On February 17, 2009, President Obama signed into law the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act, of which $4.3 billion went to the U.S. Department of Education to administer Race to the Top, a competitive grant program that incentivized states to adopt college-and-career-ready standards in math and English Language Arts, participate in a testing consortium aligned to the standards, use test scores to evaluate teachers and administrators, and lift the cap on charter schools. Footnote 1 Race to the Top dangled money to states at the height of the Great Recession on condition that they adopt several prominent ideas of the so-called “education reform” movement. Footnote 2 To be clear, many state and local politicians support education reform, as do certain business interests, civil rights organizations, and conservative think tanks. Footnote 3 Still, Race to the Top was an unprecedented use of federal power to redesign the American education system: “by strategically deploying funds to cash-strapped states and massively increasing the public profile of a controversial set of education policies, the president managed to stimulate reforms that stalled in state legislatures [and] stood no chance of enactment in Congress.” Footnote 4
Up to now, federal law only requires testing in grades 3–8 and once during high school, there are no national education standards in history or science, and charter schools constitute a relatively small percentage of American public schools. All of this could change in the next decade, particularly as many Democratic and Republican party elites support a strong federal role in encouraging or mandating education reform. One of the great questions of our historical moment is whether democrats should support top-down education reform. The question is not whether democrats should support top-down progressive education policies, because no major political constituency is lobbying for that right now. Nor is it whether democrats should champion bottom-up education reform, though there are some conservatives who support education reform but want states to lead it. Footnote 5 Rather, the question is whether democrats—those who believe in government of, by, and for the people—should support or oppose the federal government’s push for education reform. An alternative is that democrats advocate for state or local control of education policy, where there may be a greater chance of implementing progressive education pedagogies.
The work of two leading public intellectuals frames this debate about democracy, federal power, and education reform. Michael Barber, author of How to Run a Government, argues that the federal government should promote education reform because it leads to a more skilled and prosperous democratic citizenry. Zephyr Teachout, author of Corruption in America, posits that private interests have undue influence on federal education policy and, in the case of Race to the Top, have distorted the democratic process and good educational practice. My goal is to situate the pro-and-con arguments in the political science literature and show how they represent the elitist and participatory sides of contemporary democratic theory. I conclude that local control of schools, supplemented by appropriate federal and state public policies, can enrich democracy and diversify educational opportunities.
Executive Leadership on Education Reform
Michael Barber is a leading theorist and spokesperson for “deliverology,” a science for driving systematic reform in government and the public sector. Footnote 6 Barber led Tony Blair’s Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in the early twenty-first century before becoming head of McKinsey & Company’s Global Education Practice. Currently Chief Education Advisor to Pearson, the international education company, Barber advises politicians, educators, and scholars around the world on how to make evidence-based public policy, particularly with regards to education. In How to Run a Government, Barber explains why democracy in the twenty-first century means “effective accountable governments which can enforce basic individual rights and deliver effective public good” (p. xxiv).
According to the classical elitist conception of democracy, voters select leaders from among the elites, or, more precisely, elect out of office the elites whose performance they disapprove. Footnote 7 Barber’s position is, if possible, even more elitist: the government should be run by experts in the background who persist and influence regardless of the elected leaders. Barber justifies his positions on democratic grounds: “democracy is threatened if politicians repeatedly make promises they don’t then deliver; it is also important to citizens regardless of politics because if government fails, their daily lives—education, health, safety, travel and parks, for example, not to mention the effective regulation of markets—are materially threatened” (p. xiii). Democracy, for Barber, is rule by experts to provide the people with basic goods and services. Though it is appropriate to point out that many authoritarian regimes also claim to rule for the people, Barber does raise a valid point that democracies must educate their population, maintain public health, and keep people safe in order to remain stable. Footnote 8
Like Machiavelli’s The Prince, Barber’s book is filled with advice for the busy executive who wants a primer on the “secrets of the science of delivery” (p. xxi). Early in the book, Barber lays out principles that a leader must follow to reform a public bureaucracy: develop a foundation for delivery, understand the delivery challenge, plan for delivery, drive delivery, and create an irreversible delivery culture (p. 29). Later, Barber offers another set of principles for a delivery plan: articulate a purpose, delegate responsibility, choose leaders, track the delivery chain, incorporate benchmarking, manage stakeholders, identify resources, and anticipate risks (pp. 136–137). The book is filled with lists and rules for governing, of which 57 are assembled in the appendix. Barber’s political philosophy, if you will, is instrumental rationality for an era of consultants and Big Data.
