Piling on to Jackie Bennett’s excellent post last week Coming Up Short with WSF:
Someone just forwarded me an article from the February 2007 edition of the Sage Publications journal Education and Urban Society which puts William Ouchi’s claims for WSF success in Seattle, Washington, under a big old microscope.
The authors of the article, “The Bankrupt ‘Revolution’: Running Schools like Businesses Fails the Test” [PDF $] find that in Seattle, WSF was only partially implemented, and with negative consequences. The district, which had been financially healthy, ran back-to-back deficits in 2002 and 2003 totaling some $35 million and the superintendent who put the WSF formula in place at the time was forced to resign. Ouchi doesn’t mention this little fact.
Auditors hired by the Seattle school board wrote:
“…(t)he District’s financial problems appear to have been exacerbated by continued changes, including the impacts of delegating new authorities to the schools. The process of empowering schools to make their own decisions led to an unintended consequence: that is, Central Office administrative processes became disconnected from schools, which further contributed to a loss of budgetary control.”
Currently, Seattle is experiencing “a budget crisis so severe that educators are faced with the possibility of multiple school closures, program cuts, and the scaling back of the city’s choice plan,” according to the authors. We didn’t hear about this while Klein, with Ouchi’s pro bono support, was touting WSF as the next big thing. What’s more, Seattle test scores showed no improvement over these years, the authors write, and in fact began to slide against the statewide averages.
The emphasis of the article is a critique of Ouchi’s advocacy of a business model of education reform. But the WSF details figure prominently, and they should give us all a weighty headache.
