Tag:

Terry Moe

Curriculum reformers understand pedagogy but not politics

Matthew Ladner March 5, 2020

Shea Middle School in the revitalized North 32nd area of Phoenix offers the AVID program to prepare students for college and houses the North Valley Arts Academy, a rigorous arts experience.

Every so often, someone active in the curriculum reform movement will get frustrated and take time out of his or her schedule to denounce the school choice movement.

These folks tend to make obscure statements about “governance” or “structural” reform along the way to building a case that they have the one true faith that can improve education for all children. And they can produce a tremendous amount of evidence to support their curricular preferences.

Curriculum does matter. This reform tribe, however, apparently lacks a broad appreciation for politics and the mechanisms by which their preferences were largely driven out of the K-12 system.

John Chubb and Terry Moe explained back in 1990, and it bears frequent repeating, that the main problem with American K-12 is politics. Chubb and Moe did not use this exact terminology, but the American system of district schooling is very prone to the phenomenon of regulatory capture. This is the same phenomenon that leads state regulatory boards on banking, cosmetology, chiropractors or (fill in the blank here) to be quickly dominated by bankers, hair stylists and chiropractors or (fill in the blank here again).

The diffuse public interest is not organized. Your interest in state chiropractor policy is not something you think about, but it is something of intense interest to practitioners in the industry. Thus, through the normal and predictable workings of politics, such boards, intended to regulate industries they oversee, tend to be “captured” by special interests.

American school boards are elected. A certain brand of K-12 traditionalist will even sing the praises of local democracy in schooling. School board elections, however, are very vulnerable to regulatory capture. Single-digit turnout rates in school board elections happen routinely. Elections typically are non-partisan and low-profile. Highly motivated special interests such as unionized employees and major private contractors don’t find it dauntingly difficult to field working majorities on school boards.

Contractors make money building things and providing goods and services for districts. They aren’t likely to have strong preferences on curriculum. The same can’t be said for the unions. Their preferences, along with a large majority of college of education faculty, seem either actively or passively opposed to the preferences of curriculum reformers. Evidence has piled up that some forms of teaching reading and other subjects are more effective than others, and that disadvantaged children have been the primary victims of poor pedagogy for decades.

Curriculum reformers should support choice mechanisms such as charter schools and private choice programs because they create the opportunity for educators with minority viewpoints (think Core Knowledge fans) to create schools fulfilling their education vision. For instance, when Robert Pondiscio toured a Phoenix charter school recently, he tweeted:

Sometimes at this point in the conversation, curriculum reformers will raise the objection that focusing on choice means ignoring the district schools where most students attend. Nothing could be further from the truth. Back in 2013, this same classical education-focused charter group announced that it planned to open a school in my neighborhood. The image that introduces this post is a photo I took of my zoned district middle school’s response.

Giving educators and families the power to create a demand-driven system of schooling isn’t just a path to improving curriculum; so far as I can tell, it is the most effective path. Classical education is flourishing in Arizona and elsewhere because parents want it for their children and educators are willing to move heaven and earth to provide it to them.

Choice creates an incentive for districts to give parents the education they want. So curriculum reformers can either continue to bang their heads against the wall waiting for a future when they get to be the ones in control of curriculum, or they can go about the hard work of creating schools, revealing demand and making progress.

One of these strategies has a future; the other does not.

March 5, 2020 0 comment

Blog Administration

Balancing freedom & justice to shape school choice accountability

Charles Glenn February 6, 2014

Charles Glenn

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Choice Words blog. It’s one of many pieces written in response to Fordham’s release of a “school choice toolkit” for lawmakers that called for more regulatory accountability measures for “voucher schools.”

Glenn

Policy-making usually involves trade-offs, finding the right balance between competing objectives and even principles. This is especially true in education, where so much is at stake, both for vulnerable children and for the health of society.

One of the principles that should guide educational policy is that “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children” (article 26, 3, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in San Francisco in 1948). Officially, at least, this right is acknowledged by almost every nation, and in many of their constitutions; it has been settled law in the United States since the Supreme Court’s 1925 ruling in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (268 U.S. 510).

Americans agree, as Terry Moe showed in Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public (Brookings Institution, 2000). This is especially true of parents for whom public school provision is of inadequate quality. “Among public [school] parents, vouchers are supported by 73 percent of those with family incomes below $20,000 a year, compared to 57 percent of those with incomes above $60,000. . . . 75 percent of black parents and 71 percent of Hispanic parents, compared to 63 percent of white parents. . . . 72 percent of parents in the bottom tier of districts favor vouchers, while 59 percent of those in the top tier do” (212).

Moe also found, however, that “enthusiasm for regulation is remarkably uniform and cuts across groups and classes – including private [school] parents, who appear quite willing to see the autonomy of their own schools compromised in the interests of public accountability” (299). This expectation of government oversight is also well-established in international law and practice, and specified in the Pierce decision.

On the other hand, if the regulatory hand of government is too heavy, the right of choice becomes meaningless: what’s to choose among schools forced to be alike?

February 6, 2014 0 comment

Blog Administration Charter Schools Customization Private Schools School Choice Unionism Virtual Education

Can teacher unions adapt?

Ron Matus June 7, 2013

Ron Matus

For decades dominated by traditional public schools, the landscape of public education is changing fast. New species are thriving – charters, vouchers, virtual, you name it – and who knows what nimble subspecies and hybrids are on their way.

Can teacher unions, so shaped by an earlier era, adapt?

We posed that question to a handful of ed reformers who have thought deeply about these issues. Next week, we’ll bring you their answers. You’ll hear from Terry Moe, the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform; Gary Beckner, executive director and founder of the Association of American Educators; and Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students and former president of two teacher unions.

