Write a discussion (th)

Rethinking School Reform: The Distractions of Dogma and the Potential for a New Politics of Progressive Pragmatism Author(s): Jeffrey R. Henig and Clarence N. Stone Source: American Journal of Education, Vol. 114, No. 3, A mistake occurred in the pagination of volume 114 number 2, and volume 114 number 3, so that both issues began on page 169. The Press regrets the error. (May 2008), pp. 191-218 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/529500 Accessed: 05-05-2016 21:37 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted

digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about

JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Journal of Education

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

MAY 2008 191

American Journal of Education 114 (May 2008) � 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0195-6744/2008/11403-0002$10.00

Rethinking School Reform: The Distractions of Dogma and the Potential for a New Politics of Progressive Pragmatism

JEFFREY R. HENIG Columbia University

CLARENCE N. STONE George Washington University

At the national level, debate about school reform typically has been characterized by clashing paradigms offering unicausal explanations and universal prescrip- tions. At the street level, where parents and practitioners wrestle on a day-to- day basis with questions of what to do, the terms of discussion more typically are concrete, rooted in local history and influential personalities. The former style of discourse tends to promote polarization and winner-take-all battles while the latter sustains a process of unguided “muddling through.” These two dy- namics—clashing ideas and parochial practice—operate largely independently, but when they do intersect, it is more often in ways that are dysfunctional rather than enlightening. We lay out this dilemma and suggest some prospects for reform.

There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plau- sible, and wrong. (H. L. Mencken)

Consensus is a rare commodity in America’s education debates, but most interested parties agree that the nation’s urban schools are broken. There is plenty left to disagree about: whether the problem is particular to large cities or more broadly systemic, whether our expectations are realistic about what schools can accomplish against a backdrop of socioeconomic inequality, and whether the route to recovery runs through market-based alternatives or public sector reform, to name just a few. Some recent assessments, it is true, show stirrings of educational gains, including those in large urban school districts (Casserly 2006; Kober 2005). But more than 20 years after Nation at Risk raised

Electronically published February 20, 2008

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

192 American Journal of Education

school reform to near the top of the national agenda and after two decades of high attention and the cycling through of multiple reform ideas, the most hopeful observers are forced to fuel their optimism on mere fumes of en- couragement. There is not a single large central city that we can point to with confidence and claim: here is the model to show the way.

Although reformers widely share the view that profound change is needed, the future direction of school reform is uncertain. Indeed, to the extent that various reform camps generate their own solutions, convince their own sets of funders, build their own constituencies, and win their own particular lo- calized battles, political fragmentation seems destined to reign, and reformers may contribute to the pattern of piecemeal and ephemeral reform they want to move beyond.

What has gone wrong? Education has always been a high-reverberation arena, an area of concern in which conflicts can easily expand and take on increased passion, but we maintain that nationalization of the education policy debate has altered the political dynamics in important ways. The current period is not just another period in which contentious issues flourish. The education debate—once organized around concrete proposals and animated by group interests—has become ideologically charged and is now infused with questions about the principles around which society should be organized. We believe that the mixing of the reform debate with a broad ideological struggle at the national level carries with it special risks and therefore also involves special reasons to bring skepticism to bear. Such battles give rise to simplifying dogmas rather than acknowledgment of complexity that must be addressed.

Played before a mass audience, ideological duels tend toward purity of message rather than nuance. In such a context, policy advocates themselves often make far-reaching claims, caricaturing opposing forces and indulging in an us-them rhetoric of crisis and redemption. Debate at the level of funda- mental principles generates anxieties in such a way as to draw people into protective circles in which the overriding concern is to defend dogma and draw clearly the lines between friend and foe. Tests of loyalty and affinity can crowd out the inclination to explore problems in a more open-ended manner. Policy solutions come to be justified by abstract principles, and complicating

JEFFREY R. HENIG is professor of political science and education, Teachers College, and professor of political science, Columbia University. His most recent book is Spin Cycle: How Research Is Used in Policy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools. CLARENCE N. STONE is research professor of public policy and political science at George Washington University and professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. Stone continues to explore his long-standing interests in urban politics and a range of urban policy issues. He is currently coordinating a cross-national study of the politics of regenerating urban neighborhoods.

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 193

considerations that deviate from dogma may be totally screened out. The wisdom behind the aphorism “the devil is in the details” gets lost in the pursuit of purity of doctrine.

Consideration of school reform, we suggest in this article, has been simul- taneously too abstract and too concrete. At the national level and in analytic circles, debate typically has been characterized by clashing paradigms: rela- tively purified theoretical models offering unicausal explanations, and universal prescriptions that hew closely to broader ideological debates and partisan alignments. At the street level, where parents and practitioners wrestle on a day-to-day basis with questions of what is needed and what to do, the terms of discussion more typically are concrete and rooted in local history, material interests, and influential personalities.

Still, while the clashing paradigms at the national level promote polarization and winner-take-all battles, the concrete orientation of localized educational decision making, for its part, sustains a process of unguided “muddling through” (Lindblom 1959) or “hyperpluralism” (Yates 1977). These two dynamics— clashing ideas and parochial practice—operate largely independently, but they could be blended in ways that would yield progress. For that to happen, however, the role of ideas needs to be separated from the pull of dogma. With that in mind, we turn to a critical look at some major schools of thought currently on the national scene.

Three Models

Three divergent models of how society should be organized hold central places in the debate over school reform. One is the professionalism model supported by some Progressive Era reformers as “the one best way” almost a century ago (Katz 1971; Tyack 1974) and now backed by proponents of the profes- sionalization of school system professions, namely teaching (Cochran-Smith and Zeichner 2005; Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden 2005). Profes- sional expertise is the legitimating principle of this approach, and the confident and knowledgeable teacher in front of the classroom is its personification. The second model is the market model. It draws on neoclassical economics (Chubb and Moe 1990; Friedman 1962), and market competition is its legitimating principle. The entrepreneur pursuing market share is its iconic figure. Although its advocates give much lip service to the notion of satisfying diverse prefer- ences, at the macro level the market is, in its own manner, assumed to be “the one best way.” The third model is one related to the idea of community organization as a form of grassroots democracy. Community organizing is an effort to invigorate the system by bringing pressure upon it from the outside. Citizens are the central figure. They are the ultimate touchstone for values

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

194 American Journal of Education

and a wellspring of energy and ideas. Unlike the voter in the professional model, the citizen is expected to do more than pull a switch every two or four years. Unlike the consumer in the market model, the citizen is not an isolated actor acting on personal preference but, rather, someone engaged with other citizens in considering what should be done together and how to go about it. But integral to this model is the belief that unequal power and historic patterns of exclusion present obstacles to mobilization that must be overcome, primarily by uncovering highly localized grievances and channeling the emerg- ing sense of grievance into successful challenges to a resistant system of privilege (Shirley 1997; Warren 2001).1

In the following subsections we elaborate on the underlying arguments of reforms that fit each model, paying special attention to the way these models differ in their conceptualization of bureaucracy, social class, and the political process. Each sheds its own light on particular dimensions of the reform challenge, but because they are framed in national debates as rival para- digms—the credibility of each seeming to rest on the discrediting of the other— proponents more often caricature the alternatives than seek to engage with them seriously.