The main “secret” of deliverology is connecting with powerful people. “A good hour alone with the boss” is the best way to jump-start a delivery effort (p. 32). A “quick phone conversation” with a friend and government minister is more effective than going through normal civil service channels (p. xvi). “Regular access to a political leader is like gold dust” (p. 226). If “personnel issues are a major barrier to making progress toward the goals, then they have to be addressed, however uncomfortable that might be” (p. 33). Though this last maxim does not have the same shock as Machiavelli’s praise of Cesare Borgia for killing his opponents, the point is the same: avoid public debate and negate competitors in order to attain political power. And just as Borgia’s plan united the Romagna and ended civil war, ruthless leadership may produce positive results.
How is it possible to reconcile any of this with democracy, rule by the people? Barber counsels systems and delivery leaders—or politicians and bureaucrats—to ignore or overpower opposition in the crafting or implementing of public policy. When one faces resistance, “push the reform far enough and deep enough for the opposition either to adopt it enthusiastically or at the very least decide it would be more effort to unwind it than to sustain it” (p. 245). Barber’s view is that there are certain things so obviously good that it is pointless to debate them; it is just a matter of implementing them: “governments and public services are to provide the services and regulation on which our prosperity as individuals and as a global community depends” (p. xiv). In an earlier era, ideological differences may have meant something, but now there is only one criterion for good governance: “what works” (p. 63). Footnote 9
It is tempting to view Barber’s perspective as foreign, perhaps reflective on a political culture without a tradition of participatory democracy, Footnote 10 but Barber’s view about rule by experts is fairly common among political and intellectual elites. Take Cass Sunstein, author of Simple: The Future of Government. As the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for much of President Obama’s first term, Sunstein’s office was responsible for reviewing nearly all federal regulations. As a political scientist and legal scholar before entering government, and then as a powerful bureaucrat, Sunstein became famous for his view that government should nudge people in a paternalistic direction. Rather than commanding citizens to live a certain way, government bureaucrats could design “choice architectures” to make the default position a good one. But do reasonable people disagree on the good? Sunstein dismisses such talk as partisanship: “On the rare occasions when members of my staff pointed out the views of interest groups, I responded … ‘That’s sewer talk. Get your mind out of the gutter.’” Footnote 11 Instead, Sunstein and his colleagues worked for a supposedly objective good: “economic growth and job creation.” Footnote 12 Both Barber and Sunstein evince little sense that democracy is, or should be, a way of life where ordinary people debate amongst themselves, shape public policy in various ways, or participate in the running of the community. Footnote 13
In How to Raise a Government, Barber commends top-down education reform. Besides drawing many lessons from his experience reforming education—“the success story” of the Blair administration, he recalls (p. 153)—Blair offers aggressive advice to governments around the world. Here is the Roadmap that he provides the chief minister for Punjab, Pakistan: Set targets in student attendance rates and test score growth for the province as a whole and each district. Train district leaders to deliver the Roadmap. Prepare lesson plans for every one of the 200,000 primary-school teachers in the province. Acquire funding for low-cost private schools and expand a voucher program for poor families. Finally, improve facilities at schools, including the purchase of new computers (p. 110). Barber’s pedagogical vision is to measure student growth through standardized test scores, whereby politicians and consultants can provide evidence that students are learning more because test scores have risen. At no point does Barber apparently ask whether the Pakistani people want schools to use scripted lesson plans or focus on computer-based standardized testing. And Barber does not seem to wonder whether schools are teaching students how to be thoughtful and confident democratic citizens. For Barber, education reform demonstrably improves students’ literacy and numeracy; therefore, it is good for the people—in other words, democratic. Along these lines, Barber praises “the most successful education secretary in US history,” Arne Duncan, who “put in place routine processes to drive delivery,” including the Race to the Top program with its emphasis on data-driven education reform (p. 57). “The entire federal system could learn lessons from this approach” (p. 175).
