Christmas Truce (Part II)

As a guest blogger over at Rick Hess's EdWeek blog (everyone still with me?), Mike McShane started last week with a call for a Christmas truce. You can find a link to that original piece here in my response to it.

McShane promised a follow-up, and he delivered. It was kind of a disappointment; if the first truce call wasn't really a call for a truce, the second is even less of one.

McShane is an edu-guy at AEI, home of conservative market-style education advocacy. You can see him walk-and-talk his way through some ideas about how to gut public education right here.

In Part I, McShane floated the idea that people on different sides of the education debate share a desire to disempower large stupid impersonal institutional approaches to education. In Part II, he's going to offer some concrete steps to turn that philosophical alignment into real world action. It's a couple of winners and a huge whiff.

1. Dig deeper than the party label

Win. "If you are interested in understanding where the real fault lines are in education debates, party ID will probably not help you." Many of us have said as much in a variety of ways. There are plenty of reformsters wearing a Democrat label, and there are plenty of Republicans who actually value the traditional institution of public education. You have to pay attention to what people actually do if you are going to identify your allies.

2. Argue on the right terms

Win. McShane argues that the debate about what works has become a hopeless mess with the toxic side-effect of testing run amok. We need to refocus on the question of who needs to know what and how we could best collect and distribute that information. I suspect McShane and i have huge disagreement about the answers to that question, but I agree that it's a better to start with that question than to continue insisting that a couple of high stakes tests will provide useful information about students, teachers, schools, programs and educational techniques that can be put to good use by teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, government agencies and parents.

3. Let old wounds heal

Win. This is really another version of #1. Being opposed to anything that Talky McBlabsalot says because you've decided he's always wrong, and besides, that son-of-a-bitch once wrote something that really hurt and pissed you off-- that's always a mistake. It is always a mistake to evaluate what somebody says before they actually say it. There are reformsters who I suspect are going to be wrong 99.9% of the time, but I will still hear them out. Ideas should rise and fall on their own value, not on the value of their source.

4. Choice might be the answer

Fail. After all this fairly well-reasoned and thoughtful writing, McShane wraps up by veering off into choice territory. In other words, the final part of McShane's argument is "The way to achieve truce is for you to recognize that my side is actually correct." His analysis of the argument over choice is fair:

But, in order to find common ground, liberals have got to internalize that many conservatives support charter schools and school vouchers because they see them as an opportunity for community organizations to get involved and create new schools in neighborhoods. They like churches and non-profits and want to empower them to help serve kids. To put it another way, in school choice they see Edmund Burke, not Gordon Gekko. It would also help if more conservatives understood that most liberals oppose school choice programs for the exact same reasons. They think that school boards are a better guarantor of community input and values than markets are. They worry that for-profit companies or even far-away non-profit entities are trying to invade communities and instill their values and their vision on children, whether families like it or not. They see charter schools or voucher systems as cold, impersonal, and destructive.

He has missed a point or two here. First, while "many conservatives" may pursue choice out of these values, many conservatives are, in fact, Gordon Gekkoing all over the ed business. The biggest players in the charter school biz are not community groups-- they are hedge fund operators.  And that has led to the spread of charter and choice schools that are devoted to making money, and specifically by making money by serving only a portion of the community. There is a huge gulf between the mission of serving some students and serving all students, and public and choice systems sit on opposite sides of that gulf.

McShane offers three "safeties" to make charters more palatable and representative of the shared values he believes are there.

First, vouchers or stipends or whatever we're going to call the money that follows kids around has to be scaled to the kids. In other words, the high cost students that charters currently dump would come with more money to make them less dump-likely. Second, community groups get "first crack" at charters, before the outside operators come in. Third, schools should be free to do as they wish pedagogically; students will vote with their feet.

Why that doesn't work for me

That still doesn't close the gap for me, though I'm going to keep mulling over that sliding cost scale for students. I've written tons about this, but let me see if I can hit my main objections in short lines.

In my universe, any charter operator must contract for an extended period. Twenty, thirty, fifty years-- I'm not sure I can think of a period that would be too long. No shutting down after two years or one year or six months because it just isn't making enough money any more. Public schools don't just promise to educate every child-- they promise to be there for every child that ever lives in that community in the years to come. "We'll be right here as long as it suits us," is an unacceptable vision for a public school.

