OPINION

Published Monday, May 03, 2004
Let Several Flowers Bloom
The Second in a Series on Education and Election 2004
By David Meadow
APPIAN STAFF WRITER

“Essentially, we [in the campaign] see education as a human right, just as we see health care as a human right.” – Julia S. Prange, campaigner for Dennis Kucinich

This is the second installment of my piece on education issues in the 2004 presidential election. One of the issues that have made it into household discourse since No Child Left Behind is the achievement gap, and to what extent that gap is a product of systemic inequalities. More and more people are realizing the civil rights implications of this gap’s stubborn persistence. How, I wondered, does that affect what actually makes its way into campaign platforms?

Among the people I spoke with were Prange, above; Paul Reville, a professor and expert on educational policy here at HGSE; Gary Flowers, Vice President of Programs for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH coalition and fellow at the Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics; and Rod Paige, current Secretary of Education. They all had something to say about their beliefs on education, and some provided insight into what politicians choose to talk about (or not to talk about).

At least two of my favorite “taboo” topics are in play here – economics and race. I view the “taboo” topics as the ones about which one should never expect to witness a rational debate. If we bring private-school vouchers into the picture, another taboo crops up: religion.

Despite the odds, I had set out to investigate the rhetoric of the campaigns, and how one could reliably use it as a barometer for candidate’s actual agendas.

What I found was, foremost, a window into the interviewees’ personal perspectives and opinions on education, perspectives that often began with the civil rights question. If education as a civil right was central to Julia Prange and Gary Flowers’s arguments, it served as no less than the organizing theme of Paige’s speech. These conversations confirmed for me how, the more politically prominent a speaker is, the less substance he or she can safely put into words.

This does not bode well for someone who wants to cut to the heart of Kerry or Bush’s motives.

We can start again with a few statements on the purpose of education. Ms. Prange thought that educated people should feel “prepared and… ready and inspired to take advantage of society and reach their full potential” as well as “thinking critically and creatively.”

But she also mentioned things that others had not: “giving back to the community… understand other people better.” Overall, she gave me the most reasons for education off the top of her head.

As for the Hon. Rod Paige, speaking last Thursday night (see related story), he said, “Education is about knowledge and finding oneself.” These two people may approach public weal in very different ways – the latter by accusing a national teacher’s union of “terrorist” tactics – but both cherish civil rights and, more precisely, emphasized the component of education that requires knowledge of oneself and one’s neighbors. Let us look at a few perspectives on the larger policy that drives education in America.

Gary Flowers provided me with ample detail on the civil rights implications of education reform. A charismatic leader who works closely with Rev. Jesse Jackson, he has advocated for civil rights his entire career.

Mr. Flowers is surprisingly un-cynical for the amount of time he has spent in Washington, and he does not hesitate to challenge interviewers on the narrowness of their assumptions. After pulling back and critiquing the question itself, he will pummel you with quotes from Frederick Douglass and the plaque on the Statue of Liberty.

There is a strong spiritual component to his assertions. “Might does not make right. Morality makes right. And in a moral and godly sense, it should be the aspiration of a civilized nation to educate all of its citizens,” he said. However, “too few have too much education at the expense of too many.”

I played devil’s advocate against Flowers and his passionate plea for social equality by invoking the principle of economic efficiency: isn’t there something to be said for concentrating resources where an elite will use them well, and thus increase the absolute prosperity for all? In other words, I proposed, “the least benefited get… a smaller slice of a bigger pie; it’s larger absolutely but smaller relatively.”

GF: I disagree. Economics, unlike other finite fields of endeavor, is expandable. The walls are not set. The walls expand. And in such a construct of fluidity, there is growth in inclusion… who’s to say that a poor child, white or black, who’s been denied an education under the theory that you only have to educate a few in society, does not hold the key to the cure for cancer, or possess a theory in physics that advances all of mankind?.... In an educational sense, we cannot afford to restrict educational opportunity for any citizen or student.

Mr. Flowers’s key observation about resources was that “the sons of inheritance and access who are born on third base and somehow or another think they hit a triple” can be much more generous than they are now and still maintain their standard of living; what they really fear is not material deprivation, but psychological deprivation – the loss of an arbitrary status that comes from having it better than someone else. Flowers, of course, sees that as an irrational cause for preserving inequality.