Who Benefits from Education Reform?
Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University and head of Mayday, an anticorruption PAC, challenges the elitist strand of democratic politics in her book, Corruption in America. Teachout extols, with Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson, “a society dedicated to liberty in which people are not subjects, but rather participatory citizens infused with civic virtue” (p. 35). This imperfectly realized democratic vision is threatened by corruption, the hijacking of public functions for private gain, including in the field of education.
The American political tradition, according to Teachout, combines an appreciation for civic virtue, a love of the country and its laws, with a recognition that people are also motivated by self- and group-interest. Teachout explains how the American founders thought simultaneously about structure and culture. On the one hand, the Constitutional framework has multiple mechanisms to prevent any one faction from becoming too strong, including checks and balances, separated powers, and a federal structure. On the other hand, founders such as Jefferson and James Madison thought that citizens needed virtues that matured through civic participation. Footnote 14 Unfortunately, corruption is the worm in the apple of American democracy. Shortly after the Revolution, many prominent Americans, including Patrick Henry, became active in the Yazoo scheme that enabled corrupt legislators to profit off the sale of a large plot of land in the American southeast to private investors. Likewise, the nineteenth century saw the gradual legitimation of lobbying and its attendant vice: politicians angling for a lucrative lobbying job once out of office.
But the most pressing concern, for Teachout, is how recent Supreme Court jurisprudence has enabled “wealthy individuals and wealthy corporations the right to spend as much money as they wanted attempting to influence elections and policy” (p. 7). In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Supreme Court determined that citizens are consumers of information, the corporation is an association of individuals, and unlimited corporate spending on elections is free speech. According to Justice Kennedy, “democracy is premised on responsiveness,” and as long as all individuals and corporations are equally permitted to spend on campaigns, then politicians will respond to their constituents as they always have (cited on p. 233). For Teachout, this perspective reveals an academic cast of mind ignorant of how politics plays out on the ground. More importantly, this approach ignores the American tradition of bright line rules that prohibit undue influence of moneyed interests on policymaking.
For Teachout, corruption is not merely quid pro quo, this for that, or the promise of specific actions for a fee. The issue is that campaigns cost a lot of money. Rich people have the money. Therefore, candidates must ask the economic elite for financial support and give them more attention than everyone else. Because of the way Americans fund elections, politicians virtually never act on the policy preferences of the majority unless they align with those of economic elites. Footnote 15 Because the Supreme Court refuses to distinguish corruption from responsiveness, “we could lose our democracy in the process. Four years after Citizens United, wealthy individuals have far more political power than they did, and groups of individuals without money have less. A country founded on political equality and the fight against corruption is burdened by political inequality, corrupting individuals and institutions” (p. 292).
In an op-ed for a New York newspaper, Teachout explains how economic elites have used their wealth and connections to corrupt the American education system. In 2008, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, spent over $200 million on the writing and promotion of the Common Core standards. Gates orchestrated an “educational coup,” including by sending people from his foundation to work at the highest levels of the U.S. Department of Education. Footnote 16
Bill Gates’ coup is part of a larger coup we’re living through—where a few moneyed interests increasingly use their wealth to steer public policy, believing that technocratic expertise and resources alone should answer vexing political questions. Sometimes their views have merit, but the way these private interests impose their visions on the public—by overriding democratic decision-making—is a deep threat to our democracy. … By allowing private money to supplant democracy, we surrender the fate of our public institutions to the personal whims of a precious few.
