Context Matters: Pedagogy and Comparative Public Management

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Introduction­

In recognition of the increasingly global nature of the economic, ecological and social challenges facing governments, the field of Public Administration has gradually been embracing a more comparative and international approach. (Pierre 1995; Heady, 2001; McGrath, Moss & Harris 2010) Scholars engage in comparative public administration research for two broad and related reasons: the first is scholarly interest in the varieties of institutional approaches to governance, and the consequences of similarities and differences between bureaucracies and political systems. Investigations of those differences allow researchers to draw lessons about governance from an analysis of varying patterns of organization and control.

While the conclusions drawn from such studies eventually make their way into the literature, and hence into the classroom, the second reason is more practical and pedagogical in orientation. This approach involves an examination of the day-to-day, largely technocratic challenges faced by public servants around the globe in an attempt to translate and apply in our own countries the best practices and most effective solutions to those common challenges that have been adopted by others. Those who teach public management increasingly encourage students to consult resources from countries other than their own, and to look around the globe as well as around the corner for answers to local problems of service delivery and agency administration.

This latter approach, while it has much to recommend it, should not be allowed to obscure important differences in national legal and constitutional cultures—differences that reflect the specific value criteria and political framework within which each country’s citizens evaluate their government’s performance. The increase in collaboration between public managers internationally is generally beneficial; however, it is important to distinguish between service delivery modalities that can be improved and informed by reference to broader international practices and those that are rooted in and shaped by the disparate histories, cultures and constitutions of particular nations.  As one scholar has noted

“The comparative study of public administration is, as Heady (1990) argues, struggling to accommodate two seemingly inconsistent tendencies. One tendency is to try to ‘generalize by making comparisons that are as inclusive as possible, and by searching for administrative knowledge that transcends national and regional boundaries’ (Heady 1990, p. 3). The other tendency is that toward case-specific or idiosyncratic analyses ‘with only scant attention, or none at all, to foreign experience.’ (ibid.) Clearly, public administration has never experienced the same significant orientation toward comparative, cross-national analysis which characterizes most other fields of political science. Therefore, in some ways, the field of comparative public administration brings the study of public bureaucracies closer to political science and policy analysis (Peters 1992), a development which will probably infuse energy into this research. (Peters 1988 p.189)” (Pierre 1995)

Admittedly, there are many public administration challenges that transcend political systems, or are only tangentially affected by political culture. Basic public services typically fall within this category. How public managers assure water quality, provide transportation modalities, approach economic and community development, pick up and dispose of waste—these and many similar functions performed by a nation’s bureaucracy will be largely unaffected by differences in historical and constitutional norms. Even some public safety and criminal justice methods and technologies, which are more likely to reflect national understandings of what constitutes crime and what procedures are required by due process, fall into this category. When tasks are largely methodological and managerial, the sharing of “best practices” can help us learn from each other, to the benefit of all.  As Alberi and Bertucci (2006) have noted, however, although he concept of best practice is widely used to distinguish exemplary or improved performance in organizations, the term can be problematic in relation to governance and public administration. This is true for a number of reasons, including the legal and cultural context of the practices being evaluated.

Those who teach public administration need to take care lest emphasis upon cross-cultural commonalities in these large areas of everyday practice end up obscuring important differences in public administration that are rooted in very different approaches to the role of government—differences that reflect nations’ particular histories, philosophies and governing structures. A pedagogy of public administration that focuses solely on surface similarities and ignores these deeply rooted underlying distinctions short-changes students and produces public managers who are ill equipped to deal with important issues in ways that will enhance rather than undermine administrative legitimacy.

A number of scholars from a number of countries have cautioned against such mechanical transfers of administrative practices. (Taube 2002; McGrath, Moss & Harris 2010; Lynn, Jr., Heinrich & Hill 2000.)  Alberti and Bertucci (2006) advise developing “a set of tools and methodologies to identify the validity and transferability of national practices and experiences.” Cortazar (2006) has been even more direct.

