Schools as Scapegoats?

Larry Mishel and Richard Rothstein have written a long piece for The American Prospect titled "Schools as Scapegoats," which is a good summary of the labor-centered critique of education reform. They make some good points, but I think their larger takes on the political and the policy implications are deeply misguided.

First, the good points. A Nation at Risk was released 24 years ago on a wave of scare-mongering about public education--if we don't reform the schools, people said, the economic consequences will be so dire that we'll all be speaking Russian and/or Japanese in a matter of decades or less. Literally within minutes of the report's release, we embarked on the greatest economic expansion in history, leaving the Japanese in our dust, the Berlin Wall in ruins, and American workers as the most productive in the world, despite the fact that many of the critiques embedded in A Nation at Risk are as true today as they were then.

Now, that doesn't mean the critiques were wrong, or that the education system was responsible for the expansion. It might have happened in spite of the schools, since things like the Fed licking inflation or real estate bubbles and liquidity traps in Japan or the ideological and economic bankruptcy of Communism or the Internet have little do with education policy one way or another. But either way, Mishel and Rothstein are right to call foul on the idea that economic prosperity--particularly for the middle and lower classes--begins and ends with education. For years people have been saying "Adopt my education agenda or we're going to become a third-world country," and they've always been wrong.

Rothstein and Mishel are also right to say that education can't be the only answer to rising income inequality. For example:

Another too glib canard is that our education system used to be acceptable because students could graduate from high school (or even drop out) and still support families with good manufacturing jobs. Today, those jobs are vanishing, and with them the chance of middle-class incomes for those without good educations.

It's true that many manufacturing jobs have disappeared. But replacements have mostly been equally unskilled or semiskilled jobs in service and retail sectors. There was never anything more inherently valuable in working in a factory assembly line than in changing bed linens in a hotel. What made semiskilled manufacturing jobs desirable was that many (though not most) were protected by unions, provided pensions and health insurance, and compensated with decent wages. That today's working class doesn't get similar protections has nothing to do with the adequacy of its education. Rather, it has everything to do with policy decisions stemming from the value we place on equality. Hotel jobs that pay $20 an hour, with health and pension benefits (rather than $10 an hour without benefits), typically do so because of union organization, not because maids earned bachelor's degrees.

That said, in addition to getting some of their facts wrong,* I think Mishel and Rothstein misread the extent to which this is politically vital, as well as the implications for education policy. As a result, they're making things worse for families they ostensibly want to help.

I understand that it's frustrating when influential politicians justify some kind of horribly stupid and inequitable economic policy by saying "It's all good; we just need to reform public education, preferably with vouchers." But it's silly to say, or even imply, that the horribly stupid policies depend on the education justification. Does anyone seriously think that Newt Gingrich would have raised the minimum wage in the 1990s but for some talking points about school choice? Or that George Bush couldn't have implemented his phenomenally irresponsible and deeply unfair tax cuts for the rich without the rhetorical cover provided by No Child Left Behind?

Please. Redistributing money and power to the rich and powerful was the foundation of the conservative agenda, as Jon Chait recently described brilliantly in The Big Con. Chait is a connoisseur of bogus arguments and devious strategies, and nowhere in that book is there a chapter describing the crucial--or for that matter, even nominal--role of the argument from education reform in advancing the inequality agenda. If they hadn't said "we just need to reform the schools," they would have said something else, or just stuck to the various crackpot theories and outright lies that were much more important to making their case. It all would have happened anyway.

The second--and more substantive--problem with Mishel and Rothstein, both here and in their larger bodies of work, is that they seem to believe it's not enough to simply argue that education reform is a bogus palliative for inequitable economic policy. They believe we must attack education reform itself, that the only way to ensure that corporate tax cuts are never again falsely justified by a school reform agenda is to convince people that school reform is not needed and/or will never work.

This comes in two forms, the "everything is fine" argument and the "it can't be done" argument. Mishel tends to stick to the former, like when he insisted that high school graduation rates aren't so bad after all. Rothstein focuses more on the latter, arguing that schools "can't do much better" by poor kids than they do today, or trying to debunk KIPP, or peddling the (incorrect) notion that NCLB requires schools to erase all achivement difference between poor- and non-poor students.

I'm not saying issues like graduation rates or the efficacy of KIPP schools shouldn't be debated. But it's strange to see two smart "progressives" devoting all of their education-related energy toward tearing down any and all non-funding-related efforts to help low-income and minority students--until you realize that they're really not talking about education at all.

And so Mishel and Rothstein conclude their article by correctly denouncing the "suppresion of unions and the abandonment of the norm of equality," but then immediately follow with "These are not problems that can be solved by charter schools, teacher accountabilty, or any other school intervention." Sure--but that's not an argument against charter schools, teacher accountability, or any other school intervention. Or do Mishel and Rothstein actually want people trying to create better schools for poor children to abandon their efforts, just so we can force plutocrats to invent some new lies (which they undoubtedly will) while we throw the problems of the poor into even starker relief?


* Rothstein and Mishel state that:

"The American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess and former Clinton White House domestic policy staffer Andrew Rotherham jointly write in an AEI article that "study after study shows an America unprepared to compete in an increasingly global marketplace." They worry that the urgent "competitiveness agenda" could be derailed if we are distracted by a focus on equity-improving outcomes for disadvantaged students."

Hess and Rotherham explain why the "competiveness" agenda can be in conflict with the equity agenda--exploring this tension is the point of the article--but to imply that the article is an argument against equity is simply wrong.