March 1992

Marketplace Schools

Time to Shift the Education Paradigm

Last year [1991] the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC) asked for design proposals which would break-the-mold and create a new generation of American schools as a part of President Bush's "America 2000" education plan. This private corporation will be funded and will award 20 to 30 bidders contracts in 1992 and additional contracts for testing and implementation in the following four years.

Below is a brief summary of the Schools of the Marketplace proposal submitted to NASDC from Cascade Policy Institute and Richard Meinhard, Executive Director of the Institute for Development Sciences. The copyrighted proposal itself is available for $10 from Cascade. It sharpens the differences between bureaucratic and market approaches to school reform. It shows how and why we must use the creative, mutually beneficial relationships of healthy market mechanisms as a model for redesigning the teacher/student relationship as well as the rigid and highly regulated public system of schooling.

The weekly open-air market in Portland, Oregon, called the Saturday Market, rents space to individual vendors who sell directly to the public. The vendors own their businesses, and the Market itself, and so share in its profits and losses. The balances of supply and demand, profit and loss, and incentives for innovation operate on each vendor as well as on the marketplace as a whole. The marketplace does not specify what products are sold but can place boundaries on vendors and their wares. Saturday Market has rapidly grown to become a highly valued part of the community featuring a remarkable diversity of handcrafted goods in an intimate setting.

Schools need to be more like the marketplace. America's future success depends in large part on schools becoming dynamic, self-renewing, and responsive to changing student needs. Ask teachers if they'd like to run their own school and the answer comes back a resounding "yes!". But most school reform efforts don't ask teachers or take their replies seriously. Reformers have assumed those who control schools should reform them, and that is why their efforts have failed.

Marketplace Schools helps us answer two questions. What would schools look like if the teacher/student relationship were based on a marketplace model? And what would such a model do for our ailing and unresponsive system of American education? History and science continually remind us that attempts to reform education by increasing bureaucratic controls are futile.

The direction of human organizations is toward opening up human freedoms and empowering participants, not in reducing freedom and in centralizing control.

Serving Students, Not the State

In Marketplace Schools the personalized needs of each student are identified through a long range student development plan which students and parents formulate with a mentor teacher. Test scores do not serve as the goal for education services provided. Instead, teachers focus on using academic success to serve the long range goals of students, i.e. their successful entry into civic, career, and interpersonal adult roles. Students and parents choose their mentor teacher and can stay with their mentor teacher as long as they wish. The mentor teacher and students' long range education plan help students develop a strong sense of purpose and focus. Mentor teachers also assist their students in obtaining yearly teaching services by locating courses, educational resources, and learning opportunities for their students.

While bureaucratic schooling manages students' learning through centralized, uniform state or district curriculum, Marketplace Schools manage the personalized education activity for each student through contracts. The concept of human contracts - stating an intent and plan for accomplishing something, and then documenting delivery and performance - allows the freedom necessary for students to obtain personalized education services. Contracts free students from bureaucratic rules and regulations so they can retain ownership and commitment to their learning and education. In a larger sense, public education should be an important contract between students and society. Students and teachers have incentive to contract only for those courses and activities which move students toward their long range education goals, for it is upon that success that teachers and students are judged.

Results for All to See

To appear fair, public education bureaucracies must use standardized methods for testing all students. Tests are a bureaucratic attempt to impose "accountability." But in Marketplace Schools, students, teachers, and schools are regulated by the principle of public disclosure. They use contracts and public performance portfolios to organize educational activities and to display the results of contracted work. These portfolios of their best work are public documents made available for inspection by citizens, researchers, higher education, and employers. For example, student portfolios document completion of contracts, the nature of students' learning experiences, and their final and best performance capabilities in the key academic areas. They provide a powerful source of information about students', teachers' and schools' performance.