The Professionalism Model

In the early years of the twentieth century, the notion of professionalism as an organizing idea for school improvement gained force against the increas- ingly discredited pattern of machine politics, with its use of public employment as a source of patronage. Professional expertise was offered as a way of ensuring competence, validated by certified credentials. Professional-minded reformers deemed bureaucracy to be an appropriate means by which forms of expertise could be recruited, coordinated, and rewarded. In practice, seniority and completion of graduate-level courses came to serve tacitly as a measure of expertise in teaching and were treated as a legitimate basis for compensation. Transfer prerogatives based on seniority also serve as a form of professional reward. In the contemporary era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), debates about professional expertise have been three cornered. Some reformers chal- lenge the core presumption that professional expertise is important, suggesting that enthusiasm and commitment are just as important and that key skills can be learned on the job or the need for them diminished by relying on more structured modes of delivery. Some reformers regard expertise as important but define it more in terms of subject matter mastery than either experience or accumulated academic credits in pedagogy and learning. And some hold to the key elements of the traditional view, arguing that there is a unique and important body of knowledge about how to teach, one that universities generate

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 195

and refine, and that efforts to contract out teacher certification risk watering down the profession.

In the 1960s, as poverty came to hold an important place on the national policy agenda, a response consistent with the professionalism model was to call for expanded services for children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds ( Jackson 1993; Marris and Rein 1973). Title I of the 1965 El- ementary and Secondary Education Act funded such services, and Head Start extended them into the preschool age group.2 What made this consistent with the professionalism model was the central role still reserved for schools and educators as the overseers of this new service-delivery process, that the em- phasis on poverty could be used to take some of the responsibility off schools for having failed to close education gaps, and that the result was additional public investment running to and through the public school system.

Controversy surrounding school desegregation engendered forms of popular mobilization (Hochschild 1984), but many educators saw this mobilization of the citizenry around racial issues as threatening and came to rely increasingly on a “circle the wagons” response (Crain 1969). The politics of the democratic process was viewed as intrusive, and indeed, with a changing urban demog- raphy, desegregation proved to be highly disruptive of established practices (see, e.g., the case study by Grant 1988). Favored solutions were to try to limit conflict while funding schools for an expanded range of services. Within the professionalism model, when the application of good practice fails to produce sharp academic gains, the weak response is attributed to growing but untreated social problems among the student population.

The Market Model

Increasing dissatisfaction with the performance of education professionals pro- vided the ground for the assertion that professionalism had descended into a form of producer monopoly, protected by the rules and technicalities of ed- ucational bureaucracy. The image of an unresponsive monopoly wedded to established practice was juxtaposed with the idea of market competition. John Chubb and Terry Moe’s influential book on the virtues of a system driven by a need to satisfy consumer choice brought neoclassical economics into the picture (1990). In the emerging view (see also Osborne and Plastrik 1997), the ideal education administrator would be entrepreneurial—the person who is oriented toward innovation in a search to respond to (and even create) consumer demand and expand market share.

Because vouchers correspond closely to a market process, they provide a favored response. Exit—the ability of individual parents and students to vote with their feet and leave undesirable schools—is considered to be a superior

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

196 American Journal of Education

means for leveraging change. Voice—the exercise of collective influence through political channels—is deemed to be inferior. The democratic process is seen by market advocates as hopelessly dysfunctional—as something inevitably cap- tive of pressure-group politics or tyrannical majorities and in any case unable to respond effectively to the reality that members of a large and diverse public have conflicting notions about what kind of education they prefer. As an educational factor, social class is reduced to the fact that lower-income pop- ulations have little or no exit option. The response to that fact is to enhance their capacity as consumers by multiplying choices. In the meantime, priva- tization of services would put these services into a market mold and promote business-like efficiency as well as expand consumer choice.

Market proponents recognize a limited role for regulation: as protection against schools that might try to screen out children based on race, class, religion, and disability; as an assurance of fiscal integrity; and as a means to guarantee a minimum level of educational quality. But regulation is given a somewhat sketchy treatment. It is offered as a response to those concerned that markets might favor the advantaged and exploit the less so. The sharply critical portrayal of bureaucracy in the market model, however, leaves it un- clear how these regulatory protections of equity and quality assurance will be carried out. Further, no acknowledgment is made that politics occupies a significant place in setting the terms under which the market operates.

The market model shifts the definition of the citizen role from one rooted in collective action to identify and maximize public goods to one of alert consumers maximizing personal preferences. For rational-choice purists, op- erating under the assumptions of neoclassical economics, the give-and-take of democratic politics are only about strategic bargaining to further established preferences. Market theories typically assume fixed preferences and therefore make little acknowledgment of the possibility of transformative politics through which citizens come to new understandings about their interests in the context of those of others. Discourse and interaction under the rules of democratic politics thus seem to have no part in establishing standards of fairness, guarding financial probity, and defining what is appropriate educational quality.

The Grassroots Democracy Model

The idea that microcommunities outside schools should participate in public school systems has roots in the settlement house movement and other school- based efforts at the turn of the last century. Current debates notwithstand- ing, community engagement continues to hold ground as a widely recognized source of legitimacy for publicly established standards and as a source of resources that can help schools bolster their performance, particularly in un-

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 197

derfunded districts with students who draw on multiple public services (Honig et al. 2001). Elected school boards long served as the accepted means for expressing the public voice and overseeing the work of professional educators, but, as the latter half of the twentieth century unfolded, confidence in elected board members began to wane (Howell 2005). New York City’s failed ex- periment in community control was a short-lived attempt to revitalize grass- roots democracy. Chicago’s introduction of local school councils with the power to hire and fire principals also brought the idea of grassroots democracy back into use but with mixed results (Bryk et al. 1998). With impetus from state mandates, various localities have provided a place for parents on school improvement teams. The efficacy of this approach, especially for lower SES populations, remains in question. Particularly for parents with limited edu- cation, much depends on the energy and openness of educators and their willingness to create a partnership relationship. A seemingly recent form of community-based mobilization is for students to organize and engage so that they can assert a role in how schools operate and what goals they pursue (Oakes and Rogers 2006).

Organizers tend to regard the education bureaucracy as a barrier to citizen engagement, particularly for lower SES populations, and they see organizing as a way to break through established modes of operating. Typically, organizers view confrontation as a useful tactic both for mobilizing people and for altering the political rules in place. They see their challenge through the lens of class, with opportunities for engagement skewed against those with limited financial means, scarce experience in dealing with large-scale organizations (on the depth of the challenge, see Lareau 2003), and weak political access. The antidote to this usual state of affairs is an intentional and concerted effort to heighten issue awareness and organize politically around a change agenda. The aim is to enhance the civic and political skills of ordinary citizens and to overcome tendencies toward fatalism with a sense of efficacy and empowerment.

Effective and sustained community organizing is seen as a step toward leveling the civic and political playing field and establishing accountability to those who have been voiceless. Many community organizers use the language of “accountability sessions” to describe a process in which public officials are asked first to pledge support for various policy aims and then subsequently to report on progress toward those aims. This form of explicit, public ac- countability assumes a political world divided into two camps: an inside group that governs and the community as an outside group that gains concessions by putting pressure on the insiders. In practice, bargaining between the com- munity organization and officials can lead to a blurring of the divide between insiders and outsiders, but champions of community organizing see cooptation as a constant threat to the maintenance of an authentic community voice. To a population long confined to the margins of political and economic life, an

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

198 American Journal of Education

outsider position seems fully realistic, as does wariness about the motives of those deemed to be inside figures of power.

