Q and A: Paul T. Hill | Philanthropy in Ed. Reform

Paul Hill is the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, which studies education reform and governance. Hill spoke with Northwest Education coeditor Denise Jarrett Weeks at his office in Seattle.

We've done a lot of work with business. We worked for the National Business Roundtable and for organizations like the Partnership for Learning in Washington State. We've done research for them. We haven't done advocacy or program development for them, but we did an evaluation of the National Business Roundtable's nationwide agenda that was started in the early 90s, that was basically trying to get standards-based reform laws enacted around the country: state-by-state assessments.

We've done a whole series of studies that have been funded by the Partnership for Learning, on the implementation of standards in Washington State. The series name is Making Standards Work. We've looked at the difference between schools that improved with standards and those that didn't, or the attributes of schools that were stuck and didn't respond. Then we looked at high schools separately from elementary schools, and at the challenges schools faced, and at how the schools were organized that actually got something accomplished, and what brought them down when they got brought down.

That was a very sophisticated investment on the part of the business community because they took a chance that we would say some things that were problematic; as we did. But on the other hand it kept the idea alive and got them thinking about standards as a how-do-you-do-it question, rather than as an ideological one.

In doing that report, what did you discover about the role or influence that business has in getting education reform through?

Those reports didn't tell us much about that, but we knew—by other things that we looked at—that in this state it was fundamental.

First of all, business people are citizens. Most people draw their incomes from working for businesses. Though it is definitely not right to say that education is an instrument of business—that education is there for the sole purpose of providing people for the factories—it's still true that one reason we have public education is to maintain a modern economy, and part of that means that you have to create the skills that are needed in the economy.

In my view, that's an incomplete picture. I disagree with my education colleagues [who] think that business's engagement in education is illegitimate. I think it's necessary. That doesn't mean it's always right, but business has more than a right, it has an obligation to say things about what it's going to take, in the performance of the education system, for people in this state to be employable.

In some states it's perfectly clear that the blue collar, industrial base that has kept them going for a long time is going away. The businesses that are at the table may not have anything to do with that. They may be a local [businesses] that are not making the decisions to move factories to Mexico or Indonesia, but they know that it's going to happen, and that the only hope for the state is a higher-end service or knowledge-worker economy. For them to say, We need to educate our kids to different standards is legitimate. They may not always be right, but that's a different question.

And there is an accountability function that business needs to have a part in. If the whole decisionmaking environment is created inside the school system—by the union and the central office and the PTA and the school board—you end up with an unstable situation where those groups fall out and go to war with one another. You end up with union strikes or a series of union strikes, failed school board elections, unions organizing to kick out school board members they don't like, and public backlashes. This sounds kind of apocalyptic, but it actually has happened in a lot of places. So we think that there needs to be a civic leadership function which is above the politics of the school board.

There needs to be a kind of permanent set of coalitions supporting education. It needs to be broader than business, but it probably needs to include philanthropies, it needs to include churches.

Objecting to business involvement in education is like objecting to water if you're a fish; I mean it's there.

There's so much fear about business being involved in education, and yet, hasn't it always been? Historically, where does this fear and distrust come from?

In the 20th century there was an effort to move education out of politics and make it an autonomous professional structure. Educators got to think of themselves as holding a trust that was theirs alone; they didn't have to deal with anybody else.

But if that was ever the case—as opposed to kind of an ideal—it started to erode pretty rapidly after Brown vs. the Board of Education. [After that] education was seen as being, first of all, government, and so subject to all of the oversight and political issues and legal issues of government. It was seen to be a product of politics: subject to federal funding and to requirements that came out of legislators', not educators', decisionmaking.

Another part of it is that educators have been trained to see education as a moral cause, and it's something that the kind of calculations that business normally does—about cost effectiveness, about accountability, about conditionality—are quite foreign to the ways educators were brought up, and threaten them emotionally, I think, more than they do in reality. They're just foreign.

I [did] research in Catholic schools in my early days, and the nuns that taught were more worldly than many public school teachers are. They were more a part of the community, more politically engaged, more understanding of how precarious their organizations were, and that they were in markets.

Why is that, because they didn't have this cash cow coming from the federal government?

Yeah, they were more in the market. Certainly there are very engaged public school teachers, but my loose impression is that public school teachers are often in a world that is unlike any other world.

Tom VanderArk has said that when he went into education administration he was surprised at how pay for performance was not an effective incentive for teachers—that the people who go into teaching and the people who go into business are fundamentally different, and that they're motivated by different things. But I hear a very different story from other quarters, including some of the things I've read of yours.

Educators respond to incentives. They don't respond in as smooth a way as MBAs and lawyers who've been taught to go after the last dime, but there are incentive programs—cash incentive programs—that teachers flock to.

