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• Title: An Historical Case Study of Collaboration and Competition Among Independent Schools: A New Paradigm for Developing Educational Excellence (Article 25) (Case Study)
• Author : American Education History Journal
• Release Date : January 01, 2008
• Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 253 KB

Description

The competition for students amongst independent schools in the United States has often been viewed as the primary reason for their well-deserved reputations for academic excellence. Scholars, including Friedman (1980) and Chubb and Moe (1990), have long argued that public schooling could best be improved if a free market style competition for students amongst all public and private schools was encouraged. In fact, such competition has historically characterized independent schooling. Friedman first advocated for the creation of vouchers to encourage such competition as far back as the 1950s. Friedman (1980) continued to argue throughout the 1980s that as a result of vouchers "the public schools would then have to compete both with one another and with private schools", thus improving the quality of all schooling (161). William F. Buckley Jr. (2005) reported that after fifty years Friedman's dedication to school choice had not waned and that the Friedman family had "committed their entire estate" to the Friedman Foundation, which "is devoted to advancing the prospects of school choice" (55). This foundation believes that the primary beneficiaries will be economically disadvantaged students, who will either use the vouchers for private school tuition or choose to remain in their public schools, which as a result "would improve on facing competition" (55). Although Friedman's market driven economic theories about vouchers and school choice may be considered seminal by many scholars, Cookson (1994) has argued that if "one had to choose a single document that captured the imagination of the choice movement and legitimated the idea of school choice to the news media and, hence to the public at large, it would have to be Politics, Markets, and American Schools by the political scientists John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe" (36). Although Cookson questioned their definitions of key variables and then challenged the statistical analysis of their data (83-86), he nevertheless noted that Chubb and Moe essentially "believe that the natural operations of markets will drive out bad schools and reward good schools" (36). In contrast, the thesis of this article is that possibly overlooked in the above free market, intensely competitive paradigm is the supposition that independent schools, to the benefit of their families, have historically collaborated as well as competed with one another. As suggested from the evidence in this historical case study on independent schooling in Cincinnati, Ohio, local independent schools have in fact historically competed vigorously with each other for students-and yet, paradoxically, they have also collaborated with each other as well to maintain academically strong and viable independent school alternatives to local public schooling. Thus, it is not by competition alone that independent schools have sustained their historical record of academic excellence. Independent schools are a subset of American private schooling and can best be defined by the following common characteristics: self-governed, self-supported, self-defined curriculums, and self-selected students and faculty (Kane 1992). From amongst these defining characteristics, self-governance has provided the flexible mechanism by which these schools have been able to compete and cooperate freely with one another.

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