“Given the focus on learning about best practices in a specific context in order to transfer lessons learned to another context at a later date, the reader may think that what is most important would be to evaluate the results actually obtained. But is it possible to apply what is learned about one practice in another context without a prior understanding of how and why the practice was able to develop and operate appropriately in its original context? We do not think so. Because the contexts are not equivalent, it does not make sense to merely copy a practice, which is why Bardach (2004) proposes to extrapolate it, that is, to apply our conclusions about a practice in its original context to a different context.”

                                    “Best Practices” in the Classroom

In a very real sense, the study of public affairs and public management will always be particularistic. The field of public administration, after all, is defined as analysis and management of the public’s business as that business is defined by a particular society at a particular time. Efforts to study or replicate “best practices” without due regard for the governing premises of the society within which those practices occur are at best inexact and at worst, counterproductive.

The importance of context presents educators with a significant challenge: how do we learn from each other while recognizing and respecting the effects of cultural distinctions bearing upon governance? The ongoing debate over the proper approach to comparative public administration pedagogy raises both normative and technical questions about what we teach our students. Several such questions come immediately to mind: How do we teach students to approach public policy with an informed sensitivity to the operation of national norms? How do we identify and assess the function and relative importance of mediating institutions—nonprofits and NGOs—in countries with very different understandings of the roles such organizations should fill? How do we ensure that students will recognize and accommodate the systemic structures that empower or constrain public managers in different constitutional contexts? In short, how do we marry citizenship education to public management skills, so that public policy and administration will be informed by both sets of competencies?

A well-regarded American introductory public affairs text describes the policy process as a series of eight steps: 1) establish the context; 2) formulate the problem; 3) specify project objectives; 4) explore alternative solutions; 5) set the policy; 6) develop an implementation plan; 7) monitor and evaluate; and recycle the process. (Bonser, McGregor and Oster 1996).  This prescription and sequence, beginning as it does with an understanding of the context, seems right.

When we talk about “establishing the context,” we necessarily start with national constitutions and legal systems, because they establish a large part of that context. Where they exist, constitutions are controlling declarations of public policy, embodying a society’s fundamental philosophical assumptions about law, legitimacy and government power. Constitutions dictate the ways in which we “formulate the problems” and effectively foreclose exploration of certain “alternative solutions.” To take illustrative examples from America, the United States Constitution does not permit officials to entertain the “alternative solution” of imposing martial law when burglary rates get too high, or the “alternative solution” of censorship when music lyrics are deemed to be too suggestive. It does not permit American deficit hawks to reduce welfare rolls by feeding only Caucasian children, or to combat pollution by appropriating privately owned property. The U.S. Constitution, and especially the jurisprudence it has generated, controls how Americans “set the policy” and how we proceed with the “implementation plan.” In civil law countries, where case law does not constitute legal precedent in the same way court decisions do in common law countries, the guidance provided by the Constitution is textual rather than jurisprudential, but that document nevertheless requires managers to discharge their responsibilities within the framework of rules provided.

Failure to follow those rules, failure to operate within the appropriate constitutional context, undermines legitimacy—the very definition of which is “operational rules rooted in constitutional or societal norms.” A legitimate exercise of authority, no matter how coercive, is different from the exercise of raw power unrestrained by adherence to codes rooted in normative values, and members of the polity can be counted on to see it differently. Being perceived as legitimate is especially critical to the continued effectiveness of those in local government agencies who must make and implement policies having an immediate and concrete impact on citizens with whom they regularly interact.

If constitutions circumscribe the arena within which public policy debate may legitimately occur in a given society, familiarity with applicable constitutional principles also provides a common language enabling meaningful democratic dialogue. Students need not agree with every choice required by a nation’s constitution, but they do need to understand what those choices are, why initial constitutional decisions were made, and why they continue to matter (or not). Without that essential framework, public policy issues cannot be properly framed or their significance clearly understood; they will tend to be viewed as isolated and unconnected challenges rather than aspects of a coherent approach to the use of state power. With constitutional literacy comes recognition that certain underlying principles will be as applicable to discussions of welfare programs and land use as they are to public health or the civil rights of religious minorities.

