CHAPTER 1

Conflicting Models forPublic Education

Societies based on the idea of liberty have two primary templatesfor organizing their institutions. For many enterprises, free marketsare best suited for advancing both individual and collective intereststhrough the private or nongovernment sectors. For other undertakings,especially those needed to nurture or sustain freedom and individualautonomy, government action is often used to initiate, support, or administeressential services. Each of these organizational models evincesspecific advantages for recognizing and meeting the needs and preferencesof citizens, and each has its own purview of institutions where itis deemed more appropriate and useful.

And yet, while democratic or bureaucratic "politics" and economic"markets" are often presented as contrasting ideals, the line betweenthese arenas is often less defined than it may first appear, with governmentaction often necessary for supporting effective market mechanismsand private interests frequently playing a pivotal role in thepublic arena. Indeed, individual institutions themselves—for example,the military or the federal courts—can often include elements of bothpolitics and markets, so that there is more of a spectrum than a starkboundary between government action and private economic activity.Some concerns can be addressed largely through one organizationalmodel, while the other plays a lesser, perhaps supporting, role in providinggoods and services to citizens in that sector. And it is in thearea between pure market and government models—on issues such ashealth care, transportation, the environment, and education—wherethe most interesting debates play out on the appropriate and optimalroles of the government and the market in social organization.

Where one model is less effective, the other may serve as a better primarytemplate for organizing institutions. For instance, the free marketideals of voluntary participation and individual choice may not bethe best tenets for organizing, say, national security. Instead, collectiveand coercive government action may be better suited for administeringthat public good, which all then enjoy. Likewise, government's abilityto gather and redistribute resources and enforce equity standardsmay not be useful in all areas. State control over the media and foodproduction led to disastrous results in the Soviet Bloc; people preferindividual freedom and choice in many areas of their lives, and the aggregateof individual choices can lead to the best outcome when articulatedthrough market mechanisms in many areas. The problem comeswhen one model systematically fails to produce an important good orservice that is placed in its purview, yet there are reasons to resist theobvious remedy of shifting production toward the other model.

That is, there are many examples of "market failure" or "governmentfailure" evident in a number of areas. We all know of instances wherethe state fails to effectively deliver a service, such as filling potholesor policing the streets. And we know of cases where markets producedrastic inequality in wages or limit access to essential goods based onpeople's ability to pay. In these cases, people often react by seeking tomove the endeavor into the other model. Governments could easilylimit CEOs' pay or distribute important goods to the poor, many wouldclaim; and private companies may be better prepared to provide securityservices, for instance.

In this knee-jerk tendency to look to alternative models, marketshave been ascendant in particular in recent years as a means to addressthe social problems that are increasingly associated with popularlyperceived government failure. Problems of government ineffectivenessand social malaise tied to public programs such as welfare help explainwhy markets have become increasingly paramount, seen as a commonsensicalsolution to seemingly intractable problems of governmentineffectiveness. Whether it is promoting individualized retirement accounts(instead of federally administered Social Security), privatizedmedical savings accounts (instead of government health insuranceprograms), or even privatized military services (for functions previouslyperformed by the armed forces), markets make sense on manylevels.

The same is true in the area of schools, where market-style organizationhas an inherent appeal. Particularly in the case of public schools,which—as we will show—are the site of multiple tensions and competingdemands, markets represent a very attractive solution because oftheir apparently neat delineation of producers responding to the needsof consumers, namely, the children. But closer scrutiny of these issuesraises important questions about the efficacy of simplistic solutionssuch as these.

Indeed, the idea of education for all may be the best example of theunforeseen difficulties of moving to a market model. In fact, schoolswere not always a state function, as is evident in the history of mostWestern democracies. Instead, they were often left to a range of privateproviders, including religious, charity, for-profit, and family-basedmodels. Education became a state concern in the United States onlywhen reformers in the nineteenth century argued that a laissez faireapproach to education led to too much variation, too much inequality,and not enough access to a service that was crucial to the young republic(and, according to some perspectives, not enough uniformity whenthe nascent Industrial Revolution required workers with a reliable setof skills and values).

The Continuing Crisis

The U.S. public education system was created because of perceivedfailures in how schools were suited to respond to social and economicupheaval. Yet, since that time, America's system of public educationhas seemingly been in a chronic state of crisis. Reports on the state ofthe public schools are familiar to anyone concerned about the qualityof U.S. education:

• In New York City, "only 24 per cent of 1135 tenth graders tested forarithmetic performed at their grade level;" half of the studentsperformed at a sixth grade level.

