Joseph Fernandez, who has just completed his first semester as New York City's schools chancellor, is often compared with Mikhail Gorbachev. Like the Soviet President, Fernandez is using a combination of personal charm and high- handedness to reform a system nearly paralyzed by its own plethoric bureaucracy. Fernandez's brand of perestroika is called "school-based management," a system that allows those closest to the classroom to oversee budgets and set curriculums largely free of centralized control. "The idea is to give schools more latitude," says the chancellor, "because generally they will make better decisions than we will."
Having pushed that approach in Miami, where he was Dade County school superintendent for almost three years, Fernandez is trying to apply it to the nation's largest school system. Whether or not it works in New York, school- based management is gathering momentum across the U.S. School districts in 27 states have experimented with it, with varying degrees of success, over the past five years. Since 1987 the schools in Rochester have been run by a team of teachers, parents and administrators. Beginning last fall, locally elected councils -- composed of six parents, two community residents, two teachers and the principal -- have been in charge of each of Chicago's 541 public schools.
Supporters of school-based management claim that it lifts teacher morale and makes schools more flexible, factors that improve learning. But detractors contend that many teachers find group decision making threatening and onerous. Others argue that self-governance simply takes turf battles once fought at the district or state level and dumps them at the schoolhouse door. "All they have done is decentralize the politics," says Paul Hill, senior social scientist for the Rand Corp.
Does school-based management lead to more effective teaching or merely create problems for already overburdened educators? Three case histories illustrate the gains -- and some pains -- that can result from more local control:
SAN DIEGO. Within six months of her arrival at Linda Vista Elementary School in July 1987, principal Adel Nadeau custom-tailored a program to fit her 950 students, 62% of whom were from Southeast Asia and spoke little or no English. With the approval of the school district, she and her 33 teachers decided to split the day in two.
Mornings are reserved for language skills and social studies, with students grouped by their proficiency in English instead of their age. In the afternoons, youngsters of all abilities are thrown together to study two subjects, which are taught for three weeks straight, then switched. After three weeks of computer writing and library research, for example, a student might spend the next three investigating art and music. The aim: to help children learn by giving them concentrated doses of material.