Ideas to Action

Harvard University Press (2006)

Entrepreneurial creativity, private investment, and competition have been among America's great strengths. Can they be harnessed to improve troubled public schools? Or is private management of public schools at best a gimmick, and at worst an undemocratic sellout?

In the 1990s, some failing school systems turned to private education management organizations to manage their schools. The EMOs promised academic improvement to families and profits to their investors. Wall Street and foundations lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on for-profit and nonprofit start-ups, and thousands of students' educations began to be directed not by school officials, but by private companies.

In Learning on the Job, Wilson, the founder and CEO of Advantage Schools, looks back on the first tumultuous decade of this social experiment. Digging deep into the academic, financial, logistic, and political records of seven leading EMOs, including his own, he reveals the potential and pitfalls of their business and educational models, and their actual successes in the classrooms and the boardrooms. Have they given their students a better education? Can they succeed as businesses? Can businesses in fact run better public schools than school districts?

With honesty and fairness on an ideologically charged topic, Wilson describes the follies and wisdom, overreaching and real accomplishment, of the first education entrepreneurs. Acknowledging that they had much to learn about the real-world challenges of running schools, he passionately defends the promise of private involvement in public schooling.

Widely consulted by today’s charter school leaders planning for expansion, the book has informed the work of charter school management organizations, school founders planning replication, and national funders.

Pioneer Institute for Public Policy (1992)

In this in-depth analysis of a large urban school district, Wilson argued that “controlled choice” plans established under court orders in desegregation decisions were achieving neither their goal of racial balance nor promoting school quality. Opening up the supply of new schools was essential. Wilson proposed new “entrepreneurial schools” founded by teachers and social entrepreneurs outside the district that would admit students by lottery, be funded in proportion to the number of students they enroll, and be accountable for meeting achievement outcomes.

The book established a detailed blueprint for charter schools in Massachusetts, for which Wilson and Williams S. Edgerly wrote the original legislation. Today, Boston counts some of the highest-performing charter schools in the country. A controlled, longitudinal study by MIT and Harvard researchers found that students in these schools radically outperform their district peers.

Chapter of Stretching the School Dollar: How Schools and Districts Can Save Money While Serving Students Best, edited by Frederick M. Hess and Eric Osberg

With states confronting the worst fiscal crisis in decades, how can school districts both sharply reduce costs and increase student achievement? Bold cost-cutting measures are essential not only to withstand deep cuts in revenues, but to free up resources to drive school improvement. This provocative book brings together a dynamic group of authors—scholars, consultants, journalists, and entrepreneurs—who offer fresh insights into an issue no school or district can afford to ignore.

In his chapter, Wilson tackles districts’ single largest expense: teachers. In the context of an actual school district’s budget, he offers ten initiatives for cutting personnel expense while increasing teacher salaries. Districts would be wise to consider disinvesting in class size reduction, the primary and staggeringly expensive reform of the last several decades. Its promised returns in student performance will prove chimerical. Instead, districts should attend to how classes are formed and student skills gaps are identified and filled, and to equipping teachers with effective instructional systems that permit teachers of average abilities to post exceptional results. Other monies can be freed up by eliminating general education instructional aides above kindergarten, adopting a hybrid educational model that complements teacher-led instruction with instructional technology, cutting wasteful professional development costs, terminating chronically ineffective teachers, aligning employee benefits with industry averages, reducing faculty absenteeism, and strengthening referral programs to special education.

American Enterprise Institute Outlook Series, No. 3 (March 2009)

Some 200 high-performing schools nationwide are the bright lights of the charter school movement: Despite social and economic disadvantages, their students not only trounce their district peers on state tests but also top statewide averages and, in some cases, surpass students from surrounding affluent suburban districts. Among these “gap-closing” schools, one broad approach, frequently called “No Excuses” schooling, appears to dominate. But can the approach be brought to scale?

Wilson examined Boston’s top charters and found that 83 percent of their teachers and school leaders had attended top undergraduate institutions ranked “very competitive” to “most competitive” by Barron’s. That compares to 19 percent of public school teachers generally. The labor pool of such elite college graduates is small. Even if one in every ten of these graduates entered teaching for two years before moving on to other careers, they would provide only six percent of the some 450,000 teachers currently working in the member districts of the Council of Great City Schools (the nation’s 66 largest urban public school systems). Simply put, we might have enough of these teachers to staff a few hundred more No Excuses schools, but not a few thousand more, and certainly not enough to reach every disadvantaged child in America. But the development of a new wave of intellectual property for schools may in time permit a broad swath of career educators to achieve KIPP-like results—without working heroic hours. Wilson proposes a plan for overcoming human capital limits and forging a gap-closing schooling model that can be sustained and scaled.

As funders invested millions in scaling up charter school networks, Wilson’s paper triggered a new interest in human capital scarcity and the limits of the “hero” model. Two influential subsequent studies of CMOs, from the Center for Reinventing Public Education and Education Sector, identified teacher scarcity, job demands, and turnover as key obstacles facing charter school networks.

Chapter of Educational Entrepreneurship: Realities, Challenges, and Possibilities, edited by Frederick M. Hess Harvard, Education Press (2006)

Entrepreneurship has emerged in recent years as an unprecedented and influential force in U.S. K-12 education. Yet the topic has received surprisingly little serious or systematic attention. Educational Entrepreneurship aims to fill this gap. This timely volume addresses a number of central questions: What is educational entrepreneurship and what does it look like? Who are the educational entrepreneurs and what motivates them? What tools do entrepreneurs need to be successful? What policies or practices enable or impede entrepreneurship? What would it mean to open up the education sector to more entrepreneurial activity?

In his chapter, Wilson examines why entrepreneurial initiative in the last decade met with striking success in some sectors of the education industry but not—as yet—in K-12 education. Moving past political and regulatory constraints, bad business models, and poor execution, Wilson probes a lesser-know constraint: the culture of public schooling—an array of deeply held but often unexamined normative beliefs embedded in American culture. He finds that entrepreneurs often chose to accommodate standard schooling practices rather than violate a pervasive ideology of public schooling. But their adherence to conventions undermined both their educational and financial results—and arrested a promising movement for the renewal of America’s schools.