• The nation suffers from a shortage of qualified teachers: "One outof every seven teachers in this country cannot meet even the minimumrequirements."

• Teachers are underpaid, and the U.S. education system, once theenvy of the world, is falling further behind its global competitors.

• Even the students who make it through this failing system are notablyunprepared for college—a solid majority of college freshmancannot identify even the most famous U.S. presidents.

So the failure of America's public education system threatens not onlyto induce economic decline: as one report concluded, "Our democracyis at stake."

Interestingly, these seemingly dead-on indictments were all leveledbefore the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 and even before the 1954Supreme Court called for the end of a two-tiered education system. Yetthose students and teachers were also part of the "greatest generation,"which produced unparalleled economic growth, extended democraticrights, developed incredible technical innovations, and spread prosperitylike never before (or since). Were the critics wrong?

While we do not pretend to answer that question, the familiarityand resonance of these admonitions about the state of public educationillustrate that anxiety regarding the state of public schools is notnew. Such crisis factoids have always been popular with reform advocatesseeking to advance their own policy agendas. As Meredith Wilsoncomically illustrated in his 1957 slice of Americana, The Music Man,Americans may not be motivated to buy into change unless they seesigns of substantial trouble, especially in their own backyards. EconomistMilton Friedman made the same causal connection regarding thepotential of an apparent crisis to effect drastic changes in social policy:"only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change."

In fact, continued concerns about school quality and inequalityled to major efforts to improve education, including the National DefenseEducation Act of 1958 and the Great Society programs such asHead Start and Title 1, where the federal government directed unprecedentedresources toward education starting in the 1960s. Yet consternationabout America's educational performance has only intensifiedsince then. The fact that the warnings of the 1940s and 1950s reverberateso clearly now only strengthens the claim that these immenseand expensive efforts have done little to turn around a stagnant publiceducation system.

Now a new generation of reformers has taken up the familiar refrainof failure in public education, noting, for instance, that no country currentlyspends more on education but gets less in the way of results.These reformers raise the alarm when U.S. students score near or at thebottom in international rankings or when results on some standardizedtests appear to be stagnant. In view of this widespread mediocrity,it should be no surprise that every year well over one million studentsquit school; some critics note that actual graduation rates vary from60% to only 70% across states, with students in some urban areas justas likely to graduate as to flee these "dropout factories." While billionshave been spent on marquee social programs such as Title I for poorchildren, we are told that fewer than six of ten high school graduatescan read at a level necessary to succeed in daily life.

Perhaps most alarmingly, the gaps in achievement between richand poor children, and between white and minority students, are stubbornlypersistent in a nation that holds education as the primary routeto equal opportunity. A half-century after Brown v. Board of Educationsupposedly broke down legal barriers to equitable educational opportunity,the typical African American student was still scoring below75%–85% of white students on standardized tests. In the eighth grade,fewer than one out of twenty English language learners can read at aproficient level. The litany of such concerns has been so constant forso long that the crisis in public education is now a permanent attributeof the educational landscape in the United States. Parents, policymakers,employers, and taxpayers all see good reasons to demand vastlyimproved outcomes from the school system.

And reformers have been trying many things. Just as earlier generationstried to fix the schools with a plethora of new curricula, resources,and programs, the chronic concern with the state of Americaneducation has spawned a slew of new efforts at the local, state, and nationallevels. Theoreticians, policy analysts, columnists, and corporateCEOs have all advanced various plans to improve America's schools.Some of these are quite specific, focusing on a particular pedagogicalapproach such as phonics-based reading or block scheduling to reconfigureinstructional time. Others are grander in scale, such as whole-schoolreform packages, the No Child Left Behind legislation, or effortsto universalize prekindergarten education.

In view of the constant flow of reforms directed at schools, contrastedwith the generations of failure, it is hardly surprising that peoplelose patience with the constant tinkering around the edges. Indeed,in light of the myriad short-lived and misguided reform efforts, manyobservers suggest that K-12 education in America may be deterioratingnot only in spite of, but at least partly because of, this barrage of oftenmisguided efforts to improve public schools. That is, instead of concentratingon imparting core academic skills to the next generation,some worry that educators are too distracted by the next new thing,whether it be "professional development schools" or whole-languageinstruction or multicultural education or Reading First.

