I believe people are generally at their angriest when they feel powerless.
It’s one thing to be unhappy with the current state of your life—heck, we’ve all been there. But it’s entirely different when there’s nothing you can do about it. That causes fury.
My practiced instinct now, when I see a person or a group of people acting out in rage, is to assume that they’ve been dispossessed of something important. I try my best to understand what’s keeping them from exerting an influence on their situation.
You can see this in revolts against brutal despots and in centuries of civil uprisings across the globe when there are food shortages. You can see it in urban unrest when residents can’t fix crime, housing, jobs, law enforcement, or transportation. But you can also see it in an abused child’s explosion of anger—or the uncorked temper of an adult who’s been subjected to a behemoth organization’s purposely unending cavalcade of customer service representatives. In a recent article, I applied this frame to our current politics, likening the dominant story of the 2016 campaign to a riot.
There are countless such examples in education. Think of the parent whose child has been assigned to an unsafe and persistently underperforming school. She lacks the resources to move to another area or pay for private school tuition. She tries to enroll her child in a charter school but loses the lottery because there are too few open seats. So now she has to send her child back to that unsafe, persistently underperforming school. We should expect her rage—she’s in an agonizing situation and lacks the means to change the result.
But the same could be said of the family furious about its generations-old neighborhood high school being closed by district officials they’ve never met. That school might have been troubled, but the community felt that it was theirs. Now it’s being taken away, and all they can do is go to a public hearing and speak for no more than three minutes. Or think of the educators who will now be evaluated based on an algorithm no one seems able to explain; an algorithm created by people they’ve never heard of; an algorithm that’s sophisticated so just trust us. Or the parents who are told to hush up because these new standards crafted by people they don’t know and swiftly adopted by a faraway state board are amazing, you should like them, trust us.
In all of these cases and many more, people aren’t angry just because they didn’t get what they wanted; they’re angry because they feel like they didn’t have a say and now can’t do anything about it. This speaks directly to the wisdom of many of America’s institutions. Free speech gives people the right to speak up and speak out. Democracy gives people the right to self-govern. The separation of powers and federalism ensure that power is widely distributed.
This lens also reveals the dangers of speech codes, the heckler’s veto, organizational homogeneity, and groupthink—all of which inhibit the free exchange of ideas, meaning that some people are silenced. It also reveals the danger of centralizing power in the federal government, executive branch overreach, and overactive courts—all of which can undermine self-determination.
For about a century, American K–12 public education was widely understood to be a local affair. We deferred to neighborhoods, district school boards, and their superintendents. The shortcomings of that approach (e.g., segregation, inequitable spending, widely differing expectations, achievement gaps, stagnant achievement) led to a half-century of power moving to state capitals, courts, and Washington. Though this obviously led to more centralized decision making, it also led to a particular kind of centralized decision-making: faith in “experts” who would downplay the competition of values in favor of technical solutions.
Recently, Paul Peterson wrote of how the Bush and Obama agendas relied on central direction. Jay Greene has been criticizing the technocratic approach of philanthropic and policy reforms. Rick Hess has sounded this alarm for some time, and I’ve tried to point it out. Likeminded observers would generally prefer to empower families over distant “experts.”
This isn’t a particularly profound insight—that there’s an ongoing struggle over where authority should reside. My argument, however, is that we’ve failed to appreciate that anger-cum-powerlessness may be the unavoidable consequence of centralizing our K–12 decisions. Whether it’s the Department of Education dictating the particulars of ESSA implementation, state officials taking over failing districts, federal lawyers intervening in local bathroom policies, or large foundations pushing common solutions, power shifts up and away from parents, practitioners, and their local representatives.
Reformers may decide that some of these shifts in power are necessary or right. But they shouldn’t be surprised when dispossessed local communities react resentfully.