Community organizing typically provides an intentional and aggressive form of mobilizing citizens to voice their concerns and seek responsiveness to those concerns. However, the outsider-versus-insider view of the political world ob- scures the possibility that people at the grassroots level may hold conflicting views about the course of school reform. Moreover, a polarized view of the world assumes that the community organization and the organizers who staff it are simply means by which popular sentiment is channeled into the gov- erning process. Thus, a polarized view leaves little ground for questioning whether organizing itself has maintenance or other needs that might diverge from those of the populace.

Organizers themselves often view problems in systemic terms but tactically choose to emphasize concrete and highly localized issues. Getting a stop sign at a dangerous corner or removing a particularly autocratic and ineffective principal are challenges with an immediacy that helps stir interest and are readily solvable once officials decide to take action, a critical factor for or- ganizers taught to start off with sure wins. In principle, small victories on concrete issues can provide a ladder up which organizers can steer community members toward engaging more complex issues in larger venues, but when it comes to actualizing this aspiration, the record is mixed at best. Moreover, particularly when organizers are part of a national network, one might ask whether national attachments are always consistent with local needs and wants.

Inevitably there is tension between democracy and professional expertise. Public engagement at the grassroots level thus not only has to cope with (overcome the consequences of ) socioeconomic inequalities but also has to find a way of reconciling the lay role of citizens with the expertise of profes- sionals.3 Realistically, then, community-based participation has little capacity to stand alone as a foundation for school reform.

The Models Compared

With essentials of the three models now sketched, let us turn to a comparison of how the advocates of each see the world of education. The three pillars of our comparison are bureaucracy, markets, and grassroots organizing. They provide a test of the capacity of each paradigm to transcend the bounds of dogma. When the three models are compared, sharp differences appear (see table 1).

Only professionalism attributes to bureaucracy a large and not necessarily negative place in the education picture. The market model holds a particularly disapproving view and posits bureaucracy as an enemy of innovation, effi-

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 199

TABLE 1

Three Models Compared on Basic Points

View of: Professionalism Markets Grassroots Democracy

Bureaucracy Neutral facilitator Instrument of mo- nopoly; a primary source of the problem

A barrier primarily

Social class Explanation for variable level of policy outcomes

Significant only as affects availability of choices

Seriously skews capacity for engagement, absent intervention

Political process Intrusive; source of parochialism, patronage, and partisanship

Largely dysfunctional in a diverse community

Foundation for accountability

ciency, and responsiveness. Within itself, the market model contains no basis for explaining how public regulation and oversight are to be conducted. How- ever, when pressed on the point, market advocates acknowledge a need for public regulation and oversight, and they largely assume that markets are self- regulating and that information and, for those with a low income, subsidies are the essentials. Particularly for the community-organizing wing among advocates of grassroots democracy, bureaucracy is seen as a barrier, with any cooperative arrangement to be guarded and limited. Pressure on elected of- ficials and career administrators is the favored strategy.

In treatment of social class, the three models are a bit like the fabled blind men describing an elephant. The professionalism model assumes that the lower SES population is deficient in some way that professional expertise can at least partially overcome through service provision. Problems are seen as treat- able without changing the societal structures in which they arose. Greater expenditure for services rather than systemic social reform is the favored response, since problems are viewed as ultimately personal and narrowly sit- uational. For market advocates, money and information are the keys to making a market work. Hence, class disadvantages can be overcome with adequate consumer information and, where needed for adequate consumer choice, modest subsidies. Proponents of grassroots organizing see social class primarily in terms of a skewed pattern of civic and political participation. Organization built around increased issue awareness is thus a called-for response.

Significantly, two of the three models put the political process in an unfa-

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

200 American Journal of Education

vorable light. The grassroots democracy model holds the most constructive role for politics, and that role is primarily one of advocacy—although some of its champions look to expand issue awareness into a movement to transform society. Of the three, the grassroots democracy model directs the most attention to the matter of broad social change. But its treatment of politics tends to ignore what the market model emphasizes, namely, that citizens may hold conflicting views about the purpose of education and how it should be reformed.

As constructs for reform, the three models operate at an abstract level. When put into practice, the lines of separation become less distinct. Some particular practices, such as standards testing, can be seen as in service to all three models. To professionals, testing can become a diagnostic tool. For market champions, testing is a source of consumer information. For parents and community organizers, test results can provide information to hold schools accountable for performance.4 As another example, charter schools can pro- vide choice but also serve as a channel for parent engagement. To some extent, the nature of a particular practice depends on how it is perceived and used. While the three models differ sharply at the level of abstract principles to guide the organization of society, particularly for those confronting concrete problem-solving tasks, purity of principles is a lesser concern. As suggested by the brief comparison of the three models, the risk attached to them is that they narrow understanding of the scope of the problem and may thereby limit the responses. Policy advocates operating on a national stage, particularly one filled with partisan and ideological struggle, have a strong stake in product differentiation. For them, concrete problem solving is of less immediate con- cern than their visibility as advocates.

Policy Discourse and Political Dynamics at the National versus Local Levels

Thinking, talking, and strategizing about school reform take different forms at the national and local levels. Both policy needs and political pressures force national actors to a higher level of abstraction. This is neither fully avoidable nor wholly bad, but it does have some dysfunctional effects. Clashes among abstractions lend themselves more easily to ideological absolutism and make it more difficult for leaders to locate and defend pragmatically mixed solutions and negotiated compromise. Local actors operate in a more concrete arena in which context, personalities, and parochial idiosyncrasies loom large. At the national level, the three models and the program options associated with them look like competing worldviews to which allegiances must be perma- nently sworn. At the local level—in districts, neighborhoods, and schools— they more often look like buffet tables from which to pick and choose.

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 201

Consider, for example, the issue of charter schools. At the national level, the debate about charter schools is framed in terms of markets versus gov- ernment (Henig et al. 2003; Levin 2001; Maranto et al. 1999) or perhaps professional educators versus parents and communities (Nathan 1999; Rofes and Stulberg 2004). Framed thus, the stakes are extraordinarily high. Con- servative ideologues consider the superiority of markets over government a core belief and value; if charter schools represent market principles, any claim that they are ineffective, costly, or socially destructive must be challenged head- on and with all guns blazing. Liberal ideologues see the model of the common public school as sacrosanct and see charter schools as a Trojan horse designed to weaken public institutions and prepare the way for a more full-fledged assault.

While these pitched debates are understandable to local actors—and while, as we explain below, the repercussions of these national wars of attrition seriously complicate the challenges local education leaders confront—the char- ter school issue is much less freighted and volatile when it is left to unfold on its own terms in specific school districts and communities. There, charter schooling is less a symbolic abstraction that stands in opposition to an idea of public education and more a set of specific charter school providers, often with track records and constituencies already in place; there, the traditional public school system is not a stand-in for heroic visions of democracy and the public good but, rather, a familiar institution with a particular history of successes and failures. National debates can acknowledge that local conditions vary, but, to maintain traction, they minimize the same particularities upon which local perceptions and decisions typically hinge.

Why Is the National Debate Drawn to Abstractions?

