Editor’s Welcome to Volume 13: Can We Do Better than “Professional” Bureaucracy?

“Two men say they’re Jesus. One of them must be wrong.”

from Dire Straits’ Industrial Disease

In their classic Governing Public Organizations, Karen Hult and Charles Walcott (1990) show that though modern U.S. government agencies nearly always adopt bureaucratic structures, the nature of public sector work only sometimes suits conventional bureaucracy. Bureaucratic organization structures work reasonably well when agencies have stable, broadly agreed-upon goals and highly certain means of achieving said goals, say as regards processing passports or printing currency. By its nature, such work matches the chief characteristics of bureaucracy, clear jurisdiction, division of labor, rules and routines, formal merit systems assuring expertise, and impersonality. It would be horrendously inefficient to reinvent currency printing with each new run; horribly inequitable to process individual passport requests individually. After all, there are reasons why Max Weber developed the concept of bureaucracy in the first place.

Democratic theorists of widely varying stripes including traditional machine politicians (Riordan, 2001) and modern pluralist theorists (Bearfield, 2009; Maranto, 1998; Ostrom, 1974) have questioned the efficiency, effectiveness, and representativeness of expert bureaucracies. Yet thinkers going back at least to Weber and to then Princeton Professor Woodrow Wilson (Page, 1985; Wilson, 1968) countered that democracy could thrive by employing bureaucratic tools developed by business to more efficiently conduct public business. In the U.S. government, a relatively few political appointees command armies of expert career officials, the vast majority of whom carry out the lawful dictates of their political bosses. That said, agencies with more controversial missions have relatively more political appointees. Career executives in defense agencies or technical agencies like the Centers for Disease Control may spend decades without meeting a single presidential political appointee, whereas in controversial agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) political appointees serve everywhere, even at relatively low levels (Maranto, 2005). This makes sense: the controversial and often conflicting goals of organizations like EPA mean that Democrats and Republicans seek to reorient agency missions in ways unlike, say, Pentagon defenses against cyber-attacks.

So what does this have to do with schools? As one who serves on a school board and spends considerable time in public schools and at venues like American Educational Research Association, bureaucracy seems the very warp and woof of public education. Public school systems are very hierarchical, with teachers viewed as factory workers, reflecting the best of 1910 business management thought, in which male principals and superintendents oversee female teachers who lack status and discretion (Maranto, Carroll, Cheng, & Teodoro, 2018; Rousemaniere, 2013). Indeed, official training urges school board members to limit contact with teachers as “outside the chain of command.” Seemingly, school board members should evaluate school system leaders based on the data provided by those same leaders. This resembles democratic centralism more than pluralism (Ostrom, 1974).

Further, traditional public school staff have numerous titles and certifications, near religious dedication to jurisdictional lines, and ubiquitous educational leadership doctors, each of whom insists on being called doctor, even if the degree required a mere two years of part-time work. This reflects that school systems often require doctorates or specialist degrees of one kind or another for advancement but cannot control the rigor of those degrees; accordingly, graduate programs compete on bases of convenience and price rather than quality. Similarly, school boards and like actors never question certification systems for teaching and many nonteaching posts, even though as Stotsky (2015) details, most states set certification requirements at junior high knowledge levels. Notably, the elite private schools attended by Barack Obama, his daughters, Chelsea Clinton, Al Gore, the two presidents Bush, John Kerry, and John McCain do not even consider certification when hiring new teachers (Maranto, 2018). Yet my own school district has eschewed hiring teachers who graduated from competitive colleges and universities but underwent alternative certification, only relenting when innovative insiders called in favors. (My daughter had the good fortune to take algebra from one of those alt-cert teachers and finished among the state finalists in a math competition as a result.)

Terry Moe (2011) portrays education certification systems as “phony professionalism” rather than actual demonstrations of knowledge, skills, and abilities as in professions like law and accounting. Whatever their ultimate purpose, existing certification systems limit the market for teachers and other professionals and create barriers to teachers joining administration, increasing the social distance between school leaders and teachers. Systems also tend to remove much of the judgment in hiring, taking away a key lever for school improvement. This fails to improve leadership (Hess, 2013) but does make it more difficult for women to enjoy career advancement (Maranto et al., 2018). Further, some school staff use certification systems, specialized languages, and titles like “doctor” to intimidate parents, teachers, and administrators seeking input on student services (e.g., Valle, 2009) or to reallocate resources (Levenson, 2012).

