Education policy is prone to extremes. Cozy bipartisan cooperation brought big, messy compromises like the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind.” Then, an oppositional fervor stoked by Tea Party-flavored federalism attacked the Common Core, and now bitter battles with big labor consume the school choice movement. Even education reformers who’ve been around long enough to witness cycles of sweeping top-down reforms fail to weigh in the lessons of the last go-round. Can adults do what we so often ask children to and actually learn from our missteps?
Rick Hess, education policy director at the American Enterprise Institute, seems to believe so. His new book, Letters to a Young Education Reformer, (and his entire career, for that matter) is premised on the belief that incremental reforms, carried out thoughtfully and deliberately, have the power to transform schooling. He differentiates between an ambitious and abstract “big-R reform” (like No Child Left Behind) and a focused and intentional small-R reform, favoring the latter—drawing valuable lessons from a quarter century’s experience. While an obsession with saving the world steers the big-R mindset, a small-R reformer will be humbled by history. “By ignoring centuries (or even millennia) of backstory, reformers are continually surprised by ineradicable tensions that aren’t surprising at all,” he writes. (The nothing-new-under-the-sun theme builds on an ed policy book also by Rick Hess: The Same Thing Over and Over.)
This latest volume, a slender 150 pages, comprises letters to his younger self. It reads a little like a warm but frank and learned educrat’s rendition of Rod Stewart’s “Ooh La La”—the terminally catchy classic rock song that goes “I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger.” Junior bureaucrats and foundation staffers are his intended audience—Harvard Education Press the imprint—and you can picture the book handed out at a Foundation for Excellence in Education annual conference along with a glossy info-packet and branded swag. And that’s sort of a shame. Because anyone who’s ever believed his big idea just grand enough to change the world (pretty much half my college class) could learn a lot from these letters.
The book’s lessons apply seamlessly, of course, to the education policy paradox facing the school choice movement today. Betsy DeVos’s Education Department gives federal power to the formerly diffuse, teacher- and parent-driven push for public charter schools and private school vouchers. And that’s the sort of power that goes to one’s head, Hess notes.
“The funny thing about watching the DeVos team,” he told me in a phone interview last week, dispensing delightfully brusque wisdom: “It is astonishingly similar to watching Obama’s team in ’09 or watching the Bush folks get excited about No Child Left Behind in ’01.” It’s usually folks on the left who benefit from crisis-mongering, but the school choice movement—now perceived as firmly center-right thanks to labor’s roaring opposition—goes in for the familiar narrative: “‘Oh my God, the system’s rigged! Nothing works!’ The reality is 70, 75 percent of Americans are satisfied with their school.”
“When you wind up getting to go to Washington and work in the bureaucracy, whether you’re a conservative or progressive in education, people tend to be in love with their one big idea.” That’s not to say schools can’t be radically improved—but to say that federal funding and further regulation hold the key is “a peculiar narrative for folks who think of themselves as conservative,” Hess said.
Part of the problem is that education policy attracts the same personalities regardless of their political skew. “Conservatives who do education tend to be a lot of the same googly-eyed, ‘I want to fix the world tomorrow’ kind of stuff that you tend to find in left-wing social reformers,” he said. “I think there’s a little bit of utopian envy.”
Like the former social studies teacher he is, Hess has a sublime gift for sticky analogy. There’s an infrastructural challenge to totally transforming America’s public schools into temples for fostering innovation: “The architects of those schools and systems never had cause to ask, ‘Will these classrooms, budgeting rules, attendance requirements, or staffing practices help nurture powerful learning for all children in the twenty-first century?'” It’s like trying to engineer a go-kart to fly around the world, in other words:
There are plenty of ways to make the go-kart a better, more effective go-kart. It’s still a go-kart. Conservatives know this, typically, in their bones—and trust that anyone who pays adequate attention will get there eventually too. Small-R reform needs policy-makers and influencers who can see the go-kart, who are willing to “sweat the small stuff.” And, helpfully, when it comes to the small stuff—improvements to the essential element of K-12 schooling, “measured interaction between students and teachers”—partisans do see the same things. But they fall victim to the same distortions of perspective at the far more factious, but less actually effective, policy-making level.
Parents and politicians (plenty of whom are also parents) on both sides want roughly the same things. A Washington, D.C., magazine editor once told me he’d enjoyed one of Paul Tough’s books on K-12 education reform, How Children Succeed. Her arguments and overall thesis—that social-emotional skills like personal integrity and intrinsic motivation to succeed are the real root of young people’s growth and well-being—rang true. We’d pretty much covered all that in church, this editor observed. When it comes to the ways communities nurture and support individual growth, for instance, most humans reach the same handful of conclusions. On the small-R scale where improvements are most evidently significant, education reform remains an area for agreement.
“Policy can make people do things, but can’t make them do them well,” Hess writes. And with his uncommon mastery of good, practical sense “when it comes to school reform, what usually matters is how, rather than whether, things are done.” It’s losing sight of the humble but all-important how—while hyper-focused on winning the whether—that turns “a movement of unshacklers and builders” (school choice advocates, say) into the exact opposite: a movement of big government bureaucrats.