National debates about education policy are drawn to abstract models for reasons having to do with both policy and politics. Education in the United States is highly localized due to both law and custom (McDermott 1999). In this regard, it is not different from most other domestic policies in quality so much as, perhaps, degree. National policies for education—whether about academic standards, equity, sufficient funding, or content—ultimately must be filtered through a federal system comprising nearly fifteen thousand school districts and, within these districts, must be carried into the classroom in a famously “loosely coupled” system ( Weick 1976) in which about ninety-five thousand principals and over three million teachers have some degree of say- so. Some of these districts are huge, with as many as a million students; some are tiny, comprising as little as a single school; and some are wildly hetero- geneous in race, class, and ethnicity while others are almost blandly homo-

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

202 American Journal of Education

geneous. Some are growing, some shrinking; some are rich, some desperately poor. At the school level, the variations are just as bewildering. Some principals are smart, energetic, flexible, and caring; some are rigid and authoritarian, holding on until retirement and anxious to avoid rocking any political boats. The teachers at most schools present more personalities and skill sets than a Baskin-Robbins does flavors. The students and their families bring into the schools vastly different motivations, backgrounds, expectations, and support.

The consequences attendant upon national policy decisions will depend on all of these varying factors, and as a result the path from policy to consequence is extremely difficult to project. As portrayed by Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, the link between legislation in Congress to measurable conse- quences for families and children resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption more than a purposeful sequence of causality. One powerful reason that na- tional debates tend to get framed in terms of abstract models, then, is that to some extent there is no choice (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984). Unless national policy makers defer entirely to local values and capacities, the best they can do is to tilt the pinball machine in a direction that makes positive outcomes more likely, and in thinking about how to do so they need to rely on simplifying models that generate broad probabilities, not outcomes specific to each and every context.

Political pressures encourage reliance on abstractions through a different mechanism. Political partisans and movement leaders at the national level are charged with the task of mobilizing publics not crafting solutions, and various factors operate to increase the probability that competition in this arena will rely on simplifying models rather than reasoned appeals nested in complicated considerations of context and policy detail.

Scholars interested in American public opinion and political behavior have identified broad forces that are “thinning out” the moderate core of politicians in both major political parties, leaving the dance of national politics to be much more polarized than ever before and much more polarized than the American public. A combination of demographic shifts and gerrymandering of legislative boundaries has created more homogeneous electoral districts even when the overall population has more mixed or moderate views ( Jacobs and Shapiro 2000). With fewer competitive elections, parties in either safe Dem- ocratic or safe Republican districts had less incentive to adopt moderate po- sitions. As the general elections became less important (because their results were more preordained), the internal processes by which the parties select their candidates became proportionally more important.

To maintain the loyalty of ideologically purist elements among their party’s activists, elected leaders are frequently forced to adopt more one-dimensional and extreme positions than ordinary citizens are inclined toward. The fact that most of the public is more moderate than national party activists makes

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 203

it necessary for political leaders to package their appeals in ways that seem less extreme. But the fact that the mass public is relatively disengaged with the specifics of public policy means that the tools that are favored rely less on precision and detail than on broad manipulation of symbols and policy framing. Similarly, opponents of vouchers, high-stakes testing, or mayoral control of schools might concentrate on messages that contrast these initiatives with the image of the helpful and caring local teacher and her claim on professional expertise or engaged parents expressing communal voice, while proponents might seek to conjure up images of impersonalized bureaucracies.

There are other reasons, too, that national politics favors abstraction. Na- tional politicians need to hold together disparate coalitions, and abstract mod- els help them to organize their appeals in ways that crystallize a commitment to action at the same time that they obscure the differences in situation, values, and particularities that would otherwise introduce disharmony in the ranks. National leaders within the education community may know and admit that some teachers are unmotivated and ill prepared, some local union chapters ineffectual or even corrupt, and some certification requirements probably irrelevant. National school choice advocates know very well that some charter school founders are inept, some claims of success overinflated, and some charter schools badly managed. National proponents of community engage- ment in school reform realize that some community-based organizations are overly attached to a rhetoric of confrontation, lack a broad and diverse popular base, and have to juggle school reform with other issues. At the national level, where attention spans are especially fragile, policy advocates play a game of mass appeal, and the politics of mobilizing mass support works against any acknowledgment of flaws in one’s own camp or against any concession to the strength of competing programs.

Street-Level Pragmatism

Policy and politics draw local decision makers into a more intimate relationship with policy detail and context. This is not because these local decision makers are necessarily any less ideological or more pragmatic. It is due more to the fact that the tasks of making policy and maintaining power are different at this level of governance.

Congress passes laws that are designed to exert leverage in a particular direction but leaves the specifics to be worked out within the rule-making process and then, subsequently, at the state and local level, where the flesh of specifics must be added to the national policy skeleton. This is starkly apparent in the high-visibility case of NCLB, where national policy stipulates that school districts must make their teachers “highly qualified” and all their students

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

204 American Journal of Education

“proficient” but leave it to others farther down the food chain of federalism to define what these terms mean and to select the strategies for getting there. State legislatures, and even more so local school boards, have to get down to the nitty-gritty details. It is not simply a question of whether to have charter schools, but how much to contribute per student, whether to require lotteries, what kinds of organizational entities may run these schools, what kinds of student data they are required to maintain, how easy or tough to make the chartering process, and so on. It is not simply a question of whether to enact a uniform curriculum in reading or math, but whether to purchase an existing package or develop one’s own, whether and how to stress basic knowledge or analytical skills, and whether to exempt small schools or successful schools or schools with alternative themes. It is not simply a question of whether to strive for more qualified teachers, but whether to do so by raising salaries, by in- stituting merit pay, by subsidizing their housing, by spending more on pro- fessional development, and so on down the line.

Local decision makers have to pay more attention to policy detail because they are charged with responsibility for providing that detail. The president and Congress are in a position to ignore detail. Local decision making is more sensitive to context not because local decision makers want to think more about how context matters but because they are immersed in a particular context, and it impinges on them in inescapable ways. In doing their job, national policy makers confront the fact that the policies enacted will be implemented in many different settings. Local policy makers can take context for granted. Fish do not think about water; they just swim in it. The same is true for most local policy makers. While the strength and form of the local economy, the demographic character of the population, the level of social capital in the neighborhoods, the technical capacity of local bureaucracies, and the political courage of the leaders may change over time, they do so slowly and usually imperceptibly. Policy makers can treat them as a “given” because that is how they in fact are experienced.

Local pragmatism can translate into either placidity or a hyperpluralistic version of the politics of patronage ( Yates 1977). In more homogeneous and affluent suburbs, local districts feel their way through to comfortable but suboptimal positions. For decades, for example, many suburban jurisdictions with high average test scores blithely assumed that their schools were doing a fine job despite the fact that some subpopulations were seriously lagging, a complacency that some expect NCLB to unsettle via its requirement for the publication of disaggregated test score data. In large central cities with more challenging environments, the process is more likely to devolve into unstruc- tured multifront battles among competing interest groups struggling for a share of a fixed or shrinking pie. Localized battles over school closings or teacher pensions are no less heated than the ideologically pitched conflicts on the

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 205

national scene, but because they are grounded in material demands they are more susceptible to resolution through compromise. Claims on public re- sources can be met by splitting the difference, while disagreements on core principles treat compromise as capitulation.

Two Sources of Policy Churn

Frederick Hess’s Spinning Wheels (1998) grabbed attention less because of its original empirical analysis, theoretical framework, or policy conclusions than because it put front and center a different way of thinking about the nature of the problem facing inner-city school districts. The concept of “policy churn” hit home with many observers of urban school politics. For those who had actually watched urban districts struggle and fail and then struggle again, it was a more compelling metaphor than that of a self-contained and totally unaccountable public monopoly or that of a team of public-minded educa- tional experts hamstrung by interfering amateurs.

