Covid, Capitol Insurrection, And (A Lack Of) Education—Time For E.D. Hirsch?

Two men say they’re Jesus—one of them must be wrong.

from Dire Straits’ Industrial Disease

Covid and Schools

It goes without saying that 2020 will go down as the year of Covid. As detailed in the fall 2020 Covid special section of the Journal of School Choice, school systems all over the world reacted to this exogenous shock in varied ways, with different parents, educators, schools, communities, and polities choosing different approaches based more on resources and values than local infection conditions. Those who valued educational achievement and equity more, as opposed to merely talking about them, were more likely to keep physical schools open, albeit with precautions.

Policy variability both reflected and reinforced conflict. As psychologists remind us, humans crave certainty: we seek authority, either of heaven or earth, and likely for evolutionary reasons ostracize apostates (Haidt, 2012). Yesterday’s authorities were priests or shamans; today’s authorities are experts. Yet experts are human, not divine. Different experts have different specializations, which influence and are influenced by their interests and ideologies, leading to different “expert” recommendations. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, with all humankind at risk, U.S. Air Force generals pushed to bomb Cuba while Navy admirals wanted to blockade it, each prioritizing organization missions over national interests. Today, infectious disease experts want maximal lockdowns until effective vaccines are distributed; those more concerned about mental health and economic well-being want normal life to return quickly, albeit with masks. Educated decision-making thus should not blindly follow one or another set of experts, however credentialed, but rather consider various expert opinions and use judgment (Maranto, 2020b; Tetlock & Gardner, 2015). Similarly, pluralistic democracies negotiate differences, rather than relying on either brute force or technocracy to resolve them (Crick, 1982).

The undesirability of brute force in resolving disputes, whether physical violence as in Capitol insurrections or terminating people from their jobs as often happens in academia and media (Downs, 2020; Taibbi, 2020), should seem obvious. Technocracy has less obvious but still daunting flaws. With all due respect to Dire Straits, sometimes each Jesus is wrong, and there are often more than two of them. Within and across disciplines, experts will argue for years about what would have been the best pandemic responses. This is inevitable since much like education outcomes, Covid death rates seem only somewhat related to public policies. To a greater degree they reflect other national or regional variables, age distributions, general health, wealth, interaction norms, and population densities. Neither President Trump nor many other politicians have done well explaining the tradeoffs inherent to the pandemic. In part this reflects a social media driven culture (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018). Yet it may also represent the norms of Ivy League educated political classes which substitute networking and branding for leadership, and which further lack both historical knowledge and applied experience outside their narrow class boundaries (Dashan, 2019; Deresiewicz, 2014; Wood, Ricketts, Thorne & Balch, 2011).

Education and the Constitution

In 2021 most American political leaders still lack the depth to grasp and explain the tradeoffs inherent to fighting a pandemic without eroding society. Many, most notably the Ivy League educated President Trump (Penn, class of ’68), further lack the constitutional literacy to understand why Americans honor the peaceful transfer of power. We have over the past century massively increased years of schooling and numbers of degrees, without strengthening either knowledge or wisdom among either elites or voters. This is the sort of failure which cries out for congressional hearings. Luckily, we do not need them, for E.D. Hirsch (1996, 2009) still walks among us. Hirsch makes a powerful case that the gradual dumbing down of the country shows the long-term impacts of the anti-intellectual ideologies dominating the academic field of Education. How did this happen?

The year 1918 has trended recently owing to the horrendous flu pandemic starting that year and killing its way into 1920, taking the lives of tens of millions globally and roughly one in 150 Americans of all ages. (In contrast, Covid mainly kills those over 70.) 1918 deserves infamy for another reason, as the year the National Education Association, then an administrator’s organization, issued the Cardinal Principals of Secondary Education. Over time, the Principles and the education professors and administrators who supported them reoriented public schooling from academic missions (increasing student knowledge) to social efficiency missions (increasing conformity). As various historical treatments show, to distinguish themselves from other academics, Education professors emphasized processes of learning rather than the content learned. Seeing knowledge as lacking inherent value, Education professors sought to limit content to what students might need in industrial jobs, for social efficiency. As Labaree (2004, p. 109) observed, this offered “a straightforward prescription for diluting academic content.” Most notably, the nascent field of educational leadership eschewed content entirely, instead focusing on such weighty matters as the proper ratio of janitors to floor space. This represented the best of 1910 era business thinking. Small, often academically oriented schools run by women over time morphed into educational factories where men managed, women taught, and children were processed by age. In both teachers and leaders, the Cardinal Principles prioritized compliance over intelligence. Experts would tell others what they needed to know, and those holding graduate degrees in education by dint of degrees, titles, and maleness became experts, even if their actual knowledge was limited, and their ideas questionable (Hirsch, 1996, 2009; Maranto, 2020a; Maranto & Wai, 2020). I see this anti-academic ideology often in fieldwork, as when an award winning public school principal declared that the most exciting thing about his school was not students learning math, science, great literature, or the U.S. Constitution, but rather “developing their own brand on social media.” He employed these values in teacher hiring, preferring teachers with less content knowledge and more deference to authority. (The power to hire is the power to control.) Of course, if branding is the most important criterion, then Donald Trump, who declared bankruptcy six times, is a great businessman who now defends the Constitution.

