Bureaucracies are Losing: What Does that Mean for Schooling?

The American-led coalition had countless experts with backgrounds pertaining to every part of the mission on their side: people who had done their dissertations on topics like state building, terrorism, military-civilian relations, and gender in the military … The failure in Afghanistan was mind-boggling. Perhaps never in the history of warfare had there been such a resource disparity between two sides, and the US-backed government couldn’t even last through the end of the American withdrawal.

Richard Hanania (2021)

In a remarkable essay, followed by a New York Times commentary, maverick political scientist Hanania (2021) pointed out something at once obvious, yet rarely reported or studied. Credentialed experts, quite literally the globe’s best and brightest, ran the lavish international effort to save Afghanistan from the Taliban for 20 years. The experts staffed large bureaucracies which conducted strategic planning, had well developed policies and procedures, used state of the art measurement, and had sophisticated equipment including weapons which could literally target individuals from the sky. Money was no object. The last Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani, had a Columbia Ph.D. in Anthropology and had himself coauthored a book on fixing failed states. Yet they lost to the Taliban, who “did not have a Western PhD among them.” As the old saying goes, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Hanania offers the analogy of Wernher von Braun losing the moon race to an indigenous shaman, or if I may modify the reference, a Trump-voting auto mechanic. In some respects, the modern world’s loss to the Taliban was even worse. The Taliban held power from 1995–2001, alienating the median Afghan to such an extent that a handful of U.S. troops with air support quickly and easily enlisted locals to depose the regime in winter 2001–2. Afghans wanted the Taliban gone, so much so that most changed sides overnight once it was safe to reveal their true preferences. Over a decade later, as Coburn (2016) detailed in Losing Afghanistan: An obituary of the intervention, the Taliban had not reestablished authority so much as the internationally backed government had lost it. Privately, most Afghans had little use for either side, leaving an opening for the Taliban to return.

So how does this, like our Vietnam debacle (Maranto & Tuchman, 1992) before it, apply to schooling? I see at least four obvious applications which AERA will ignore.

First, most obviously, bureaucracies have ideologies (Downs, 1967), and are only as effective as their ideas. If bureaucratic ideas do not reflect realities, then the models therein are unlikely to work in a stubborn real world. For schooling, particularly regarding efforts to improve equity, models preferred by experts in schools of education have underperformed both scientifically, and pragmatically, for decades (Chall, 2000; Frisby & Maranto, 2021; Hirsch, 2009). Instead, methods devised by street level practitioners reflecting parent needs and values have shown considerable success in difficult work such as schooling in high poverty communities (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 2003). The same could be said for policing in those settings. Schooling and policing innovators have redefined what is possible. Yet regular leaders fail to copy them (Maranto & Wolf, 2013).

Why not learn from success? This suggests a second lesson from Afghanistan. Experts are not disinterested. When forced to choose between organizational loyalty in support of existing practices, SOPs, and budgets; and innovations accomplishing stated missions, experts back the former, for both material and psychological reasons. Over time, bureaucratic recruitment and promotion processes reward conformity supporting norms and budgets, not independent thinking (Downs, 1967). In both schools and the military, the label “not a team player” is roughly equivalent to being called a child-molester. In schooling and policing, the greatest innovations have often come from newcomers and outsiders, not those socialized into existing hierarchical practices. This tends to disempower both outsiders, and street level bureaucrats and parents. As a sidebar, successful innovators are often fired for their achievements, having stirred resentments (Levenson, 2012; Maranto & Wolf, 2013). Quite simply, this means that efforts to leave teachers and parents out of the governing of schools, including curricular decisions, will fail in practice. Even if areas like curricula development and school leadership were rigorous and scientific like civil engineering – and as Hess (2013) and Hirsch (1996) show, they clearly are not – models lacking support from teachers and parents will fail just as surely as our Afghan effort failed without local legitimacy. In schools, and counterinsurgencies, relationships matter.