Hess’s account of why school systems engage in policy churn also has merit. He argued that school leaders have an incentive to appear to be innovative and effective and that, played out against a backdrop in which core elements of education are difficult to change and genuine progress difficult to measure, this incentive encourages superficial and symbolic responses. Without taking issue with this, we suggest that other factors also need to be taken into account. In particular, based on the arguments we have offered, we think it is useful to draw a distinction among differing types and causes of policy churn.

Our consideration of the dynamics of school reform and the role that ideas play in shaping debate at the national and local levels suggest that there may be two distinct forms of policy churn. The first, characteristic of the national clashes among abstract models, takes the form of a “reverberated” version of punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium refers to the process by which policy subsystems evolve through long periods of relative incremental change broken by sharp changes in subsystem stakeholders, problem definitions, and policy approaches (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). Education politics may constitute a distinctly jittery and volatile policy arena in which local regimes never quite gel, ideas are embraced and forsaken before they mature, and policy initiatives get abandoned before they have a chance to take root (Stone et al. 2001). The clash of abstract models that insist on mutually exclusive arrays of causal mechanisms contributes to this by exaggerating the conse- quences of political transitions at the national level. An existing policy model occupies center stage for a while, influencing funding priorities in government and the foundation world. Insiders with a stake in that model resist or ignore alternative models, thus promoting periods of stasis, but, when change comes,

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

206 American Journal of Education

it is abrupt and complete (like a pendulum that swings abruptly and then holds at the extreme for a while before swinging back).

At the local level, where reform is built less around abstract models and more around context, concrete proposals, material group interests, actual lead- ers, local history, etc., the sources and form of churn are different. Precisely because local decision making is less anchored in abstract ideas and theories, it is more susceptible to shifts based on fad, changing personalities, and simply reaction against the latest thing. But this form of churn is more ongoing while also less sharp: a percolation rather than a sea change. It involves shifts in personalities, emphases, procedures, and style but often stays within a narrow range of substantive emphasis. Succeeding administrations put their own stamp on a local mix of professionalism, market, and community, but broad recon- sideration of direction rarely takes place.

Of utmost concern is that neither the local politics of muddling through nor that of hyperpluralism typically breaks out of the powerful constraints imposed by race and social class. To the extent that inequality infiltrates the educational process in more homogeneous and advantaged settings, the feet- on-the-ground pragmatism of local policy dynamics serves as a perceptual screen. In large central cities, the rhetoric of race, class, and ethnicity more frequently erupts into public discourse. But as Douglas Yates described in his discussion of mayors as “crusaders,” those appeals serve more as symbolic ploys for mobilizing support to which actors have recourse when they lack the capacity to deliver more substantive goods ( Yates 1977). Appeals to class and inequity, in that setting, often mask more conventional personal and group politics in which the real commerce is in elected office, jobs, and contracts, not systemic reform. Like the water in which the fish swim, poverty and its consequences become part of the context to which policy is adapted, more so than the target at which it is aimed.

States and Local Leaders in the Middle

For most of American history the cocoon of localism shielded education de- cision making from the destabilizing clashes among competing dogmas. That had its costs. These included the stultifying parochialism that allowed local majorities to impose narrow-minded bigotries such as segregation, creationism, and sorting children early and irrevocably into curricular rich “academic” versus second-rate vocational tracks on fragile and fragmentary evidence about their potential. But the situation has changed. One of the most serious con- temporary problems is that national clashes among competing orthodoxies are generating solutions that fit poorly the complexity of the situation on the ground, but this does not mean that the answer is to return to a system in

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 207

which we simply invite local communities to feel their way into a set of practices that are concrete and comfortable.

Never complete, the relative insulation of local school decision making has been eroding over the past few decades. The states led the way. Beginning in the 1980s, states—to varying degrees—took on leadership roles in addressing inequitable school funding, instituting various policies promoting public school choice, and building accountability regimes anchored around tests with con- sequences. On the continuum between dogma and pragmatism, the states occupy a territory closer to the locals than to their constitutional partners at the national level. That can be seen in the particular way that state-led reforms unfolded. Governors leading the state reform effort included a mix of Re- publicans and Democrats, and their lobbying efforts at the national level tended to be bipartisan. As they moved into the realm of charter schools and public choice, most states resisted national advocates’ entreaties to jump more aggressively into a market-based approach. Vouchers for the most part were rejected, and charter school laws, when implemented, often included provi- sions designed to ensure that the process of change was incremental. Many states included caps on the total number of charters, for example; as the states absorbed the early cohorts of charter schools and assessed their impact, some of those states revisited the issue and raised the caps. Incrementalism and working in stages also characterized the movement of states into the realm of test-based accountability. The leaders built new tests and data systems and reshaped the specific policies as their capacity to carry them out evolved. Other states sat back initially, taking in the lessons from among the leaders, borrowing some of their products and approaches, and taking advantage of the private publishing and testing industry that grew in response to the market created by the early initiatives and that saved states from having to carry out—with limited resources and person power—tasks they were not ready to do on their own.

But with NCLB, national politics has truly changed the nature of the game. For local school leaders as well as states, the results can be bewildering. Superintendents and school boards can no longer concentrate on local prob- lems, resources, and constituencies. States that were among the leaders in developing student-level, longitudinal databases for assessing true gains and monitoring students’ backgrounds now find themselves pressured by national policies to conform to testing regimes that are less sophisticated and less accurate.5

In some instances—perhaps many—the erosion of complacency may be a good thing. But “shaking things up” only serves the public interest when it proves to be a prelude to putting new and better things into place. Local interests—both within regimes of local governance and within those embedded in civil society and community-based institutions—are less free than they were

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

208 American Journal of Education

previously to craft pragmatic solutions that more or less “work” within set contexts and instead must defend themselves and pursue support and resources in broader arenas in which clashing dogmas are at work.

Our concern here complements but should be distinguished from the more commonly expressed objections to the “top-down” constraints associated with NCLB and the accountability movement writ large. We are not antifederalists of the old school who see unreconstructed localism as the wellspring of all that is good in education and regard state and especially national efforts to define common objectives as objectionable on both constitutional and moral grounds. Nor do we mean to be celebrants of what Petrilli (2006) labels the “whatever works” camp, presuming that each locality is so distinct that work- able policy must maximize flexibility and avoid any effort to favor pedagogical methods, norms about process, or policy approaches based on empirically tested conceptions of what works. Our concern has less to do with national constraints on local leaders’ free selection of policy tools than with the infection of the local political arena by overly simplistic and almost puritanical appli- cation of an ideological and partisan style of political warfare that pressures them to pick, choose, and loyally defend one abstract notion of reform over its competitors.

Others—including local leaders themselves—have made the point that they feel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of initiatives that are being foisted upon them by outside actors. But the number of particular initiatives is not a problem in and of itself, or at least not the main one. Difficulties stem, rather, from initiatives that have no coherence and that seem to go in many different directions. That contrasts with what Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993), among others, call positive feedback. If there is an overall logic that is apparent, then new initiatives can have a consistent direction. Not everything has to be spelled out because there is a shared understanding.

The tricky part comes from the situation that complex problems are not amenable to a single logic (Rittell and Webber 1973). The ideological framing of the education battles at the national level exacerbates this because, while each of the competing models obtains a degree of coherence on its own, their incompleteness and the misfit between abstraction and concrete application mean that no one school of thought can ever prevail, at least not for long. When the White House moves in one direction and takes steps to enforce this on local districts, the courts, foundations, the state legislature, or the governor, some other influential force is likely to be moving in another direction and making similar demands. Such problems call for fighting on multiple fronts or, in the chess analogy, orchestrating the movements of multiple pieces, each with different capacities. It also means adapting to local conditions and possibly creating strange coalitions.