Excessive bureaucratization has at least three other impacts. First, as seen in current efforts to increase the numbers of counselors in schools and micromanage their schedules from the state capital to show that state government cares about school violence (Walkenhorst, 2019), we have made school staffing patterns more complex. Today’s elementary schools have counselors, school psychologists, social workers, English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers, special education teachers, and a range of other specialists that barely existed a half-century ago—all governed by laws limiting their ability to share information about students. The ironic result is that an individual professional may see a part of a child, not the whole child and certainly not the whole family. This fits the Weberian conceptualization keeping schooling impersonal, avoiding emotional involvement with students. It does not serve children however, nor make the lives of educators more meaningful. It also contrasts schooling in certain other nation-states, and in the better private and charter schools. Relatedly, the graded school, itself an accident of history rather than design (Hess, 2010), means that each year the relationships between teachers and pupils are severed and must start anew, something we would never do in grownup workplaces.

Second, the very complexity of the administrative bureaucracy makes it easy for insiders to maximize their power, sometimes for purposes of waste, fraud, or abuse (Maranto, 2019; Segal, 2004). This brings up an interesting point. Rick Hess (2013) claims that regarding inefficiency and outright fraud, most school systems resemble Al Capone’s Chicago: “everybody knows where the booze is” but no one wants to take on Capone. I am not so sure. For school board members, information asymmetries in even medium-sized districts are such that unless they frequently seek information from street level bureaucrats (teachers) and clients (parents), sources outside the chain of command, board members are in fact unlikely to find out where the booze is (Downs, 1967; Maeroff, 2010). Last year, after a 3-month process, the traditional public school board I serve on terminated our superintendent due to unprofessional actions presenting clear contract violations. No one on the school board saw this coming. That said, having good relations with many teachers and with their union leadership, I received advance warning of the situation. Teachers knew about the issues long before school board members. Their warnings got me to research how to hold officials accountable while honoring the ethical and legal processes respecting the rights of all parties.

As Ouchi (2009) argues, one reason for school choice is that school-level actors like parents and teachers have street-level knowledge of school operations difficult to tease out in official metrics. When parents or teachers seek to transfer out, this says much about building climate. Climate surveys can help fill the information void but may well be a distant second as metrics go.

There is a third problem with our attempts to rule by bureaucratic expertise, one discussed two decades ago in Rick Hess’s 1999 Spinning Wheels, and more briefly, by Dire Straits in Industrial Disease. In education, in contrast to medicine, different “experts” advocate markedly different “expert” policies. Educational leaders and consultants often invoke their “expertise” to avoid answering basic questions and insist that teachers and parents who raise questions don’t really care about “all” kids. Essentially, such educational “leaders” claim to be Jesus; by implication, skeptics are satanic. This happened recently in our district, with an administrator attempting to undo his predecessor’s (successful) innovations, freezing when teachers and parents asked basic questions about the new schemes, and insisting that anyone who cared about kids would support the plan to make this school just like his prior school (which performs worse on nearly all measures). One of the joys of serving on school board is the ability to point out this sort of thing without fearing that my children will face repercussions.

Yet as the later Rick Hess (2017) writes, in education Dire Straits has it wrong. Policies and practices which help the unique staff and students in school A may well fail with the distinct cohorts across town in school B. In education, two Ed.D.s say they are Jesus, and both of them could be right, depending on the time, place, and context.

Generally, we would all be better off if no mortals aspired to be Jesus in the first place, if we acknowledged that rather than seeking the one best way to do education, different strokes may indeed work for different folks; thus, questioning ordained policies does not make one disloyal, much less satanic. Not quite parenthetically, nationally, 53% of male principals and a higher percentage of male superintendents are former coaches. Teachers who raise questions, particularly female teachers, often pay a penalty because in most educational leadership cultures, the coach finds it difficult to accept a critique from the wide receiver (Maranto et al., 2018). Ex-coaches tend to value subordinates with compliance, not brilliance.

