As House and Senate members work out their differences on the education funding bill my thoughts are drawn back to Pioneer Institute Introduces the Beamer vs. Beater Theory of Democracy. That concerned a proposal by Pioneer to keep poor and minority communities from having the same say in their schools as wealthier and whiter communities. The accountability proposal is on the same track.
What Pioneer was suggesting was to strip away representation from communities based on the amount of state aid for education they receive. To use Pioneer’s example if a community got 85 percent of its funding from the state and had a seven seat school committee, then six members would be appointed by the state. That would leave well off suburbs untouched but steal representation from minority and poor cities and towns.
The accountability proposal would infringe on representative government by a different means. It looks like this: if communities fall short of certain benchmarks, the state can step in. This would likely fall most harshly on struggling communities, not on the Scituates and Dovers of the world. It isn’t that Holyoke or Lowell have less caring or competent representation than those places, just more challenges.
One counter argument is that many communities with high minority populations are still being represented by elected officials who are not diverse, and this is true. The case goes that since elected officials do not represent the community then perhaps state intervention would work better. But there are stronger arguments in opposition. For one thing elected officials may still do a better job advocating for constituents of color than state education professionals, who are not there to advocate. Also the position is a pre-emptive strike against the day when more people of color come to serve in currently under-represented communities.
What underlies this dispute is that conservatives have a vested interest in suppressing representative advocacy from poorer communities and from people of color. As I wrote in the Beamer vs. Beater post of the drive to reduce representation:
This is a major preoccupation of Pioneer and of its funders, such as David Koch, the Walton Family Foundation, Bradley Foundation, etc. The problem is that the less well-off might agitate for policies that would make their own lives better but which would require more in taxes from the wealthy. Rich people do not like that.
In 2003 Pioneer’s founder Lovett Peters gave a speech accepting an award from the far right and Koch-connected State Policy Network. He told his audience that an advocacy shop like Pioneer has to think long term, even fifty years – it is out to transform the ideas atmosphere and that can take decades. Especially in a place like Massachusetts it has to achieve small victories and inch forward. Thus the 1993 education reform bill “represented an opportunity to sneak in authorization of some charter schools.” So if school committee members in Chelsea and Springfield wake up in 2039 wondering why they have less power than colleagues in richer communities, the 2019 fight will have been a success.
The accountability position is not some manifestation of enlightened progressives pursuing the ‘civil rights issue of our time.’ Quite the opposite. As I showed in Arkansas Billionaires Fight to Change Massachusetts Education Policy, The Waltons and the Politics of Public Education, and The Walton Family’s Massachusetts Political Team, 2019 the entire interest group drive is being manufactured from Arkansas afar. There is local support from the moderate-conservative governor and the neo-liberal paper of record and a few wealthy individuals speaking through foundations.
It’s the Wal-Mart/State Street Axis.
“Why wait for popular opinion to catch up when you could portray as ‘reform’ what was really slow-motion demolition through privatization?” – Professor Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Plan for America.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education.]
Photo: Pixabay.