Terry M. Moe: Government, Markets, and the Mixed Model of American Education Reform

Paul T. Hill, the John and Marguerite Corbally professor of Public Affairs at the University of Washington-Bothell, director of the Center of Reinventing Public Education, and a colleague on the Hoover Institution's Koret K-12 Education Task Force, and I co-authored an essay for Education Week's blog "The Futures of School Reform."
Our article is part of a series written by members of a working group organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The group's goal is to seek "seeking to engage a wider audience in an “urgent” conversation—one that it hopes can advance the national dialogue on improving public education for all children."
Over the next few weeks, Education Week will run essays from the group.
In our essay, Hill and I call for a new education model, one that has "different mixes" that meet the needs of "different states and communities, depending on their distinctive values, concerns, and local conditions."
Here are some highlights from our article:
-- The current system of district-run schools can simply be left in place, but required to compete for children and money in a much larger marketplace of educational options.
-- A core rule is that money should follow the child (with more resources attached to the disadvantaged) and flow to the school of the family’s choosing.
-- Policy rules should encourage the proliferation of new educational options, chief among them (for now) charter schools—with no ceilings on their numbers or enrollments, funding equal to that of district schools, access to buildings and seed grants, the right of for-profit firms to manage them, and no requirement that they be unionized.
-- States should open the marketplace to online learning and the new forms of schooling that offer it: virtual charters, blended (hybrid) schools, state-led virtual schools, and more—which may enroll “whole” students taking full curricula or just “parts” of students taking a few courses.
Click here to read the entire essay.
Click here to learn more about my new book Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools.