I know that many on the right, and many on the left as well, like to ascribe the actions of their opposite number to malice or other unworthy motives, but the truth is, if you look at their actions objectively, there are very truly few evil people out there. Oh, there are plenty of people who do harmful things, who take actions which cause widespread harm, which are destructive and so on. But when you look at things through the eyes of the actors, most of the time they are not evil, they are not doing evil for the sake of harming others, nor are they even trying to advance their own interests at the expense of others. In almost every case, they really do believe they are doing what is best for others and themselves. As I described in  "The Nature of Evil", it is usually not evil, but simply a bad understanding of reality, sometimes coupled with circumstances which push them in the wrong direction.

As my son is about to start preschool next month, my wife and I were discussing education, and I was struck by the way that public schools, thanks to their very structure, tend to take even the most conscientious teachers and turn them into time servers. Though, as I suggest in the first paragraph, the reason for doing so makes total sense, at least from the perspective of the public schools.

Actually, there are two reasons¹ that public schools have such a stifling environment, why they have so much uniformity, so little room for innovation and so on². First, there is the more idealist argument, that public schools exist foremost to ensure that every student gets an education, and so they must ensure that even the worst school provides an adequate education. Second, there is a pragmatic argument that school boards are elected bodies, and so they react like any political entity, meaning the administration acts like any bureaucratic organization, as I described in ""Bureaucratic Management" and "Killing the Railroads".

Allow me to elaborate on both.

First, the idea that every school must meet some minimal requirements. As schools are entrusted with providing certain educational minima at every school, they must establish some guidelines to guarantee that every teacher is providing the basics. Thanks to the difficulties they face firing unionized teachers, and because of the institutional government mistrust of employees³, the solution is not to hire employees they feel can perform the task, nor to rely on upper management to ensure compliance⁴, but to document in detail the expectations of each class. In that way they can be sure that each school will be providing the same education, and that each student will receive an adequate education.

Unfortunately, what suffers under this scheme is any pressure to move beyond adequate. Rules are great ways to ensure that the bare minimum is provided, but they discourage any innovation. As any deviation from the rules may be for the worse, such rule driven systems tend to discourage departures. As a result, not only are bad ideas stopped, but so are good ideas. In addition, in such an environment, those who have a real passion for the field, those filled with new ideas and interesting ways to do things, tend to feel frustrated and eventually quit, either going into a different field, or seeking out schools which allow more autonomy, usually private schools. Meaning that not only do the rules crush innovation, but they tend to favor retaining those teachers who are comfortable working under such minutely controlled circumstances.

Even were the management more trusting, willing to allow the teachers themselves more leeway, it is doubtful anything would come of it, as the political environment does not favor such a change. As I stated in "Bureaucratic Management", politicians and their underlings, tend to be driven primarily by avoiding blame. For bureaucrats (and unionized teachers as well), the incentive is obvious. Promotions are based in whole or part on time served, personal merit plays a small role. On the other hand, causing trouble can make one's time more uncomfortable, as creating headaches for those higher up will result in future problems, such as assignment to less desirable positions⁵.

For the political positions the pressure is less obvious, but still understandable. Doing the right thing in local politics is a losing proposition. If the school board introduces an innovation meeting with public approval, for instance, odds are good some elected official will steal credit. Even if that does not happen, public enthusiasm over good ideas is short lived. On the other hand, the person who institutes a plan which upsets a parent will likely be remembered forever. And in the case of an idea which may be a success or may be a failure, the costs of failure are much greater than any rewards for success.

As a result, it is easier for elected officials, and those beneath them who give form to their ideas, to implement rigid rules which prevent all conceivable mishaps, rather than trust employees in hopes of achieving a rare success here or there. As above, the benefits for those successes will be fleeting and small, while the risk of even a single angry parent, much less a small group of them, is too great. It is simply much easier to keep your head down, implement a few, well controlled, flashy "improvements", which are largely simply retoolings of existing projects, and hope for the best. Risk in minor elected offices is something to be avoided, not embraced.

But none of this requires any of theories I have heard on the right. True, there may be a handful of people who want to indoctrinate children, or hope to keep them foolish to more easily control them, but, for the most part, those implementing educational policy really believe they are doing the best they can, and the best they can for the students as well. True, elected officials are also trying to stay in office, but they do so because they believe they are better at that job than their opponents, so even there they are not wholly self-interested. I do not say there is no one with an ulterior motive, but most indoctrination is seen by those pushing it as valid education, most failure of the schools are the outcome of perverse incentives built in to the system, and like most of our government, the shortcomings of the programs we have are due to nothing more than well meaning people trying to use the wrong tool for the job⁶.

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1. There are problems beyond those I mention. As I described in "Why Private Schools Win" there is, for instance, the inability to expel trouble student and the tendency to confuse discipline problems with learning problems, serving neither group well. In this essay I intend to stick entirely to issues of curriculum. (Some additional information can be found in my posts  "Reforming Education", "Why Private Schools Win", "A Contradiction" and "Skeptics? Really? I Beg to Differ".)

2. Yes, there are charter schools, magnet schools, IB schools and so on. But they are still a minority, and by and large, as the huge administrative overhead shows, public schools are tightly controlled from the top and still ascribe to some variant of "every class on the same page on the same day" mentality.  Some school systems are better, some worse, but public schools do still suffer from a stifling structure and a lack of interest in innovation, though public discontent has led to some small exceptions, such as the previously mentioned magnet and charter schools.

3. I cannot go into this here, but as I describe in "The Bureaucratic Mind", the bureaucratic mindset tends to encourage government employees to expect that most employees will do as little as possible, and act only in response to threats. As a result, they tend to surround employees with countless rules, allowing them to threaten punishment for violation of those rules. It is an interesting topic, as it colors so much of our government, but not one I can explore in depth here.

4. The reasons here are twofold. First, middle management, such as principles, are not trusted any more than teachers, and are themselves surrounded by countless rules. Second, thanks to unionization, it is impossible to delegate much authority to mid-level management. As any complaint needs to go through high-level arbitration, any complaints need to originate near the top, and so the upper levels need to be intimately involved in even the most low level decisions.

5. Thanks to unions it is hard to fire teachers, but there are many ways that those higher up can make their time unpleasant, and if they upset parents it is unlikely the union will support them, as that sort of political fallout troubles the other teachers as well.

6. I have touched on this topic several times, including "Tools", "The Benefits of Federalism","My Vision of Government", "My Vision of Government Part II","An Analogy For Government", "In A Nutshell".

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POSTSCRIPT

Some may be skeptical of my description of teachers and bureaucrats trying to avoid political risk,, as they will recall a handful of well publicized fights over sex ed curriculum or other contentious topics. But if you think about it, in each of those cases, the school may have offered an initial defense, but if the parents persisted, most often a scapegoat was offered up and the program quietly retired. It may have been later brought back when it was thought it would no longer be problematic, but overall the behavior of the schools in most such cases has been that of people seeking to avoid conflict.

If you doubt me, think of how far left most schools of education are, and how far to the left of the mainstream are the many theories underlying many prepared curricula. That teachers espousing such theories have produced only a handful of courses that parents found objectionable is a sign of  how much our school systems seek to avoid conflict. If they were truly unconcerned with parents' opinions and wanted just to indoctrinate, they would be making headlines daily.

POSTSCRIPT II

I don't mean to imply that only the right ascribes actions with which it disagrees to evil. The left does so just as often. However, in this case, the right is clearly the group finding evil where simple incompetence, coupled with institutional pressures, will do. And so they get the lion's share of the blame. Don't worry, I will be back to criticizing the left before you know it.