Correspondence - Letter to the Editor

Education Next, Summer, 2003

Paper tigers

Terry Moe ("Reform Blockers," Feature, Spring 2003) writes with his usual analytic elegance and passionate commitment to reform, The only problem is that many of his arguments conflict with the facts. I am no fan of teacher unions, for the same reason that Moe articulates--they too often support the status quo. But Moe's tendency to regard them as all-powerful does not accord with education politics in the past decade.

Exhibit A is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In this case, most congressional Democrats supported a bill that was largely crafted by a Republican presidential administration, So which is it? Were the Democrats engaged in a collective electoral suicide pact? Did they not fear the unions' ability to punish them in the next election? Or did their traditional union allies actually support the law's accountability provisions? None of these scenarios supports Moe's storyline.

An alternative explanation is that NCLB was all a big sham--the Democrats (and Republicans) pretended that they were seeking real reform; the unions pretended to oppose this pretense of reform; and governors and school administrators will pretend to implement this pretense of reform. This would accord with Moe's view of education politics. Yet it seems convoluted beyond plausibility. NCLB contains real provisions that will complicate the lives of public school teachers and administrators for years to come. If teacher unions are truly antireform, they lost on this law.

Of course, teacher unions act to protect their members; so do associations of lawyers, doctors, college professors, hairdressers, and undertakers. However, there is nothing inconsistent in wanting both to enhance one's job and to help the people with whom one works. Does Moe believe that police officers are indifferent to the murder rate in their city? Will firemen stand by while buildings burn down? Will tenured professors at community colleges or state universities shortchange their students as much as they can get away with? Surely there are some timeservers within all these groups, just as there are in reaching. Yet for the most part they are conscientious, hard-working professionals. We ought to assume that the vast majority of teachers also care deeply about their charges.

Moe is correct that core constituents of the Democratic party--"poor and minority families" in cities--endorse choice more enthusiastically than do Democratic elites. (It is worth noting that poor and minority families also endorse lots of other reforms, such as access to decent health care, to which Democratic and Republican elites fail to respond. School choice is not usually anywhere near the top of their list.) However, Moe does not point out that core constituents of the Republican party--middle-class and white families in suburbs--also disagree with their party elites on choice, Just about the last thing they want is choice programs that would open their schools to the children in failing urban schools, Both parties face a radical disconnect between the preferences of their elites and those of their voters, which may explain why fewer than 0.1 percent of the nation's school-age children are m publicly funded voucher programs.

JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Bronze Age, at best

Let's begin with Paul Peterson's premise ("Ticket to Nowhere," Feature, Spring 2003) that the schools haven't matched America's economic and social progress in the past generation. The A Nation at Risk report warned in the starkest terms that if U.S. schools didn't shape up, the Germans and Japanese would beat our economic brains out, just as all the post-Sputnik Cassandras of the late 1950s and early 1960s warned that the Russians would win the cold war if the schools did not improve. Those children of the 1950s and 1960s are the ones who produced all the progress that Peterson now celebrates. Meanwhile, we've left the Germans, the Japanese, and the Russians in the dust.

The premise of progress is also partially wrong, in a way that illustrates the problems of the schools. For instance, America's improvements in health care have been horribly distributed, with a large percentage of Americans having no health coverage at all--just as the poorest Americans are generally forced to send their children to the worst schools. Most of the nations with which the United States is compared on international tests have far broader social-service networks, especially for children. It's wonderful to see conservatives using welfare states like Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and France as benchmarks, In the United States, it's the teachers and schools that, for the most part, are the front line in dealing with the huge gaps in the social-service system.

Yes, America's schools are often outscored by other nations on international exams, but to what extent do those comparisons measure schools and to what extent are they reflections of cultural attitudes over which schools have little control? This country offers perpetual second chances and open access to some form of postsecondary education for virtually every student. Societies where high-stakes decisions are made by the age of 13, or even 18, concentrate students' and parents' minds wonderfully at a time when Americans, with their anti-intellectual traditions, are often thinking a lot more about Friday night football, cheerleader camps, drugs, and safe sex. It was not the schools that Ross Perot had to fight in the 1980s when he pushed his proposal that no student with less than a "C" average could play football; it was the local Texas football boosters.