In this gracefully written account of post-Katrina New Orleans, Terry Moe shows that education reform is a rich vein for mining. He dismisses as oversimplification the notion that idea-based commitment and passion are the main drivers of reform and highlights instead a major role for pragmatic problem solvers. The all-charter system that emerged in New Orleans was not a preplanned outcome, but in Moe’s account an effort to find something workable in the aftermath of a massive disaster.
For someone working from a neoliberal paradigm, Moe gives a surprisingly deep bow to players experienced in the workings of the governmental sector. Although he uses a narrow slice of “anticipated reactions,” he brings power centrally into his analysis. Moe is clear about what his book does not attempt: it makes no claim to be a definitive history of the 2005 storm’s impact nor a comprehensive treatment of school reform in New Orleans. Instead, the book holds up central issues in the move to replace a ruinous past with an improved arrangement capable of lasting into the future. And, as the title plainly says, Moe’s book is about politics, not program evaluation.
The key theoretical elements are vested interests and the law of anticipated reactions. In Moe’s framing, all governing arrangements differentially favor some players over others. Those favored defend their position accordingly. A typical scenario consists of a small number of beneficiaries pitted against a large, diverse body of players who incur significant costs. For Moe, unionized teachers and school district staff are the vested interests; those left out and paying the costs are students, parents, and an eclectic public. Although the latter may be aggrieved, they face a collective-action challenge. Vested interests not only have a strong motivation to defend the status quo but also resources and an advantaged position for doing so. Hence, a huge power discrepancy enables established interests to block all but marginal efforts toward reform. Consequently, because far-reaching reform stands no chance, it is kept out of the picture. An imbalance in the first face of power thus gives rise to anticipated reactions. Power begets power, and would-be challengers develop a disinclination to pursue fundamental change.
In Moe’s analysis, Hurricane Katrina totally wiped out the local arrangements that had protected vested interests. Incremental moves along the edges then gave way to an extraordinary opportunity to build a new institutional infrastructure. With old constraints removed, the possibility of basic reform surfaced, and New Orleans became infused with a previously untapped level of education energy. Katrina revealed a potential that the city’s power imbalance had kept hidden.
Appealing though Moe’s scenario of reform politics may be, there are troubling aspects. Perhaps in quest of parsimony, Moe makes simplifying assumptions that can be challenged. For instance, to what extent did the storm provide a clean slate? Before Katrina there were striking power resources commanded by the teachers union and the administrative staff of the school district, and the storm literally washed away this arrangement. What then? In Moe’s treatment, “after” consisted of a power vacuum. Although state and local actors had made pre-Katrina moves toward reform, their limited successes in Moe’s estimation reinforced the anticipation that big reform had no chance. National players as well had little interest in entering a sure-to-lose game. Anticipated reactions rendered national actors inconsequential. In short, the power arena posited by Moe is small and the time frame is short. Hence concentration on a few key factors is fitting. But is it? How highly insulated is any locality from a bigger stage of players, ideas, and organizations?
Rejecting the charge that school reform in the Big Easy was a corporate conspiracy, Moe dismisses this possibility as too crude to be taken seriously. He sees as unfounded such labels as “disaster capitalism” and the notion of players poised to seize local opportunities to pursue a neoliberal agenda. Missing, however, in Moe’s treatment is a nuanced version of corporate influence.
Arguing that there was no right-wing takeover, Moe cuts corners that might have put New Orleans in a larger context. In Tinkering toward Utopia (1995) Tyack and Cuban, for example, remind us that tightly conceived school reforms have “often diverted attention from more costly, politically controversial, and difficult societal reforms” (p. 3). Putting New Orleans in historical perspective might have suggested a deeper problem than a select body of locally vested interests. An earlier study (Robert Crain’s The Politics of School Desegregation, 1968) found that decline in the city’s schools began in the 1940s, well before teacher unionization. If public school malperformance preceded current forms of vested interests, shouldn’t reform be put in a more encompassing context? A “no excuses” lens of neoliberalism, however, tends to isolate education and its reform from an intertwined body of socioeconomic conditions and a heritage of political inequality.
Terry Moe inclines toward seeing matters in stark alternatives. In rejecting the notion that “a band of reformist zealots” seized the moment, he posits the alternative of a diverse group of problem solvers aligning to assemble “something distinctive, coherent, and innovative, something that no one anticipated at the beginning” (p. 138). Apparently in Moe’s analysis, an absence of well-formulated intentions keeps power out of the picture; any muddling through precludes a power test.
In contrast with Moe’s conception of power, consider John Gaventa’s celebrated study of Appalachia (Power and Powerlessness, 1982). In it, anticipated reactions do not come in sharp, distinct phases but from levels of experience. Mindsets develop over time and involve more than strategically calculating players considering opportunities to seize the moment. For those steeped in neoliberalism, power is readily understood as a mano-a-mano contest. But for those disinclined toward a highly individualized conception of power, there are no lapses into power vacuums in which reform aspirations can spring up and come together simply by trial and error. The political landscape consists of factors that can be molded to favor some alignments over others. Social-construction models of power offer scenarios in which coalitions form and can preempt policy space in which governing occurs.
Moe makes a case that education reform in New Orleans came through a diverse alliance of players, but primarily from those who saw themselves as pragmatic problem solvers. However, in his effort to avoid unnecessary complications, Moe confines himself to an immediate body of actors engaged in the task at hand. The overall setting, especially its high level of socioeconomic inequality, gets no attention as a context for anticipated reactions. In accord with neoliberalism’s no-excuses mantra, high-stakes testing was embraced uncritically while a community-development approach lay unaddressed.
The city’s reported “explosion of reformist activity” (p. 141) did not emerge ad hoc from nowhere, but out of a wider setting in which corporate and related interests had seeded the policy environment with supports for a neoliberal approach. Effort (power) was expended nationally, for example, in extensively promoting the pro-charter documentary, Waiting for Superman, and touting Michelle Rhee as a champion of high-stakes testing.
While Moe occupies solid ground in rejecting New Orleans reform as the product of a right-wing plot, the alternative is not a power vacuum filled by pragmatists. From a different take on anticipated reactions, preemption can occur through cultivating a policy terrain with an assortment of features amply funded and promoted to make one avenue of favored reform viable while alternatives never cross the line of perceived feasibility. Moe concludes by acknowledging that there is more to be learned from Katrina. Omissions notwithstanding, his book points toward power lessons as a pathway that all readers should appreciate and explore further.
