Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy

Transcript of a talk by David Mathews, Public Agenda board member and president of the Kettering Foundation, on the public and public schools. Jumping off from his new book, "Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy," Mathews says, "Policy has an impact because it narrows education down to schools. It narrows schools down to one thing that happens in a curriculum or some particular method, like testing, for example. There is no reason to expect policy not to do that. It is in the nature of policy to do just that, but it creates a tension with a public that does not think that way."

I'd like to talk just a bit about my new book, "Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy," and some of the research that led up to it. Let me begin by saying three things that this book is not about. First, as you will see, the Kettering Foundation's work is not about the argument that education is essential to democracy. That's already been made. This book is about the reverse argument: that democracy is essential to education.

The second difference between our work and much of the dialogue about education is that there is nothing in our study about what concerns most of you in this audience for most of your working lives, which is the shape of educational policy. I don't know anything about educational policy, and if you will look up my record of service to the government, you can get evidence that that is true. This book is about political democracy. It is not about policy.

This makes the current discussion a very interesting occasion for me. It is an opportunity to see what happens when democracy meets public policy. They have been in tension for quite some time. All of the literature on the policy side of it, particularly on the public administration side, is quite clear about what the tension is. It is interesting to me to see what this research, which is not about policy, would mean to people whose perspective is primarily educational policy.

The third difference between Kettering's work and much of the writing on policy is that this research is not about schools. It is about education. As opposed to being about the school, which is an institution, it is about education, meaning a process by which a society transmits its skills and values to the next generation through a host of institutions and social conventions, one of which is the schools.
What I am going to try to do in this brief talk is make some connections between our research and educational policy. Although Kettering's work is not specifically about policy, policy is relevant to our research in at least three main ways, which I will try to explain.

The first is that policy structures the relationship between the citizenry and the government. Whatever the policy is about, it will—willy-nilly—structure that relationship one way or another. For example, No Child Left Behind structured the relationship in a particular way, and we are familiar with some of the ways that it has changed the relationship between citizens and the government. And for much of the 20th century, policy has been structuring that relationship in a particular way. I refer you to a book called Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public, by Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg. In this book, they have summarized about 30 years of political science research. Their conclusion is that without intending it at all, in fact often intending to do just the opposite, the public has been sidelined. We pick this up in polls; people feel as though they have been pushed to the back of the bus. Crenson and Ginsberg show us the correctness of that perception. The public has been sidelined. Systematically, policy has increased the distance between the citizenry and the government. Policy may not address the problem that we are talking about, but policy is hardly irrelevant to it. In fact, policy has helped to create the problem that we are discussing.

A second way that policy is relevant to our broader concerns is that what policy does is to narrow our focus. You cannot make policy about health, life, and eternal whatever. You have to make policy about some specific thing. That is what you do in Washington as you work on a particular piece of policy. But this is relevant to our question because, again, it puts a distance between the government and citizens. People do not, in fact, think in narrow terms. Often you will hear journalists say, "We have to simplify this for the public." Actually, policymakers think in simplistic terms. They have to think narrowly. The public thinks in comprehensive terms or interconnected terms.

Policy has an impact because it narrows education down to schools. It narrows schools down to one thing that happens in a curriculum or some particular method, like testing, for example. There is no reason to expect policy not to do that. It is in the nature of policy to do just that, but it creates a tension with a public that does not think that way.

One of the more interesting things that we found in the study is that although people will use the word "school" and "education" interchangeably, if they stop to think about it for a moment, they will make a clear distinction. For them, "school" is out there or over there. When the talk turns to education, people will say, "Education? I know something about that. Education is important to everything." When they talk about education as distinct from schools, the conversation can lead into a different conversation. So here is another way that policy impacts the relationship between the citizens and the government. Policies tend to be about schools. Concepts such as citizenry and democracy tend to be about education.

When we started out writing this book, we were assuming that it would be about public schools. But we had to change our approach because all of the information we were getting in from the research suggested that people are thinking in much broader terms. They were not thinking with the narrow focus of the policy expert, which narrows the scope of what can be considered.

The malfunction is this. Have you seen that TV ad where people are rubbing a salve on their stomachs, hoping that the salve will give them flat stomachs? There is another one that suggests that if you wear this certain kind of belt you will lose inches off of your stomach. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, none of that works. It does not work because you cannot go to one part of the body and change it by focusing just on that one part. If you want to get rid of fat, you have to get rid of fat generally. Rubbing your tummy is not going to do it.

Policy is kind of like rubbing your tummy. Policy hones in on one thing and tries to change it, but education is an organic system. In fact, if you change one part, you may change something else that you do not expect. There is a constant tension between the organic nature of education and the nature of policy. This is not intended to be a criticism of policy, since it is a necessary feature of policy.

Third, and I think maybe most interesting of all, is that we found that the public and the policymakers have a totally different understanding of what they mean by "accountability." Accountability, in policy terms, is a fairly legal matter. There are certain standards, they need to be met, and they can be quantified. By contrast, people do not think that way about accountability. When you go out and ask people about accountability, we find that people do not even want to talk about it. We had one group where nobody even brought it up, except one person who happened to be a school superintendent.

