Education Experts Rarely Allowed at the Policymaking Table

A hundred years ago I was the Associate State Superintendent for Standards and Curriculum in the great state of Delaware.  I got there just as the movement began to develop state-level curriculum standards for schools, so I oversaw that process.

The Chief State School Officers is a national organization made up of the executive leadership of state departments of education, so one perk for me was to be able to go to those meetings and to confer with the people who were in charge of curriculum at the state level all over the country.  At one of those meetings we had a one-day workshop on how to engage the public in writing curriculum standards.  The facilitators of that training clearly wanted us to leave with the commitment to make the standards development in our states a product of participatory democracy so that absolutely everyone could help shape what it is that kids should learn in each discipline at each grade level.

I grew quieter as the day went by, as I crawled into my head to think.  I reviewed how long it had taken me as a practitioner and as a scholar to learn my discipline as thoroughly as possible.  I thought of all the studies and books and conversations and teachers who had informed my knowledge and skills.  And, truthfully, I was having some difficulty seeing the value of a democratic process in making such difficult decisions that required high levels of expertise.

Finally, near the end of the day, the facilitators entertained a Q&A period.  I waited my turn and then asked, “What is the role of expertise in a participatory democracy?”

“What?”  she asked.  “I don’t understand what you are talking about.”

I didn’t know how to state it any differently, so I merely repeated my question.  “What is the role of expertise in a participatory democracy?”

In exasperation and without an answer of her own, she simply adjourned the meeting, and we all left the room wondering if anyone had come to terms with those two competing values.  In a democracy every voice is equal.  But we have professions, and we don’t get a democratic opinion about what the cancer treatment ought to be for our mother.  We want an expert to decide.  If we have a legal problem, we don’t want to ask the folks at the coffee shop how to resolve that problem.  We go hire an attorney with expertise in the area.  Too, if my car breaks down, I don’t poll the people with whom I work as to what to do.  I take the car to an expert in how to fix my brand of car.  So, I was wondering, is the expertise of teachers, curriculum specialists not just as important?  Shouldn’t standards be the result of a consensus among the experts in a discipline?

Shouldn’t teachers be the ones who design assessments and teacher evaluation systems since they are the experts in both areas?  Shouldn’t local communities who know the children, know the staff, know the neighborhoods served by the school decide what the accountability system ought to be?  After all, the management expert W. Edwards Deming said over and over that it is the customer who defines quality.  Does anyone seriously think that the state legislature knows more about how to specify graduation requirements than does a local board of education working with the staff and community?  Does anyone think it is ironic that state leaders who spend millions in federal court to protest just about every decision made by the federal government are the same people who take away more local control from schools every time they meet?

Educators are dispirited in 2013 for many reasons, not the least of which is the funding cuts that are being done just about everywhere and at every level of education.  No worker does well without appropriate tools and some level of acceptable working conditions.  We rail against the stupidity of assessment and accountability systems that do actual harm to all involved.  And we are sick to death of the Bill Gates, Michelle Rhees, Arne Duncans Chester Finns, Eric Hanusheks, Bill Hammonds, etc. of the world who do NOT have expertise in teaching and learning, nor in any specific academic discipline and in the ways in which it is best taught, nor in the area of youth development, and yet they seem to be able to shape policy at all levels.  So, we wonder, why do policymakers listen to them and not to the teachers and specialists in education?  And why do they actually sneer and bash us when we even mention that their ideas are not sound?  Why is research evidence so routinely ignored by policymakers, especially in education?  Why is the Texas Commissioner of Education not an educator?

And my question still goes unanswered, “What is the role of expertise in a participatory democracy?”  What it seems like is that the experts are the ones who are shut out of the “participatory democracy” since decisions are most frequently made without us.

The blog below explores this same problem.  It is important, I think, that we discuss the issues that are raised.  Democracy is a high, high value, and keeping it, as the founders warned, is always difficult.  But we can do it–and, at the same time, invite and embrace expertise into the decision-making that involves our children.   –Bonnie Lesley

The “Naïve Expert” Problem in Market Paradigm and Education Reform | National Education Policy Center http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/daily-kos-naive-expert-problem-market-paradigm-and-education-reform via @nepctweet