Unless they are trained to look for inconsistent assumptions, inhabitants of different cultures will take for granted the universality of their worldviews. This is true even of countries that all consider themselves democratic. For example, the term “public affairs” implies the existence of both public and private realms. A generally underappreciated reality is that different legal and constitutional systems define those spheres very differently. In the United States, the legal system draws a constitutionally significant distinction between the public sector, defined as government and its agencies and officials, and civil society, defined as the multitude of nongovernmental, voluntary communal and religious associations through which individuals may act and connect. That distinction is a crucial, if unarticulated, element of most U.S. policy decisions, because only government actors can violate the American Bill of Rights, which limits government actions but not private behaviors. (Kennedy & Schultz 2010, Hartmus 2008, Cross 2001, Kennedy 2006). Based upon this particular understanding of the relationship of public and private behaviors, the American Constitution does not grant affirmative rights; it limits the power of the state to infringe private ones. This is not the case in many other Western democratic states, where it is common to have a constitutional system that both restrains and empowers government (Cross 2001), and where social entitlements frequently are embedded in the constitution. As a consequence of these differences in legal context, public managers working in different countries must confront a different set of questions when they are contemplating collective social action.

                                                Exemplary Cases

An example of the practical significance of such legal worldviews can be seen in the responses of different systems to efforts to privatize previously governmental functions. The move toward greater privatization has gained popularity in a number of countries over the past quarter-century, despite considerable confusion over the precise meaning of the term. Although “privatization” literally means ceding government-run enterprises to the private sector, much as Margaret Thatcher did in England, most of these arrangements are more accurately described as “contracting out.” The government continues to determine the need for the program or service, funds it, and remains ultimately responsible for its management; however, the relevant agency enters into an arrangement—typically a contract, but sometimes a grant or other partnership arrangement—with a private or nonprofit organization to deliver the service or otherwise perform the designated function. In the United States, during the past century, these arrangements have fundamentally transformed governance. The scope of government action has increased at all levels of our federal system, but the means through which agencies of government address service delivery and public problem-solving have changed radically. (Kennedy 2006; Kennedy & Jensen 2005; Salamon 2002: Fredrickson 1993; Kettl 2002).

In the United States, this transfer of sovereignty to nongovernmental agents is more than merely a management problem, as it is in many other countries, because constraints on the use of public authority are fundamental to the United States’ political and constitutional order. The Bill of Rights restrains only government action, making it essential that citizens and public managers alike be able to identify when government has acted. The growth of contracting arrangements has made that identification increasingly problematic, blurring the boundaries between private and public action and making it difficult in many situations to determine whether a particular action or decision can fairly be attributed to government. The result, in the opinion of many scholars (Metzger 2003; Kennedy 2001; Gilmour and Jensen 1998) has been a loss of essential governmental accountability. This is simply not an issue in countries with constitutions that do not rest on foundations of “negative liberty.”  In those regimes, public service delivery by private contractors or NGOs raises management issues, not constitutional ones.

Similarly, most European governments routinely contract with religious organizations; separation of church and state, if it exists at all, is framed very differently than in the United States. American courts have long held that, whatever else the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause may mean, it definitely precludes the use of tax dollars to advance religion or support religious endeavors. On the other hand, faith-based and religious organizations remain free to contract with agencies of government to provide secular services, and local units of government fund thousands of them to provide job training, childcare, adoptions, homeless interventions and a plethora of other human services.  Legally, public managers must ensure that the contracting organizations providing these services are not engaging in constitutionally prohibited activities, i.e., that they are not proselytizing clients, requiring their attendance at church services or engaging them in prayer. The ability of cash-strapped government agencies to assure compliance with these constitutionally required prohibitions is virtually non-existent; as a result, the propriety of governmental partnerships with religious organizations has from time to time become a heated and bitterly contested political issue. (Kennedy & Bielefeld 2006; Lupu and Tuttle 2003, 2004; Lynn 2002)

These outsourcing issues are far from trivial. They do not simply reflect different ways of delivering social services. Instead, they implicate normative understandings of accountability—a concept absolutely integral to public administration theory and practice.  In an important article on outsourcing and the New Public Management, Peters, Guy and Pierre (1998) made precisely this point.