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 209

Big-time policy advocates at the national level may see themselves as high- lighting important problems and offering promising solutions, but at the op- erational level the national dogmas informing policy discourse may serve more to obscure reality than to illuminate it. What is put forward on the national stage often has a strong hint of immaculate conception about it. Advocates tend to shrug off bothersome “complications” that distract from the purity of the central message. At the local level, those who carry out reform have to cope with those very complications.

A challenge, Philip Selznick might say, is to define a mission (Selznick 1957). Logics have to do with means, missions with ends. Being confined to a single logic is not helpful in pursuing a complex and difficult mission. But being able to convey a coherent sense of mission may be necessary for being able to maintain morale. Chester Barnard, for one, argues that a strong sense of purpose or mission gives an executive a source of motivation that may be essential for overcoming the shortcomings of formal authority or the inade- quacies of contractual agreements (Barnard 1968).

Being bombarded with multiple logics can be a problem, if the expectation from each bombardier is to follow only that logic. Or it can be a problem when the work team is confused about which logic to follow. For its part, being confined to a single overriding logic can be a problem if the challenge faced is too complex to yield to a single logic or approach. Mission is perhaps best defined locally, if it is not conceived in an overly provincial fashion. In any case, mission is a way of drawing on multiple logics but without falling victim to incoherence.

National policy debates over principles and abstractions are desirable. States, based on their traditionally somewhat more pragmatic orientation, are potentially available as allies to local leaders, but there is an equal chance that if they continue to become a more prominent venue for high-stakes education policy decisions, they may get pulled more into the national fram- ings. Local leaders today have no choice but to understand the broader debates and be able and willing to play ball in those broader political arenas. The alternative of putting one’s head down and concentrating exclusively on “the job” at home is less open and viable than it once was. Local leaders need the resources that are at stake in these broader games: whether those resources are federal grants, state support, or foundation investments. And to shape and sustain local constituencies, they need to be able to draw on credibility and support from outside. What is needed, however, are strategies and institutions that make it possible to combine this broader cosmopolitanism with a political and policy pragmatism that responds to concrete circumstance and not the distracting elements of dogma.

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

210 American Journal of Education

Moving Beyond the Distractions of Dogma: Prospects for a New Politics of Progressive Pragmatism

Addressing the real challenges of education, particularly for those with the greatest need, requires mobilizing resources across the boundaries that nor- mally separate public from private, local from national, and schools from the array of other services relevant to supporting healthy families and neighbor- hoods. Fixing the broken systems of urban education requires moving beyond the battle of abstractions. The challenges that are manifested at the local level involve a tangle of interrelated issues. To deal with such “wicked issues” (Rittell and Webber 1973), education leaders, community advocates, politicians, and parents deal or should deal in a more concrete world in which multiple approaches are sampled and blended, no important institutional leverage points are left unattended, and no important stakeholder groups are perma- nently marginalized. They need to draw on elements of each strategy and embrace a richer understanding of politics, bureaucracy, and class. And they need to do so in a serious and sustained way.

Is there a way to escape the spasmodic lurching from remedy to remedy anchored in competing abstractions? Or is this just an inevitable by-product of the growing polarization of American national politics combined with the end of localism as the defining character of education policy? If it is possible to move away from abstraction and ideology toward a more pragmatic ed- ucation policy, is it possible to do so without succumbing to the provincialism and domination of local elites that historically made the politics of local prag- matism often synonymous with maintenance of a dubious status quo?

While the challenges are real, we see some signs for optimism. In other work and with others, we have suggested the advantages of approaching school reform through the lens of building civic capacity (Clarke et al. 2006; Henig et al. 1999; Orr 2000; Portz et al. 1999; Stone et al. 2001). Because it highlights the multisector nature of problem solving, civic capacity, compared to the three models discussed in this article, may be more conducive to the search for pragmatic solutions fitted to local circumstance and political bargain strik- ing necessary to sustain multisector coalitions that are needed if genuine pro- gress is to be made. Shifting to a civic capacity perspective involves starting with a different goal and questions. Rather than trying to understand how the world works, the civic capacity perspective starts by looking for evidence of what works in the real world; while the former enterprise puts a premium on finding a parsimonious set of independent variables that account for sub- stantial variance across different times and places, the latter is less interested in parsimony and more interested in variables that are manipulable through deliberate intervention and in the way that interventions resonate within and in interaction with particular settings. As applied to school reform, that means

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 211

asking what social conditions frame the challenge that schools face and, where the challenge is severe, what might make it more manageable. This more pragmatic starting point encourages recognition that professionalism, markets, and community all play potentially important roles and that key issues relate to how they interrelate rather than which one of them is the master key. It means taking the positive construction of politics in the model of grassroots democracy and expanding into a broader notion of civic engagement, one that starts rather than ends with a systemic perspective and a presumption that harnessing the apparatus and shaping healthful markets are part and parcel of what political participation is all about. It also aims, we believe, at a more multidimensional understanding of the practical challenges posed by concentrated poverty.

Significantly, this vision is in accord with the record of some recent local reform efforts. These suggest that overload, stalemate, and confusion are not the only possible consequences when overly simplified reforms are injected into real local contexts. Where local leaders are strong—meaning where they develop strong local constituencies and not just authoritative mannerisms— the realities of administrative and political implementation tend to reshape rigid and simplified models into more workable and sustainable hybrids. Where local leaders are weak or stick too obstinately to a particular model, the results are less fortuitous. By way of illustration, we briefly consider some lessons from Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Baltimore.

The public-engagement paradigm clashed with the complexities of real- world conditions in Chicago’s well-documented experience with “democratic localism as a lever for change” (Bryk et al. 1998). Without revisiting details of that experience here, we can bear in mind that intraneighborhood conflicts proved to be a difficult hurdle in several instances. Moreover, a powerful neighborhood voice turned out to be hard to sustain politically, even though educators had lost considerable legitimacy (Shipps 2006). Citywide a political divide between community groups and educators left the way open for the mayor’s office, with business backing, to become the central directing force. Archon Fung’s exploration of the reform experience in Chicago points to a strategy by which the engagement of lower SES citizens can become robust, but the specifics of that experience show that effective participation by the nonaffluent is most readily achieved by partnership with professionals (2004). And this process requires resources and administrative support from the upper echelons of city administration. It is not a magical bubbling up of popular energy, disconnected from the politics of the city and from a body of com- munity groups supported by foundations and others outside the conventional circles of government. Even with a civic terrain containing numerous supports for citizen engagement, it is no easy matter to achieve a durable form of

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

212 American Journal of Education

cooperation between citizens and professionals. There are built-in tensions that require ongoing mediation and careful management.

In Philadelphia, state intervention led to the hiring of Paul Vallas, who was given the authority to make the city a leading example of “portfolio man- agement” as a market-type reform. National-level proponents of portfolio management call for contracting out the operation of all or most schools to private providers, both for profit and nonprofit. For example, Paul Hill (2006) offers portfolio management as an alternative to a bureaucratically sclerotic system committed to a standardized, one-size-fits-all approach. Under portfolio management, school boards would manage an array of schools and services, presumably eliminating less productive ones and adding new ones in order to experiment with new approaches and find ones that work. The locality would experience a free and frictionless movement of dollars, students, and educators to encourage high performance and eliminate weak performance. Local politics received little or no attention. Indeed, in pushing portfolio management as the way to go in reconstructing New Orleans schools, its advocates felt comfortable injecting it into an arena in which there was no effective local regime at all (Hill and Hannaway 2006). The assumption ap- pears to be that the approach will be so clearly superior in its performance that it generates its own base of political support.

