Election post-mortems typically take three forms: congratulations to the winner for their success and efforts to understand what caused it; soul-searching among the losers; and prognostications by pundits about the legislative and policy agendas that await the new Congress, reconfigured state legislatures, governors, etc. In education as in a hundred other policy domains, expect a blizzard of forecasts about which bills and proposals can get enacted at municipal, state and federal levels in light of the political lineups that changed on Tuesday.
Before that blizzard engulfs us, however, please pause and take a deep breath. Consider the possibility that we already have too much state and federal education legislation and most of it isn't working. Consider the fate of a nation where lawmakers issue orders but nothing actually changes, where elaborate statutes set lofty goals that in reality few will attain. In such a nation, what is gained by more legislating?
The world abounds in countries where people ignore their governments and go about their business with scant regard for the law. Some are scary lands of violence, chaos and misery. Others are lovely places - Italy comes to mind - where people behave decently, lead good lives and raise their families in reasonable comfort and safety, but where innumerable government laws and rules are honored in the breach. Much of the economy is underground. Permits depend on whom you know. Enforcement of everything is spotty and unpredictable. Taxes get paid sometimes. Regulations get winked at.
The United States celebrates the rule of law and, overall, we've done a decent job of living by it. There are troublesome exceptions (drug abuse, tax compliance, speed limits) but we're generally a law-abiding lot, capable of outrage when someone - a lone sniper, a giant corporation - breaks the rules. Our respect for laws, however, is linked to not having too many of them and not letting them intrude too deeply into our lives and institutions. It's one thing to deter people from harming or gypping others and to provide for the common defense. It's a very different matter when lawmakers seek to change our behavior, tell us what to aspire to, dictate where we live, how we raise our children or run our schools.
In recent decades, primary-secondary education has come to illustrate government's proclivity to overreach. States now tell teachers what to teach. Large bureaucracies control whom principals may hire for their classrooms, what to pay them and whether they can be fired. Other government units decree the training that colleges must supply to future teachers and the textbooks to be used in 5th grade. Congress enacts thousand-page statutes that spell out in detail the procedures a school must use to meet the needs of a disabled child, the ways a state must track pupil achievement and the interventions that a district has to make when its schools falter.
The intentions are laudable. Americans aren't satisfied with the academic achievement of our children. As a result, state and federal governments have sought to take action to solve the problem. So laws proliferate, regulations multiply, red tape coils and bureaucracies bulge. Referenda multiply, too, seeking through "direct democracy" to achieve complex policy ends that legislators can't or won't embrace. (Tuesday evening, as Jeb Bush was getting re-elected to the Florida statehouse, that state's voters also approved constitutional amendments to reduce class size and establish universal pre-school. Bay State voters sought to undo bilingual education.)
There's just one problem: little of it is working. Not many schools meet state academic standards (and the others seem to linger forever on the "failure" list.) National education goals don't get attained. When too few "certified" teachers are available, schools hire anyone they can. Local districts disregard statutes admonishing them to end "social promotion" and go right on advancing kids who fall short of the state's standards. (This has been an acute problem in Florida.) Even compulsory attendance laws are scorned, as witness our millions of dropouts and the many schools whose attendance is far below their enrollments. (15,000 youngsters cut school in Philadelphia on an average day.) State law says that parents whose children don't come to class are guilty of a misdemeanor. Yet nothing happens.
Most states still have not complied with the big 1994 federal ESEA revision, much less the dictates of last year's "No Child Left Behind" act. Rather than organizing themselves to attain the ambitious academic goals that the new law mandates, several states have already eased their standards. They're working on ways to foil the rule that says every child must have a "highly qualified" teacher. And the new federal mandate - supposedly in effect right now - that districts must provide choices for youngsters stuck in "failing" schools has been widely ignored.
What happens to a country where government passes ambitious, complex, far-reaching laws and referenda but nothing changes? First we see a lot of jawboning and finger pointing. Then, at least in education, after five or eight years they pass another law, ostensibly fixing the errors of the last one. Yet again little changes. Money gets spent, sure. Rules get made. Forms get filled out. Bureaucrats keep busy. But not much happens on the ground. Few kids learn more. They don't even attend more. And teachers and principals gradually adopt the attitude that "This, too, shall pass. Wait a bit and they'll try something else. They'll change the plan again." In other words, we lose respect for the law itself.
There are rare, partial exceptions. The 1954 Brown decision eventually ended de jure segregation in the public schools, although this took many years, a relentless judiciary and the deployment of troops and marshals. The 1975 law saying that handicapped youngsters must get a "free, appropriate public education" has also gained traction, though at enormous cost in dollars and red tape. Neither of those measures, however, led to satisfactory achievement, either for minority youngsters or for many with disabilities. It turns out to be far easier to comply with the formal requirements of a law than with its spirit.
As the election post mortems festoon themselves across your computer screen and clutter your inbox, therefore, as governors and presidents prepare their "state of the state" and "state of the union" addresses, as changed legislatures and reconfigured Congressional committees work out their agendas for next year, and as pundits beyond counting predict what bills will pass and which policies may finally be adopted, consider the possibility that less is more. That we don't need a lot more legislating, at least not the kind that fruitlessly seeks to alter our behavior or put government in charge of improving us. We should covet Italy's food, its art and its music, but not its amused contempt for laws and lawmakers. If we had fewer laws, perhaps we'd be more apt to heed them. In education, for starters, we might try lightening up some heavy-handed statutes and liberating educators and parents to make more of their own decisions.