“The basic problem in both theories [outsourcing and NPM] is that the linkage between control and accountability—the heart of democratic theory and a democratic system of government—has been confused. Both models of public administration seek to replace political power derived from legal mandates or elected office with an entrepreneurial style of leadership or—with NPM—a remote and indirect model of leadership. This creates two different problems, derived from different perspectives on governance and citizenship. First, if elected political leaders have such limited control over public administration, is it reasonable to hold them accountable for the decisions and actions of the public service, and if elected officials should not be held accountable, then who is accountable?”

The authors also note that outsourcing and the New Public Management have met with opposition in Europe, due to incompatibility with longstanding traditions of administration there.

Contracting with a third-party surrogate for service delivery is simply one example of the complex interplay between basic governmental institutional theories and managerial efforts to improve service delivery. Peters, Guy and Pierre quite accurately note the problem with assigning accountability—the problem with determining who is responsible for what. There is, however, an even more foundational accountability issue, and it brings us back to the central concern of this article, the role of national political culture in determining accountability. It is necessary, but not sufficient, to identify the person or institution that is responsible for a particular government action. It is even more critical to ask the question “accountable to what?” What is the system of rules, what are the normative expectations, against which we are to measure action and determine accountability?  If we do not understand that legal and cultural context, we cannot form a coherent theory of accountability, and without a coherent theory of accountability—a theory that is grounded in normative expectations and transparent enough to allow citizens to identify responsible actors—we simply cannot teach a discipline called public administration. At most, we can offer technocratic skill training.

                        Instructional Tools and Approaches: Some Conclusions

Unfortunately, conscientious public affairs instructors who understand they must begin any comparative exercise with an introduction to the basic assumptions of a society do not have a wealth of pedagogical materials available to them. Too many books dealing with comparative public administration ignore or slight foundational social and contextual differences, preferring to highlight the more technocratic issues common to public administrators everywhere.  There are, however, a few scholars who have argued for the importance of grounding public management pedagogy in the relevant political theory.  Michael Spicer’s book, The Founders, the Constitution and Public Administration, published in 1995, made a strong case for the importance of a public management rooted in a nation’s constitution. “The purpose of this book,” Spicer noted in his introduction “is to examine the worldviews underlying public administration and the Constitution.” Although Spicer directed his attention to the U.S. Constitution, all legal systems are constitutive of national cultures to a greater or lesser extent, and they all shape the worldviews of those who operate within them. Differences in those worldviews can be seen in the varying attitudes toward government that characterize different countries, even when the countries being considered are all constitutional democracies. In the U.S., as public administration has concentrated on the need to legitimize the administrative state, it has found itself at odds with a polity fixated on the need to limit government power, a central U.S. Constitutional concern. As a result, administrative actions that are taken for granted in European countries with strong administrative traditions often generate accusations of illegitimacy in highly individualistic America.

Constitutional cultures not only dictate perceptions of legitimacy, they also provide the framework within which a polity defines ethical public service. John A. Rohr, one of the pre-eminent American scholars in the field, insisted, “the job of the public manager is to implement the Constitution.”  (Rohr, 1998). Perhaps the most eloquent statement of this theme occurs in Rohr’s essay entitled “A Constitutional Theory of Public Administration.” After noting that adherence to constitutional principles is independent of partisan ideology, and that “The Constitution transcends a given tax policy, a weapons system and food stamps,” he writes

   “The link between subordination to constitutional masters and the freedom to choose among them preserves both the instrumental character of public administration and the autonomy necessary for professionalism. In this way, we can reinstate the great insight of the discredited dichotomy between politics and administration…By suggesting a theory of public administration that combines constitutional subordination and autonomy, I hope to preserve the enduring insight of the venerable dichotomy without succumbing to its naïve view of public administration as apolitical” (89-90)

All constitutions and legal systems rest upon considered normative judgments about the conduct of public affairs, judgments that have their roots in the particularities of that country’s history and experience. Trying to teach public administration without constant reference to those foundational judgments is like trying to teach reading without reference to the alphabet.

References

Alberti, A., & Bertucci, G. (2006). Replicating innovations in governance. In Innovations in Governance and Public Administration: Replicating What Works (pp. 1-25). New York, NY: United Nations.

Bonser, Charles F., Eugene B. McGregor Jr., and Clinton V. Oster Jr. 1996. Policy Choices and Public Action. Upper Saddle River, N.J. Prentice-Hall.

