National Review
Bureaucracy won over schools. Joe Biden won’t fix it
For more than half a century, from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to Barack Obama’s Race to the Top and the new educational package within the COVID stimulus project under Joe Biden, well-meaning presidents have tried in vain to redo public schools in the United States. Why have all your efforts failed? We blame an increasingly bureaucratic history that started with Napoleon and has had no end in sight since. President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill from the Great Society – the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 – to guarantee educational equality by financing and formalizing federal intervention in public education. ESEA has been reauthorized and changed several times, each creating new offices, bureaucrats and practices, but not necessarily catering to children. In 2002, President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind – ESEA’s seventh reauthorization – as a law to change public education as we know it, forcing schools to test students annually and reform or close, unless they taught all students. Autopsies, a decade later, found that few failed schools reformed and even fewer closed. Instead, schools have become increasingly passionate about stupid test preparation. Less than a decade later, President Obama’s Race to the Top (RTT) – another ESEA-related initiative – promised an almost national curriculum, the Common Core, in part to help increasingly mobile students who needed to start over every time. they changed schools. RTT also paid states to consider whether students really learned anything when principals assessed teachers, introducing some consideration of performance in payment systems previously defined by seniority and whether teachers had an extra degree. None of this has changed schools. The politically toxic Common Core has brought together strange comrades, like teacher unions that were suspicious of any national test and conservatives were suspicious of any national curriculum. At best, RTT replaced teacher assessment schemes that had found 99 percent of effective teachers with more rigorous schemes that found 98 percent of effective teachers. The public education system enjoys the status of being the most stratified, centralized and massive bureaucracy in America, and federal intervention has only made matters worse. As two education analysts with a combined 70 years of studying – and studying at – public schools in the United States, we see historical explanations for the past 60 years of bipartisan school reform’s failure to fundamentally change school bureaucracies. That same story also suggests that the Biden government will make schools hire more bureaucrats, but not to better serve children. This bureaucratic giant was not created on purpose, at least not in its current form. In the early 19th century, the United States had small public schools run by local school committees, usually located in religious temples. It was a sensible arrangement when the government was small and the churches were the dominant social organizations. This dynamic began to change when, in 1843, the Massachusetts State Secretary of Education, Horace Mann, visited Prussia. After suffering repeated invasions by Napoleon, Prussian leaders remade their schools to instill military discipline and patriotism so that students would grow up ready to fight foreign incursions. For this, Prussia has bureaucratized teaching, with national control of schools and teacher training. The Prussian example inspired Mann and other American reformers. From the mid to late 1800s, American states increasingly regulated and standardized schools, paving the way for even more bureaucratic reforms in the 20th century. The district system became essential to control schools. Spreading gradually across the country, first informally and finally through state constitutions, school districts basically forced the majority of students to stay in the public school to which they were enrolled by virtue of their postal code. In addition to all other educational considerations, this gave schools captive consumers that bureaucrats could now often ignore. Later, state and federal governments would seek to control these local monopoly districts to get them to pay attention, worsening the problem sadly. In the early 1900s, to copy American manufacturing, faculty colleges, state governments and district school boards began to adopt the theory of scientific management. Thus, they began to transform small schools, often run by women, who emphasized academics, into large education factories in which male directors headed the teachers, who in turn processed the children in batch. As Kate Rousmaniere writes in The Principal’s Office in the middle of the century, “it seemed to be the natural order of things that women taught and men administered” in schools. Most male directors and superintendents are former coaches, with sports training providing the traditional way for men to promote educational administration. They often emphasize loyalty and teamwork over academic quality. Like factories, schools praise specialization and division of labor. In fact, professional administrators manage teachers and children in much the same way as factory process widgets. During the middle and late 20th century, American education developed new professions, such as curriculum specialists, school counselors and psychologists, as well as teachers specializing in special education, English as a second language and gifted and talented students. Each new profession had its own specialized bureaucracy, imposed by federal legislation, such as the Education for People with Disabilities Act. Federal intervention, therefore, fostered and expanded bureaucratization. Here, we close the circle. Many of the new experts came with their own specialized bureaucracies authorized by federal law, such as ESEA Title I, Bilingual Education, the Education of Individuals with Disabilities Act and the Carl Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. In fact, as one of us notes in the next “Increase in a Centropoly: good intentions, distorted incentives and the hidden costs of top-down reform in US public education”, federal intervention in schools turned out to be a powerful driver for a thing: school bureaucracy and its employees. Benjamin Scafidi, a professor at Kennesaw State University, documents the increase in public education personnel from 1950 to 2015, when the number of teachers grew more than twice as fast as student enrollments, and the ranks of administrators and support staff increased almost three times faster than teachers did. From 1950 to 2006, the number of students for each school employee dropped from 19.3 to eight. With increasingly larger teams, education budgets have skyrocketed, but teacher salaries have stagnated, encouraging teachers to make more money out of the classroom. For men, sports training offered a direct route to well-paid administrative jobs, over and above the unglamorous work of classroom teaching. For women, the new bureaucratic education professions, as a “curriculum specialist”, offered similar upward mobility. Now, the Biden government does not promise big changes, just more bureaucrats, more mental health advisers and more summer school days. The K-12 money offered in the third COVID relief package – nearly $ 123 billion – goes to a laundry list of programs and services. This includes addressing learning loss during summer school, after school or extended day programs, or responding to students’ academic, social and emotional needs, and any activities permitted through existing programs, including ESEA Title I, IDEA, Adult Education and Family Literacy Act and Career and Technical Education Act Carl D. Perkins. For years, news has been circulating that large sums of money, like those coming from the feds, are used to hire new employees. In other words, the money simply goes to finance more boots on the same site. Both students and employees are consumed by a bureaucratic machine that favors ever-increasing budgets, not to mention the fads that range from building self-esteem to personalized learning that are regularly adopted and discarded, doing little more than filling out the administrator’s resumes. Along with the erosion of students ‘dreams and teachers’ status, excessive bureaucratization had two pernicious consequences. First, as any parent of a student with a special education label can attest, in today’s public schools, a single child is the responsibility of several education professionals who do not always talk to each other, least of all to their parents. Not everyone focuses on students’ academic advancement. This may explain the results of the research that special education, for example, may not help students in the long run. Other vulnerable students have similar results. Second, bureaucratization means that directors have little control over other professionals who work within their buildings. In Smarter Budgets, Smarter Schools, former school superintendent Nate Levenson complains that when specialist program coordinators within schools claim that federal or state statutes require a particular practice or expense, few know enough to object. With dozens or even hundreds of spending categories, it is rare for a principal to understand the school’s budget, let alone how to transfer resources than fail to work. This machine – layered bureaucratization over a set of government monopolies – makes it almost impossible to change schools to advance academics, or anything else. Except for one thing: the bureaucracy itself. Martha Bradley-Dorsey is a distinguished doctoral fellow in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, where Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Leadership Chair. Mr. Maranto served on his 2015-2020 local school council.