One can draw a straight line from the Cardinal Principles to current attacks of both right and left on American constitutional traditions. In the century since 1918 the full implementation of the Principles has left voters, and increasingly elites without the basic knowledge of the U.S. Constitution and any number of other matters needed to discern fact from fiction on a wide range of issues, left and right. Trump’s claims of election fraud and the New York Times claims that the U.S. was founded primarily to preserve slavery, are factually flawed in myriad ways. Yet without an informed elite and mass public, we suffer the untender mercies of demagogues and twitter mobs.

Professors spend relatively more time detailing the dangers to pluralism from a nationalist and sometimes reactionary mass public (Applebaum, 2020; Hofstadter, 1964). As the Capitol Hill home invasion makes clear, these threats are real. Yet on a day to day basis comparable dangers may come from the postmodern left and its bureaucratic allies, who no longer respect basic constitutional rights like freedom of speech, and have used economic, legal, and social power to intimidate and at times terminate dissenters (Dashan, 201; Downs, 2020; Melnick, 2018). Postmodernists see such values as the rule of law and such processes as science as epitomizing nefarious Western traditions. Regarding matters such as the integrity of democratic institutions, one irony is that while the illiberal right often wins elections, it is the illiberal left which has a far stronger presence in media and academia (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018; Taibbi, 2020; Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2020), with the power to fire critics. An additional irony is that postmodern rejection by scholars like Reimann and Rossi (2021) of norms like free speech and civilian control of the military would, if adopted, completely unshackle wannabe caudillos like Maduro or Trump.

As Hirsch (1996, 2009) shows, teaching knowledge enables rationality, understanding how facts fit together and how we fit into our society and polity. Education, rather than mere years of schooling, can create citizens following the rule of law, inoculated against the primal emotional appeals of mob rule. Ignorance leaves citizens tempted by the enticements of would-be authoritarians or totalitarians like social media activists employing symbols against enemies at home or abroad. In Hirsch’s terms, whatever their formal degrees, both hard core Trumpers and social justice warriors seem uneducated. One hopes that in this time, with evidence of constitutional illiteracy quite evident, policymakers might push educators to teach elements of Hirsch’s Core Knowledge. Sensible voices like Journal of School Choice editorial board member Rick Hess (2021) have called for such approaches. As Rick writes, rightist violence in the nation’s capital and leftist violence elsewhere are enabled by ignorance. Only a quarter of Americans can name the three branches of government, and further:

… the Rand Corporation conducted a national survey of social studies teachers and found that barely half thought it essential that students understand concepts like the separation of powers or checks and balances … Prominent voices in education and academe have given every indication that they are more interested in telling students why American institutions are fundamentally corrupt than in teaching students why these institutions are an inheritance to be safeguarded.

For ideological reasons, the American Educational Research Association is incapable of addressing this issue. Ideally, policymakers of each political party might fill the void, mandating constitutional literacy. This should be E.D. Hirsch’s moment, though I see little evidence of it.

Meantime, back at the Journal of School Choice

Here at the Journal of School Choice, work continues, though Covid has made everything 30% less efficient. I am pleased that our turnaround time for manuscripts remains quick, nearly always under three months from submission to decision for both new and revised manuscripts. One wishes this was the industry standard. We reject most manuscripts but take the time to advise authors on next steps, so that some papers which fail to make the cut here later appear elsewhere.

Our journal impact factor is .74, still modest, but more than five times that of a few years back, with a current H-Index of 12. In 2015 we struggled to obtain content that could pass peer review; we now have a two-issue backlog for the print edition. We continue to have success offering a range of quantitative and qualitative work, though we would like more non-USA content: by topic, our host nation still accounts for roughly five of six articles. We have recently added new editorial board members from the Netherlands, India, Hungary, and Italy to help address this. For help running peer review, in particular, I remain grateful to my colleagues at the University of Arkansas, to the consulting editors, the editorial board, Dany Shakeel, and our intrepid book review editor Eric Wearne ([email protected]). Please send Eric your works to review, and volunteer to review for him.

Tangentially related to the current unrest but planned long ago, we open Volume 15 with a special issue on populism and school choice, with Harvard’s M. Danish Shakeel serving as lead editor. Later in 2021 we will likely, as usual, feature a special section on the best papers of the International School Choice and Reform Conference 2021, which alas must be held online. We look forward to the in-person ISCRC-2022 in Ireland. Currently, we plan to have our next special issue in early 2023, on family structure and schooling. See the next page for initial details.

I will end on a personal note. Despite, or perhaps due to support from the teacher union and the local newspaper—quite unlike my first election—last March I lost reelection to school board. Fortunately, I genuinely like my successor, and am delighted she has to deal with Covid questions and I do not. I was initially disappointed, but two days after the election a fellow reformer who had also worked in local public schools pointed out that I no longer was responsible for fixing things, to scheme each week about which battles to fight and how to fight them. A huge weight departed; my blood pressure has felt great ever since. That said I am glad I served and miss my fellow board members and many teachers and leaders. I gained respect for those serving on school boards and in top school leadership posts. Most are good people—we just disagree about whether public schools need reform. Generally, it is far harder to reform schools than to write about reforming schools, work I now return to. I believe I made a difference, however, on matters including protecting our award winning Advanced Placement program from likely evisceration, helping settle a multimillion dollar Title IX lawsuit by getting the two sides to meet, delaying a massive schedule change for a year to allow teacher input, protecting vice principals from arbitrary mass transfers, and getting us to hire math teachers who know math (long story). Every school board needs at least one reformer. I also helped hire and then terminate a superintendent (very long story). My local school district has lived interesting times.

With that, enjoy the start of Volume 15.