Throughout his career around public education, your editor - a post-Cold War ronin -  has been reminded of the Kombinat. The best advertisements for productivity under Communist central planning were these fully integrated industrial concerns, truly the pride of East Germany. Perhaps the best known was VEB Carl Zeiss Jena – formed around the assets of pre-war Germany’s world-famous optics firm found in areas occupied by the Red Army.  Deprived of heavy state subsidies and a special relationship with Warsaw Pact armies, the enterprise lasted only a few years after German reunification - along with its less efficient peers. Even the best central planning doesn’t compete very well in a market economy.

During our standoff with the Soviet empire, it was political suicide to compare our institutions of public education with “godless Communism” in any way, shape or form. But now that we’ve more or less demonstrated that imperfect markets are better for society than imperfect – or even great, central planning, it's time to be honest about how school systems are organized, and learn from their institutional cousins in the former Soviet empire.

Two stories in yesterday’s newpapers harken back to the Kombinat. Both reveal the classic failings of central planning.

Parenthetically, these stories are not about the workers (teachers) or their unions. They are about the managers.

Seattle Moves Towards a Uniform Curriculum

The Seattle Times’ Alex Fryer discusses the plans of Seattle Public Schools new Chief Academic Officer, and former Denver Public Schools Area Superintendent, Carla Santorno.

If her plans move forward, Seattle's future classrooms will have a lot more of what Santorno envisions, especially standardized lessons in math, social studies and reading.

Her most conspicuous effort so far - establishing a uniform math curriculum at the elementary-school level - has been difficult to develop and met resistance from parents and teachers. Her proposal, which the School Board is scheduled to consider tonight, is something of a compromise between two distinctly different approaches.

But it also represents a step toward a centralized system, something newly hired superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson strongly advocates. A districtwide curriculum would mark a huge departure for Seattle, which has touted school-based decisions for years.

Santorno is confident the changes will improve grades and ultimately put Seattle Public Schools graduates on a path to college or employment.

Ms. Santorno’s plan just might have “worked” (complied) with state accountability requirements before NCLB. Uniform lesson plans probably have some chance of raising a school’s average student performance. Yes, they will bore the gifted to death and fail to reach the disadvantaged students who have always lagged. But uniform lessons aren’t aimed at the ends of the Bell Curve, they are designed for the middle. And when you get right down to it, all school districts have aimed the bulk of their programs at the middle. It is not far-fetched to think that a bit more focus on the middle will raise the middle’s test scores on the margin.

A centrally-managed district run according to Santorno’s prescription will perform better than a lax counterpart against the old measure of system performance. But can an education Kombinat possibly succeed under NCLB, where accountability is about lifting each and every individual student, not the mythical average student. The Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) measure forces schools and districts to focus on the specific needs of students who are not demonstrating proficiency.  If you want to raise every student to proficiency the logical direction for district curriculum and instructional policy is customization rather than uniformity.

DC Practices Top-Down Planning

The second story is from the Washington Post's Robert E. Pierre, on the aftermath of the discovery that portions of Mayor’s Adrian Fenty’s plan for the DC public schools were lifted from Charlotte-Mecklenberg's.

Although there is plenty to admire about Charlotte's schools, there is also a growing chorus of critics who question whether Charlotte's successes reach beyond an academic elite.

Charlotte's students overall perform well in elementary school, for instance, but those gains largely disappear by high school, where many arrive needing remedial work. In the latest round of statewide tests, the yawning achievement gap between black and white students widened.

It is also unclear how much Charlotte's experience applies to the District. Charlotte's sprawling system of 129,000 students has more than twice as many pupils as the District and includes suburban and rural schools. The District's enrollment has declined for more than a decade; Charlotte is growing by 5,000 students a year. In national tests, Charlotte's fourth- and eighth-graders topped the list for urban schools in reading and math, while the District brought up the rear.

These differences raise questions in Washington about whether Charlotte's performance is broad enough or relevant enough for the Fenty administration to follow. Victor Reinoso, deputy mayor for education, who took responsibility for the copying, said he did not visit Charlotte or talk to educators here while preparing the D.C. strategy. Nearly one-third of that strategy was directly lifted from Charlotte's plan.

One of the classic sayings of the Soviet economy was attributed to a laborer: “The managers' pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” Yet the ideal of communism was "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” 

The difference between the two attitudes is what every educator and student of school reform knows as “buy-in.”  If those who must implement the plan don’t believe it, it doesn’t happen. And buy-in is a function of the personal stake created by participation in the development of the plan and in the inevitable mid-course corrections. The classic example of this on the shop floor is the quality circle; in school reform designs like ATLAS Communities,  Turning Points, and Accelerated Schools, it is about the use of data by school-level teams to develop pedagogy tailored to particular studen needs. Recently, edbizbuzz.com noted a district level approach - Maryland's Montgomery County Public Schools M-Stat system.

DC might get school reform, but Reinoso's plan won’t be the reason. Your editor has been involved in the writing of business plans from three perspectives – advisor/consultant, investor, and manager in three arenas – charter schools, Comprehensive School Reform providers, and education nonprofits.  Plans written by consultants almost never work, because even management hasn’t bought in. They’ve simply had someone write a plan because they must meet an expectation that they have one reduced to writing. Reinoso’s “cut and paste” job doesn’t even rise to that level, because a consultant at least tries to draw on resources and thinking within the client organization.

As an investor, Reinoso's approach to planning would be a very strong negative, particularly if the enterprise had progressed to a point where many employees where not part of the original team. (That seems to describe DC Public Schools.) In brief, the plan is completely unreliable as an indicator of management's intentions.

As a manager responsible for all types of planning, your editor would say that only a fool fails to engage employees in the process of plan development and to assure that every point of view gets a fair hearing before he or she makes decisions. (As a staff member at New American Schools your editor respected President John Anderson for living up to his saying: “Everyone gets his say, not necessarily his way.”) Engagement in planning is a far better motivator than any marginal increase in pay, and failing to engage only adds to the inevitable “friction” every manager experiences when any plan meets reality.

Central planning can be improved upon with better systems and leadership. But a continuous improvement of any model yields successively marginal returns on performance. Especially when basic rules change – like the switch from average student scores to Adequate Yearly Progress, breakthroughs in performance require new models.

Yesterday also saw an interesting story on the News Hour with Jim Lerher about an Alaskan school that is building its science curriculum around participation in a NASA program to explore sun storms. The only way this would work under central planning is as a political exception. And then we are back to that "islands of excellence, sea of mediocrity" phonemenon in a system that is neither "here (centralized) nor there (decentralized). "

Even if they are the best managers central planning has to offer, the path followed by Santorno and Reinoso leads only to public education’s equivalent of the Kombinat.  And there’s simply no research suggesting that the way to leave no child behind is more efficient central planning. Heck, even private-sector Edison’s take on that approach isn’t getting us there.