a meaningful, responsive, efficient, and equitable school

system for all students.

This paper begins with an analysis of the many different purposes of schooling that people

have hoped to achieve. Then, I explain how the ideal public school system should function and

address these goals and objectives. I look at alternative school systems and explain where they fall

short, and how a state/community hybrid school system addresses those weaknesses. Finally, we

conclude with the idea that although a state/community hybrid school system is imperfect, and

difficult to carry out in practice, it is the best system administratively, socially and economically for

our time.

1 http://www.localschooldirectory.com/2 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/education/20graduation.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/education/20graduation.html

http://www.localschooldirectory.com/



Purposes of Schools

The purpose of schooling revolves around the development of two ideals: 1) the

development of the individual (private goals), and 2) the development of the citizen (public goals).

Ultimately, I believe that these two goals can address most if not all of the purposes of education

that many theorists, including Friere, Hofstadter, Galston, Counts, Lazerson, and Grubb all espouse.

The purposes of schooling have been continuously contested among intellectual heavyweights, and

ideas have also changed over time. Since the early twentieth century, the goals set out for

education have been many and varied, and have taken to account ideas of social justice, economic

considerations, the benefits of being “educated,” etc.. Many of these goals and visions for a proper

school system are valid and not inherently wrong. Why shouldn’t we expect a public school system

address social, economic, and individual goals at the same time? History has shown that it is

difficult to meet all these goals at the same time, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t. The

ideal school system should adequately strive to fulfill high standards, and be satisfied with nothing

less.

During the Civil Rights era, George Counts wrote about the idea of social justice, and the

ability for schools to educate students about how to change society to become more just (Counts,

1932). Three decades later, Richard Hofstadter wrote about how qualities of intelligence different

with qualities of intellect, and that it is the goal of schools (or that it should be the goal of schools)

to develop their students’ intellect. Whereas intelligence “seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order,

adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines.” (Hofstadter, 1963, p.

25) Education, then, becomes a means and an end unto itself. Paulo Freire went further, and wrote

about education as a form of liberation (Freire, 1970). Freire writes that the ideal of education is



that “the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the

world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of

thought and action.” (Freire, 1970, p. 71) Simply, in Freire’s view, a great education transcends

power relationships and allows the world to be analyzed and thought about without deceit. People

such as William Galston believe that schools should teach citizenship and educate students on how

to flourish in a democratic state (Galston, 1989). Recently, Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson have

written about the economic purposes of schooling, and try to balance the ideas of vocational

education for economic benefit, and the need for a minimum standard for knowledge that all

individuals should obtain (Grubb & Lazerson, 2004).

There is no reason that a proper school system cannot address all or most of these goals.

Most of these goals are not mutually exclusive, and many are mutually supportive. For example, a

more equally educated society might correlate with a more just society, and a more egalitarian

education system might promote economic and social equality. There is an argument that conflict

exists between public goals and private goals. Even if this were the case, private goals largely

benefit from the development public goals. Take public safety and my individual quest for financial

security, for instance. While it is my private goal to acquire wealth, I benefit by having rules and

regulations in place that limit my ability to take shortcuts to acquire that wealth. This also affords

me protection against others who would seek to overpower, cheat, or swindle me. Therefore,

maintaining the public order supersedes, and even supports, my private objective of obtaining

fortune, as long as the economic system considers both public objectives (law and order), and

private objectives at the same time. Similarly, a proper school system takes both private goals and

public goals into account, and maximizes the harmonious development of both.



Ideal School SystemsThe best system for organizing a school system revolves around accountable community

autonomy, which takes into account the strengths of both community-centered school systems and

state-regulated school systems. A similar idea was also espoused by Archon Fung in his book,

Empowered Participation. In it, Fung writes about how accountable autonomy manages the

complicated task of balancing discretion versus accountability, and how “school systems can

become more responsive, fair, innovative, and effective by incorporating empowered participation

and deliberation into their governance structures” (Fung, 2004, p. 4). Empowering communities

requires a level of decentralization to give localities meaningful decision-making and administrative

power, while holding these communities accountable also requires a level of centralization of

power in order to regulate. Thus, the ideal school systems combines a bottom-up and top-down

approach to simultaneously check each other’s weaknesses and take advantage of each other’s

strengths. An accountable community school system utilizes the local community of teachers,

parents, students, administration, and other community members to make the majority of

meaningful decisions about a school, and yet also utilizes a strong central and national educational

organization to give guidance, ensure equality across schools throughout the system, and ensure

compliance to relevant regulations and public goals.

