Reviewed by Rick Cochran
I care deeply about the issue of education because it directly affects people who are very important to me – my children. It also affects them indirectly in that the society in which they grow up and live is comprised of individuals whose character has been affected by the education system. The direct effects of the American government public school system on my children have ranged from positive to devastating. Our experience with the government public schools was made worse by our inability to comprehend how an institution, for the most part comprised of individuals who were trying their best to be helpful, could have such an appallingly harmful effect. Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools is an articulate, clear, and elegant analysis of how and why the government public school system is failing parents, their children, and our society. When I first read it, I had the feeling that the authors must have been following me around to principals’ offices, special ed. meetings, school board meetings, and community meetings for the last 15 years. This book should be required reading for anyone involved in education – parents, teachers, administrators, policy makers, and even taxpayers.
The authors begin with this formulation of the problem: “America’s children are not learning enough, they are not learning the right things, and, most debilitating of all, they are not learning how to learn.” Though there is little disagreement about the problem, the reform measures which are inevitably proposed to resolve it are, in the authors’ opinion, seriously misguided: “Reformers believe the source of these problems is to be found in and around the schools, and that schools can be ‘made’ better by relying on existing institutions to impose the proper reforms. We believe existing institutions cannot solve the problem, because they are the problem — and that the key to better schools is institutional reform.”
In the years since 1900, the American school system has gradually evolved into our current system by a series of political struggles. A significant number of these struggles have been in areas in which compromise is not possible: forced busing, sex education, bilingual education, mainstreaming, and book censorship. I would add ability tracking, and religious content in curricula, music, and art. The result has been the creation of what the authors call the “one best system”. The impact of the “one best system” is illustrated by what happened in a recent school board election in the Ithaca City School District. A community “meet the candidates” night was organized so that people would have an opportunity to ask questions of the candidates. The questions fell into two categories: what were the candidates’ positions on tracking, an ongoing point of contention, and why was there so much hostility between the teachers and the administration, the administration and the board, and among the individual board members. Tragically, the answer to the second question is obvious in light of Chubb’s and Moe’s analysis of public school governance. In the “one best system”, one of the sides in the tracking issue will win and the other will lose. The losers will be angry because they believe deeply that those most dear to them are being harmed. The winners will be desperately fearful in the knowledge that they can just as easily be the losers next time around.
Though the last 30 years have seen a frenzy of “education reform” involving vast commitments of energy and resources, the basic nature of the “one best system” remains essentially unchanged, and there has been precious little improvement in educational outcomes. This chronic lack of progress has prompted a great deal of research to determine what can be done to improve the situation. In the mid-1960s, the Coleman report shocked observers by its finding that the usual collection of “educational ‘inputs’ – funding levels, teacher salaries, teacher credentials, numbers of books in the school library” were not correlated with better educated students. Later research showed that “superior performance arises from important differences in school organization across sectors.” However, the mysterious fact remains that these “important differences” seem to depend on something other than the above-mentioned “educational inputs”. The authors propose the following resolution to this mystery:
“Our analysis shows that the system’s familiar arrangements for direct democratic control do indeed impose a distinctive structure on the educational choices of all the various participants — and that this structure tends to promote organizational characteristics that are ill-suited to the effective performance of American public schools. This is not an outcome that any of the major players would want or intend if acting alone. It is truly a product of the system as a whole, an unintended consequence of the way the system works.”
Indeed, they “show that private schools are organized more effectively than public schools are and that this is a reflection of their far greater autonomy from external (bureaucratic) control.”
Even this early in the analysis, one can begin to make sense out of ones hitherto inexplicable school experiences. One of the things which bothered me greatly about my children’s schools was the sense that school personnel seemed to think that I was imposing unreasonably on the system whenever I attempted to arrange for the basic educational needs of my children. I was making the assumption that the system was there to serve parents and children. The authors’ analysis addresses this myth with crystal clarity:
“The fundamental point to be made about parents and students is not that they are politically weak, but that, even in a perfectly functioning democratic system, the public schools are not meant to be theirs to control and are literally not supposed to provide them with the kind of education they might want. The schools are agencies of society as a whole, and everyone has a right to participate in their governance. Parents and students have a right to participate too. But they have no right to win. In the end, they have to take what society gives them.”
Seen in this light, my experience makes perfect sense. My children’s schools did not have the flexibility to meet their needs, no matter how simple, because of the many bureaucratic constraints required to make them conform to the “will of the people” as a whole. The needs of my children simply lost out to the higher purpose of the education system.
Additional topics covered by the authors are the effects of bureaucracy on educational professionalism, the effects of unionization on staffing quality, team effort, and morale, and the effects of democratic control on the concept of leadership. Much of the book is devoted to a detailed statistical analysis of school quality data which seems to support their theoretical analysis. I find the latter more interesting since it so neatly resolves some of my most perplexing questions.
Though I have few disagreements with the authors, there are some areas in which the book is weak. Like so many others, Chubb and Moe uncritically accept the usual unfavorable comparison of American students with those of other countries. Though we certainly have serious academic problems, this comparison seems unfair to me because I suspect that the test scores of children in other countries represent a much more selective group than those in the US.
To their credit, the authors mention that in the American public school system, “the losers also included a sizable portion of the less powerful segments of the American population: the lower classes, ethnic and religious minorities, and citizens of rural communities.” However, they fail to adequately point out the historic role of the schools as an instrument of the oppression of these groups, e.g. Irish Catholic immigrants, by the reigning cultural powers. Today, the reigning culture is most accurately described as anti-Judeo-Christian. Examples of this are attempts to ban Christian music in extracurricular programs while introducing children to Native American worship forms in the classroom, the acceptability of posting New Age philosophy on the same school walls where the Ten Commandments are forbidden, and the general acceptance of secular thought as “religiously neutral”. A brief treatment of this aspect of the government public school system is Dr. Richard Baer’s article in The School Choice Controversy, Skillen, ed.
The third weakness in Politics, Markets, and America’s Schoolslies in the authors’ recommendations for addressing the problems they have identified. After presenting a compelling argument that the very nature of the institution of democratic control is incompatible with effective school organization, and after presenting statistical evidence that private schools, controlled via market forces, are both intrinsically fairer and better organized for effective education, the authors stop short of the logical step of recommending the privatization of America’s school system. Possibly, they think that the current system is so firmly entrenched, and its defenders so powerful, that the best we can hope for is some small measure of choice within the existing system. In this they contradict their own analysis, which convincingly argues that the institution of democratic control inevitably leads to the “one best system”. Or perhaps they are not able to imagine creative solutions to the shortcomings of the market system as applied to schools – how to accommodate students who might be considered undesirable because of their behavior or special needs. These are indeed serious problems, but there are possible solutions, such as means- or needs-tested vouchers, and it can be well argued that the current system doesn’t do a particularly good job of addressing these problems either.
I am greatly indebted to John Chubb and Terry Moe for this excellent contribution to the discussion of the American system of education. I hope that many will read it and that it will serve to raise the level of the discussion to the point where effective solutions will become possible.