Lots of Variety in the Sausage

This week's New Yorker book review offers a lesson on pluralism. It compares two works, one by the long-forgotten political philosopher Arthur Fisher Bentley and one by Thomas Frank of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" fame. This passage from the review has particular relevance to education policy:

[Frank] believes that liberals, once in power, will not merely transfer economic resources from business to working people but will tend to the public interest, to good government. Underneath all the fun Frank has with lobbyists and their dainty shoes, the heart of his book is the idea that, just as conservatives actually want government to be corrupt and incompetent, liberals have an equally strong interest in making government work properly.

We see this phenomenon in education too. It's fashionable in some circles to argue NCLB was designed to show schools as failures in order to completely re-shape the educational landscape, opening the door to greater support for vouchers and private schools. There's even limited evidence that some in the Department of Ed. used this rationale to support the law. Under this theory, conservatives win when government (in this case, public schools) fail. In a never-ending cycle, they campaign on the need for more private education options (as evidenced by public school failures), and, when their own policies lead to more public school failure, they argue for more private school options. So the argument goes.

The New Yorker review does a nice job refuting this position in general. Most convincing is the political reality that any party that does a bad job of governing will get kicked out of office by our electoral system. If a party passes bad legislation or ignores crises, they're probably not going to hold their positions long (see the 2006 midterm elections).

Specific examples in the education world make the bad-government-is-good-for-conservatives argument silly. To begin with, elected politicians from both parties face enormous pressure at the local level to advance their city or state's education system. It is local and state governments' most expensive and important function, and a politician who performs poorly in this key area will not last.

At the national level, anyone assuming the NCLB-as-conspiracy premise must believe either that the law was unnecessary--i.e. our schools were wonderful and didn't need a more extensive federal accountability system--or ridiculously punitive--i.e. the law punishes schools unfairly. Neither position was ultimately defensible, because in reality we knew our schools could be a lot better than they were, and they're not being punished in either massive numbers or draconian ways. Mostly they're pursuing benign "other" reforms.

In Thomas Frank's world, competition for policy is between only two groups. Corporations, conservatives, and lobbying are all aligned against the people. He even writes that, "lobbying brings a constant pressure in a single direction."

Bentley's work has far more relevance to today's education policy landscape, in which liberal reform groups frequently are at odds with teachers unions, who in turn disagree with civil rights groups about the future of federal education policy. On most issues, these groups are mostly in agreement, and they likely vote for the same candidates in national elections. But observers would be hard pressed to pin down exactly who are the liberals and who the conservatives on national standards, for example. No, the policy alignments are ever-shifting.

Bentley's primary thesis, and one that sounds downright scandalous in a political climate like ours, is that interests are absolutely essential, that all governing is the result of interest groups, and we are being duplicitous when we decry "special interests" on the other side while accepting them on our own. By extension, as much as there's a portion of the population seeking to "blow up" public education, so is there one seeking to convert schools to bastions of radical leftism.

We in the middle are left sorting it out and making the sausage.