In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

10. Asking a New Question, Getting New Answers:Designing Solutions

[ 172 ] 10Asking a New Question, Getting New Answers: Designing Solutions The last chapter was about the evaluation of policy when the pursuit of happiness is the criterion. This chapter is about the design of solutions . The theme is that the conventional paradigm for designing social programs doesn’t work very well, and that using the pursuit of happiness as a backdrop for seeking solutions is more productive. To make this point, I am going to slow the pace, using an extended example involving a single social issue (education) that stretches through this chapter and the next. I devote so much time to a single issue for an important reason. I favor a way of approaching social problems—involving education , but also crime, racism, poverty, welfare dependence, drugs, and the rest—that is radically different from the approach that currently dominates. Such advocacy must deal with a curious asymmetry: In designing conventional social programs, the reasons why the program should work are obvious (“If people have no job skills, of course a job-training program will help”) and the reasons why it won’t are subtle. Approaches that assume a limited role for government are in precisely the opposite fix: The reasons why the solution won’t work seem obvious (“There’s no plan; you’re just assuming people will do the right thing on their own”) and the reasons why it might work are subtle. Thinking about them requires a leisurely spinning-out. And that is the purpose of this extended example: not to persuade you to support any particular reforms in education, but to provide an elaborated example of a different way of thinking about a familiar problem. It introduces motifs that I hope you will find to be broadly applicable. asking a new question: designing solutions [ 173 ] For the illustration, I have tried to pick a problem in the middle range: critical, but not catastrophic; a live political issue, but not rabidly partisan; difficult, but not so difficult that no one has any ideas for solutions. I have also sought a problem that will be relevant to the personal concerns of many readers. My choice has been the general problem of deficiencies in public education—specifically, an aspect of it that has been much in the news, the need for better teachers. The Teacher Problem In recent years, a considerable portion of the controversy about public education has centered on teachers. There has been anger and unhappiness on both sides. We read in the newspapers that not only do teachers feel they are underpaid, the best ones are voting with their feet and leaving the profession. We also read (and sometimes observe in our own children’s classrooms) that too many teachers joining the profession aren’t very good. Sometimes they don’t know the subject matter. Sometimes they don’t know how to deal with children. Sometimes they are unmotivated. Sometimes they just aren’t smart enough. Social scientists have tools for determining whether such public perceptions are well-founded and have discovered that, indeed, the public is right. Overall, teachers are drawn not just from the average college graduates, which would itself be cause for concern, but from the below average. To take just one indicator (the evidence is extensive , but proving the existence of the problem is not our purpose here), the high-school senior who is planning an education major in college has an SAT-Verbal score that puts him at the 39th percentile of college-bound seniors.1 Then it gets worse: Among college graduates who took the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) intending to major in education during graduate school—in other words, those who will be running the school systems of the future—the GRE-Verbal score put them in the bottom third of new graduate students.2 There are other indicators as well. The turnover statistics reveal that large numbers of well-qualified teachers are leaving the profession. Opinion [ 174 ] toward the best of all possible worlds surveys show widespread teacher dissatisfaction with their profession. A documentable problem exists. So we have the kind of problem that requires a good, hardheaded policy analysis. How are we to put fine teachers into the nation’s classrooms? A Conventional Approach In 1985, the Carnegie Corporation, an entity with a long and distinguished history of involvement in American education, established a task force headed by a panel...