DM: Is it against the interests of those born on third base, in any way, to expand education?

GF: Yes, in a… purely selfish sense…. Expanding the pot could limit their status, or reduce their status, as the most educated – as the ruling class…. You have to view that in a very myopic and selfish sense.

I tried to extract a few ideas about what the average American thought of all this, and how the major candidates would accordingly couch their appeals.

DM: What changes in education do you think they can get away with pitching – what do think it’s politically possible for them to get the country on board with?

GF: I do not view educational reform with a ceiling. So the framing of your question… is not as important to me as what is in the best interest of all Americans.

I protested that a nation that reads mainly tabloids and gossip columns cannot be expected to listen to complex or daring proposals. Flowers wasn’t having it. He said that the state of literacy I described was due to bad education, which should be fixed before one can expect discerning thought from voters. In short, he felt I (among others) was attacking the issues backwards.

DM: We’ve digressed a little, because I know that –

GF: No, we’ve progressed a little. We haven’t digressed, we’ve progressed.

DM: Okay…

GF: Your questions were framed in a limited structure, so I expanded the walls.

When I left his office, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Gary Flowers felt that the richest nation in the world ought to be able to do right by its citizens, and that it could ill afford to keep them under-educated.

So what can we expect the politicians to do? I opened my interview with Paul Reville by asking about expectations. When I took his course in the fall on educational policy, this idea had come up time and again. How much can we expect of students? Of teachers? Of the public school system? Where should one set the bar, and does it make sense to set especially high standards from which one can bargain down? Based on this, I asked if he thought the major candidates have “multiple layers” of expectations when it comes to selling the public on certain policies.

PR: In general, both candidates can be expected to exaggerate the [role of] federal government… they will act as though they are going to deal with things like disciplinary problems… underperformance… development of school leaders… when, in reality… the influence of the President on these particular details is relatively small….

He did add that No Child Left Behind has, in fact, expanded the federal role in public education a fair amount, but that that role was pretty small to begin with.

I pressed further about rhetoric, and how candidates package the particular agendas they want to promote. Here, the issue of a disparity appeared again. Prof. Reville menitioned two common phrases, “closing the achievement gap” and “excellence for all.” The distinction he drew was as follows: the first phrase refers to bringing the lower achievers up – and not necessarily to improving the best students’ performance. The second phrase is a more vague reference to giving everyone the necessary tools to succeed – and does not address the achievement gap.

On hearing this rhetoric, the professor noted, families with children in already thriving schools (usually in affluent neighborhoods) often fear being shortchanged by an effort that focuses solely on “closing the gap.” They ask, “Don’t we get to improve?” This should not really surprise anyone, when we consider that people become affluent in the first place largely through a sustained, informed inquiry about “What’s in it for me.”

But the voting does not break down neatly along the lines of “haves” and “have-nots.” Secretary Paige would not go so far as to say that opinion on No Child Left Behind broke down this way, in any case.

In his address, Mr. Paige characterized NCLB as the most important piece of federal civil rights legislation since Brown v. The Board of Education. It is not a stretch to say that he compared opponents of NCLB to the conservative nay-sayers in 1954.

When I had a chance to ask him a question, I mentioned that most people I knew who opposed NCLB – for reasons Paige and the audience had established, like perverse incentives and punishment of the weak – were of the liberal or progressive ilk. What motive might they have for preserving separate and unequal schools?

Smoothly as ever, Paige turned on a dime and replied that we could not “straightjacket” the public into certain categories around this issue; indeed, he knew of “arch-conservatives” who had opposed NCLB for one reason or another.

In truth, we cannot straight-jacket anyone around the complex issues and sub-issues that come out of contemporary educational reform. Those who do understand what these issues imply for policy must take their own educational experience into account, as well as imagine how others have fared in the system. We can only hope for a reasoned debate about race, economics, and religion, and for campaign platforms that assume their listeners read more than one book a year.

David Meadow, a masters candidate in the Specialized Program, is a staff writer for The Appian.