Two Ways to Avoid the Truth

Public support for public schools has revived. But the opportunity, while real enough, is rickety. Bond measures to upgrade shockingly dilapidated facilities are passing around the state--as in Los Angeles last month--not in high-turnout general elections reflecting the old popular consensus, but in low-profile, low-turnout elections. Should real progress not be forthcoming, even these limited victories will evaporate.

Amid the cascade of depressing statistics--with California’s children falling behind regardless of race or income--the usual suspects in the education debate offer characteristic, off-target answers. The education establishment--teachers, administrators and their political and media allies--offers managerialism in the form of class-size reduction in the early grades, an idea that sounds great. The education establishment’s opponents--libertarian and conservative think tanks, some businesses and right-wing politicians--offer marketism, undermining public education as a prelude to another push for school vouchers. Both “solutions” are exercises in glibness, more faddish form than substance.

It’s no accident that Thomas Jefferson was so ardent a champion of public education. “Even under the best forms,” he noted in 1778 as he moved to create a public schools system in Virginia, “those with power have perverted it into tyranny. The most effectual means of preventing this would be to illuminate the minds of the people at large.”

The great democrat would be deeply troubled by today’s prospect. And so should modern-day progressives, especially those in the party that he founded, the Democrats. Like welfare and other elements of the social net before it, public education is in danger of destruction.

The right wants to privatize education, arguing that parents with vouchers would fuel a new educational renaissance. It ignores the fact that widespread privatization would shatter Jefferson’s vision and that private school kids do only slightly better than their public school counterparts on the SAT.

Managerial liberals, joined by Gov. Pete Wilson, a lame duck desperate for good publicity, see the key to be reductions in early grade class size--an expensive, wrenching approach that is exacerbating crises in school facilities and libraries, day care and the state’s already appalling shortfall in qualified teachers.

There is no little irony in the emergence of class size reduction as the latest centerpiece of reform. Some of us unsuccessfully proposed it as a central theme of Kathleen Brown’s 1994 gubernatorial campaign. When Wilson found in 1996 that revenues were higher than expected, he--required by law to spend more on education--seized on it. The education establishment, caught in deceptively obscurantist struggles over curriculum and defensive about poor performance, couldn’t be happier. Focusing on class size deflects criticism and means more union members. Now Dianne Feinstein has seized on the issue as a centerpiece of her potential gubernatorial campaign. The circle of political thematics and intuitive policy development is complete.

Intuition, as it happens, is the issue’s intellectual grounding. While their materials reflect a boosterish will to believe, even those at the top of the state’s education department acknowledge that there is no definitive research demonstrating that class-size reduction is especially effective.

It’s not easy to slice through the glaze of establishment thinking when the California Teachers Assn. gives awards to reporters on the education beat, dominates many school boards and is the biggest funder of state Democrats. Kids are failing upward, but they are the victims of poor instruction in literacy and numeracy, much of it the result of horrendously misconceived 1960s philosophy. And too many teachers are simply incapable, with some even failing the state’s embarrassingly easy teacher competency test.

Teachers’ unions and others in the education establishment prefer not to focus on such hard truths. In their view, it’s better to claim that class sizes smaller than those experienced by baby boomers or alarmingly low per-pupil spending are responsible for the poor performance of California schoolchildren than to recognize that much of the money allocated to education has been misspent.

That sort of resistance to change didn’t do much good for the welfare establishment, nor will it for the education establishment. Teachers’ unions have more clout than welfare recipients ever dreamed of, but the ultimate result will be the same.