Responsive Schools Key to Good Society: Nobel Winner
It takes a political scientist to unravel the economics of citizens effectively and efficiently managing their own affairs and that of their immediate communities. In other words, self-governance works. Provided there is limited central state interference and provided powerful self-interested insiders don’t rule.
That is the message Elinor Ostrom, a co-winner in this year’s Nobel Economics prize, passes on to help empower people at local levels to both a) challenge outsiders and self-interests, and b) confidently evolve the procedures, rules, and oversight which serve their interests. She cautions against any one-size-fits-all model. Local people, local governance.
She and others of her school of thought challenge the usual dichotomy in seeking solutions – state or market. Should there be state finance, control and provision of services and resource management or should the markets prevail? There is a third way – communitarian.
While Ostrom’s work has usually dealt with user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, she has also been embraced by development workers, especially in third world countries. Her general principles apply to any area where citizens manage their own projects — without the heavy fist of the state or the invisible hand of the market.
Ostrom distinguishes the three methods of provision: public, private, and civil. She sees more citizens becoming involved in policy analysis and application if they are to avoid becoming “the objects of an authoritarian regime” or exploited for profit.
Self-governing, adaptive organizations follow these principles:
1. Balance power at many levels within the structure (checks and balances)
2. Monitor performances and hold designated persons accountable
3. Accept conflict as healthy, indicating need for mediation or more problem-solving
4. Empower citizens and communities with enforceable rights to check abuses of authority
Regarding the education field she comments that simplistic solutions can go “amok”. Amazing word to be used by an academic — "berserk, demoniacal, possessed, insane, characteristic of mental derangement” (Wikipedia)!
After studying 70 years of school district consolidations in the name of efficiency and equity she found that these “top-down, command-and-control solutions” did not result in better achievement or lower per-pupil spending. She concludes that “policy makers are reconsidering the consequences of past reforms and recommending charter schools, voucher systems, and other reforms to create more responsive schools.”
In other words, she concludes, “state control has usually proved to be less effective and efficient than control by those directly affected” and sometimes even “disastrous in its consequences.”
What applies to forests and fish-stocks applies to people services as well. That is why school-based management, independent schools, charter schools, parent participation preschool cooperatives, etc. work so well. Unfortunately, today, they are often resisted and blocked by powerful self-interests.
Fortunately, however, we now have a more prominently revealed social science to help those who seek communitarian solutions to social services. (See “Policy Analysis in the Future of Good Societies” by Elinor Ostrom http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/good_society/v011/11.1ostrom.html