June 14, 2007

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The Ills And The Charms Of Bureaucracy

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 3:44 pm

At the Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey and Sara Meade ask some important questions about what a progressive solution to dysfunctional educational bureaucracies might look like, here and here.

Kevin is right that contemporary progressive solutions lack the simple clarity of today’s right wing solution. That is, we would argue, a good thing. Current right wing wisdom is reductionist in the extreme — all that is wrong in American education, including dysfunctional bureaucracy, is laid at the foot of its public and democratic character. This world view is captured in the pejorative phrase used to describe public schools, “government schooling,” as if American public schools were indistinguishable from the indoctrination mills of authoritarian societies. Consequently, privatization and turning schooling over to markets is the universal solution, the magic bullet, for every educational problem. Even the most elegant of right wing analyses, such as Chubb’s and Moe’s Politics, Markets and American Schools, only employ more elaborate forms of this reductionist syllogism.

Reductionist analyses do considerable damage to understanding the multiplicity of forces at work in real life institutions. This is true whether the analysis in question is the rational choice theory of Chubb and Moe on the right or the functionalism of an earlier generation of ‘revisionist’ educational writers on the left, best represented by Bowles’ and Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America. Their solution is simple and clear because their analysis simplifies real world complexities to the point of becoming simplistic. Their arguments replace Ockham’s razor with a conceptual sledgehammer.

Take the Washington Post series on the state of the Washington DC public schools which provided the inspiration for Kevin’s and Sara’s posts. Some of the most distressing passages in the articles relate stories of widespread patronage and corruption. Although he is generally critical of right wing reductionism, Kevin too readily accepts their proposition that these problems are symptomatic of educational bureaucracy.

Patronage and corruption are hardly unique to bureaucratized systems for delivering education — they arise just as easily among charter schools, where bureaucracy is by design far less. In fact, they appear most often in charter schools located in states where the charter law is so intent on minimizing “bureaucracy” that it fails to provide for meaningful financial oversight on the part of charter authorizers. When the reigning ideology operates on the premise that charter school governance and the elimination of bureaucracy provide magic bullet protection against patronage and corruption, scandals such as the one which arose around the collapse and closure of California’s then largest charter operator, the California Charter Academy, become inevitable. A disaster of the same sort is brewing in New Orleans, where financial oversight of charter schools does not exist as a practical matter.

Similarly, in pre-mayoral control New York City, patronage and corruption were far more prevalent in a few of the thirty odd Community School Districts around the city than in the massive bureaucratic center at 110 Livingston Street, the largest educational bureaucracy that has ever existed in the United States, if not the world. If anything, the central 110 bureaucracy was a check on patronage and corruption in the transgressing community school districts.

Rather than being a feature of a particular form of organization of schooling, therefore, patronage and corruption arise in any institutional context where financial transparency, a culture of accountability, systemic checks and balances and — most importantly — meaningful oversight are weak to non-existent. When these problems are widespread in a school district, it is because of serious problems in the political and civic culture of the community in which they are located. Here in New York City, patronage and corruption were concentrated in a few community school districts where significant portions of the local political elite was engaged in what would properly be called rape and pillage. When political and educational leaders are serious about addressing these issues, they establish meaningful oversight, build cultures of accountability, institute checks and balances and make all budgetary matters transparent. And they ensure that those who steal from the education of children are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Let’s be completely honest here, even though it will leave our argument open to caricature. As the issue of financial oversight and accountability shows, there is a need and a place for a well-functioning bureaucracy in education. It should be kept to a minimum and limited to a well-defined set of tasks, but the business/service side of the educational enterprise — matters such as building and maintaining facilities, purchasing and delivering materials, student transportation, school breakfast and lunch, and reporting to the state and federal government — works best when managed by an efficient, smoothly functioning bureaucracy. The ideal educational institutional arrangement would be one in which the educational leaders and teachers at a school level can focus exclusively on teaching and learning, precisely because they do not have to worry about these ancillary matters. One of the biggest challenges for charter schools is how to maintain the focus on education, in the face of having to assume all of these additional administrative burdens which, in the well-functioning school district, are performed by the central bureaucracy. Susan Moore Johnson wrote about this reality some years ago in a Teachers’ College Record article, “Sometimes Bureaucracy has its Charms,” which compared the working conditions of teachers in Boston charter schools, pilot schools and regular district schools.

We don’t want to be misunderstood here. There are real ills of bureaucratic organization, especially when it is extended into areas where it is unnecessary and counter-productive. You don’t have to read Max Weber on the subject to realize that even the best of bureaucracies are large, impersonal and hierarchical, that they tend to be rule bound and focused on the written record [the 'memo' and the disciplinary letter], and that they are not nurturing of innovation and experimentation, to name just a few of their more problematic features. When the educational core of schooling — as opposed to its ancillary services — is bureaucratized, real damage is done. Quality teaching is the antithesis of bureaucratic thinking and operation, just as a Socrates or a Horace Mann is the antithesis of the educrat. The testing craze that has been initiated by NCLB, with its regimen of standardization, is the bureaucratic logic applied to teaching and learning.

When the world of schools is seen in all of its complexity, then the simple clarity of magic bullet solutions appear as the chimeras they really are.

In subsequent posts, we will take up this theme once again.

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