On its own, a community-centered school district is a powerful tool for addressing the local

needs and diverse characteristics of different communities. The strengths of a community-centered

school system are many. Community-centered school systems are flexible, and ideally can take

advantage and/or more directly address local educational objectives and needs. Furthermore, in an

ideal community-centered school system, the community at large is engaged with the responsibility



of educating the next generation of citizenry, helping to establish social relationships and engaging

more citizens in political process/civic governance. As Fung noted, the community-centered school

system model “emphasizes the positive and constructive face of autonomy—the capacity, indeed

responsibility, of groups to achieve public ends that they set for themselves—as much as the

emancipatory aspect of shedding centrally imposed constraints and demands.” (Fung, 2004, p. 8)

Therefore, the majority of decisions in an ideal community-centered school system, and our

hybrid system, should be made by a locally elected body for each school which includes parent,

teacher, administrative and student representation. The school site council’s responsibilities should

be clearly delineated from the school administration’s responsibilities to prevent interference and

muddled school leadership. In effect, each school would act as a miniature school district. The

school site council will have a say in the hiring and firing of the school administration, shaping the

overall school budget, and crafting school policies, much like a school board, but the school

principal should be tasked with all of the administrative responsibilities of running a school,

including creating teaching schedules, ensuring school compliance with district, state, and national

goals, etc., much like a district superintendent.

On the other hand, a community-centered school district, when not held accountable to a

more centralized power with a system-wide view, can propagate inequality. Some communities

may have higher, or different, standards than other communities. Furthermore, communities that

are predisposed with greater resources, types and levels of expertise, etc. will be advantaged over

other communities. In comparing urban and rural school districts with suburban school districts,

Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick referred to discrepancies among different school



systems and communities as “nested inequalities” (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003, p. 25). A strong

centralized power can work to address these inequalities.

Where the community-based school system fall short, districts, states, and the federal

government should step in to ensure some form of minimal standards and achievement across all

schools across the nation. Accountable-autonomous school systems necessarily rely on a larger

institution to ensure that public priorities are being enacted, and that school systems are constantly

improving and evolving to address student needs. The idea of a state-centered public school

system was also espoused by Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick in The American Dream

and the Public Schools. The idea of a state-centered public school system is to strengthen and

maintain social order and upward social mobility. Essentially, the state will look at the performance

of schools overall from a more global perspective. At the same time, local communities are tasked

with handling administrative details, but are also given the freedom to utilize resources to best

address local needs that may be different from other communities. The state can step in to

interfere with local community schools and school systems only when their performance

meaningfully and/or significantly lags behind their peers, and the state should only be involved with

managing the local school or school system until it is stabilized, and given the resources, and/or

expertise, to perform on par with other schools and school districts.

In that regard, an institution with a perspective across all school systems is important

because this national body will be able to more accurately ascertain which local school systems are

falling behind as well as disseminate information quickly system-wide. Furthermore, as Finn noted,

there is an information vacuum with regards to student performance and what is happening in

schools, therefore preventing various stakeholders from being accountable to increasing student



performance (Finn, 1991, p. 154). By utilizing a standard yardstick, a state/national entity can

increase transparency across the country and across different school districts to measure relative

performance.

In sum, a public school system ideally utilizes the strengths of community-centered school

systems and state-school systems to enhance public education and resolve or minimize the

shortcomings of the other. For states, a great shortcoming is that bureaucracies can have a slow

response time, and be unresponsive to local needs and situations. On the other hand,

communities, where these problems can be noticed immediately, and be noticed directly, can

address the concerns of a slow and unresponsive bureaucracy. A great shortcoming for community-

centered school systems is that the academic standards and rigor across school systems can be

highly diverse, and students in comparatively lax school systems can be left behind. There may be

cases in specific communities where experience in, for example, parliamentary procedure and

balancing a budget, may be lacking. In these cases, it is important that a central authority step in to

1) provide the training, and/or 2) take over until a capable local governing body is organized.

Although he espouses community control, Fung writes that schools and districts, when “left to their

independent devices, some would surely flounder while others excelled at problem-solving due to

their superior wealth, deliberative capacity, or brute luck.” (Fung, 2004, p. 89) Therefore, Fung is

also a proponent of some form of centralized control, that can step in when necessary to equalize

achievement and performance gaps (Fung, 2004, p. 89).

The idea is that schools will mostly be run by local governing and administrative bodies,

such as school site councils and principals. Participants will be doubly accountable both to the

expectations of the community, and the expectations of the centralized authority. The larger state



and national governments will ensure that each local community is meeting a set of minimal

standards, and will step in to run and train the bottom rung of school systems until they are on the

path to improvement, as well as be a medium for spreading useful information across the entire

school system at large. This vision is different from what is currently available because currently

there is little collaboration between communities and states in educating young children, and

furthermore very few school districts empower local school site councils to provide meaningful

input and influence in school decisions.