North Carolina has a big cash incentive for getting the National Board Certification, and that's the state that has the most people going through the National Board. There are places that have cash incentives for teachers to work in the inner-city. If they're small [incentives] it doesn't work; if they're big, it works.

I think it's absolutely nuts to think that teachers don't respond to incentives. It's just that teachers have other preferences. What teachers fear—and they have reason to sometimes—is that business will think of them as people who can be handled with M&Ms: with little rewards and penalties. It doesn't work that way, and it shouldn't. I think on average, business people are smarter than that. I hope!

They shouldn't take over school systems. They should demand accountability systems which are designed in light of what schools do and of the uncertainties faced and the complexities of schools, rather than demand rigid accountability systems where, if you have a bad year, you're gone. And they shouldn't think that they can teach if they haven't been trained.

Beyond that, I don't think I can say anything categorical. They shouldn't ignore obvious things: that people who teach know something; that schools are a class of organization that can't be reduced to business. There are very important things about [schools] that are lost if you reduce them to business.

But I have to say: I've been in a lot of schools, I've worked in this my whole life, but I wasn't trained in an Ed school, and when I talk about my research to groups of teachers and principals, they're often enraged by it. It's analytical, and yet I see it as very school friendly. But they say: "You talk about these general principles and these incentives and the effects of rules—it makes me feel like a rat in a maze." They want to deny that what they do is subject to analysis. When that happens, they're in trouble, because it is subject to analysis; it will be.

I'm still trying to understand where this fear of being measured as a professional comes from.

Educators have every right to fear thoughtless measurement. They understand that the crudest way of measuring performance is not only going to be wrong, it's going to be perverse. So they have reason to be worried about this. They don't trust that anyone else understands their business well enough to get it right. But it's not helped by the kind of characterizations I just mentioned.

I'm at a loss to understand the fervor of the anti-testing movement, which comes from a lot of places. One place is teachers' fear of being measured. Nobody in their right mind would claim that a low score is just as good as a high score, or that a bunch of kids who get low scores in third grade have the same probability of a good outcome in adulthood. We have an emergency with these kids, we need to invest in these things, we have to find new options, we have to do something about these unacceptable low scores. If you say you should ignore these facts and treat everybody the same, I just can't find any rational basis for objecting to tests on those grounds.

Now the trouble is: Tests are wrong for individuals sometimes. There are kids who aren't assessed properly, and it is frightening that poor kids may be the ones who are most often mal-assessed, but you just can't ignore this information.

So are we on the cusp of something? What do you see as the future for school-business partnerships?

Well I think we're in the middle of a lot of turbulence, and I wish we could focus the debate. I think that the fight about advertising in the schools, for instance, doesn't help this conversation.

That's right, they do. There are people who are just outraged by the idea that business has anything to do with education. I don't share that, but I do think it makes sense to call education a "consumerism-free zone" or something.

The funny thing is, business is a very large category, and there are many different kinds. The consumer goods groups are almost never really engaged in education reform because it's too hot. You don't want to have a controversy about charter schools connected to Pepsi-Cola or even to the Bon Marche. The more aggressive businesses—the ones that deal with policy—are not the ones trying to sell products in the schools. They're often big national banks, they're Boeing, they're big economic interests in the city that are not an explicitly consumer interest. So in some ways, there's an internal conflict in business, where the people trying to sell products to kids weaken the case of everybody else.

How much influence should business have on curriculum? I'll give you an example that I've run across. In Alaska, the oil industry has developed a science curriculum that is promoted and available statewide, it's on the Alaska Department of Education Web site, and it includes a training and a science kit—the whole package. The curriculum is about resource development.

Well, it's about business trying to feather its nest by what's taught in school, but it could be just the other way. You could just as easily have an environmental group teaching something that would be contentious on the other side, and you probably do have that in some places. It isn't that business is feathering its nest and other people are just acting in the public interest.

I think that what's to be taught in value-laden areas—everything from reproductive health to the environment and social equity and how you teach civics—there's almost no way to settle that. It's going to be turbulent. I could even imagine someday having a public school system that taught nothing but core skills and provided vouchers for the other stuff.

There are some things that are subject to politics at the adult level: environmental policy is one of them, and reproductive health is another one, and diversity issues are others. Business might be better organized than other groups [to influence curricula], but I don't think so. I think they're less organized. Curricula have been more deeply influenced by leftist concerns about social equity and the rethinking of America's past and so on—which I may happen to approve of—but the point is that they have been the results of political action. There's no way around it; that's going to happen. It's going to be turbulent. It's a tiger that has to be ridden.

Q & A: Paul T. Hill