Legal Commentary

Susan Jacoby's op-ed piece in today's New York Times beautifully illustrates how not to attack local control of education. Jacoby calls for a national curriculum, national teacher standards, and national investment in teacher training, arguing that local and state control of education "is ill-suited to the needs of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy." She unfavorably compares the United States' system of K-12 education to that of France by noting that "No Frenchman could conceive of a situation in which school officials in Marseille [sic] decide" on local curriculum the way that the Texas school board can choose to make Texas' textbooks more conservative.

Aside from misspelling Marseilles' name, Jacoby's piece follows the usual script first written by Horace Mann when trying to import a Prussian model of the Common School into Massachusetts during the 1830s: Serve up a Yankee's delusional fantasy of European bureaucratic competence and Jacobinical nationalism as a standard by which to measure American schools' alleged shortcomings while ignoring real conditions in America. If such pieces are intended only as a way for elites to blow off some frustrated steam about goings-on in Texas, then their failure to come to grips with, or even mention, the problems of educational centralization can be ignored as irrelevant to their purpose. For those, however, who want to write a serious critique of American educational decentralization, however, Jacoby's piece nicely illustrates three blunders that any competent fan of centralization should avoid: Don't simply ignore the ways in which centralization might exacerbate the problems of (a) bureaucratic sclerosis; (b) cultural conflict; and (c) parental self-interest.

(1) Don't ignore the problem of centralization and bureaucracy. There is a substantial literature, starting with Chubb's & Moe's 1988 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools and more recently exemplified by the empirical work of Paul Peterson (see, e.g., his contribution in a volume edited by Caroline Hoxby) suggesting that students are better served by many competing educational providers than by a single large school district. Chubb & Moe suggested one causal mechanism behind these findings: Schools are more effective when principals have more autonomy to choose a team of teachers united behind a single educational vision, but schools governed by larger and more centralized school districts tend to deprive principals of the necessary autonomy. In particular, teachers' unions may insulate their members from meaningful performance measures, including discipline or re-assignment by principals, such that stronger teacher unions diminish educational performance (see, e.g., Hoxby 1996), and unions may be stronger in larger school districts (see, e.g., Rose & Sonstelie 2004), where parents have fewer choices and more costly routes to political participation. Caroline Hoxby's study of charter schools, published last Fall and suggesting that charters significantly improve student performance, is only the latest piece of important empirical evidence suggesting that centralized control of schools might not serve the best interests of students.

One does not have to accept the conclusion that competition improves performance. There is a voluminous and conflicting literature on the question, some of it highly technical -- indeed, nit-picking -- about how to code variables like district competitiveness (for instance, the Rothstein-Hoxby debate of five years' ago on Hoxby's use of rivers and streams as proxies for exogenous school district fragmentation to deal with the issue of reverse causality). But one cannot write an op-ed that simply ignores the controversy and expect to be taken seriously.

(2) Don't ignore cultural conflict. Since Jacksonian Democrats resisted Horace Mann's called for greater state and professional control of education in Massachusetts, there has been a tendency for educational reformers who like centralization to assume that their opponents are defying some obvious national consensus about what constitutes a good education. But the problem in America is that we Americans lack much of a consensus on what makes for a good school. Whigs like Horace Mann thought that their program of civic morality was non-sectarian, while their Democratic opponents thought that it was a Yankee Pietist plot to brainwash their kids, denigrating their traditional Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, or just anti-Yankee cultures. (On this conflict, see Carl Kaestle's classic account, Pillars of The Republic, at 139-69).

Jacoby assumes that a federally led curriculum reform would enforce "a curriculum consensus reached by genuine experts in the subjects being taught," thereby avoiding the foibles of Texas. Oddly, she ignores the fact that the feds were led by a Texan not so long ago: Does she think that those eight years were a bad dream that will never repeat itself? In any case, the putative "curriculum consensus" might be a fantasy if we Americans are bitterly divided over everything from whole language (versus phonics) and sex ed (versus abstinence). The French govern a far more homogeneous culture than American society -- one far more tolerant of expert leadership and far less tolerant of religious and linguistic minorities, where (for instance) wearing a head scarf on public school property is grounds for expulsion. The notion that Americans would tolerate a similar level of expert control is a dirigiste delusion: Rather than enforcing the expert curricular ideals of Harvard Yard in Texas, the federal government would more likely become enmeshed in a quagmire of irresolvable cultural conflicts that would make health care reform look easy.

(3) Don't ignore the self-interest of parents. How does one get anyone to invest in the education of other people's children? Centralized finance is one mechanism -- if one assumes that voters' incentives to maintain school funding does not decline as the money is spent farther from home. Voters, however, might lose interest in financing schools when the nexus between their dollars and their own kids' education or house values becomes more attenuated. This, at least, is the suggestion of some research suggesting a link between school finance equalization efforts in California and declines in per capita educational spending. Again, one need not accept such claims: The evidence linking Serrano v. Priest with Prop. 13 is contested. But one cannot simply ignore the controversy: Even an op-ed with a word limit ought to acknowledge that there could conceivably be a link between voter interest in education and voters' perceived returns on their educational dollar.

On the New York Times op-ed page, however, one can apparently ignore a quarter-century of controversies over educational centralization without losing credibility as a pundit. If the only point of such a piece is to rally the faithful to the Whiggish banner of the One Best System of schooling, then I guess such a piece does no harm. But it does tend to confirm the stereotype that the New York Times is just one more echo chamber for the ideologically like-minded.