Cortazar, Juan Carlos. 2006. “Learning from Best Practices in Public Management: A Methodological Approach” in Alberti & Bertucci (eds) Innovations in Governance and Public Administration: Replicating What Works. New York, NY: United Nations.

Cross, F. B. (2001). The error of positive rights. UCLA Law Review, 48, 857-924.

Frederickson, H. George. 1993. “Ethics and Public Administration: Some Assertions” in Ethics and Public Administration, H. George Frederickson (ed). Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Gilmour, Robert S. and Jensen, Laura S. 1998. “Reinventing Government Accountability: Public Functions, Privatization, and the Meaning of ‘State Action.’” Public Administration Review

Hartmus, D. M. (2008). Teaching constitutional law to public administrators. Journal of Public Affairs Education, 14(3), 353-360. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40215822

Heady, F. (2001). Public administration: A comparative perspective. New York, NY: Marcel Dekker, Inc.

Kennedy, Sheila Suess. “Checks and Balances? Or L’etat, C’est Moi?” The Remnant Review Vol. 2, No. 1, 2006. pp. 65-78.

Kennedy, Sheila Suess. (2001) “When is Public Private? State Action, Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships.” George Mason Civil Rights Law Review. Vol. 11 #2, Spring. 203.

Kennedy, Sheila Suess and Wolfgang Bielefeld. (2006)  Charitable Choice at Work: Faith-Based Job Programs in the States. Georgetown University Press, Washington D.C.

Kennedy, Sheila and Schultz, David. 2011. American Public Service: Constitutional and Ethical Foundations. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Kettl, Donald F. 2002. The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America (Interpreting American Politics). Johns Hopkins Press.

Lupu, Ira C. and Robert W. Tuttle. 2003. The State of the Law 2003: Developments in the Law Concerning Government Partnerships with Religious Organizations. Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy. Albany, NY: Rockerfeller Institution of Government.

Lupu, Ira C. and Robert W. Tuttle. 2004. The State of the Law 2004: Developments in the Law Concerning Government Partnerships with Religious Organizations. Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy. Albany, NY: Rockerfeller Institution of Government.

Lynn, Laurence E., Jr. 2001. “Social Services and the State: The Public Appropriation of Private Charity.” Social Service Review.

Lynn, L.E., Jr., Heinrich, C. J., & Hill, C. J. (2000). Studying governance and public management: Challenges and prospects. Journal of Public Administrations Research and Theory, 10(2), 233-262.

McGrath, C., Moss, D., & Harris, P. (2010). The evolving discipline of public affairs. Journal of Public Affairs, 10, 335-352. doi: 10.1002/pa.369

Metzger, Gillian E. 2003. “Privatization as Delegation.” Columbia Law Review 103: 1367-1502.

Pierre, J. (1995). Bureaucracy in the modern state: An introduction to comparative public administration. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.

Peters, G. B., & Pierre, J. (1998). Governance without government? rethinking public administration. Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, 8(2), 223-243.

Rohr, John. 1999.  Public Service, Ethics, and Constitutional Practice. University of Kansas Press.

Salamon, Lester M., ed. 2002. The Tools of Government: A Guide to the New Governance. New York: Oxford University Press.

Spicer, Michael. 1995. The Founders, the Constitution, and Public Administration: A conflict in worldviews. Georgetown University Press.

Taube, C. (2002). Baltic Diversity: Comparing Constitutions. Jurisprudencija, 30(22), 42-46.

 

 

 

 

Not Mentioned in the Body of the Article:

Frederickson, H. George. 1993. “Ethics and Public Administration: Some Assertions.” In Ethics and Public Administration, ed. H. George Frederickson. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Kennedy, Sheila S. 2000. “Back to Basics: Citizenship, Public Administration and the Constitution.” Journal of Public Affairs Education. Vol. 6, #4. October.

——————. 1993. Sharing Power: Public Governance and Private Markets. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Perry, James L. 1998. “From the Editor-in-Chief.” Journal of Public Affairs Education, Vol. 4, No.4

Putnam, Robert. 1995. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy.

Kettl, Donald F. 1988. Government by Proxy: (Mis)Managing Federal Programs. Washington, DC: CQ Press.