Of course, self-interest and relationships can promote success rather than safeguard failure. Research consistently indicates that on a range of measurable outcomes homeschooled students taught by parental amateurs do the same as or somewhat outperform other students, who are taught by professionals (works in Maranto & Bell, 2018). No doubt part of this success reflects parental self-interest in the success of their own children; it is rare that education professionals care more about a child than do the parents. Educators have dozens or hundreds of kids and get new ones each year; parents have one or a few kids, usually for keeps. No matter one’s degrees, it helps to have skin in the game, and long-term relationships. Research going back to early in the current pandemic indicates that schools dependent on parental choice, private and charter schools, were more likely to work with parents and maintain structured instruction than were traditional public schools, which depend on political support (Carpenter & Dunn, 2020).

Third, again relatedly, skin in the game often explains a key concept in war, education, policing, and nearly anything else: effort, or as economists abstractly dubbed it, “X-efficiency” (Leibenstein, 1966). While the Taliban might die or suffer exile had they lost, no one in the global coalition missed a paycheck. None will even have black marks in their personnel files. Moreover, since the architects of defeat in Afghanistan occupy key positions in both U.S. political parties and throughout western governments, they can, by virtue of their “expertise” and power, avoid serious discussions of what went wrong. Even in representative institutions like the U.S. Congress, party loyalty sabotages accountability. Four administrations, Democratic and Republican, lost in Afghanistan, so no one has sufficient political incentive (or conscience) to hold hearings on why, to learn from defeat. Likewise, as Maranto and Bradley-Dorsey (2020) argue, neither police unions nor Black Lives Matter activists have shown much interest in promoting police personnel reforms likely to save Black lives, the sort of changes which would have gotten Derek Chauvin terminated long before he murdered George Floyd. As Dunn (2008) shows, education researchers have similarly showed no interest in what went wrong when a federal judge took their advice, and tripled spending in Kansas City schools. Ameliorating problems rarely raises an expert’s grants or political support.

This third matter offers background for a fourth, more serious one. Since at least the Scottish enlightenment, Western civilization has emphasized free inquiry and debate, to self-correct error through reason and exchange. That makes free inquiry vital for academia to seek truth, rather than merely promote orthodoxy. Yet increasingly, on campus and off, expert bureaucracies and their backers have been able to deter debate to safeguard their material and ideological interests (Whittington, 2018). Postmodern approaches increasingly dominant in media and academia now sometimes attack debate and hypothesis testing as “white” behaviors, thus deriding Black excellence in ways reminiscent of traditional white racists. (Who knew Ibram X. Kendi and Jefferson Davis were ideological soulmates?) Increasingly, academics declare their expertise not through reason, but either via position or identity, thus escaping accountability when their empirical predictions fail (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018; Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2020). Strangely, Hanania (2021) argues that the medieval Taliban may have permitted more debate over tactics and thus had more local operational flexibility than our side’s bureaucratic experts!

Regarding debate, not all hope is lost. I am active in Heterodox Academy, and its more radical branch, the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (SOIBS, which sounds diseased), along with my betters like Stephen Pinker, John McWhorter, Lee Jussim, and Sally Satel. I have an associated center, COIBS. My associates will soon we will launch a journal, JOIBS, out of Rutgers. Though our ideals vary, SOIBS people agree that good social research is enabled by free inquiry, ideological diversity, and debate, things we need more of in education. For a great example of respectful and interesting dialogue by intellectual heavyweights, read Hess and Noguera’s (2021) In Search of Common Ground, a book everyone should require for students. In Search of Common Ground is the oddest of creatures, an epistolary education policy book. In 13 brilliant sets of e-mails answering each other’s best arguments, conservative Hess and liberal Noguera tackle topics ranging from the very purpose of schooling to COVID-19. When confronted with idiocies from people on their own side, these intellectuals repeatedly refuse to defend the indefensible. We need far more of this in higher education, k-12 education, and everywhere else.

Unfortunately, La Noue (2019) offers empirical evidence that higher education rarely hosts reasoned debates like these. I know, having tried without success to convince both AERA and the American Political Science Association (APSA) to debate the home education restrictions advocated by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet (2020). To her credit, Bartholet is game to debate opponents, but higher education professional associations lack enthusiasm for such events, to the detriment of us all. (That said, I have a new debate in the works.)

We are at an odd historical juncture, in which many “experts” declare their policies to have succeeded even when they have failed, and then use their positions to avoid criticism and accountability. On the other hand, many populists are so alienated from expertise as to fall prey to conspiracy theories, as on January 6 of 2021, or regarding vaccines. At least in my key area, schooling, inexpert parents and “mere” teachers are developing models seemingly having as much or more success than larger, far better resourced bureaucracies. These are not stories which experts seems able to tell, and that offers a niche for our journal.

