Blindspots on the right - conservative illusions about education policy - Back to School: Dumb and Dumber - Cover Story

National Review, Sept 25, 1995 by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

CONSERVATIVES know many important truths about American education that liberals deny, resist, or haven't figured out. In no field is it clearer that the Left now rationalizes and defends the status quo while conservatism has become a powerful force for change.

Conservatives know that American youngsters are not learning nearly enough, that our schools and universities are operated for the benefit more of their employees than of their clients, and that we're not getting our money's worth from the huge investment we're making in those institutions. Conservatives see the depredations of multiculturalism, the carnage wrought by too much pluribus and not enough unum, and the perils of social engineering in the name of education.

Conservatives also understand that this cannot be set right by maintaining the producer monopoly or devising elaborate new 'top-down' schemes. They know that teachers' unions, however eloquent their national leaders, are the monopoly's staunchest guardians.

The conservatives' reform agenda is bold, comprehensive, and in most respects promising. But it isn't perfect. Its shortcomings arise from illusions and half-truths to which conservatives are vulnerable, like a driver so anxious about the truck on the road ahead that he doesn't see the car in the blindspot alongside. I've spotted 11. There may be more.

1. Abolishing the U.S. Department of Education will cure what ails us. House GOP freshmen recently introduced a bill to wipe out this 15-year-old Cabinet agency, which arose from a Faustian pact that Jimmy Carter made with the National Education Association in 1976.

At the level of symbolism, abolishing the agency is swell. But the Department is merely the tip of an iceberg of educational mischief. Hundreds of programs, thousands of regulations, and billions of dollars have legislative and political lives of their own, separate and distinct from the agency that operates them. (In fact, tens of billions in education-related programs are run by other agencies, Carter having lacked the clout to assemble them in one place.)

Curbing the offending activities is thus more important than scrapping the Department, but it's also harder. Half the college students in America are aided by federal grants and loans. Much of what Uncle Sam does in education is entangled with civil rights, long a briar patch of politics and policy. Clumsy efforts to curb 'special education' programs (by far the biggest unfunded mandate in education) will launch flotillas of children in wheelchairs to encircle the Capitol. Pulling down the 'Department' sign doesn't begin to get at the hard issues involving the federal role in education.

2. Local control of schools is wonderful. Federal control of education is a disaster. State control is mostly bad news. Alas, despite buckets of rhetoric about the American tradition of 'local control,' it has been no recipe for bold improvement, either. With a few exceptions among our 16,000 school systems, the norm is smug or timid administrators who may speak eloquently to the Rotary Club but who also twitch when the teachers' union tugs their chain, who churn out misleading press releases about all the kids reading above grade level, who squander vast sums on bureaucratic overhead, and who conspire with the school board to shore up the monopoly. Nor have those boards been attracting America's best and brightest. Elections are often dominated by the unions -- as happened recently in Milwaukee -- and feature candidates whose main goal is to find jobs for cousins, fire an innovating superintendent, or launch themselves on a career in politics.

3. Standards are evil. The follies committed in the name of 'outcome based education' and 'Goals 2000,' and the uproar over those wretched history standards, left a bad taste in the mouths of conservatives. But we must resist playing right into the school establishment's hands. The absence of clear standards against which student and school performance can be gauged remains one of the central failings of American education. If we don't judge quality in terms of results, we'll slip back into judging it by money spent, class size, 'innovative' programs, how many years a teacher spent in graduate school, and other discredited measures.

4. Private schools are doing fine, if only more children could attend them. I like private schools. My kids went to them. I tried to help Chris Whittle create more of them. They're more likely to be safe places with a moral climate -- no small accomplishment today. And there's evidence that their students, on average, do learn more. A little more. But we poke our heads in the sand if we think they're doing a swell job. Consider the National Assessment reading results from 1994: In twelfth grade, slightly less than half of private-school students were reading satisfactorily; 16 per cent could hardly read. Mind you, these were high-school seniors. Attending private schools. (The corresponding figures for public-school twelfth-graders were 32 per cent 'proficient' readers and 31 per cent below the 'basic' level.)