Now consider the Philadelphia experience as an approximation of a port- folio system at work locally (Christman et al. 2005; Gold et al. 2005). Under Vallas, there at least appear to be some promising returns in rising test scores, but it would be a mistake to attribute those to a faithful implementation of the portfolio idea as it is typically discussed. In reality the Philadelphia ex- perience is less than fully dedicated to experimentation with diverse ap- proaches. Elements of command and control are fully in evidence. Indeed, one administrator described the process as “all about standardizing academics across the city” (Gold et al. 2005). And the incorporation of nonprofit providers appears based as much on the political imperative of solidifying a local con- stituency as on any demonstrated capacity of those organizations to turn schools around. Indeed, as it turns out, the use of community-based organizations is confined largely to after-school programs, and they are closely controlled. After- school programs have been allocated mainly to churches and other nonprofits on a contract basis. The contracts involve detailed prescriptions. In its own way, this system is politically top down and highly bureaucratic.

By way of contrast, consider San Diego and Baltimore. The notion, widely prevalent, that teacher and parental support can come later in the game if those at the top have a clear vision, a good game plan, and the courage to brush aside obstacles and marginalize those invested in the status quo, is thrown into some doubt by the rise and fall of the Bersin regime in San Diego. Under Superintendent Alan Bersin, San Diego was regarded by many as a

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 213

model effort to put into place a comprehensive accountability- and manage- ment-oriented regime. Despite some evidence that test scores, at least at the lower grades, were beginning to respond (Bassok and Raymond 2005), the aggressive, “do it fast, do it deep, take no prisoners” (Hannaway and Stan- islawski 2005) implementation style that Bersin adopted helped set the stage for his ouster. It is an open question at this point whether San Diego will jettison those initiatives or simply weed out more objectionable elements and soften the mode of implementation, and unclear in either event whether the initial gains were sustainable. What does seem clear is that a one-dimensional top-down management regime is problematic unless linked to a broader effort to engage the community in a supportive role (Hess 2005).

Kurt Schmoke, as mayor of Baltimore between 1987 and 1999, was a forerunner of the contemporary emphasis on strong mayors taking respon- sibility for shaking up the local education bureaucracy. Market-oriented re- formers celebrated his daring leadership in inviting a private provider, Edu- cation Alternatives Inc. (EAI), to run under contract a selection of poorly performing public schools. While this raised his stature—temporarily—on the national stage, it led to his undoing locally. Community-based groups and unions were hostile from the outset, and when EAI schools failed to outperform traditional public schools quickly and dramatically enough, the business- and state-level supporters of Schmoke’s initial efforts left him exposed and polit- ically vulnerable; frustrated, he stepped down after his third term, not only passing up the opportunity to run again but stepping completely out of elected politics (Orr 2000).

Our intent is not to lionize Richard M. Daley or Vallas,6 nor to take potshots at Bersin or Schmoke. What Daley and Vallas both appreciate, however, is that reform ideas need a sturdy political base to sustain them; they do not reliably create their own political supporting winds. Not all political constit- uencies are equal, however. If pragmatic school reform is to be progressive as well as sustained, it needs to be incorporated into the local education governance groups that, on their own, lack the stature, resources, and tinder- box readiness to mobilize that are found among more advantaged potential allies.

The Chicago experience informs us that involvement by lower SES citizens is a challenge not easily met, even by combinations of strategies. One element of that challenge is the structural inequalities that come from a stratified society. They are not readily surmounted even when students from the lower strata find themselves in schools populated with a diverse base of enrollment and equity-minded educators in strategic positions (Oakes and Rogers 2006). Up- per SES parents and students have the resources and skills to insert themselves into cooperative relationships with schools. Lower SES parents and students

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

214 American Journal of Education

can achieve a parallel position only with substantial supports both inside the schools and in the wider community.

Blending the efforts of lower SES people with professionals is most likely when there are multiple expert efforts, operating from varied institutional bases. Hence market advocates may indeed be on the right track when they call for an end to monopoly. It is not clear, however, that markets are a better source than civil society for diverse efforts from the professional community. Intermediaries and other nonprofits such as community foundations can bring independent professional voices to bear. Education reform is again well com- pared to a chess match. The secret is not the movement of one key piece, but the combined movements of several pieces, making use of their comple- mentary strengths.

Conclusion

Paradigms or abstract models of school reform highlight significant problems, but they also seem to miss much and risk oversimplifying the challenges faced in running large and complex school systems. Policy advocacy tends too often to be played as a game of product differentiation. Advocates tend to generate stark contrasts that demonize the status quo and other rival approaches and depict their own alternative as a flawless solution. When the game is played this way, nuance and a careful vetting of ideas get lost. Here we have tried to suggest that bureaucracy is not something to be wished away, that social class has to be reckoned with in all of its manifestations, and that politics can be neither bypassed nor assumed to be naturally benign. It is possible to build arrangements that involve many elements of the community in constructive ways. It may be as one local education fund executive said: “This is not rocket science. It’s political science.”7 But it is an intricate form of political science.

Organizing the unorganized is one possible step, but professionalism is not something to be dispensed with. Intermediaries that combine professionalism, sensitivity to national standards and obligations, and a concern with broad- ening the base of public engagement can play a useful role not as advocates of a favored dogma but as players aware of both the national discourse and local complexities. They should not have their hands tied by unwavering commitment to a single paradigm or by complete aversion to any single paradigm. “Puzzling” through complexities is more promising than attachment to dogmas ( Winship 2006). What we need to know more about is how to build and maintain a variety of reform-supporting entities at the state and local levels, and that is a different task from rallying the troops behind a favored dogma. How to bring that off and orchestrate their efforts is a form of politics we need to understand better. There are scattered experiences from

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 215

which we can learn, but only if we take on that task with an openness to politics and a full appreciation of how complex the move is from policy initiation to implementation in varied settings, characterized by multiple chal- lenges and no scarcity of “wicked issues.”

Notes

1. A recent article by Mark Warren (2005) considers community organizing in the context of a larger concern about community, and a book by sociologist Kristina Smock (2003) puts community organizing into a wide framework of urban change.

2. Head Start took somewhat different forms in different places. Perhaps the sharpest departure from the professional-service model was the Child Development Group of Mississippi, created as part of the civil rights movement in that Deep South state. It was controversial, however, and was eventually brought more in line with the standard- services approach (Dittmer 1994; Payne 1995).

3. An illuminating case study of this challenge is Mediratta and Karp (2003). 4. Standards can also be seen as a violation of each of the three models. Hence,

market champions may call for exempting voucher and charter schools from testing requirements, relying instead on consumer choice. Uniform standards can also be viewed as a failure to accommodate local needs and wants and therefore out of line with the idea of local democracy. Enforcement of uniform standards gravitates toward what can be readily measured, and that might be quite different from what professional judgment would aim for. Details like this matter greatly in the application of standards and especially in how they are mixed with other considerations.

5. See Hannaway and Cohodes (2006) on the lack of fit between schools identified as failing under the NCLB framework versus the more sophisticated Florida scheme.

6. Both, after all, have come under criticism for their methods of garnering political support (Gold et al. 2005; Shipps 2006).