In my universe, we do not disenfranchise the taxpayers. Every choice and voucher system ever created has one thing in common-- it tells all childless taxpayers that they are no longer stakeholders in public education. That's wrong. Dead wrong, completely wrong, absolutely unjustifiable. Every citizen of this nation is a stakeholder in public education. Are parents stakeholders? Certainly. Are they the only stakeholders? Absolutely not. Charter advocates keep trying to shade this with the market-tested idea of having the money follow the child so that families can choose the educational option they prefer. That's baloney.

Christmas is over

So, I don't think we're getting a truce, exactly. Personally, I'll keep reading and listening and trying to make sense of people all over the map on the issue of public education, so maybe I've already been observing a kind of truce all along (and that may also be affected by the fact that I have no real power or ammunition other than whacking away at this blog).

I appreciate the effort, Mr. McShane, and I think you've drawn some important connections, but no truce yet.

A Truce for Redrawing the LIne

Mike McShane is guest-blogging at Rick Hess's EdWeek spot, and today he calls for a truce between sides in the education wars, except that he doesn't really, which is okay because what he's saying is worth paying attention to.

McShane starts with the story of the 1914 Christmas truce on the western front of the Great European War. It's an even more apt opening than it first appears, but let me get back to that shortly. McShane is calling for a similar truce between the warring sides of the battle for US public education, and he makes his pitch by suggesting that there are some important things that unite us. McShane says that people are getting stuck with "caricatured views of their ideological opponents," which is fair, although as with any highly divisive issue, there are plenty of people who insist on behaving like caricatures. But if we look past the caricatures, we can find things that unite us. Well, two things, anyway. He lists them as mistakes he thinks folks are making.

Letting Means Obscure Ends

McShane says that in interviewing people from across the spectrum, he found that both sides see themselves as opposing a goal of monolithic, unresponsive school systems. Conservatives want to avoid a giant governmental bureaucratic monolith, while liberals want to avoid a giant corporate monolith. At the same time, neither actually has a desire to create a large, unresponsive, monolithic system.

The difference, McShane suggests, is what the two sides see as an antidote to the monolith-- liberals like democracy, and conservatives like the free market. But both want to break up the monolith and create a system more responsive to the needs of students and the values of a community.

McShane's not wrong, but he's not entirely correct either. The free market and democracy are distorted reflections of each other. The free market is a form of democracy in which a dollar is a vote-- and therefore some people get to have more votes than others. In a democracy, Bill Gates has as many votes as I do. In the free market, Bill Gates has a gazillion more votes than I do. And because people tend to believe strongly in and value their preferred system, we all tend to launch with, "First, we have to get the system working the way it's supposed to so that we can get started on schools." But not everybody is in a position to make that happen. Folks who won at the Free Market Game are uniquely equipped to advocate that same game be played by everyone.

But there is a commonality that both sides can share, and it's the meat of McShane's argument. It's also why his call for a truce isn't really a call for a truce at all.

Not Recognizing a Common Enemy

What McShane really does in his piece is argue for a redrawing of battle lines. It's not so much that we could have a cease-fire-- it's that we need to start fighting the right people.

When Secretary Duncan says that education can be bipartisan, he means that centrist Republicans can coalesce around an essentially center-left technocratic vision of how to operate schools. They want centralized standards, test-based school and teacher accountability, and limited "quality" choices for students.

The real fight, McShane suggests, is not liberals versus conservatives, or democracy versus the free market-- it's collectivism versus individuals. And on this point, I do not disagree with him. The last fifty years or so of American government has been about the development of a new hybrid form of centralism, in which DC collects a bunch of power and then hands it over to corporate interests.

Politicians like centralized power because that gives them more control, more ability to realize their personal visions of a better place. Corporate interests have always been pro-centralization; from Rockefeller through Gates, business leaders have loved an open market until they are winning, at which point they do their best to shut down all diversity and competition. And everybody has at least moments in which they dream of a system that is more efficient, less wasteful, less cantankerous, a nation of happy people united boldly behind one clear, singularly correct vision-- which is the governmental equivalent of a squad of unicorns dancing on silver clouds with hippogryphs. It can't possibly happen, but it's so pretty to imagine.

