The Agony of Public Education.

• Author: PAYNE, JAMES L.

The tragedy at Columbine High School in Colorado has spurred another round of soul-searching on public education and yet another wave of reform proposals ranging from the hackneyed (more spending) to the whimsical (posting the Ten Commandments). The premise of all this concern is, of course, that public education can be fixed--that if the right changes were made, it could be an effective and esteemed national institution. At first glance, this hope does not seem unreasonable, for public education used to be effective and esteemed. Furthermore, government education appears to be succeeding in other countries: indeed, policy-makers in this country seek to emulate the systems of Japan, France, and Germany. America's troubles seem to be an accident, a running off the rails caused merely by a badly set switch and therefore repairable.

This hope needs to be reexamined. The failures of public education in the United States do not seem to be, at bottom, the result of fixable flaws. To be sure, public education has suffered from its share of inept managers and wrongheaded approaches. But beyond those shortcomings is an enduring problem that is built into the nature of democratically controlled education. This problem is emerging today because only recently has a significant degree of real democratic representation in school governance developed. Therefore, the American system should not be seen as "falling behind" the systems of other countries. It is the leader of a trend, revealing difficulties with public education that will overtake other countries as they catch up to our level of openness and popular control.

The frustrations with public education point up a larger question of political theory: In a fully democratic context, can government manage public services in an effective, confidence-inspiring way? Many modern supporters of government programs automatically assume that it can, but in their zeal they have rushed past an elementary logical gap in the theory of democracy.

Democracy rests on the premise that government is answerable to the people. Officials have no right to take money from citizens by force unless citizens agree to the levy, and officials have no right to spend those funds as they wish. They are obliged to spend tax money as the people want it spent. Jonathan Swift expressed this axiom of modern political theory in 1725 (in connection with English rule over Ireland): "Government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery" (quoted in Neville 1997, 119). Or, as the American revolutionaries said a few generations later, "Taxation without representation is tyranny."

Though highly beneficial from the standpoint of humanizing government and limiting its use of force, taxation with representation has a glaring flaw that the civics books overlook. It is all very well to say that millions of people have the right to be represented in government, but what do you do when they actually show up? What happens when those millions try to crowd into hearing rooms and board meetings? You cannot tell them to go home, that government "by the people" is an unworkable fiction. You have to try to give everyone a say. As a result, real democracy becomes a cockpit, a formula for maximizing conflict over the provision of a public service. As the story of public education shows, this conflict means that the democratic provision of a public service is likely to be both mistrusted and inefficient.

Which Religion Wins?

The remarkable thing about the strife over the public schools in the United States is not that it has occurred, but that it took so long to develop. Education, after all, bears on vital questions of values, religion, morality, and culture. When education is put under the authority of a democratic government, therefore, one creates a struggle of cosmic proportions. Citizens--both parents and taxpayers--have the right and the duty to involve themselves in every aspect of education. They have the right and the duty to form an opinion about, to petition over, and to try to change what subjects are taught, what shall be said about them, what books shall be used, which teachers should be hired, and all the more mundane issues such as school bus routes, cafeteria policies, and dress codes. In theory, a public school should be an ungovernable chaos in which every prejudice, taste, ideology, and religion in the community contends with every other.

For a long time, American education largely escaped such conflict. There were rumblings, such as the Scopes trial in 1925, which dealt with teaching the theory of evolution in public schools, but for the most part politics did not enter the schools in a highly visible way. Principals had almost autocratic powers, and teachers were given great latitude to run their classes as they saw fit. Parents, taxpayers, and even school boards hung back, awed by the authority and expertise of school officials, afraid to "make a stink" by publicly protesting some wrong. In effect, democratic representation was not really working, and as a result the schools got along rather well.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the reserve of parents and taxpayers broke down--sooner in some places than in others, of course, but by the 1960s, most schools had become the political battleground that was their democratic destiny. One of the first conflicts to disrupt the public schools was religion. Up through the 1950s, most schools were incorporating certain watered-down Christian rituals--prayers, Bible reading--as a way of satisfying the sentiments of Christian majorities in their districts. Those practices angered agnostics, atheists, and Jews, who argued that they should not be forced to pay taxes to support religious observances contrary to their feelings. The dispute made its way to the Supreme Court, which sided with the protesters, notably in the cases of Engel v. Vitale (1962) and School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963).

Instead of settling the issue, the Supreme Court's decisions created new points of friction. In effect, they directed administrators to root out all spiritual symbols from their schools: the creche at Christmas time, prayers at graduation, the Bible in the school library. When they played religious policeman, administrators earned the scorn of those who revered the forbidden symbols, but when they tried to preserve this or that religious custom, they became the targets of complaints and legal action.

The problem went deeper than the spat over religious symbols. The effort to purge the schools of any trace of religion, many finally realized, itself amounted to a religion, a creed...