AJE Feature | Recreating the Central Office in the Portfolio Management Model: The Cases of Denver, Los Angeles, and New Orleans by Katrina E. Bulkley, A. Christopher Torres, Ayesha K. Hashim, Sarah Woodward, Julie A. Marsh, Katharine O. Strunk & Douglas N. Harris

The full-length American Journal of Education article “From Central Office to Portfolio Manager in Three Cities: Responding to the Principal-Agent Problem” by Bulkley, Torres, Hashim, Woodward, Marsh, Strunk and Harris can be accessed here.

In 1974, David Tyack coined the term the “One Best System” to describe persistent structures within U.S. public education. Many of those structures have seen little fundamental change in the past 100 years: elected school boards oversee district central offices and those central offices directly operate schools (Gamson & Hodge 2016; McGuinn & Manna 2013). However, in response to critiques of urban schools and districts, the 1990s saw a shift as many contemporary education reformers began to argue that the only way to truly improve urban public education was by fundamentally restructuring the “One Best System” (e.g., Broad Foundation n.d.; Finn Jr & Petrilli 2013; Hill, Pierce, & Guthrie 1997). 

In the recently published AJE article, “From Central Office to Portfolio Manager in Three Cities: Responding to the Principal-Agent Problem,” we examine how one popular strand of reform within this movement (the Portfolio Strategy or Portfolio Management Model (PMM)) has been enacted in three distinct cities (Denver, New Orleans, and Los Angeles) (Hill, Campbell, & Gross 2012; Bulkley, Henig, & Levin 2010; Bulkley, Marsh, Strunk, Harris, & Hashim 2020). In a PMM, “portfolio managers” (PMs), which are often traditional district central offices taking on new roles, oversee—but may not actively manage—a “portfolio” of more autonomous schools (often charter and/or privately managed).

Some districts that have shifted in the PMM direction have done so based on active policy choices and a belief in the portfolio idea, while others have done so in reaction to changes within their systems that have resulted in more schools that are overseen but not operated by central offices. The latter is most visible in districts where a substantial percentage of students are attending district-authorized charter schools. As seen in Figure 1, the number of such districts has grown steadily (based on annual reports by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools).   

NOTE: Reports from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools available at: https://www.publiccharters.org/tags/enrollment-share  Number of communities on each line are not mutually exclusive; in other words, a community listed as having 30% or more of students who attend a charter school would also be counted for the “20% or more” and “10% or more” lines.

While the number of districts either proactively or reactively shifting in the portfolio direction has increased, we are just recently seeing systematic, empirical evidence examining PM practices within such systems. Our study relies on 76 interviews with system actors, including leaders and mid-level administrators overseeing the key mechanisms of change within PMs, as well as formal and informal leaders in labor unions, school boards, mayors’ offices, advocacy organizations, local philanthropies, state departments of education, charter management organizations (CMOs), and organizations that work directly with aspiring or practicing educators. Consistent with findings from our recent book (Bulkley et al. 2020), we describe the three school systems as enacting the PMM idea in distinct ways that show up in the practices of portfolio managers. 

As a centralized portfolio, Denver Public Schools (DPS) created common and consistent performance expectations across charter, autonomous, and district-run schools. DPS’ central office sought to enact a collaborative and proactive approach to portfolio management, including limiting school-based autonomy when the central office identified that autonomy as in tension with the goals of the system as a whole. DPS was able to limit autonomy with relatively minimal pushback, in part, by seeking to collaborate directly with charter school leaders in order to come to agreement on how to tradeoff school-based autonomy for common policies and practices. While the centralized portfolio approach aided with resolving some tensions between schools and the central office, it was less successful in creating a similarly collaborative relationship with parents and the community. As we explore in the article, this was particularly visible around school closure and the role of some more influential parents. 

In New Orleans, the managed market PMM largely prioritized school-based autonomy (in this predominantly charter-based system) over common policies and practices (Bulkley et al. 2020).  At the time of our study, two entities – the Orleans Parish School Board and the state-authorized Recovery School District both acted as PMs, each with distinct sets of schools in their portfolios. The role for the two PMs was largely to manage student enrollment and choice, design and enforce expectations via a strict performance-based accountability system, and maintain a “market” approach (e.g., mostly “hands off”) around issues of school capacity. The PMs also set shared policies and practices in specific areas including student discipline (Bulkley et al. 2020).