The public tends to think of accountability in terms of relationships. In other words, it is not informational; it is relational. They think, "I'm glad you gave me this information about test scores, but that is not what I want in a relationship. What I want in a relationship is the ability to look you in the eye and find out what you’re about and get an account of it." The concept is more like when we were in school ourselves and came back from the summer and someone said, "Tell me what you did this summer. I want to get an account of what you were doing." What the teachers who asked this question were looking for is not something that can be answered by talking about ten more of this or five less than that. So when people think about accountability in education, what they are trying to determine is whether the person they are talking to shares a commitment to do something to help the education of these kids. If that commitment is shared, then they feel that they have accountability.

So the citizenry, from a democratic point of view, has a totally different meaning of accountability from what you find in the policy world. Again, this is not intended to be a criticism of either side. You cannot make a policy without the kind of accountability that fascinates policymakers.

Here is the kicker in the public's sense of accountability. People say, "How can you hold me accountable for what happens in the schools if I can't make any difference in what goes on in them? How can I possibly be accountable for something I can't do anything about?" You are never going to get public accountability without cutting the Gordian knot that has sidelined the public in its relationships with the schools.

Here is the difficulty. People say, "What is it that I can do today that can make a difference to my local school?" Often the answer is something like this: "You could bake some cookies for our cookie sale." But people know that activities like this are so far in the margin that they won't make a difference in our highly complex, legalistic, bureaucratic, and professional educational system. As a result, the available options for making a difference strike people as inconsequential.

The only way I can think of dealing with it is this. Unless there is some action that people can do that makes a difference, they will never be willing to hold themselves accountable. The arena where they can make a difference is in education broadly, rather than schools specifically. The arena where the citizenry is comfortable is the larger arena. There is all kind of evidence that show that the factors that affect the education of young people cannot be dealt with in the school itself, any more than rubbing something on your tummy will give you a flat stomach.

For example, several people have looked at the demographic trends that impact on education. We know now that the very birth weight of a child sets that child in an educational direction. There are trajectories that affect the education of young people that the schools alone cannot change. Are schools going to be able to increase the birth weight of infants in the United States? Of course not. That is simply a dramatic example of what I think is a general and true proposition. In our book, we point out an enormous number of things that people have done and are doing in education to improve the education of young people. The difficulty is that those efforts are off-line, off-target, off-page, off-budget, and isolated. The tensions that I've mentioned tend to overwhelm and pervade the discussion.

Let me finish by saying that I am not against government policy, but we need to understand how it works. Our research does not show that people have any great hatred for government. They tend to like their social security checks and those kinds of things. But they do have some real trouble with the political system. That is what alienates them from government.

This has a lot to do with how modern government works and, in particular, how it relates to the nongovernmental part of society. What we're learning is that something, which nobody intended to happen, happened very gradually over the 20th century. The nongovernmental sector of society weakened considerably, and the relationship with it and government changed. All of this happened for good reasons. Unfortunately, what often weakened the relationship was when government then went out, with all good intentions, to increase public participation.

The government tried to open itself up to citizens, but the more it did so, the more alienated citizens felt. Why was that? Some evidence now tells us that it was in the way the government opened itself up. The government tended to say, "Here's some information." For its part, however, the citizens responded by saying something like this: "I don't just want the information. I'd like a different relationship with you."

Another problem is that the government became more available to the organized public, including the interest groups. The problem is that most of us are not organized. The more the government became responsive to the organized public, the less it became responsive to the broader citizenry.

We are learning that the things that we intended to do don't always work out the way we expect. This is hardly a surprise; it is just in human nature. I think the lesson for government is not that people think that government is bad or awful. The lesson for government is that unless it learns to pay attention to citizens and to communicate in terms that make sense to the public, government will not be able to do its job effectively. The places where government is most effective and most appreciated are places where there is a tandem relationship between public and government.

I have said some disparaging things about government policy, but I would also like to say some disparaging things about consumerism, just to round things out. Here is the difficulty with consumerism. It is a kind of mentality that goes something like this: "My kid is kind of like the TV set. I bring the TV set in to your shop at 8:30 in the morning and I want that TV set fixed by 3:30. If it's not fixed, it's your fault." That is what we should do as consumers and that is fine. That is what a good consumer does.

You can run schools that way, but if you do, the schools become, essentially, a public utility that we pay for in our tax dollars. If you talk to the folks who have to teach in the schools, what I hear them saying is, "If you bring me your kid at 8:30 in the morning and we understand that we both have got some things that we can do to educate the kids, I can do a pretty good job." But here the emphasis is on what both the parent and the teacher can do in a partnership. Those same teachers also say, "If you just hand your kid to me and tell me you want him back and fixed at 3:30 without us working together, there's no way I can do a good job at teaching."