Administrative Overload

William Ouchi, Eric Nadelstern, and Chester E. Finn, Jr. were the panelists at an American Enterprise Institute event on September 23, 2009. The event, entitled Total Student Load: The Secret to Boosting School Performance?, and William Ouchi’s recent book, The Secret of TSL, both pose solutions to the challenges currently faced by the nation’s public school systems.

To William Ouchi, the first speaker, the answer lies in what he terms “TSL,” or “Total Student Load.” This term refers to the number of students each teacher must know and interact with.

Ouchi went on to claim that merely lowering TSL is not enough: decentralization of school districts is also key. He found in his research that when principals—instead of centralized school districts—are given control over school budgets, school achievement increases. Uniformly, principals who were given more control over their school budgets did two things, even without direction to do so: they eliminated non-teaching positions from the schools and they lowered TSL.

As Accuracy in Academia has reported, more than a third of public school employees nationwide are not teachers. Ouchi pointed out that in a typical public school, each teacher has a TSL of around 150—and the surplus of students leads to a gross decline in real attention per student. Ouchi explained that when he was in high school, he would have to write essays 25 pages long, but today’s teachers, each teaching dozens of students, would never be able to grade assignments that intense. Decreasing TSL, Ouchi claimed, has the effect of giving teachers a limited number of students that they can get to know and support, and the smaller number of total students the teachers interact with makes grading tough assignments simpler.

The next speaker was Eric Nadelstern, from the New York City Department of Education. Nadelstern spoke of his personal experiences with TSL, its implementation and its sustainability. According to Nadelstern, TSL is extremely effective, but also impossible to implement without competent school principals and the cooperation of the school board (or, in Nadelstern’s own case, the mayor). Nadelstern explained that in order to facilitate the creation of more “empowered schools,” or decentralized schools employing TSL, he created a program solely focused on training school principals. Nadelstern argues for rewarding success and punishing failure; when schools fail, he closes them. Right now, the school closing rate every year in New York City is three percent, but Nadelstern said he thought ten percent would be more responsible. To him, keeping schools accountable is of utmost importance, because the education and futures of real people are on the line.

The concluding speaker was Chester E. Finn, Jr., who argued that small schools are not always better, and wondered if the remarkable evidence in favor of TSL could have been influenced by other factors such as curriculum, individual teachers, location, and so forth. One point Finn made, however, had gone completely undiscussed: the issue of online classes as they relate to public education and TSL. Finn argued that online classes must be examined in future studies regarding TSL, because the public school system is so rapidly changing to include online education.

The speakers at this event made it very clear: the public school system right now has problems, and decentralization may be the solution. Now the biggest problem is implementation.

Allie Winegar Duzett is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.