Reform blockers: the American political system advantages those who prefer the status quo, which is why so little has changed in American education - Feature

Education Next, Spring, 2003 by Terry M. Moe

Twenty years ago A Nation at Risk set off alarms about the quality of America's schools, and ever since our country has been caught up in a frenzy of education reform. But the frenzy hasn't produced much, After untold billions of dollars and lofty reform packages too numerous to list, very little has been accomplished.

Why such disappointing results? Many factors are no doubt responsible, but much of the answer rests with the politics of education. The problem is that, with rare exceptions, reforms that make it through the political process tend to be those that are acceptable to established interests and that leave the fundamentals-and problems-of the current system intact. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This status quo bias arises from three facts of political life. The first is that the teacher unions are far and away the most powerful actors in American education, Their tremendous financial resources allow them to influence campaigns at all levels of government, and their huge memberships--more than 3 million total, spread across virtually every electoral district in the country--enable them to turn out armies of activists in support of union-endorsed candidates, No other group can claim such an awesome capacity for in-the-trenches political action.

The second fact of life is that the teacher unions use their power to resist true reform. Their fundamental interests have to do with protecting and extending their collective bargaining arrangements, protecting members, jobs, enhancing members' pay and working conditions, defending members' rights in the workplace, and increasing the demand for teachers, These interests need have nothing to do with what is best for children, schools, or the public interest, They are classic vested interests--interests rooted in the existing structure of public education--and they are threatened by serious efforts to transform the system and to make it more productive.

The third fact of life is that American government is built around checks and balances that make new legislation difficult to pass and blocking it relatively easy. To be adopted, a reform must make it past subcommittees, full committees, and floor votes in two houses (not to mention filibusters, holds, and other obstacles), and the executive must sign it. This means that reformers must win political victories at each step to achieve their ends, while opponents need to succeed at only one step to block. By the design of our political system, then, the advantage always goes to interest groups that want to keep things the way they are. Which is precisely what the teacher unions want.

These are the elements that, taken together, generate a politics of the status quo. The teacher unions are extraordinarily powerful, they have a strong self-interest in resisting change, and they operate within a political structure that magnifies their power by making it easy for them to block change. This is why true reforms are either defeated or eviscerated, and why the reforms we get don't change things much.

Mainstream Reforms

In the wake of Risk, the driving force for change came from business groups and state governors. Business groups were deeply concerned about a faltering economy and the growing threat of international competition. They saw a mediocre education system as a big part of the problem--and they demanded action, Governors were the politicians who responded. They were held responsible, by both business and the public, for doing something to improve the schools, and their popularity and careers hung in the balance, Education reform became the politically smart thing to do.

But how to do it? Not experts themselves, governors and business leaders turned to experts within the education community, particularly academics from education schools--whose advice was predictably mainstream. The way to improve the schools, these experts argued, was to spend more money, raise teacher salaries, roughen graduation requirements, and strengthen teacher certification and training, among other things: reforms that could be pursued without changing the basic structure of the system. As a result, the tidal wave of reforms that swept across America involved almost nothing that was threatening to the teacher unions, Indeed, the unions had much to cheer about, because the reform movement gave them golden opportunities to press hard for what they wanted anyway--more spending--and to claim that they too were dedicated reformers.

With mainstream reforms doing little to change the system, real reformers generally agreed by the late 1980s that their efforts were not working. The notion spread that incremental changes were inadequate for dealing with the system's deeper problems, that significant improvement called for a restructuring of the system itself.

This shift in perspective led to a surge of support for two major movements that soon took on lives of their own: the choice movement and the accountability movement, In other respects, however, the newfound concern for restructuring didn't amount to much. Intellectually it served as little more than a big tent under which a hodgepodge of ideas--from decentralization to professional development to the teaching of higher-order thinking--could be packaged as exciting, break-the-mold reforms. Which they weren't, There was no grand vision of how the system should be changed, no agreement whatsoever on what it might mean to restructure.