Teachout criticizes education reform in general, and the Common Core in particular. The standards and the aligned high-stakes tests make teachers follow a narrow, and often scripted, curriculum in primarily two subjects: math and English Language Arts. Though there are exceptions to this rule, and some teachers may find the Common Core standards useful, teachers as a rule should be empowered to address the personal interests and talents of students. Many of America’s finest private schools have not adopted the Common Core for a reason. Finally, in a democracy, people expect to have a say in public policies that impact them and reject, on principle, paternalistic policies imposed upon them by elites. Process matters in a democracy, and parents, educators, and citizens are right to oppose “a scheme conceived and heavily promoted by a handful of distant and powerful actors.” Footnote 17 Teachout’s position is a minority perspective within her party: in the summer of 2015, nearly every Democratic senator voted for the Murphy Amendment to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that would have enacted tough, federally-mandated accountability measures. Footnote 18 Still, Teachout offers principled reasons why democrats should be wary of the federal government pushing education reform.
A Brief for Local Education Control on Democratic Grounds
America needs a democratic public philosophy to counter the near-hegemonic view that the federal government should enforce the standards, testing, and accountability paradigm. In lieu of that broader project, it is worth responding to both Barber and Teachout on the question of who should make education policy. In a word, democrats need to reclaim that idea that participation matters in well-run education systems and that democracy should enable many educational models to flourish.
Participation Matters
In How to Run a Government, Michael Barber approvingly cites a British minister who says, “The first words a baby learns in this country are ‘What’s the government going to do about it?’” (p. 2). For democrats inspired by Tocqueville, this moeur, or habit of the heart and mind, would signal the end of America’s experiment in self-government.
According to Tocqueville, American democracy works because ordinary people run public affairs, as much as possible, by themselves. In volume two, part two, chapter 5 of Democracy in America (“On the Use that the Americans Make of Association in Civil Life”), Tocqueville gives the example of temperance. In France, a hundred thousand men would individually petition the government to oversee all the cabarets. In America, on the contrary, two hundred thousand individuals collaborated to create temperance societies. Tocqueville finds this example both amusing and deserving of the utmost respect. In mid-nineteenth-century France, according to Tocqueville, people have atrophied civic muscles: they are not used to articulating their ideas in public, or learning the art of governing, or actually doing the nitty gritty of civic functions. Meanwhile, “everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.” Footnote 19 Tocqueville talks at length about how free institutions spread salutary effects throughout American society, making Americans assertive, industrious, and generous. Though Tocqueville feels nostalgia for the old aristocratic society from which he came, he is also filled with admiration for American citizens who take their share of responsibility to govern the community. “Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.” Footnote 20 Tocqueville anticipates the elitist view of democracy and tries to ward it off: “The morality and intelligence of a democratic people would risk no fewer dangers than its business and its industry if the government came to take the place of associations everywhere.” Footnote 21 Democracy, for Tocqueville, means rule by the people—through elections, yes, but also by associating in civil society.
Tocqueville does not think that associations need be inspired by civic virtue, or love of the public good, to have democratic effects. Take elections. Individuals may run for office because of ambition and will use shameful means, including calumny, to gain office. “These evils are undoubtedly great, but they are passing, whereas the goods that arise with them stay.” Footnote 22 Tocqueville expects passionate, unreasonable disagreement about public goods and how to provide them. He does not make a clean distinction between public and private interest; like James Madison, he expects that most people will be partial to their friends and family and then, to a weaker extent and in different ways, to the community at large. Tocqueville disagrees with Barber and Sunstein that there are impartial experts who should run the government or write regulations. Instead, Tocqueville holds that it was the genius of the American founders “to give political life to each portion of the territory in order to multiply infinitely the occasions for citizens to act together and to make them feel every day that they depend on one another.” Footnote 23 It is the widely-shared act of governing, not efficient or virtuous government, that makes American democracy flourish.
