In the last week I had a brief exchange on Twitter with CPRE’s Robin Lake and Fordham’s Mike Petrilli about so-called portfolio districts. A short description of the components of a portfolio district is accessible on the CPRE website, and aside from the jargon that irritated me in the Twitter exchange, the gist is the proposal that a school district administration should manage its schools in a contract sense rather than a supervisory sense, closing and opening schools and inviting in “providers” to run many of the “new” (or reopened) schools.

In many ways, the argument for managing districts as portfolios feels like an ad-hoc justification of the churn in Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, New York City, and Philadelphia. When pushed with jargon, it looks like yet another silver bullet approach (YASBA). But let’s remove that jargon and see if there is a plausible theory of action for how this would work: by giving up some control at the central level and reserving the right to terminate managerial and personnel contracts, a portfolio district would substitute a delegate-and-terminate method of accountability for supervise-and-manage. This is essentially the modal bargain proposed for charter schools: some freedom in return for greater accountability.

There are a few reasons why I am skeptical of such theories of action. One is the recent experience¹ with charter schools: the modal bargain has turned out to be a little less freedom than promised and often less public accountability than with locally-managed public schools. Contract supervision turns out to be more difficult than imagined in the case of charter schools, which should not surprise anyone who has managed service contracts. This is a case of which unpleasant job you want when something is deeply wrong with a school: is it the task of removing principals and other administrators in a directly-supervised district or the task of terminating contracts with a charter school organization (whether local or chain)? Both require good judgment, a spine, and skill in navigating the relevant legal context. You get neither a pass nor necessarily an easier path by shifting from direct management to a portfolio concept.

The second reason why I am skeptical of the portfolio-district theory of action is that superintendents and school boards drawn to it will be motivated in part by the wrong reason: the desire to insulate the top from problems by removing the direct-supervision role that is standard in districts. I don’t see any signs from portfolio-district advocates that they recognize the possibility of this as a motivation, but it’s fairly obvious to me–some superintendents and school boards will think that their jobs will be easier politically if they can wash their hands of supervision in some symbolic sense. The reality is that the top level of management does not get a pass when outsourcing the main job that the organization is designed for. No one gets a pass when outsourcing side jobs, either. Consider transportation as an example. A few years ago, several children living in Pinellas County died when bus drivers dropped them off on the wrong side of busy highways. It was a horrible year for the county’s parents, realizing how much their children’s lives depended on poorly-paid bus drivers, including on occasion substitute drivers who did not know routes well. Rightly, the head of the county’s school transportation division was reamed in public, as was the superintendent. Imagine for a second that the district had outsourced transportation to a private bus firm. Do you think the superintendent would have been any less responsible, politically, for such a tragedy in an outsourced school-bus system? Not in your life. Same with the basic job of running schools; because we connect primary and secondary education with citizenship, the head of any public school system will be politically responsible for the success of those schools no matter what the details of management are.

The third reason why I am skeptical of the portfolio-district theory of action is the core assumption that organizational churn is the best path to school improvement. When schools are deep crisis, there are no good answers–at some point, change is required, and the risks of major transitions for children are justifiable. But a portfolio-district approach prioritizes churn as the easiest response to problems in schools. Because the primary tool in a portfolio district is the threat to a contract rather than direct supervision, that takes intermediate solutions off the table unless a district has extraordinarily skilled people in the right position. And if you had those skilled people in the position to manage contracts in a portfolio district, they could exert the same skills in supervising principals in a regularly-managed district.

At least thus far in districts that look like portfolio management, I have seen little to dissuade me of my skepticism. That does not mean that a portfolio district cannot be successful, but I think the theorizing requires a little more evidence on key issues. Right now, “portfolio district” is rhetoric-based more than it is research-based.

Notes

1. I am an historian, so I get away with calling events since 1991 “recent.” [↩]