Salamon, Lester M., ed. 2002. The Tools of Government: A Guide to the New Governance. New York: Oxford University Press.

Preliminary Questions

There has been a growing debate about the value of a college education. That debate takes two basic forms. The most prominent is an argument that the rising costs of higher education are making college years less cost-effective–that what you get really isn’t worth what you pay. There is also a growing “movement” of young people who decide to drop out to pursue more “creative” endeavors, who want to emulate folks like Bill Gates and other wildly successful internet entrepreneurs who made their billions without dilly-dallying around a college campus for four long years. (Yesterday’s New York Times had an article about several of them.)

The young people who are impatient to be the next Big Thing have always been around. The truly gifted among them will be successful; the others will find jobs or return to school or do whatever it is that such young folks have always done.  College affordability, on the other hand, is a genuine issue, and requires our attention (and probably some unwelcome-to-college-administrators interventions).

I don’t claim to know what measures to take to make higher education more affordable. But I do know that we need to preface that discussion with one that addresses what trial lawyers like to call “a preliminary question.”

Preliminary questions are those we need to answer before we can make sense of the answers to subsequent questions. And mine are deceptively simple: what is education? What is it for? How does it differ from job training?

This question is as applicable to elementary and high schools as it is to college, and the answers will have clear policy implications. If–as many parents seem to believe–K-12 education is a consumer good, something one gives ones children in order to advantage them in the marketplace , then sending Junior to a private “academy” may make sense–at least, so long as that private institution provides accurate science and history lessons. If, however, education also has a public dimension, if it includes an emphasis on citizenship and the forging of a unified polity from a diverse population, it may need to be delivered by a public institution.

When we get to the question of university education, differentiating between job training and education becomes much more important, because those are two very different missions, and the conflation of them is in large part responsible for the current woes of academia. In my (admittedly jaundiced) view, there are far too many students on university campuses who really belong at a job-training institution. They have been told that their employment prospects require a diploma, and they are on campus to acquire that credential. They have zero interest in what great minds have pondered in the past, what history might teach us, what we have learned about human interaction and all the other intellectual goods acquisition of which was once the purpose of the university.

Faculty spend far too much time in campus meetings assessing whether the courses we offer will lead to employment and far too little time considering whether those same courses will lead to enlightenment.

If we separated out the institutions offering a credential from the ones offering an education, it would be much easier to assess cost-effectiveness of the former, and it would send a clear message to students considering attendance at the latter.

Mission clarity is an important element of assessment–if you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish, it’s hard to determine whether you’ve accomplished it. Until our institutions of higher education can answer those preliminary questions—until they decide whether they want to be vocational schools or educational venues–arguments about cost and efficacy will continue.

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The Urban Archipelago

In the wake of the 2004 election, the editors of The Stranger, an alternative newspaper published in Seattle, wrote a wonderful rant about what they titled “the urban archipelago.” Looking at the red and blue of the election map, they saw that cities were blue dots in even the reddest states, and explained that division by a vast difference in urban versus rural values.

The most recent issue of The Atlantic confirms the nature of America’s divide: it is between cities and “what remains of the countryside.” The article states what is becoming increasingly obvious: “virtually every major city (100,000 plus) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer where people live, it is how people live.”

This really isn’t news, although it is an important and under appreciated feature of American life. When I was in City Hall back in the 1970s, Indianapolis routinely faced the resentment of rural Hoosiers, a resentment reflected in the legislative priorities of those who represented them. That animus continues–we can’t get genuine home rule, or even legislative permission to decide for ourselves whether we will pay an extra tax in order to provide our residents with decent mass transit.

As Gail Collins noted in a column a few months ago, people living in urban areas understand the need for government–paved roads and public safety and garbage collection and all those other services that are necessary when people live in close quarters. That farmer out at the end of the gravel road, who rarely even gets a visitor and isn’t worth the effort of the burglar, doesn’t see much reason to pay taxes.

