Politics, Markets, and America's Schools:

...Undoubtedly...

...The essential mainstream finding is that, more than any attribute of its students or any aspect of its community, what makes for an effective school is the degree of autonomy it enjoys from bureaucratic and other outside influences...

...In short, what counts is how free the people on the firing line are to call the shots...

...democratic control fosters bureaucracy, which smothers autonomy...

...Would it work...

...For example, in criticizing the current popular panacea of "school-based management," they observe that "as soon as problems arise-as soon as the schools make bad decisions or are perceived to be performing poorly or are faced with difficult situations that seem beyond their control-the authorities will find themselves under pressure to reassert their power...

...So what is the solution...

...Admission criteria would be entirely up to the individual school, subject only to non-discrimination requirements...

...builds systematically on mainstream ideas and findings-but, in the end, puts a very different slant on things...

...All the major participants in democratic governance...

...And they mean what they say...

...As they sketch it in the last fifteen pages of the book, Chubb and Moe would create what they call a new system of public schools that would substitute the "indirect control" of the market for the "direct control" of democratic governance and its bureaucracies...

...A child-and his or her parents-could use the voucher at any school that met certain minimal requirements for health and safety, teacher qualifications, and graduation requirements...

...And, crucially, private schools, including religiously affiliated ones, would be eligible to participate...

...If the hyperventilating of Bill Honig, California's superintendent of public instruction, on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times is any indication of the opponents' arguments, it will be some time before a rational debate is joined...

...But they are the ones who bureaucratized the schools in the past, and they will continue to bureaucratize the schools in the future....The incentives to bureaucratize are built into the system...

...The institutions of democratic control ensure that, in the politics and governance of public education, bureaucracy is almost everyone's dominant strategy...

...By far the bulk of the book is a careful, scholarly analysis of what makes an effective school, based on some original research by the authors and some derived from earlier work by other scholars...

...The authors readily acknowledge that "No institutional system can be expected to work perfectly under real-world conditions...

...For if there is any notion to which Americans are more attached than that of virtuous public schools, it is that there's nothing that can't be made better-with a little democratic attention.ocratic attention...

...As the authors state, "our effort...

...It is that mysterious reverence that accounts, I suspect, for the inability of people who would radically change the American system of public schooling- people like John Chubb and Terry Moe-to get an honest hearing for and a rational public debate of their proposals...

...And no one that I have heard of or talked with questions that it is sound research and valid analysis...

...In a sentence redolent of Ronald Reagan (one wonders why they shrank from the term "voucher" but so willingly summoned up the shade of the Gipper), the authors assert: "Government cannot be the solution because government is the problem...

...There are grounds for questioning the Chubb-Moe prescription...

...Just as democratic institutions cannot offer perfect representation or perfect implementation of public policy, so markets cannot offer perfect competition or perfect choice...

...Markets, they insist, by their very nature foster the kind of autonomy that makes for effective schools...

...Maybe the most important thing to understand about Politics, Markets, and America's Schools is that it is not principally about vouchers or, as Chubb and Moe would prefer, a market system for public education...

...Don Wydif I One of the great mysteries of American life is the almost religious reverence that the public schools inspire-even among people who are least well-served by them...

...In place of government-operated schools they would put a system of government-provided scholarships for all children...

...complain that the schools are too bureaucratic," they write...

...Politics, Markets, and America's Schools cannot be written off as the work of crackpots...

...It also accounts for some of Chubb's and Moe's own lack of candor, particularly their refusal to apply the term "voucher" to the plan they propose, although that unquestionably is what it is...

...That flaw will exist in any system, even a market-based one...

...Chubb is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Moe a professor of political science at Stanford...

...If "public school" is a term of reverence, "voucher" is an anathema...

...As Chubb has stated, these institutions have proven themselves a valuable resource to too large a segment of the population to be excluded...

...As the authors note, almost nobody in the education game now questions this...

...More than credentials, however, they have challenging ideas that demand intelligent consideration and response...

...Simply to utter the word, they know, dooms a proposal to rejection out of hand by the public education establishment and its supporters...

...But the more important questions are how well and compared to what...

...The problem, then, is democratic control of the public education system and the pernicious imperatives that go with it...

...What is important, they say, is that the two alternatives-democratic control and markets-"have very different consequences for the organization and performance of schools...