There is a certain kind of weariness that comes from trying to change something inside out. It’s the principal who stays late not because the students need her, but because the district’s paperwork does. Anyone who has worked in a big public school district has seen this happen. The teacher who had a better plan for the day but couldn’t get three people to agree with it. The idea that was slowly and without much drama turned into something that looked a lot like everything else.
That was meant to be fixed by charter schools and innovation schools. Give school leaders more power over time, money, staff, and the curriculum. Get rid of the bureaucratic hassles. You can trust teachers to make things better. On paper, it’s hard to argue with such a good idea.
One of the three new public high schools in an urban Colorado district was an innovation school, and the other two were charter schools. A qualitative study tried to find out what happens when that theory meets the school day. The results were not as simple as either side of the education debate would have liked. There was real freedom for leaders at these schools. They also had to deal with burnout, systemic resistance, and a growing gap between what they were allowed to do and what the district’s structures would actually let them do.
The second finding should get more attention than it does. The study found systemic, district-level problems that kept school leaders from carrying out the missions that their districts had approved. In a strange loop, a school gets the go-ahead to try new things but then gets an amber or red light every time something goes wrong. It’s possible that these problems exist in part because big organizations are slow to change. But there may be something more planned going on: a quiet institutional resistance to schools that could show the traditional model isn’t needed.
The burnout finding is also important, and it’s not just a fun fact. It is really hard work to open a new school, even if you have more freedom. Leaders in the study said that the first three years were very hard. It’s a certain kind of pressure to build culture, manage staff, meet district accountability requirements, and stay true to an original vision all at the same time, while having limited resources. Some people think that the way innovation schools are set up in many districts right now puts a lot of responsibility on individuals without giving them the structural support they need to handle it.
This tension isn’t just present in the United States. The government of Punjab, Pakistan, is giving nearly 14,000 public schools to NGOs and private operators. This could be one of the biggest tests of outsourcing schools ever. It makes sense to get rid of rigid state management and replace them with operators who can work faster and think in new ways. But there is at best mixed evidence about these arrangements around the world. Liberia’s version got some results better, but it left out students who were already struggling and went over its per-pupil budget by more than twice as much. Being close to a good idea doesn’t mean you’ll get a good result.
The Colorado study and Punjab’s experiment both question a basic idea: that bureaucratic restrictions are the main thing that keeps schools from getting better. Get rid of the red tape, and teachers will do great. The students will do it. The story sounds interesting, and it’s likely partly true. But the evidence from Colorado shows that the red tape can come back, even in schools that are meant to avoid it. In Pakistan, the worry is less about red tape and more about whether private operators will actually help the kids who are most likely to be quietly left out.
As these tests take place in districts from urban Colorado to rural Punjab, it seems like the real question isn’t whether schools need more freedom. I think most of them do. The tougher question is whether freedom is enough and who pays for it when it’s not. People who have always been there—the principal who is tired, the kid on the edges, and the community that was promised something new but got something old with a new name—are usually the ones who show up.