So instead of lining up the Left against the Right, McShane would like to line up the Forces of Freedom against the Courts of Centralized Collectivism. This is not so much a truce as a redirection of attack.

This Is Not Easy

Parsing the battle along those lines makes lots of sense, but there are problems.

For one, there are sympathizers on both sides. There are pro-public ed folks who don't like Common Core in particular, but who think centralized national standards in general would be just fine. And there are plenty of privatizers whose believe in the free market only to the extent that it lets them take control and get rich.

There are people who reject ed reform but accept many of its premises; for instance, those who say the current high-stakes testing must go, but of course there must be some mechanism by which a central government can monitor school progress. Some folks reject standardization, but agree that education must progress pretty much the same from state to state; you don't get that without some centralized control. And there are people who just sincerely hate the inefficiency and mess that come with democracy and pluralism.

Nor is history on McShane's side. The ed wars didn't erupt through some form of spontaneous combustion. Reformsters came out swinging, hard, by demonizing public school teachers and creating a system designed to create failure rather than help schools succeed. At the same time, people who actually rather hate public education have come out hard against ed reform policies. Democrats have shat upon their traditional allies in public education, but Republicans have not leapt into the breach to make new friends. It has become quite a challenge for teachers to tell friend and foe apart. McShane's desire to redraw the lines involves a field that is already marked by lines drawn with a feather in fields of wet mud.

My Proposal for Lines Drawing

So we can redraw lines many ways. Centralists versus  individualists. Corporate versus public. Urban versus rural. Efficiency versus robust flexibility. But I think there's another place to draw a line-- between the people who have money and power, and the people who don't.

The people with power and money have the means to impose their singular vision for education on everyone else. A classroom teacher or a thinky tank thoughtmeister are just two more people with opinions until they can get someone with power and money to listen to them. David Coleman was just a shmoe with a dream until he successfully bent Bill Gates' ear. Arne Duncan was just one more educational amateur who was sure he knew the Secret of Fixing Schools until he acquired the power to make everyone agree with him.

In other words, the world is filled with people who say, "Boy, if I ruled the world, this is what I'd make everybody do." Only the people who also have money and power are a problem. They will mostly want to have a centralized vision, and they place they envision as the center is the place where they're standing. Arne Duncan without a cushy government gig and Bill Gates without a personal fortune would just be two more guys on twitter scrambling for retweets and followers with the rest of us.

Where you find the threat of a centralized vision, you'll find somebody with money and/or power selling it, pushing it, enforcing it. And one technique of those with money and power for keeping the little people from storming the castle is to get the little people busy fighting each other.

The Great European War

Back in the day, I did plenty of reading and studying of what we now call WWI. One of the striking universal features of the war is that soldiers felt a stronger kinship with other soldiers than they did with the generals and politicians in cushy offices far from the front. Regardless of their nationality, these soldiers often expressed the idea that their biggest enemies were not the other soldiers in the other trenches, but the politicians, generals, and wealthy industrialists who had sent all the soldiers there to fight and die.

The rare truces that broke out at the front can be seen as moments in which the soldiers recognized their kinship, and also recognized that the real enemy was far away, comfortably ignorant of what was really going on at the front. The powerful were far away, making the decisions that would govern the war.

But of course all they did, for that day, was sing some carols and play some soccer. And by 1917, reports of such random truces were rare. They knew that while their real enemies were far away, they were also powerful and untouchable.

I look forward to the next installment of McShane's guest turn. I'm not sure what can be accomplished by a truce-- I think some truly unbridgeable differences in fundamental values stand in the way of significant alliances across these many lines that separate us. But I do believe that we can all benefit from the exercise of figuring out with whom we really agree and disagree, which in turn helps us clarify what we really want, all of which is infinitely preferable to knee-jerk reactions to the people we think we're supposed to align with (or not). And we can always listen. Don't stop paying attention to other things going on, but listen. It never hurts to listen.