Tocqueville saw a role for the federal government, but he also commended the American tradition of local institutions, particularly the schools, that harnessed and generated civic energies. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. … Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Footnote 24 In America, Tocqueville explains, the towns found and run the schools, and “in the heart of the township one sees a real, active, altogether democratic and republican political life reigning.” Footnote 25 People support the schools because they have built, run, and support them, and vice versa. Modern people do not want benevolent dictators; they want to live under laws and institutions that express their thoughts, hopes, and actions.
In a recent article in Political Behavior entitled “Learning Citizenship? How State Education Reforms Affect Parents’ Political Attitudes,” the political scientist Jesse H. Rhodes confirms Tocqueville’s warning that federal intervention in the schools has a democratic demobilizing effect. Rhodes compares states that have adopted, to varying degrees, the standards, testing, and accountability paradigm, or the basic principles of education reform. Then, Rhodes uses survey data to measure people’s attitude toward government and education as well as their involvement in their children’s education. Running a regression analysis, Rhodes shows that parents in states that have more fully embraced education reform “express significantly lower trust in government, substantially decreased confidence in government efficacy, and much more negative attitudes about their children’s schools.” Footnote 26 Rhodes uses qualitative interviews to flesh out this picture: “Parental frustration is grounded in the perception that policy changes with huge implications for their children’s education have been instituted without consultation or, in some cases, consent.” Footnote 27 Finally, Rhodes notes what has become apparent to many parents of children in the public education system: standards-based education reform tends to narrow the curriculum, shift the classroom focus to preparing for and taking tests, and have a high opportunity cost in terms of what is not done, e.g., projects or field trips. Footnote 28 In the face of this reality, Barber’s claims about the benefits of federally-driven education reform “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Footnote 29
A Garden of Schools
In light of many prominent Democrats supporting the Race to the Top framework, Teachout deserves praise for keeping lit the flame of America’s tradition of participatory democracy. Still, Teachout has the habit of speaking of the public good, and this habit can undermine the practice of democratic education.
In Corruption in America, Teachout identifies her main theoretical opponents as “interest-group pluralists” who dismiss as sentimental the civic republican conceptions of corruption and government (p. 10). After a summary of pluralist political theory, she surmises that “the invention of pluralism is itself an ideological framework, not a factual one” and that “the framers thought it possible to be public interested even while they perceived group interests” (p. 288). From the perspective of agonistic democratic theory, however, Teachout’s appeal to a single conception of the public good occludes differences between communities and the damage that occurs when one faction imposes its conception of the public good on a pluralistic society.
William E. Connolly provides a general framework by which agonistic democrats may respond to political thinkers who insist that all citizens agree on fundamentals such as a shared notion of the public good. First, perform a genealogy of the fundamentals in question and show how they possess “incorrigible elements of difference, incompleteness and contingency within them.” Footnote 30 Next, show how this demand for unanimity performs its own harm against other ways of life. Finally, envision possibilities for different existential faiths to cohere on a conception of the public good that does not aspire to have the final word. The point is not to dismiss civic republican concerns about corruption; it is to encourage democrats to recognize that thoughtful people disagree on the public good and cooperate with others in a spirit of agonistic respect.
