- Posted by David on July 14, 2010
http://www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/edu_assoc_articles/95465.html
Center on Reinventing Public Education on 13/07/2010 22:01:00
“Improvement in productivity in other [labor-intensive service] economic
sectors may hold important lessons for understanding how the education system
can become more efficient and effective,” state Professors Paul Hill and
Marguerite Roza, at the UW’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.
In their new white paper, Curing Baumol’s Disease: In Search of Productivity
Gains in K–12 Schooling, Hill and Roza site the successes of other
labor-intensive service organizations that have raised productivity in the face
of competition for workers and rising costs.[1]
Public schools in most areas of the United States are caught in the vise of
declining funding—as states and school districts must deal with depressed
revenues—and rising costs: contractual pay increases for teachers and staff,
and in some places pressures to reduce class sizes.
Hill and Roza discuss several areas in which labor-intensive businesses have
improved productivity: information technology, deregulation, redefinition of the
product, increased efficiency in the supply chain, investments by key
beneficiaries, production process innovations, carefully defined workforce
policies, and organizational change.
Observing that public education largely has been resistant to improving
productivity and that reform efforts have focused upon improving student
performance with little attention paid to costs, Hill and Roza offer a five-step
agenda for finding the cure for Baumol’s disease-afflicted public schools:
*Systematically consider strategies employed by other labor-intensive industries for their relevance to education.
*Zero in on learning systems outside schools to surface alternative production processes that may yield greater productivity.
*Understand the key cost drivers in the current schooling model, and examine the impact on each of proposed alternatives.
*Prototype test new models.
*Create a policy agenda for identifying and reproducing the most promising ways to increase productivity.
To those who might object that such a research and development project seems
frivolous in this time of tight budgets, Hill and Roza say, “If depressed
revenues are instead used as a rallying cry for innovation, the current fiscal
crisis could ultimately strengthen public education by opening the door to
improved processes that have the potential to do more with less.”
Curing Baumol's Disease: In Search of Productivity Gains in K-12 Schooling can
be downloaded at www.crpe.org.
Paul Hill is the John and Marguerite Corbally Professor at the University of
Washington Bothell and the director of the Center on Reinventing Public
Education. Hill is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and
a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education.
Marguerite Roza is currently on leave from her positions as senior scholar at
the Center on Reinventing Public Education and research associate professor at
the University of Washington’s College of Education.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington
engages in independent research and policy analysis on a range of K-12 public
education reform issues, including choice & charters, finance & productivity,
teachers, urban district reform, leadership, and state & federal reform.