And the apparent failure of massive reform efforts to spur substantivechange in a system "institutionally opposed to significant structuralreform" has fueled a new generation of reformers who look tochange the structures of the system itself. These policy advocatespoint to persistent evidence of public school failure in advancing anagenda structured around choice and competition—giving familiesthe option of attending a private school or using competitive pressuresassociated with private schools to force public schools to improve. Theyhave forcefully moved beyond the considerable evidence on the substantialdifficulties of educating at-risk children to focus on school andteacher accountability—arguing that educators too often fall back ondemographics as an excuse, when we now have models from the chartersector that demonstrate that poor children can learn if given theeffective instruction that is apparently evident in private schools. Thewatershed 1990 book, Politics, Markets and America's Schools, from Brookingsscholars John Chubb and Terry Moe is still probably the most articulateand compelling statement of the problems and root remediesfor public education since Milton Friedman published his proposal forvouchers in the 1950s. They identified politicized governance—"directdemocratic control"—as the institutional flaw of American public educationand presented empirical evidence on market mechanisms ofchoice, competition, and school autonomy as the panacea for laggingschool performance.

Politics, Science, Markets, and School Failure

Once only on the periphery of education reform, the insight fromChubb and Moe on the structural problems in public education hasgained prominence in its appeal as an alternative perspective for inducingfundamental change in schooling. This idea is premised on thenotion that the public education system is inherently incapable of improvingitself. According to this line of thought, and echoing RonaldReagan about government in general, these "existing institutions cannotsolve the problem, because they are the problem." Wave after waveof ultimately unsuccessful reforms demonstrate that schools resistand repel even the best, most well-intentioned efforts at substantivechange.

In the 1970s, radical scholars argued that, like it or not, this is exactlythe way that the system is supposed to function in a market society.According to this "social reproduction" perspective, schooling is aninstitution in capitalist society that perpetuates social and economicadvantages for elites. Since a hierarchical economic structure needs acertain number of people to fill less prestigious and less rewarding positions,schools serve the role of sorting students based on their socialclass origins or race or gender and not on their actual abilities. Consequently,although schools may go through the motions, adopting therhetoric and symbols of reform in order to maintain their popular legitimacy,they in fact avoid substantive efforts to make education moreeffective, since increasing equitable outcomes would actually underminetheir true function.

In more recent times, theorists of quite a different ideological benthave also argued that the institutions of schooling are structured to resistsubstantive change. Reforming the internal policies and processesof schools will not go very far, according to these self-avowed "markettheorists." Contemporary curriculum and instructional practices reflecta remarkable continuity with earlier eras because, unlike schoolsin the private sector, public schools themselves have no incentive to becomemore innovative or responsive to the needs of students. Educatorsmay half-heartedly adopt ideas that could work, only to cast themaside when the next fad appears. More likely, they may adopt nominalchanges to please their bureaucratic supervisors but will continue doingwhat they always do once the classroom door is closed. So the strategyof targeting the internal processes of public schools is destined tofail because the external environment—the institutional framework inwhich schools have operated—essentially inhibits real change, accordingto this logic. Rather than focusing on educating children, theseinstitutions are instead geared toward serving the needs of powerfulinterest groups, most notably the teachers unions in the current expressionsof this thinking. To change public schools, these theorists arguethat we need to change that institutional framework in ways thatencourage schools to adopt the more effective educational practicesthat drive the private school sector.

At least that is the logic of the reform agenda we examine in thisbook. However, the evidence presented later in this volume suggeststhat market models may also face challenges owing to the complexitiesand uniqueness of education as a social endeavor; in fact, marketmechanisms such as deregulation or greater autonomy for schools mayeven be causing some of the problems they are purported to address. Indeed,Americans put multiple (and often conflicting) responsibilitieson their public schools by enabling schools to avoid effective practicesin response to misguided market demand. America's schools are supposedto promote social tolerance, train students in employable skills,provide nutrition, teach social skills, offer athletic programs, and boostacademic achievement. And the idea of public education means doingall this and more for very diverse groups of people who often have verydifferent conceptions about what schools should be doing and howthey should be doing it. Few would say that public schools are succeedingat these multiple missions. Indeed, market theorists offer a cogentand compelling critique of the myriad failures of public schools, but wewill see that it is not at all clear that market models would do any betterin this regard. In light of this potpourri of demands on public schools,the question that has emerged as the central consideration is whetherpublic schools can still "work" in enhancing academic outcomes fordiverse students.