Bureaucratic schools tend to fragment learning and to focus on short range or superficial "process" skills listed in extensive documents. In Marketplace Schools, there is an in-depth focus on discipline-based learning because such in-depth understanding of the world is necessary and of value for students' long range successful participation in a free society. At the heart of Marketplace Schools are the students' learning activities which are directed to accomplishing significant projects and investigations into the fundamental structures of math, science, geography, history, English, and students' specialty areas. Directing education to long range goals of successful adult participation means teachers have powerful incentives to help connect students to the real world and its primary information sources through student investigations and experiences with data bases, electronic learning technologies, community resources, business partnerships, and many other advanced methods. Marketplace Schools are client-driven because students and parents pay for the instruction they want and need.

Freeing Up Teachers

In public monopoly schools, bureaucratic teachers are told what, when, and where to teach. In Marketplace Schools teachers remain free to determine what educational services to offer students because they must react to students' needs and develop specialized services in order to serve their 'market niche.' In Marketplace Schools teachers control resources. Thus, professional teachers can offer educational experiences which are no longer bound by walls, clocks, or calendars.

In bureaucratic schools teachers must follow state or district curriculum mandates for a pre-set curriculum. In Marketplace Schools teachers' focus on individual students' needs since students are now their clients. Teachers are rewarded for working with and through students' activities and participation to obtain high student involvement in learning. Teachers have natural incentives to base instructional methods on guiding learners through highly involved investigations and problem solving to produce high student performance in each discipline.

Teachers and professional group practices specialize and cooperate with each other so that they can maintain an identity while still accommodating a range of learning abilities and interests. Since students are consumers of teachers' educational services, the push is not to exert more control over students but to decontrol learners so as to support and develop their growing ability to take charge of their learning. In Marketplace Schools a larger percentage of resources goes to teaching and learning than in bureaucratic schools because teachers choose and purchase only those managerial and professional support services which help them maximize their responsiveness and power in serving students. Since teachers accept any clients which they are qualified to serve, Marketplace Schools are very open and public. There are no rigid boundaries or assignments of students. Parents and students not only have their choice of schools, they also have their choice of specialized teachers.

Teacher Support

In the example of the Portland Saturday Market, the fees charged to vendors pay for joint marketing and such services as rest rooms and security. Customers don't buy from the marketplace, but from individual vendors. The marketplace does not plan what goods or services are produced, their prices, or what combination of goods and services are sold.

Marketplace Schools encourages service agencies, called Educational Development Corporations (EDCs), to act as development agencies for new Marketplace Schools. EDCs can also offer research and development, administrative, teacher education and development, curriculum and instruction, or system development and consultant services to teachers, schools, and communities. For example, teachers in Marketplace Schools have great incentive to understand the importance and the academic richness of the disciplines as well as research explaining how students develop understandings. This focus on professional knowledge generates a real need and market for teacher support services.

EDCs also provide a public education information system. All teachers, schools, and EDCs must prepare and provide portfolio information to the public. The public education information system makes information available to parents who are selecting teachers and to citizens who wish to know about the effectiveness of Marketplace Schools.

Development of Marketplace Schools

Marketplace Schools grow and develop only with their success and without legal coercion. If they offer an attractive and successful alternative to the public bureaucracy, they will gradually and naturally grow and develop to include more teachers and parents who opt out of the educational bureaucracy.

The chart below shows some differences between government provided schools and those based on a market model.

The Development of Organizations

Old Government Monopoly Model	Free Market Model
Controlling	Freeing
Political	Non-political
Inefficient	Efficient
Standardized	Personalized
Coercive	Voluntary
Collectivized	Individualized
Rhetoric	Research & Development
Centralized	Decentralized

Increasingly bureaucracy is futile. Centrally planned government systems tend to grow too large and become more inefficient and unresponsive to citizens' needs. They do not tend to produce high quality results, and attempts to regulate participants actually ten to produce lower quality results. Marketplace Schools takes us in the direction of opening up human freedom. In the process we benefit from the tremendous creativity, responsiveness, and efficiencies of marketplace models -- exactly the qualities lacking in the current education bureaucracy.

Finally, the question is not "How do we change our schools?" The question is "How do we change the structure and rewards of schools so they change themselves?"