Some comments on Spring

Spring reveals the fact that most times, educational policy is determined by interest groups, and not all interest groups are operating from any kind of informed educational background. Instead, the values and agenda of the interest groups tend to sway the politicians making the policy from the President of the United States down to the school board member in a small community. Unfortunately, politicians are most often concerned with votes, not kids, so they make decisions to please their constituents and shore up votes rather than decisions that will truly benefit schools or children.
So if we know interest groups will force action, the question doesn’t become whether or not to include them or consider them. The question becomes which focus groups do we want at the table. If we support local control of schools, citizens can enjoy a greater degree of participation. Local interest groups are easier to access, so one can appeal to them, understand them, and work with them. Also, at the local level, elections are not as much of a motivating factor. At a national level, where a president has to re-run for office and only has a total of eight years to enact change in a variety of sectors of society, he/she does not have enough time to work through education, global economic issues, military decisions, etc. Rather, as Reagan and Bush have demonstrated, most of the educational change to occur is delegated to a secretary or other appointee the public hasn’t voted into office, or the interest group with whom they align. The actual political leader just uses the educational platform developed by others to campaign as the “Education President.” With the number of “Education Presidents” we have had in the past fifty years, it is amazing we are not the world expert on education.
If schools could force more local control, communities could feel more empowered in structuring their schools, its curricula, and its policies. They would be able to practice more effective representative democracy because the people making the policy decisions are actually the people they elected. This, in turn, would model democracy for their children and help advance the goal of creating an educated citizenry through education. The Boards of Education, hopefully, would have more access to specific, district-based educational needs and challenges and design more targeted reform to improve conditions and performance. These changes could occur faster and be more tailored and monitored.
One challenge to local control is that elite citizens would control the decision-making, and the underdogs may not have adequate representation. Delaware City Schools has seen this phenomenon. I held a focus group there to discuss community relations, and found that the Board as well as the Superintendent tends to rely on the same voices, the “Old Guard,” when making choices. They recognized the economically disadvantaged were not having the same experience in their schools and they realized that situation would cause them problems on the state report card and other performance analyses. That pressure to perform motivated them to at least look at how they could close the achievement gap, but even then, the participants in my focus group indicated that the “disadvantaged voice” was not invited to the table to actually be part of the solution. They said the “Old Guard” didn’t even consider that their voice would be relevant.
So although local control of schools is attractive from a democratic point of view, and attractive if one is truly looking to build social capital in its individual citizens, local control can prevent a more global view of education, reduce willingness to embrace multiculturalism, and actually promote anti-American values in some communities. Local control can actually stifle change and prevent access to information that does not fit into the commonly held views of the community. We saw this a bit when we did our focus group in Kettering, where the consensus of the group was that Kettering Schools produces Ketteringites, indoctrinated into the values and practices of the community. Perhaps that helps students see a more realistic view of their communities and prepares them to actively participate because they know the politics and the pressures faced by public officials.
Faced with the possibility of education narrowing the minds of students instead of expanding their minds, many would say nationalization is the way to go because more voices will be heard. However, politicians, who need votes to even enter into office, can prevent true collaborative problem solving by caving in to the demands of the loudest interest group that holds the greatest number of votes. They can also succumb to their frequently inflated egos and employ the attitude that they have the best plan to save the disadvantaged from themselves. Either way, the policy ends up reflecting the values and culture of America’s upper middle class. Most often, the interest groups pushing the concerns of the disadvantaged are made up of middle class voices working furiously to raise the disadvantaged up far enough to enter the middle class rat race.
Finally, a third option, and the one that is used today is state control. However, in our current educational power structure, the states are held hostage by the federal initiatives. States may understand their particular educational needs, but they are not given the real power to carry out their policies because the federal government threatens to yank funding if states do not adhere to their policies. So our current system is perhaps the worst because the players can blame each other for education’s problems.
The state can complain that the federal government mandates impossible programs and then doesn’t fund them. They cannot possibly do well because they have to redirect their finances so they are compliant. The local schools may know what is best for their students, but they point to the state standards and testing procedures as their reasons for making poor choices or unpopular ones. The federal leaders complain that the family is to blame (which adds fuel to the Conservative Christian interest groups’ agendas) and the teachers and the local district bureaucracies. The different levels of leadership spend so much time pointing fingers at each other, they spend little time actually problem solving collaboratively.
So what is the solution? If I knew that, I would be a very rich woman. What I am learning, however, is education is much too complicated to point at one leader as good and one leader as bad. The bottom line is we all care about education, even if some of us are more focused on its ability to provide credentials, or its ability to sustain democracy, or its ability to generate a workforce. The educational problems will not be solved as long as education is part of the public good, because it will be a victim to the constant tension between the market and democracy, the Republicans and the Democrats, the religious and the secular.
I don’t think, however, a solution is possible because education is a process and its purpose and practice ebbs and flows with the tide of our own changing culture. In a perfect world, I would like to see some realistic, well informed national standards about what makes a person literate. I would like to see what processes are considered necessary by all interest groups for a democratic citizen. I would also like to see a national policy somehow enforcing the right for all children to attend school and learn the basic skills needed to be an American. The states can determine how to make their students good workers. They are the ones that know what industry their state has and what its workforce needs are. If the state is the one investing in its educational system, it should be able to prepare a workforce that will benefit its own industry so it keeps the students in the state. I also think the federal government should not punish states and their schools by taking away their funding. Perhaps they should punish the businesses in the state when a state fails to produce students.
Forcing businesses to pay for the failures of the school could help them stop simply criticizing, and start actually problem-solving. Currently, they discuss what needs to be done, but do not feel any kind of responsibility to be an active part of the solutions they propose. If people want a voice at the table, that voice should be granted only if they accept the responsibility to take an active role in carrying out their suggestions. Imagine what a collaborative system we could set up if it was designed to force meaningful and long term collaboration between business and school and government.