While the role of PMs in Denver and New Orleans were quite different, we identified similar tensions between the goals of the PMs and those of parents and the community. For example, PMs in both cities emphasized the role of transparency as a means to minimize conflict around school closure and were less focused on revising expectations of schools to be more consistent with those of parents and the community. 

Finally, LAUSD enacted the PM role by engaging with schools in two distinct ways, in effect creating competing systems of district-run and charter schools. In the district-run system, LAUSD’s approach to portfolio management included a more conventional and “hands on” approach, despite having multiple school models with varying levels of autonomy, alongside limited threats of school closure. For the charter sector, LAUSD took a largely “hands off” approach, allowing substantial autonomy while still enforcing compliance with federal, state, and a small number of district policies. 

Our analysis suggests that, while perhaps tackling some of the tensions within the “One Best System,” enactment of a PMM can sometimes include distinct challenges. PMs in all three systems, despite their differences, struggled at times with: (1) balancing their own performance expectations and parents’ desire for school continuity and limited disruption created by school closure; (2) figuring out how to provide school-based autonomy without jeopardizing some aspects of equity (such as consistent and fair practices around student discipline); and (3) ensuring that schools with greater autonomy also had the supports and capacity needed to meet the needs of students. These challenges were sometimes intertwined with, and exacerbated by, persistent issues of power, such as the influence held by some charter management organizations in each city.  

The proverbial One Best System is increasingly fraying at the edges. Through looking closely at one specific alternative, the portfolio management model, and the role of PMs within it, we see how “solving” some challenges can also create new ones. 

References

Broad Foundation. (n.d.). “75 Examples of How Bureaucracy Stands in the Way of America’s Students and Teachers.”

Bulkley, Katrina E, Jeffrey R. Henig & Henry M. Levin, Henry (Eds.). 2010. Between Public and Private: Politics, Governance, and the New Portfolio Models for Urban School Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Bulkley, Katrina E, Julie A Marsh, Katharine O Strunk, Douglas N Harris, and Ayesha K Hashim. 2020. Challenging the One Best System: The Portfolio Management Model and Urban School Governance. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Finn Jr, Chester E, & Michael J Petrilli. 2013. “The Failures of U.S. Education Governance Today.” In Education Governance for The Twenty-First Century: Overcoming The Structural Barriers To School Reform, P. Manna & P. McGuinn (Eds.). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Gamson, David A, & Emily M. Hodge. 2016. “Education Research and the Shifting Landscape of the American School District, 1816-2016.” Review of Research in Education, 40: 216-249. 

Hill, Paul T., Christine Campbell, & Betheny Gross. 2012. Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Hill, Paul T., Lawrence Pierce, & James Guthrie. 1997. Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America’s Schools (RAND Research Study). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McGuinn, Patrick, & Paul Manna. 2013. “Education Governance in America: Who Leads?” In Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century: Overcoming the Structural Barriers to School Reform.  P. Manna & P. McGuinn (Eds.). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. 2019. A Growing Movement: America’s Largest Public Charter School Communities. https://www.publiccharters.org/sites/default/files/documents/2019-03/rd1_napcs_enrollment_share_report%2003112019.pdf 

KATRINA E. BULKLEY is a professor of educational leadership at Montclair State University. She is the author, with Julie Marsh, Katharine Strunk, Douglas Harris, and Ayesha Hashim, of Challenging the One Best System: The portfolio management model and urban school governance (Harvard Education Press, 2020).
A. CHRISTOPHER TORRES is an assistant professor of K-12 Educational Administration at Michigan State University. He studies urban and low-income school improvement efforts related to school choice, leadership, school turnaround, charter schools, and educator retention and turnover.
AYESHA K. HASHIM is Assistant Professor of Policy, Leadership, and School Improvement at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education. Dr. Hashim’s research focuses on district-level school reform aimed at improving student achievement in underserved communities.
SARAH WOODWARD is the Programs Director for the Arts Council New Orleans, where she directs arts-based youth and community development programs. Sarah earned her PhD in Urban Studies from the City, Culture, and Community program at Tulane University.
JULIE A. MARSH is a professor of education policy at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Marsh specializes in research on K–12 policy and governance, blending perspectives in education, sociology, and political science.
KATHARINE O. STRUNK is a professor of education policy and, by courtesy, economics and the Clifford E. Erickson Distinguished Chair in Education at Michigan State University. She is also the director of the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC).
DOUGLAS N. HARRIS is professor and chair of the Department of Economics and the Schlieder Foundation Chair in Public Education at Tulane University. He is also the founding director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA-New Orleans) and the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH).