The Ideology of Education: The Commonwealth, the Market, and America's Schools

4. Institutional Structure and Educational Goals

he arguments and analyses in the preceding chapters empirically challenge the market’s arguments in several ways. Value systems seem to do a better job of predicting aggregate productivity than test scores and the useful knowledge and skills they are held to represent. These test score measures in turn seem to be at least partially reflecting social inequities related to class and race. Much of the epistemology underlying research supporting the market case has normative roots, and when this is recognized and accounted for, the empirical findings that support calls for market-based institutional reform moderate or are even reversed. At a minimum, the functionalist perspective of education —the notion that schools are in the business of transferring technical blocks of knowledge that are socially and (especially) economically useful—is highly incomplete. Yet in raising these challenges to the market, the preceding analyses have said more about what schools do not do, rather than what they do. At least in an aggregate sense, schools do not seem to be in the business of creating stocks of human capital that lead to appreciable gains in economic productivity, and market-based organizational structures do not help schools more equitably distribute educational opportunities . This leaves open the possibility that the mission of schools is more cultural than functionalist and that market reforms may be more valueladen than utilitarian; but if schools are smuggling values rather than transferring technical knowledge and skills, little thus far illuminates specifically what values are being smuggled, or how market-based institutional reform might affect those values. Such an investigation requires more focus on what schools are doing rather than what they are not doing. A question central to the purpose of this book is still 75 4 Institutional Structure and Educational Goals T unanswered: What are the goals of schools and how are market reforms of education likely shape those goals? This is the question that this chapter seeks to answer. THE “ARE” AND “OUGHT” OF SCHOOL GOALS The debate between market advocates and their opponents over what schools ought to do is often framed as a set of differences about means rather than ends. The Jeffersonian ideals most visible in consensus theory are, in the abstract, universally embraced. These universals include education’s importance to underwriting the democratic process and equitably distributing social and economic opportunity. While such goals are easily embraced as abstract “oughts,” they become highly controversial as they are translated into policy specifics. These controversies make clear that the conflict between the market and the commonwealth is not a disagreement about the best technical means to achieve a commonly desired end but a fundamental philosophical difference about the primary purposes of public education. Chubb and Moe (1990, 53–55 and 78–79), for example, point out that public schools tend to have a lot of goals, many of them vague, contradictory , or mutually exclusive, and argue there is nothing particularly sacrosanct about any of these goals, that whatever objectives schools pursue is simply a product of their controlling agents. The central problem for public education is the number of controlling agents, which indirectly includes any constituency able to get the democratic process to respond to its policy preferences. As public schools must respond to the preferences of various powers in democratic bodies and their bureaucratic management mechanisms, they end up trying to conform to a bewildering tangle of regulations and top-down mandates. An advantage claimed for more market-like schools is an ability to cut through this clutter and provide a clearer and more focused mission (Chubb and Moe 1990). This mission clarity is obtained adopting the demands of education’s clientele, i.e., parents and students, as the primary organizational objective. Institutionalizing this connection between clientele demand and school mission is thus justified by a standard functionalist conception of education (schools have no immutable goals, their job to respond to whatever demands are generated by a dynamic task environment ) and the market conception of who should ultimately regulate an organization’s goals and behavior (the customer). Yet this approach to defining the mission of schools by consumer preference stands in stark contrast with a long philosophical tradition 76 The Ideology of Education surrounding public education. At least since the Founding generation, public schools have been justified with a commonwealth vision—they are repositories and replicators of democratic values, and as such should be oriented towards the polity and not the...