It goes deeper than just the need for public services, however. Living with other people shapes a certain worldview. It creates an identifiably urban value structure. As the authors of the Urban Archipeligo wrote in that seminal essay,

Look around you, urbanite, at the multiplicity of cultures, ethnicities, and tribes that are smashed together in every urban center (yes, even Seattle): We’re for that. We’re for pluralism of thought, race, and identity. We’re for a freedom of religion that includes the freedom from religion–not as some crazy aberration, but as an equally valid approach to life. We are for the right to choose one’s own sexual and recreational behavior, to control one’s own body and what one puts inside it. We are for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…..

Unlike the people who flee from cities in search of a life free from disagreement and dark skin, we are for contentiousness, discourse, and the heightened understanding of life that grows from having to accommodate opposing viewpoints. We’re for opposition. And just to be clear: The non-urban argument, the red state position, isn’t oppositional, it’s negational–they are in active denial of the existence of other places, other people, other ideas. It’s reactionary utopianism, and it is a clear and present danger; urbanists should be upfront and unapologetic about our contempt for their politics and their negational values. Republicans have succeeded in making the word “liberal”–which literally means “free from bigotry… favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded”–into an epithet. Urbanists should proclaim their liberalism from the highest rooftop (we have higher rooftops than they do); it’s the only way we survive….

Let’s see, what else are we for? How about education? Cities are beehives of intellectual energy; students and teachers are everywhere you look, studying, teaching, thinking. In Seattle, you can barely throw a rock without hitting a college. It’s time to start celebrating that, because if the reds have their way, advanced degrees will one day be awarded based on the number of Bible verses a person can recite from memory. In the city, people ask you what you’re reading. Outside the city, they ask you why you’re reading. You do the math–and you’ll have to, because non-urbanists can hardly even count their own children at this point. For too long now, we’ve caved to the non-urban wisdom that decries universities as bastions of elitism and snobbery. Guess what: That’s why we should embrace them. Outside of the city, elitism and snobbery are code words for literacy and complexity. And when the oil dries up, we’re not going to be turning to priests for answers–we’ll be calling the scientists. And speaking of science: SCIENCE! That’s another thing we’re for. And reason. And history.

The recent article in The Atlantic confirms this division of values, noting that in November, 37 states voted on 174 ballot measures, and that the rural states that cast (entirely symbolic) votes against Obamacare were the same states that ban same-sex marriage and any use of marijuana.

The problem is that in Indiana–and many other states–we don’t really have “one person one vote.” Rural areas are vastly overrepresented. Taxes paid by city dwellers go disproportionately to rural areas. And the people who populate the General Assembly have lots of incentive to keep things that way. This last election put the values of rural Indiana firmly in charge.

The next four years are going to be very painful for those of us who live in Indiana’s Urban Archipelago.

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Vouchers and Education

While the constitutional challenge to Indiana’s much-hyped voucher program is pending in our Supreme Court, it might be instructive to look to Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal’s equally-hyped version has just been declared unconstitutional. The legal issues are very different–both challenges were based upon state constitutional provisions, and Indiana’s constitution doesn’t contain the provision that was fatal to the Louisiana program. So there’s no legal equivalence.

Instead, what we can learn from Louisiana falls under the old adage that “there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.”

Even the most well-meaning privatization efforts tend to founder on the shoals of accountability. When the effort involves education, those problems multiply. Despite lots of rhetoric, most academic studies of school voucher programs find that the only area of improvement is in parent satisfaction. Even in well-run programs, student performance remains where one would expect based upon a variety of sociological factors. Reports about rising test scores tend, upon further inquiry, to be based on the ability of private schools to eject students who aren’t making the grade.

Those results come from well-run programs. Louisiana is a poster child for the programs where ideology trumps accountability and basic common sense.

A report from Louisiana Progress, a good-government business group, is instructive. The group petitioned the Board of Education to set at least minimal standards for schools receiving vouchers–evidence that the schools have adequate physical facilities, that they not dramatically increase either tuition or enrollment in order to benefit financially from the program, etc. Calling the program “poorly thought out and poorly implemented,” the report noted that schools selected to participate were not chosen on the basis of educational quality. Most were religious, and many of those quite fundamentalist: the New Living Word School had been approved to increase its enrollment from 122 to 315 students, despite lacking physical facilities for that number; increased its tuition from 200/month to 8500/year, and has a basketball team but no library. Students “spend most of the day watching TV. ..Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses bible verses with subjects like chemistry or composition.”