An Alternative?Aside from the concerns mentioned above, there are also poignant concerns brought up by

people such as Milton Friedman, who believe in the idea that the best way to improve public

education practice is to rely on free-market principles. The idea is that a market oriented system is

more flexible than most other systems to respond to parents’ and families’ demands. A market

oriented system, they argue, will also offer a plethora of choices for parents to choose from, as long

as there is a demand for those services, and by schools competing against one another for students

inefficient organizations will go out of business and further competition will bring about better

performance.

In a privatized school system, however, there is no mechanism to ensure that students will

receive an education that responds to social objectives rather than individual objects. Simply put,

individual goals and social goals can come into conflict, and when that is the case this school system

is heavily influenced by individual goals because choice will be left to the individual. A privatized

system can also increase economic inequalities more than a state-centered school system or a

community-focused school system. The best private school organizations may attempt to choose



the best students, and/or the cheapest students to educate, potentially leaving students who can’t

supplement their school vouchers, have learning disabilities, are ELL students, or aren’t the easiest

students to teach (i.e. have personality disorders or who don’t conform to cultural expectations of

the school) behind. A public school system full of high achieving schools inherently is more

egalitarian than the selection processes for private schools, and therefore, a choice between a high

achieving public school system should be preferable to a high achieving private school system that

is not held accountable to the public at large, but just to smaller, more distinct and potentially

homogenous, communities.

Friedman points out that the state up to now has been relatively incapable of running a high

achieving school system and that furthermore, the current situation is already inequitable because

some families already have easier access to the capital required to access the very best institutions

and education. School vouchers may give students of lower income backgrounds better access to

elite institutions that previously had been reserved for the rich and the elite. A public school

system that shares principles with the private market economy should also inherently be more

susceptible to innovation due to competition, and furthermore will be held directly accountable to

each of its consumers, the students and their families. If private schools are unsuccessful in this

model, they will close, and schools with successful/popular practices and accomplishments will

flourish. On the other hand, private schools have incentives not to share best practices with other

schools in order to maintain their competitive advantage. In this manner, a private marketplace for

schools can also discourage innovation and collaboration system-wide. Furthermore, if schools are

not held accountable to a more centralized authority like the state government, then private



schools can still propagate inequality as well as have their interests be influenced by special

interests.

For example, in certain areas of America, schools that teach creationism over evolution

might have a market. Friedman states that it is acceptable for the government to intervene when

there are “neighborhood effects,” (Friedman, 2002, p. 30) but in this case it would be difficult to

argue that slight or meaningful differences in academic curriculum are equivalent to polluting a

stream. In these cases, students who attend schools such as those that teach creationism will find

themselves at a disadvantage in college admissions and perhaps job opportunities. Thus, a private

school system can also propagate inequality. A public school system not based on profit-

maximizing institutions better takes public goals into consideration, even if a private school system

may respond better to individual goals and objectives.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that a community-based school system cannot

also achieve some of the benefits of a privatized school system. Schools can be crafted to the

specific needs of the community of students (or the neighborhood community) that it serves.

Parents, if frustrated with their local community schools, are empowered to change the

administration or change the focus of the school, and states are empowered to take over failing

schools to try to make them more successful. What the free-market model doesn’t address, that

communities and states emphasize, are the development of the social goals and public objectives of

the country, in addition to the individual goals and private objectives of students and families. It is

also harder to address inequalities in private school systems, because there isn’t an envisioned

common yardstick, by which to measure student performance and achievement system-wide.



ConclusionIn spite of the weaknesses presented in this paper concerning community-centered school

systems and state-run school systems, and the strengths espoused by Milton Friedman concerning

the free-market school system, a school system that utilizes both communities and states to run

schools is the most ideal. While not entirely perfect, communities and states can form a symbiotic

relationship that works off each other’s strengths and helps address each other’s weaknesses. A

privatized school system, even a partially regulated one, is inherently problematic where the

product is a public good and some of the objectives of schooling are broader than just serving

individual goals and objectives to also serving the goals of society. A community/state-based school

system can fulfill public objectives, ensure a minimal amount of standardization, and address

individual objectives that a privatized school system cannot, and therefore is the best option.

Works CitedCardinal Newman, J. H. (1923). The Idea of the University. London: Longmans, Green and Co.

Counts, G. S. (1932). Dare the School Build a New Social Order? New York: Arno Press.

Finn, J. C. (1991). We Must Take Charge. New York: Free Press.

Freire, P. (1970). The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Friedman, M. (2002). Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Friedson, E. (2001). Professionalism: The Third Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fung, A. (2004). Empowered Participation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Galston, W. (1989). Civic Education and the Liberal State. In N. Rosenblum, Liberalism and the Moral Life (pp. 89-101). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Grubb, N. W., & Lazerson, M. (2004). The Economic Gospel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hochschild, J., & Scovronick, N. (2003). The American Dream and the Public Schools. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hofstadter, R. (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage Books.

Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering Toward Utopia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Documents

Purposes of Schooling: How State and Community Hybrid School Systems Best Achieve Student Learning Objectives