This post is my reflection on a classic piece by my former advisor, Michael Katz. It’s a chapter in Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools called “Alternative Proposals for American Education: The Nineteenth Century.” Here’s a link to a PDF of the chapter.
The core argument is this. In American politics of education in the 19th century, there were four competing models of how schools could be organized and governed. Katz calls them paternalistic voluntarism, democratic localism, corporate voluntarism, and incipient bureaucracy. By the end of the century, the bureaucratic model won out and ever since it has constituted the way public school systems operate. But at the time, this outcome was by no means obvious to the participants in the debate.
At one level, this analysis provides an important lesson in the role of contingency in the process of institutional development. Historical outcomes are never predetermined. Instead they’re the result of complex social interactions in which contingency plays a major role. That is, a particular outcome depends on the interplay of multiple contingent factors.
At another level, his analysis unpacks the particular social values and educational visions that are embedded within each of these organizational forms for schooling.
In addition, the models Katz shows here never really went away. Bureaucracy became the norm for school organization, but the other forms persisted, in public school systems, in other forms of modern schooling, and in educational policies.
This is a piece I often used in class, and I’m drawing on class slides in the discussion that follows.
First, consider the characteristics of each model:
- Paternalistic voluntarism
- Pauper school associations as the model (which preceded public schools)
- This is a top-down organization: we educate you
- Elite amateurs ran the organization
- Democratic localism
- The small- town district school as the model
- Purely public in control and funding, governed by an elected board of lay people: we educate ourselves
- Anti-professional, anti-intellectual, reflecting local values
- Corporate voluntarism
- Private colleges and academies as the model
- Independent, local, adaptable; on the border between public and private
- Funded by student tuition and donations
- Flexible, anti-democratic
- Owned and operated by an elite board of directors
- Incipient bureaucracy
- An interesting composite of the others
- As with PV, it’s a top down model with elite administration
- As with CV, it provides some autonomy from democratic control
- But as with DL, it answers to an elected board, which exerts formal control
Questions to consider:
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- How have paternalistic voluntarism, corporate voluntarism, and democratic localism persisted in modern schooling?
- What difference does this make in how we think about schools?
Consider how all of these forms have persisted in the present day:
- Paternalistic voluntarism
- Means tests for educational benefits (Chapter I)
- School reformer’s emphasis on the education of Other People’s Children (e.g., no excuses charter schools)
- Teach For America
- Corporate voluntarism
- Private colleges and private schools continue this model
- Democratic localism
- Decentralized control of schools at the district level — 15,000 schools districts that hire teachers, build schools, and operate the system
- Elected local school boards
- Incipient bureaucracy
- Still the most visible element of the current structure of schooling
Katz sees democratic localism as the good guy, bureaucracy as the bad guy
- Is this true? Consider the downsides of democratic localism
- Parochialism, racism, restricted opportunity, weak academics
- Desegregation of schools relied on federal power to override the preferences of local school boards
- Katz is critical of ed bureaucracy from the left, a reflection of when he published the book (1971)
- But the right has more recently developed a critique of ed bureaucracy, which is behind the choice movement: free schools from the government school monopoly;
Question: What is your take on the role that the educational bureaucracy plays in schooling?
My own take is this:
- Bureaucracy is how we promote fairness in education
- Setting universal procedures for everyone
- Bureaucracy is how we promote democratic control over a complex educational institution
- Setting a common set of standards transmitted by the elected board
- Bureaucracy is how we protect schools from pure market pressures (see Philip Cusick’s book, The Educational System)
- As consumers try to manipulate the system for private ends
- It’s how we protect teachers from the unreasonable demands of parents
- Thus bureaucracy serves as a bastardized bastion of the public good
- Consider the modern school system – elected board and bureaucratic administration – as an expression of liberal democracy, with the democratic and liberal elements constraining each other
- B expresses democratic will and enforces it, restricting individual choice
- B provides due process for adjudicating individual choice, protecting it from tyranny of majority