Another voucher school, the Upperroom Bible Church Academy, operates in “a bunker-like building with no windows or playground.”

There are 120 private schools authorized to receive vouchers in Louisiana. A significant percentage are “Bible-based” institutions with what have been characterized as “extreme anti-science and anti-history curriculums” that champion creationism. (One is run by a former state legislator who refers to himself as a “prophet or apostle.” Wouldn’t that encourage you to enroll your child??) A number use textbooks produced by Bob Jones University.

Mother Jones has a list of 14 favorite lessons being taught by Louisiana’s voucher schools. Among them: dinosaurs and people hung out together; gays have no more claims to ‘special rights’ than child molesters and rapists.

Your tax dollars at work.

Louisiana Progress pointed out–reasonably–that since the reason for the voucher program was that Louisiana’s public schools were not meeting educational accountability standards, it makes no sense to spend tax dollars on private/parochial schools that aren’t even being asked to meet those same standards.

We Americans have a love affair with easy answers. We also tend to believe that–whatever the task–private enterprises will outperform governmental ones. And we have a well-documented belief that change equals improvement. Unfortunately, solving real-world problems requires analysis. Sometimes, there is an easy answer; sometimes, a private entity is better suited to solve a certain problem. Sometimes, change is warranted–and positive.

Sometimes, not so much.

If we want to improve education, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions. We might start with: what is the content of a good education? How can we determine whether schools are providing that content? What can we do to improve the prospects that children who enter our schools without the necessary background and tools will actually learn?

Louisiana and many other states–including our own–don’t want to grapple with those questions. They want an easy way out.

Even Adam’s pet dinosaur knew better.

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Why Cynicism is Growing

I’ve been distressed by the growing cynicism of the students I teach–a cynicism about the motives of those in business and public life that has seemed to grow over the past few years. There have always been a few who sneered that “public service” was an oxymoron, who believed that given the chance, everyone would demonstrate greed and disregard for others, but most students were more charitable in their judgments.

Still, as I detailed in my book “Distrust, American Style,” we’ve seen a lot of corrupt institutional behavior over the past couple of decades. Enron, WorldCon, the various scandals in major-league sports, the Catholic Church’s cover-up to protect pedophile priests, the Bush Administration’s assaults on civil liberties and its dishonest case for war in Iraq–there has been plenty of reason for cynicism and distrust. While I’m sure similar examples have existed throughout our history,  the growth of Facebook and Twitter and blogs has brought news of the misbehavior to many more people than might previously have known what was going on.

Student cynicism began to grow more pronounced around the time we headed into the Great Recession, as the public learned much more about the behaviors and compensation levels of the “banksters.” (Rhymes with gangsters….). The widely publicized emergence of SuperPacs funded by corporations intent upon protecting  favorable tax rates and corporate welfare hasn’t helped.

This morning’s news provides two examples, noteworthy only because they’ve become utterly commonplace.

The first example–Brian Bosma’s appointment of a lobbyist with his law firm as parliamentarian–prompted this editorial language from the Indianapolis Star:

Whetstone is coming back to work for Speaker Brian Bosma as the House parliamentarian, even though he will continue to work with the lobbying firm of Krieg DeVault LLP. Whetstone has pledged not to lobby the legislature during his employment as parliamentarian, a job that pays $12,000 a month through the legislative sesion.

Whetstone says Krieg DeVault holds itself to the highest ethical standards. Even so, there’s a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one. As parliamentarian, Whetstone will advise the House Speaker on rules challenges and other procedural questions that arise. What happens if he’s asked to weigh in on a challenge that would affect legislation supported by one of his former clients, or by clients of other lobbyists working for Krieg DeVault?

The second was a report that the executives who took Hostess into bankruptcy and blamed that decision on “greedy unions” unwilling to take yet another round of pay cuts even while those executives tripled their own compensation have petitioned the bankruptcy court to approve the payment of their bonuses as part of the court-supervised demise of the business. (There’s a yiddish word for this: chutzpah.)

When the daily news consists of little but reports of self-dealing and ethical obtuseness, of evidence that politicians continue to put special interests above the national interest, how can I fault the students who assume that the whole world works that way?

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