More than ten years ago, in what now seems like another life, I lived and studied in the former Soviet Union. I was an exchange student in Krasnodar, Russia, not far from Ukraine and Georgia. Krasnodar is the heartland of the “red belt,” where nostalgia for the Communist era still runs high – despite all the dysfunction caused by that system, especially in its death throes in the 1980s and 90s.
More democracy, not less, is what this movement is about.
Given my own experiences, I read Deborah Meier’s recent column comparing today’s education reformers in America to Boris Yeltsin (of all people!) with some trepidation. Meier is right that well-connected “new Russians” did a bang-up job buying state-owned property for a song in the 90s (really stealing it), creating billionaires overnight while leaving most ordinary citizens impoverished. She’s wrong, however, in thinking that “the people” ever controlled that property in the Soviet era, or that oligarchs and ed reformers both “smell property like a beast after prey.”
Despite Meier’s claims about Yeltsin doing away with “inconvenient” ownership of the state’s wealth by “the people,” wealth in the USSR was owned and controlled (in fact, if not in name) by the nomenklatura who ran industry, agriculture, and education for the socialist state. It goes without saying that party officials didn’t suffer from the food shortages that hit Russia as late as 1990; “the people” did. To the extent that ordinary Russians got their hands on the finer things in life (fine food and clothes, televisions, etc.) it was often through connections in the West. A joke from the late Brezhnev era has the Soviet premier stopping at a Moscow apartment to see how ordinary people are living under his rule. He knocks on the door and tells the little boy who answers that he (Brezhnev) is responsible for all the new creature comforts they enjoy. The boy turns away, excited, to announce to his parents that Uncle Mitya from America has arrived to visit!
That history lesson aside, Meier’s suggestion that education reformers “smell property like a beast after prey” in their efforts to improve America’s schools and provide more choices to parents is very troubling. Most of us, I suspect, agree with her that parents deserve more control over their children’s schooling. That’s why school choice (and funding to support it!) is so central to the agendas of many reform organizations. It’s not as if the Gates and Walton foundations aspire to own the charter schools they invest in; on the contrary, meaningful representation of parents on boards and serious responsiveness to the needs of families are key priorities of the private philanthropists who support choice. More democracy, not less, is what this movement is about.
We agree on one thing: Nostalgia for the past (Soviet or otherwise) is not going to get us anywhere. Looking forward, Meier might find more friends on this side of the wall than she expected.