We asked several current teacher union officials to contribute to our series, but they declined. One told us the current climate within the union made it politically unsafe to do so. We remain eager to publish the views of teacher union officials, and don’t hesitate to reach out directly to me at rmatus@sufs.org or (727) 580-1577.

June 7, 2013 0 comment

Blog Administration Catholic Schools Education and Public Policy Grassroots Policy Wonks

School choice, subsidiarity and the common good

Adam Emerson January 17, 2012

Adam Emerson

Subsidiarity is an organizing principle rarely discussed outside the Catholic Church and the European Union, and it’s a shame so few academics and advocates of school choice in the United States talk about it. It is a principle that is skeptical about the ability of large bureaucracies to trump smaller units to function for the common good. At this past weekend’s inaugural international school choice conference in Fort Lauderdale, an Italian researcher introduced the concept to describe why a stubborn region in his country could not accept the government’s insistence that public education must be centrally administered. A sympathetic audience nodded in approval, but there was no obvious sign that the conference understood that its mission was just given political order.

If there was, it could have better informed the rhetorical jousting match that happened minutes later between Stanford University political scientist and union scourge Terry Moe and United Federation of Teachers vice president Leo Casey. For Moe, author of Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, the problem of public education is one of structure, organization. “Nobody has a coherent vision of the whole, and no one is organizing schools in the best interest of kids,” he said. Casey countered that Moe favors market-driven and top-down “punitive” reforms that diminish an institution of public education built from the ground up in a model of civil society.

Would that it were so. If we’re to take Casey at his word, then his union would favor the public support of an educational enterprise built in the American tradition of association and social charity with minimal interference from a higher order of government and bureaucracy, the kind of effort facilitated by charter school and school voucher policies. Moe was right to call out the union’s insincerity in promoting transformative reform and its role in maintaining a structure of public education that is largely unresponsive to the unique needs of schoolchildren. But, except for calling for an end to the collective bargaining of work rules among public school teachers, he stopped short of defining how we can reorganize our governance of public education.

If the principles of subsidiarity were more commonly dispatched in our nation’s school reform debates, it could inspire more competing ideologies to find common ground and it could expand our definition of what we consider “public.” We have wrung our hands over what could have stopped the closure and consolidation of 49 Catholic schools in Philadelphia, but we have failed to collectively acknowledge that the urban Catholic school meets the original definition of the “common school” better than many schools that today we call public. The Philadelphia families whose households have been upended by the news have ordered their lives around the social capital they’ve invested in these schools, and the school closings leave fewer stakeholders who share the common goal of reaching out to the city’s most disadvantaged.

Former assistant education secretary Bruno V. Manno once wrote that subsidiarity is not only a principle of justice, but one of empowerment . “The doctrine of subsidiarity values both individual liberty and community,” Manno said. “It is a way of formulating and pursuing true social order. Even though groups have varying interests, subsidiarity implies that common ends are not antithetical to the pursuit of particular interests.”

For states to grasp Moe’s plea to develop “a coherent vision of the whole,” they’ll have to see how traditional schools, parochial schools, charter schools and virtual schools can maximize their unique characteristics and organize around the common goal of a quality education for all. In many ways, that will force us to grasp political concepts foreign to our ears. But in other ways, it simply defines what we’ve been searching for all along.

January 17, 2012 0 comment

Blog Administration Education and Public Policy Jack Coons Parent Empowerment School Choice

A new era, and a new partner, for redefinED

Special to redefinED October 11, 2011

Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: As redefinED enters its second year of publication, it has joined an alliance with the American Center for School Choice. Its first post comes from Fawn Spady, the Center’s chairwoman, and Stephen D. Sugarman, its vice chairman.

Today the American Center for School Choice begins its exciting partnership with redefinED in a joint effort to focus attention on the importance of empowering parents with the authority to educate their children. The mission of the American Center for School Choice, advocating expansion of public support for families to choose the schools they believe will best serve their children, is rooted in two basic propositions:

The education of the child is a fundamental responsibility of the family
Enabling parents to choose the school that will best help them to fulfill this responsibility will strengthen families, schools, and communities

The American Center supports the work of the many fine organizations advocating for education reform based on expanding the power of consumers in the educational marketplace and the need for greatly improved academic outcomes. The movement has won significant political victories, but also experienced many defeats.

Our organization’s name was intentionally selected because we believe a strong political center and consequently a broad coalition for school choice exists in a focus on parental empowerment. In placing families first, the Center’s perspective creates a unique and powerful opportunity to expand support for school choice to include greater numbers of political centrists, religious leaders, social justice advocates, and ordinary citizens who are either uninformed or uninspired by current educational reform debates.

Ultimately, we need to create and support good schools of all types to serve the diversity of our population’s needs. We want to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities, including inter- and intra-district choice of public schools, choice through public charter schools, and choice of private and religious schools through publicly funded scholarship and tax credit programs. The American Center for School Choice believes that expanding support for families to choose public, private, or religious schools for their children is a civic and moral imperative.

The Center’s primary activity is education. All families, but especially low-income parents and students who have not been well served historically, benefit when they select the school that they believe will best serve their children. The Center has utilized a variety of media and forums to provide information and analyses to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities. In partnering with redefinED, we have found a kindred spirit where great synergy exists.

Our board, associates, and staff will be regularly contributing their thoughts on where we are, where we hope to go next, and how best to get there. In addition to us, you will hear from Jack Coons, Charles Glenn, Gloria Romero, Terry Moe, Darla Romfo, Alan Bonsteel, Rick Garnett, and others in our network. We all look forward to joining and stimulating ongoing thoughtful and respectful exchanges that have marked redefined since its beginning.

October 11, 2011 0 comment