Take, for example, how agonistic democrats may modify Teachout’s contestation of the Common Core. In her op-ed, Teachout mentions that the billionaire Bill Gates paid for the writing of the standards and their advertisement. According to a recent history of the Common Core, business entrepreneurs played a role at every step of the conception, writing, promotion, and implementation of the standards. Footnote 31 For agonistic democrats, such genealogies disrupt certain narratives made on behalf of the Common Core, including that it reflects the “experience of teachers, content experts, states, and leading thinkers.” Footnote 32 Furthemore, agonistic democrats would point out that child development experts or teachers did not contribute to the early-grade-standards writing process and that parents and educators across the country have protested, for example, an unreasonable expectation of when all children should be able to read. Footnote 33
Agonistic democrats may part from Teachout, however, on where we go from here regarding education policy. To be sure, Teachout’s scholarly trajectory may take different directions, but her recurrent appeal to the public good repeats one of the main claims on behalf of the Common Core, that the federal government has the right to “ensure all students, regardless of where they live, are graduating high school prepared for college, career, and life.” Footnote 34 It bears asking what pedagogical vision would incur the allegiance of all thoughtful people across the country. Explaining the principles of progressive education, John Dewey said that “we cannot overlook the importance for educational purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance got with nature at first hand, with real things and materials, with the actual processes of their manipulation.” Footnote 35 Dewey’s model of progressive education emphasizes sewing, cooking, building, and so forth, not because the schools should necessarily train children for such professions, but because learning how the world works is a precondition for having the power to change it. The Common Core, by contrast, specifies education content standards in two academic disciplines and makes no provision for the hands-on education expounded by Dewey. My ambition here is not to adjudicate the pedagogical dispute between Dewey and David Coleman, the so-called architect of the Common Core. Footnote 36 Rather, the point is that any attempt to define one educational vision across a pluralistic country such as the United States will probably spark a revolt.
What is the alternative to fed-led education reform? Here, I mention the seed of an alternative paradigm that I discuss in my book, Deleuze’s Political Vision. According to Deleuze, Western political theory has often used an “arboreal” image of pluralism whereby groups (branches) may depart from one another on peripheral matters just as long as they agree on an ideological trunk. Deleuze’s wager is that in modern, pluralistic societies, we should think in terms of gardens whereby constituencies (flowers) interact in complicated ways. For agonistic democrats, the American educational system should be envisioned as a garden that has space for many kinds of schools: Montessori, Waldorf, Jesuit, progressive, vocational, foreign-language immersion, as well as public schools that have diverse curricular options, including theater programs, calculus and physics classes, internships, and so forth. Right now, American public education is moving towards a model where children spend their days preparing for the online, high-stakes Common Core tests (PARCC, SBAC). According to Deborah Meier, “what is missing is balance—some power in the hands of those whose agenda is first and foremost the feelings of particular kids, their particular families, their perceived local values and needs.” Footnote 37 The idea of a garden of schools may give democrats a goal for which to strive.
Conclusion
In the summer of 2013, then-U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a talk to a convention of American news editors. He explained that “the Common Core has become a rallying cry for fringe groups that claim it is a scheme for the federal government to usurp state and local control of what students learn.” The administration’s plan for promoting the Common Core, apparently, included ridiculing opposition from the unenlightened provinces. Footnote 38 Arne Duncan could have been using Michael Barber’s talking points: the executive branch should promote high academic standards so that citizens can compete in the global economy, and the only way to ensure implementation of the standards is to test them and hold teachers and students accountable for the results. For the well-being of American democracy, democratic elitists maintain, the country should reject its tradition of locally-controlled schools in favor of education reform led by the federal government.
This idea, however, has faced increasingly widespread resistance. In the spring of 2015, for example, about 200,000 New York students refused the Common Core exams. Footnote 39 The test refusal movement has been nonpartisan, ethnically inclusive, and geographically diverse. It includes groups that lean more conservative (e.g. Stop Common Core in New York State) and more liberal (e.g., New York State Allies for Public Education), and has the support of Diane Ravitch, one of America’s most celebrated education scholars. The movement against education reform is not driven by ignorance or political considerations. Rather, it expresses a yearning for local communities to run schools for themselves, to take responsibility for raising the next generation of citizens, and not to follow dictates from self-anointed education experts. In short, the parent-led movement against education reform is a reclamation of America’s fugitive tradition of participatory democracy. Footnote 40