Meanwhile, back at the journal

We miss bob fox

In the Journal of School Choice community, we mourn the October passing of our friend and JSC consulting editor Bob Fox, who after a remarkable career as a physicist, at the urging of his spouse, Nina Buchanan, turned to a second career as a highly successful education researcher. His success in two fields reflected Nina’s influence, and Bob’s insatiable curiosity. In their decades together, Bob and Nina visited more than 70 countries.

Bob produced numerous articles, and with Nina, two edited volumes which should be on any education researcher’s bookshelf: Proud to Be Different: Ethnocentric Niche Charter Schools in the U.S., published in 2014, and School Choice: A Handbook for Researchers, Policy Makers, Practitioners, and Journalists, in (2017). The latter is all one need assign in a course on school choice, a marvelous book offering competing chapters from capable, strong willed researchers who disagree. One could spend each week in a course simply weighing contrasting claims about choice. This heterodox edited volume offers a model for how academic work should work, but rarely does work.

Bob combined a physicist’s logic with a sage’s wisdom, and beard, and trademark Hawaiian shirt. He mastered the art of being simultaneously critical and supportive, something few can carry off, always to help others and seek knowledge. With Bob, nothing was off limits; however critical Bob might be, he had the best interests of others at heart. Bob liked ideas, and Bob liked people. In the 1990s Bob served on the State of Hawaii Board of Education, no doubt as a good public servant, but as no team player. As Nina recalls:

One of Bob’s gifts was to recognize talents in his students, friends, and professional colleagues. If Bob spotted someone with potential, he eagerly engaged in conversations, not monologues, asked probing questions and not be content with shallow answers. He would mentor those he found sufficiently worth learning from and teaching and never suffered fools gladly.

My first hint that Bob was sick came in August, when for the first time ever he turned down a request to review an article, because he did not feel well. I wish everyone was so supportive. Bob played a big part in our success, as a bright, broad go-to reviewer, but also as a consigliere on special issues, awards, and of course as a regular master of ceremonies at our annual International School Choice and Reform (ISCRC) conferences, where Nina will remain a mainstay. The ISCRC Distinguished Service Award is quite properly named for Robert Fox and Nina Buchanan. All of us missed Bob this year at ISCRC-2022 in Dublin, where I write this.

The Journal of School Choice keeps getting better

Thanks to Bob, Nina, and others, JSC has improved. Google informs me that our impact factor has risen to a solid 1.33, more than ten times the measure six years back. Not counting special issues, last year we published 23 research articles from submissions, a 37% acceptance rate. Three-quarters of the time, we get decisions to authors within ten weeks. In Volume 15 (2021) we published a sound mix of qualitative and quantitative work, including five articles on charter schools, four on private schools, four on magnet and district-based school choice, and three on home education, with the rest on other education policy topics. Regrettably, only three non-U.S. papers survived peer review, two from India and one from Chile. It is a big world out there, and we will explore more of it in Volume 16, having already accepted manuscripts from Israel (this issue), Russia, Quebec, and Qatar.

Generally, there is much the world can teach the U.S. about school choice. Accordingly, Tommaso Agasisti of Politecnico di Milano, Rodrigo Queiroz e Melo of Universidade Católica Portuguesa, and I will edit a special issue on School Choice in Europe, where most countries have some form of publicly funded private school choice. See the next section for details. We hope School Choice in Europe will eventually become an affordable book, like our earlier special issue Educating Believers: Religion and school choice, just out in paperback (Maranto & Shakeel, 2021).

For now, Dany Shakeel and I are delaying the JSC special issue on family change and education, for reasons aluded to above. In the current climate, topics related to family structure seem too politically incorrect to attract submissions. This is one of many examples in which restricting free inquiry limits our ability to tackle social problems. We hope this changes next year. Stay tuned.

I must conclude by thanking all my helpers on the JSC masthead, but perhaps none more than our indefatigable book review editor, Eric Wearne ([email protected]). Please continue to send Eric your books to review and offer to review those of others.

With that, Volume 16 awaits.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).