Lyndon B. Johnson once quipped, “Good politics is good government.” Johnson realized that whether a given public policy achieves its intended objectives is rarely a matter solely of technical design. Rather, success depends both on the quality of the plan and whether it is implemented fully enough to stand the chance of having an impact—a process that may take years.
It has been more than a decade since my colleagues at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Paul Hill and Christine Campbell, wrote It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform along with James Harvey. But its lessons about urban school reform are as relevant now as they were then. In analyzing systemic education reform in six cities, the authors posed a question of enormous consequence: How can city leaders construct reform strategies that promise to be powerful enough and last long enough to make a difference?
Fixing urban schools, they argued, requires more than lofty goals or incomplete strategies. The reform plans in the studied cities too often relied on “zones of wishful thinking”—assuming that teachers, principals, and district administrators would do what was right, rather than creating a plan that provided the incentives, freedom, and capacity for them to do so. Combining the best elements of each, the authors put forth three new reform models, including one option that would provide community oversight of a system of autonomous schools, much like the portfolio strategy does today.