The Hidden Obstacle to Education Reform

(Note: These comments reflect a conversation Kevin and I had earlier this week that he offered me a chance to share with a broader audience through the blog. For more commentary by me, look here.)

Kevin made some good points Tuesday about what he calls "the 'empirical agenda' of the Harper's set on education." But I think Kevin, and other ed reform types, make a mistake when they automatically conclude this agenda is incoherent and contradictory. In fact, if you realize that many of the people who hold these views are looking at education primarily through a social service, rather than an education, lens these views actually make a lot of sense.

If education is just another social service, like public housing, or subsidized nursing home care, or food stamps, it's about consumption rather than investment, and the primary goal is to provide the safest, healthiest, most pleasant set of experiences for kids right now. If that's the measure you're using, rather than student achievement, then schools are doing a pretty good job: They're keeping the kids off the street, most schools are pretty safe, particularly compared to many kids' homes and communities; most teachers are nurturing, and so forth. At the same time, schools, particularly those serving poor kids, are much less pleasant places than they could be. Buildings are the classic example here, but also things like lack of art and music classes. Unlike achievement gaps, these disparities often come down entirely to and could easily be fixed by more money. When you look at schools simply as a service, money actually becomes more important and financial inequities even more troublesome than if you focus on achievement. Most significantly, the idea that schools should be accountable for standards and improving student achievement doesn't make much sense at all in the social service framework--It's like arguing that Medicaid payments to nursing homes should be making the terminally ill better citizens. That's not the point.

This social service view of education is closely connected with progressivist pedagogy. If you disdain content knowledge and believe real education is simply the natural flowering of children's development, then it makes sense that the best way to support education to create as hospitable an atmosphere as possible for children to develop in, and get out of the way. More troubling is the mutually-reinforcing relationship between the social service perspective on education and certain types of progressive economics. If you believe that fundamental inequalities mean that there will always be have-nots who need public assistance to lead decent lives, then it makes sense to focus your energies on redistribution and provision of social services rather than trying to make some people marginally better fit to compete in a fundamentally unfair economy. But then it also becomes a very bad thing to suggest that education or changes in behavior can help the have-nots do better in any way, because it distracts from the larger goals of redistribution and redressing systemic injustice.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that Kevin's "Harper's set" have had far better luck selling progressivist education views than they have had selling more progressive economic policies. This creates the worst possible scenario for poor kids--or, more accurately, the adults they eventually become: Schools that merely deliver services, rather than educating, don't prepare kids to succeed in the workforce, AND there's no social service system for them to fall back on when their lack of preparation means they can't earn a decent living.

Like many liberals, I believe that better health care, public housing, etc., are all important social justice measures. But while public education is also a social service, it is fundamentally different from these services, because it aims not only to give something good to today's have-nots, but also to equip them with the skills to, in the future, get good things for themselves and, more importantly, to contribute to our society and economy. When we lose sight of this, or when we lose the ability to embrace both help for the poor today and help for their children so they won't be poor tomorrow, we all become poorer.