Issues

Restructuring in 
store for the CCSD?

Would 'superstar' superintendent's real role be overhauling the Clark County school system?

By Steven Miller
Business Nevada

For Silver State public schools, it could be one of the most positive developments in decades: A group of consequential Southern Nevada businessmen have allied themselves with an important critic of centralized government K-12 systems.

The development surfaced almost inadvertently last week in a news report on the search for a new superintendent for the Clark County School District.

While the first five paragraphs of a Las Vegas Review-Journal story focused on the quest of Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Jim Rogers and some business allies for a highly paid “superstar” CCSD superintendent, paragraph six revealed that UCLA Professor of Management William G. Ouchi is serving as consultant to the group.

And who is Bill Ouchi? In 2001-2002, he led a team of 12 researchers in a landmark study that examined 223 schools in six cities. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the study found that decentralized school systems were not only more economically efficient but also better at producing achieving students.

The research project provided the basis of Ouchi’s widely hailed 2003 book: Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need, from Simon & Schuster.

The UCLA business professor and his researchers had set out to test a question that is critical for under-performing and over-sized school districts like Clark County’s: Are districts more successful when principals are put in charge of the individual schools and allowed to run them as small businesses?

Three types of large North American school systems were included in the huge research sample. First, three very centralized public school districts—New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Second, three very decentralized public school districts—Seattle, Houston, and Edmonton, Canada. And finally, three very decentralized Catholic school districts—Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles.

Ouchi’s research team visited at least 5 percent of the schools in each system, gathering data about student performance, school centralization and the amount of money reaching the classroom. Receiving the most attention were school budgets, the achievement of students and the accountability systems.

The resulting evidence, writes Ouchi, was clear: Schools perform better both fiscally and academically when there is 1) local control of school budgets by principals, and 2) open enrollment that allows per-pupil funding to follow the child.

All this has important implications for the Clark County School District. Now fifth largest in the country, the district has long resisted open enrollment. Instead it compels almost 300,000 students to attend district-selected schools that, by a large margin, fail year after year to make adequate progress under state and federal standards.

The district also follows a highly centralized and hierarchical “command and control” model of organization. To cope with criticisms of the structure, former CCSD Superintendent Carlos Garcia in recent years introduced regional sub-administrators. But in actuality the centralized Soviet-style framework stays firmly in place, with budgets remaining under district-level control.

Because of the distinct contradiction between Ouchi’s research findings and the ingrained practices of the Clark school district, the professor’s function with the business group appears significant. According to the Review-Journal report, Ouchi’s role “is identifying many of the choice candidates” for the CCSD superintendent job. So is the group—named the “Council for a Better Nevada”—actually committed to structural reform?

On the one hand, the selection of Ouchi suggests that the group understands that the CCSD needs to be reconceived from top to bottom. Presumably, candidates vetted by the UCLA management expert would also understand the decisive significance of the research project Ouchi led, and would be prepared to pursue those reforms in Nevada.

On the other hand, it is not clear that Council members really grasp the dimensions of the fight they’re picking. True, Ouchi-style school-district decentralization makes profound sense and would do a great deal—if ever implemented—to raise Nevada schools out of the cellar. Yet the two key elements—local control of school budgets by principals and permitting per-pupil funding to follow the child—are little more than curse words to teacher union bosses and professional educrats. It is they who constructed, and profit most from, Nevada’s current wasteful and educationally destructive system. And it’s a dominion they won’t easily yield.

Still, a genuinely serious “Council for a Better Nevada” will not shirk that confrontation. Morever, should the Council be able to find a new superintendent for the Clark County School District who will spearhead the needed reforms, he indeed will be a “superstar”—and easily worth a star’s salary.

<748 words>

Steven Miller is editor of BusinessNevada and policy director for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.