EdChoice at 30: Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools

EdChoice is celebrating its 30^th anniversary this year. As part of that celebration, we’re looking back on the individuals, research, and books that shaped the school choice movement.

If you had to pick the single most influential book for the school choice movement, you could do much worse than John Chubb and Terry Moe’s 1990 volume Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.

According to Google Scholar, it has been cited more than 7,200 times. When it was published, it was reviewed in top journals by leading scholars like Richard Elmore and Anthony Bryk. A review in the American Journal of Education opened with, “All readers of this book will find something in it to infuriate them. And they will find much with which to agree.”

Accurate.

The book’s central argument is that the much-heralded reforms of the 1980s (like more money, stricter graduation requirements, accountability, teacher quality initiatives, and modest forms of school choice) were doomed to fail because they did not wrestle with the fundamental institutional problems with the American education system. Early in the book they write:

“Our analysis shows that the system’s familiar arrangements for direct democratic control do indeed impose a distinctive structure on the educational choices of all of the various participants — and that this structure tends to promote organizational characteristics that are ill-suited to the effective performance of American public schools.”

They continue:

“Our perspective also suggests that, absent new institutions, the problem of ineffective performance is likely to continue, however earnestly reformers may try to engineer effective school characteristics.”

The guts of the book are a deep empirical examination of two surveys from the 1980s. The first was the High School and Beyond survey of more than 60,000 students from 1,000 schools. They combined those data with the Administrator and Teacher Survey that surveyed the administration and a sample of teachers from around half of the High School and Beyond schools. Given the times, this was a massive undertaking, with the authors examining 220 different variables on school performance.

They came to three conclusions.

First, schools that have “clear goals, an ambitious academic program, strong educational leadership, and high levels of teacher professionalism” tend to perform better. This was not news. The “effective schools” literature had been identifying these characteristics for at least a decade.

What was new was their second and third conclusions, namely that “the most important prerequisite for the emergence of effective school characteristics is school autonomy, especially from external bureaucratic influence” and that the American public school system’s “institutions of democratic control function naturally to limit and undermine school autonomy.”

What they proposed was a choice-based, market-driven system of school organization that would give schools the organizational autonomy to achieve the elements of successful schooling necessary to improve student achievement.

“Panacea”

The most controversial and long-lasting phrase from the book was “Choice is a panacea.” It has been viewed as a hubristic, overconfident promise for a policy that was unable to live up to it. But the reality of what they wrote is more nuanced than the caricature of their position that emerged over the years.

Here is what they actually wrote.

First:

“It is fashionable these days to say that choice is ‘not a panacea.’ Taken literally, this is obviously true. There are no panaceas in social policy. But the message this aphorism really means to get across is that choice is just one of many reforms with something to contribute.”

Then, about two pages later, they write:

“Without being too literal about it, we think reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea. This is our way of saying that choice is not like other reforms and should not be combined with them as part of a reformist strategy for improving America’s public schools. Choice is a self-contained reform with its own rationale and justification. It has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in myriad other ways…Taken seriously, choice is not a system-preserving reform. It is a revolutionary reform that introduces a new system of public education.”

Two things are worth lingering on here.

The first is that we have to remember the context in which Chubb and Moe were writing. They were some of the first people to argue that we must look at the system itself rather than try to use policy within the system to improve America’s schools. Insofar as their “panacea” message was simply saying “don’t think of choice like all of these other reforms,” that is absolutely fair and accurate.

They were trying to shake generations of observers out of a slumber and alert them to issues that they had simply taken for granted or priced in as the water in which American education swam. That takes a certain level of directness and forcefulness. We should probably forgive them for rhetorical flourish.

It was also the early 90s. The Berlin Wall had fallen the year before. Poland, Hungary, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia had abandoned communism. Romania turfed out the Ceausescus. Markets were ascendent. These were heady times.

That said, using a term like “panacea” set them up for trouble. Choice is not a panacea, and thinking of it as such can lead to problems. Perhaps the better metaphor (borrowing from Friedrich Hayek) is that choice creates the garden in which great schools can grow. Existing schools are mired in a thicket of brambles and weeds that are choking the life out of them, and choice builds and tills a fresh garden in which they can have the space and sunlight to thrive. That doesn’t automatically mean that schools will thrive. Some flowers wither, even with a caring gardener. What choice does is maximize the likelihood that great schools can thrive, but it is the educators and families that ultimately have to make it happen.

Success

While both the diagnosis of the American education system’s ills and prescription for what to do about it captured much of the imagination of readers, the book’s more subtle point perhaps was the most influential.

The authors argued that too little (read: almost zero) attention was paid to the institutional structures of American education. While there were lots of discussions about all of the ways that the existing system could be poked and prodded and twisted and pulled to try and spit out new outputs, too few people were asking whether or not the existing arrangement of schools was fit for purpose. As they wrote:

“We will regard our effort as a success if it directs attention to America’s institution of democratic control and provokes serious debate about their consequences for the nation’s public schools.”

By that standard, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools’ success was Avatar-like. 

Writing

On a personal level, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools deeply influenced me as a graduate student in Arkansas two decades after it had been published. The ideological influence is obvious if you have even a passing familiar with my body of work. But perhaps more influential to me was its writing.

I have a confession to make. I have been imitating John and Terry’s writing style for almost the entirety of my professional career. In fact, I just did. Their style begins paragraphs with simple declarative sentences. The rest of the paragraph may be dense with data and figures or go on multi-sentence digressions. But they start with a simple sentence, usually without conjunctions or punctuation marks.

Take some examples of topic sentences from the opening chapter of Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools:

• “The signs of poor performance were there for all to see during the 1970s.”
• “We take a very different view of these developments.”
• “This was not to last.”
• “The last decade has been a period of massive discontent with the public schools.”
• “There are two basic reasons why institutional issues have consistently been ignored.”
• “The educational system is hardly unusual in this regard.”
• “This methodology came to dominate social science research on school performance.”

I could go on; there are many more examples.

The writing is so clear. It offers a great lesson for budding writers. Every paragraph has a job to do and if that paragraph’s point cannot be summed up succinctly and directly, it’s probably too unwieldy or disorganized. Trying to sum up every paragraph with a simple sentence disciplines you as a writer. It is a great help to readers as well, especially graduate students with hundreds of pages of assignments to read who need to get the main points without reading every single jot and tiddle.

Right, just early

Chubb and Moe hope in their conclusion that governments might institute a throughgoing system of choice at some point in the next decade. While there were some small beginnings of choice programs in the 1990s in places like Milwaukee and Cleveland, it would be almost 30 years before something resembling Chubb and Moe’s ideal began to emerge.

But it is hard to believe that such programs would exist without the ideological groundwork laid by Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools those decades before. It saddens me greatly that John Chubb (who in my limited dealings with him was an absolute gentleman) did not live to see his ideas come to life.

But perhaps that is the greatest lesson of this book. It is important to put ideas out into the world, to make them clearly and forcefully, and to be rigorous in their presentation. Policymakers might not pick up on them for a year or a decade or even two or three. But if those ideas are good, and if they have promise, someone many years down the line might be drawn to them and put them into action. And children can benefit as a result.