We Must Take Charge by Chester E. Finn

Author:Chester E. Finn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1991-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

These bodies are the arenas for battles among teachers’ unions, administrators, advocacy groups for students with special needs, business interests, textbook publishers, and others, each of whom has a different idea about how to run schools. However the battles go, some groups are pleased while others are not. Bureaucracy is the winners’ instrument for getting the losers in educational politics to comply. 2

Sometimes the boundaries between internal and external blur, as when schoolteachers run for the state legislature—an increasingly frequent occurrence—and in short order find themselves chairing the education committee.

Cui bono? Whose interests, we must never stop asking, is public education meant to serve? Is it the instrument of the larger society, a form of common provision that requires the continuing and active consent of the governed, or does it exist mainly to serve its own employees, its managers, and the other longtime denizens of its self-absorbed policy arena?

Today major interest groups within public education (as in other fields) wield their immense political power first and foremost on behalf of their own members. To the extent that they see those interests served by embracing certain changes, they do so. But they never stop looking out for number one. 3

This preoccupation with stability and constituents sometimes produces unexpected twists, as organizations grow so attached to the equilibrium of the system that they abandon their own members’ putative interests. The national PTA, for example, pays scant attention to parents’ real concerns in such key domains as choice among schools and accurate feedback on student achievement. We might suppose the PTA would fight to free families from the tyranny of being forced against their will to attend bad schools when there are better ones not far away. We might also expect to find the PTA leading the effort to construct reliable, user-friendly assessment systems through which Mr. and Mrs. Brown can readily see how Toby and Rachel are doing in school, how their school is doing vis-à-vis the national education goals, and so on. In reality, however, the PTA has placed so many constraints and conditions on its position with respect to educational choice as to be functionally opposed to most actual choice schemes, and it fields one of the fiercest armies in the war on testing. It has become a full-fledged member of the school establishment, indistinguishable from the professional organizations. In these matters it serves the interests of parents about as well as ivory merchants serve the interests of elephants. 4

Other education groups devote themselves to the preservation of archaic, supplier-friendly structures and practices. Sound education reform in the 1990s would move a number of key decisions up to the states and devolve practically all the rest to individual schools and parents. What then is the point—or function—of the bulky layers of middle management associated with “local” education agencies: those 13,000 superintendents, 96,000 school board members, and the bureaucracies that serve them? There is no doubt that they were essential elements of the nineteenth-century arrangement, but if we did not already

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