A case for pluralism

The hunt for the one best professional practice seems doomed, given the rich local variation among kids, teachers, and parents. Yet the training of school board members and school administrators remains wedded to expert singularity, empowering administrators to claim a (false) authoritativeness. Generally, school boards and superintendents are comfortable with predictable, hierarchical relationships, not with free-flowing pluralistic interactions involving staff and parents, understanding that different approaches could fit different staff and students. Perhaps training in political science, the most pluralistic of the social sciences, would help (Ceaser & Maranto, 2009; see also Ostrom, 1974), but no one displays much interest in that. Anyway, if we ditch the early 20^th-century progressive models of expertise, what comes next? Free marketers like my esteemed predecessor as editor, John Merrifield, and his former protégé Corey DeAngelis, have a ready answer: free markets. Similarly, Hult and Walcott (1990), who are hardly libertarians, argue that when actors contest means and ends, markets may allow social experimentation and foster peaceful coexistence.

Moreover, a rising tide of markets need not end professionalism: indeed, markets could strengthen professionalism. In their innovative “Professionalism 2.0: The Case for Plural Professionalism in Education,” Jal Mehta and Steven Teles (2014) remind us that in professions like architecture and psychotherapy, different clients and practitioners embrace different definitions of professionalism. Unlike setting bones, there are many distinct ways to educate students: Montessori and No Excuses schools put children first and demand hard-working, honest staff—but have completely different means of classroom management, and typically have different governance, with Montessori more democratic. Accordingly, the authors call for different certification schemes for different types of schools and teachers, chosen by parents. Just as reasonable clients might select Rogerian therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, so too might rational parents select a Montessori school or a No Excuses school (or one of each for different children) to fit individual needs, and build lasting relationships between children and teachers. Generally, as the pioneering work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2012) suggests, humans have inherent yearnings for authoritative leadership, even though in the real-world authorities may quickly devolve into authoritarians. Perhaps something like the Mehta/Teles plural professionalism, coupled with markets, would enable institutional authority, while checking that authority through exit (market) options.

Having called for pluralistic policy making and pluralistic professionalism, I might also note the Lukianoff and Haidt (2018) call for a pluralistic society, and in particular for pluralism in the ivory tower. The authors warn against the common and wholly unproven mantra that exposure to uncomfortable ideas is bad for us. Rather, the wisdom of the ancients and modern psychological research suggest that individuals and whole systems function in better, more flexible, happier ways when exposed to rather than protected from controversial ideas. This is nowhere more true than in academic settings. Along these lines, I am pleased to report that the Journal of School Choice, and its annual conference, hold considerable ideological diversity as regards school choice (and other matters), something not always the norm in academic settings.

Meanwhile, back at the journal

Here at the Journal of School Choice, we are maintaining a roughly 40% acceptance rate, Scimago Journal Rank impact factor of .4, and H Index of 10, not where I had hoped starting a 5th year as editor, but acceptable. With the help of JSC’s editorial board, consulting editors, former editorial assistant M. Danish (Dany) Shakeel (now at Harvard), and current editorial assistant Angela Watson, we have kept nearly all review times under 3 months for new manuscripts. We have had success in featuring a sound mix of quantitative and qualitative pieces, and featuring more (though still not enough) work from outside North America. Volume 12 included a special issue on school choice and religion, and another featuring the top papers from our annual conference. A year ago, a JSC special issue on home education was released as a book edited by me and Debra Bell, Homeschooling in the 21st Century: Research and Prospects. More recently, Patrick Wolf produced a second book arising from a special issue, School Choice: Separating Fact from Fiction. Dany Shakeel and I now plan a special issue on school choice and rural education. See the call for manuscripts in the following pages. Also feel free to suggest your ideas for special issues.

I will end the introduction to Volume 13 with two shout-outs. New JSC book review editor Eric Wearne is doing fine work. Please contact Eric ([email protected]) with your ideas for book reviews. My final thanks belong to one of the most pluralistic intellectuals I know, Rodrigo Queiroz e Melo, who just finished hosting our amazing annual conference in Lisbon – Obrigado! With that, Volume 13 awaits.