7. The comment is that of Carolyn Akers, executive director of the Mobile Area Education Foundation (an affiliate of the Public Education Network). A brief account of the effort in Mobile to build a politics of support for education reform can be found in Akers (2005).

References

Akers, Carolyn. 2005. “Developing a Civic Infrastructure: Annenberg Institute for School Reform.” Voices in Education 9:14 –21.

Barnard, Chester I. (1938) 1968. The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bassok, Daphna, and Margaret E. Raymond. 2005. “Performance Trends and the Blueprint for Student Success.” In Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego, ed. Frederick M. Hess. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Baumgartner, Frank R., and Bryan D. Jones. 1993. Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bryk, Anthony S., Penny Sebring, David Kerbow, Sharon Rollow, and John Easton.

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

216 American Journal of Education

1998. Charting Chicago School Reform: Democratic Localism as a Lever for Change. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Casserly, Michael. 2006. “Beating the Odds: A City-by-City Analysis of Performance and Student Achievement Gaps on State Assessments, 2004 –5.” Council of Great City Schools, Washington, DC.

Christman, Jolley Bruce, Eva Gold, and Benjamin Herold. 2005. “Privatization ‘Philly Style’: What Can Be Learned from Philadelphia’s Diverse Provide Model of School Management.” Research for Action, Philadelphia.

Chubb, John E., and Terry M. Moe. 1990. Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. Wash- ington, DC: Brookings.

Clarke, Susan E., Rodney E. Hero, Mara S. Sidney, Luis R. Fraga, and Bari A. Erickson. 2006. Multi Ethnic Moments: The Politics of Urban Education Reform. Philadel- phia: Temple University Press.

Cochran-Smith, Marilyn, and Kenneth M. Zeichner, eds. 2005. Studying Teacher Edu- cation: The Report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education. New York: Erlbaum.

Crain, Robert L. 1969. The Politics of School Desegregation. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Darling-Hammond, Linda, and Joan Baratz-Snowden. 2005. A Good Teacher in Every

Classroom: Preparing the Highly Qualified Teachers Our Children Deserve. New York: Jossey- Bass.

Dittmer, John. 1994. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fung, Archon. 2004. Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press. Gold, Eva, Maia Cucchiaro, Elaine Simon, and Morgan Riffer. 2005. “Time to En-

gage?” Research for Action, Philadelphia. Grant, Gerald. 1988. The World We Created at Hamilton High. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press. Hannaway, Jane, and Sarah Cohodes. 2006. “Trouble Even in Choice Paradise: NCLB

Options in Miami-Dade County Public Schools.” Urban Institute, Washington, DC, http://www.urban.org/publications/411446.html.

Hannaway, Jane, and Maggie Stanislawski. 2005. “Flip-Flops in School Reform: An Evolutionary Theory.” In Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego, ed. Frederick M. Hess. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Henig, Jeffrey R., Thomas T. Holyoke, Natalie Lacireno-Paquet, and Michele M. Moser. 2003. “Privatization, Politics, and Urban Services: The Political Behavior of Charter Schools.” Journal of Urban Affairs 25 (1): 37–54.

Henig, Jeffrey R., Richard C. Hula, Marion Orr, and Desiree S. Pedescleaux. 1999. The Color of School Reform. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hess, Frederick M. 1998. Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform. Washington, DC: Brookings.

Hess, Frederick M., ed. 2005. Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Hill, Paul T., and Jane Hannaway. 2006. “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans.” Urban Institute, Washington, DC.

Hochschild, Jennifer L. 1984. The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Honig, Meredith, Joseph Kahne, and Milbray McLaughlin. 2001. “School-Community Connections: Strengthening Opportunity to Learn and Opportunity to Teach.” In Handbook of Research on Teaching, ed. Virginia Richardson. 4th ed. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Henig and Stone

MAY 2008 217

Howell, William G., ed. 2005. Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics. Washington, DC: Brookings.

Jackson, Thomas F. 1993. “The State, the Movements, and the Urban Poor: The War on Poverty and Political Mobilization in the 1960’s.” In The Underclass Debate: Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jacobs, Lawrence R., and Robert Y. Shapiro. 2000. Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Katz, Michael. 1971. School Reform: Past and Present. Boston: Little, Brown. Kober, Nancy. 2005. “Do You Know . . . the Latest Good News about American

Education?” Center for Education Policy, Washington, DC. Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press. Levin, Henry M., ed. 2001. Privatizing Education: Can the Marketplace Deliver Choice, Efficiency,

Equity, and Social Cohesion? Boulder, CO: Westview. Lindblom, Charles. 1959. “The Science of Muddling Through.” Public Administration

Review 19:79–88. Maranto, Robert, Scott Milliman, Frederick Hess, and April Gresham. 1999. School

Choice in the Real World: Lessons from Arizona Charter Schools. Boulder, CO: Westview. Marris, Peter, and Martin Rein. 1973. Dilemmas of Social Reform; Poverty and Community

Action in the United States. 2nd ed. Chicago: Aldine. McDermott, Katherine. 1999. Controlling Public Education: Localism versus Equity. Law-

rence: University Press of Kansas. Mediratta, Kavitha, and Jessica Karp. 2003. “Parent Power and Urban School Reform:

The Story of Mothers on the Move.” Institute for Education and Social Policy, New York University, New York.

Nathan, Joe. (1996) 1999. Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity for American Ed- ucation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Oakes, Jeannie, and John Rogers. 2006. Learning Power: Organizing for Education and Justice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Orr, Marion. 2000. Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986–1998. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Osborne, David, and Peter Plastrik. 1997. Banishing Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government. Boston: Addison-Wesley.

Payne, Charles M. 1995. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Petrilli, Michael. 2006. “What Works vs. Whatever Works: Inside the No Child Left Behind Law’s Internal Contradictions.” Education Week, July 26.

Portz, John, Lana Stein, and Robin R. Jones. 1999. City Schools and City Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Pressman, Jeffrey, and Aaron Wildavsky. 1984. Implementation. 3rd ed. Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press.

Rittell, H., and M. Webber. 1973. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (2): 155–69.

Rofes, Eric E., and Lisa M. Stulberg, eds. 2004. The Emancipatory Promise of Charter Schools: Towards a Progressive Politics of School Choice. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Selznick, Philip. 1957. Leadership in Administration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Shipps, Dorothy. 2006. School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 1880–2000. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Progressive Pragmatism: Rethinking School Reform

218 American Journal of Education

Shirley, Dennis. 1997. Community Organizing for Urban School Reform. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Smock, Kristina. 2003. Democracy in Action: Community Organizing and Urban Change. New York: Columbia University Press.

Stone, Clarence N., Jeffrey R. Henig, Bryan D. Jones, and Carol Pierannunzi. 2001. Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Tyack, David. 1974. The One Best System. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Warren, Mark R. 2001. Dry Bones Rattling. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Warren, Mark R. 2005. “Communities and Schools: A New View of Urban Education

Reform.” Harvard Educational Review 75 (2): 133–73. Weick, Karl E. 1976. “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems.” Ad-

ministrative Science Quarterly 21:1–19. Winship, Christopher. 2006. “Policy Analysis as Puzzle-Solving.” In Oxford Handbook

of Public Policy, ed. R. G. Michael Moran and Martin Rein. New York: Oxford University Press.

Yates, Douglas. 1977. The Ungovernable City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

This content downloaded from 192.251.139.3 on Thu, 05 May 2016 21:37:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms