Responsive Schools, Renewed Communities.

Shughart, William F., II

Responsive Schools, Renewed Communities sounds a clarion call for school choice. In it, Clifford Cobb, identified as a former public school teacher, the holder of a master's degree in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and the executive director of the Institute for Educational Choice, presents one of the most spirited and thorough defenses of vouchers available among the recent spate of books on educational reform. Unfortunately, Cobb's well reasoned responses to the critics of school choice are ultimately overcome by increasingly strident communitarian rhetoric and some very woolly headed economics.

Following an opening paean to the "self-governing way of life" by Robert Hawkins, president of the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and Amitai Etzioni's foreword, about which more later, the book is divided into four main parts. The first documents the decline and fall of educational achievement in America's public schools and lays out the case for reform based on subsidizing the student, not the school. Here, although failing to credit Milton Friedman for originating the voucher idea, Cobb argues forcefully that choice is meaningless unless alternatives to existing government schools, including those run by sectarian organizations, are made available on proportionately equal terms. Indeed, it is the freedom to offer curricula and teaching methods tailored to the needs of their student- and parent-customers, rather than marching in lock step to the edicts of state education bureaucrats, that, along with the freedom to fail, largely explains the successes of existing non-government schools.

Part II focuses on the benefits of school choice to minority and low-income parents. But in the process of laying to rest some of the paternalistic fears of those who claim that vouchers will either leave the children of the poor behind in substandard public school dumping grounds or leave their parents vulnerable to fraud by the operators of for-profit non-government schools, Cobb falls into the "self-esteem" trap laid by the defenders of the status quo. He, too, largely blames the alarmingly high drop-out rates and the abysmally low academic achievement of poor and minority children on the failure of the public schools to present their native cultures in a favorable light. The public schools fail Latino kids, for example, not so much because they fail to maintain order, but rather because the teachers submerge them in "the ideology of the mainstream (Anglo) culture".

Hence, Cobb sees one of the strengths of a voucher program in the supply response of ethnocentric schools that will cater to demands for cultural identity, thereby raising the self-esteems and boosting the academic performances of minority students. But there is no evidence of a causal link between self-esteem and academic performance. Presuming that self-esteem can be measured objectively, Asian children, for instance, seem to have less of it than the middle class white kids they consistently out-perform, and black youngsters often do better academically in integrated schools where they feel more out of place.

In any case, Cobb never does explain why the job of keeping ethnic identities intact can only be performed adequately during school hours. And while he constantly points to the dominance of a majoritarian Western "commercial" culture in the public schools, the inroads of the propaganda of left-leaning interest groups into approved government curricula go wholly unchallenged. Striving to remain "value neutral" himself, Cobb does not address the critical issue of whether a public school system controlled by and operated for the benefit of teachers' unions and education bureaucrats is capable institutionally of teaching children to read, write, and do sums.

A summary of the experiences with voucher-like programs elsewhere and the G.I. Bill in this country is presented in Part III. Part IV assesses the prospects for reform. Here, Cobb addresses wider issues, including the economic factors he thinks responsible for the declining competitiveness of American business. Three pages before bemoaning the rise of racism and Japan bashing in response to the frustrations of millions of "expendable" workers who cannot meet the rising productivity demands of an increasingly impersonal global economy, Cobb wildly asserts that "no amount of school reform could compensate for allowing the Japanese to dump below-cost products in the United States . . . or for allowing American corporations to move to low-wage countries while continuing to sell their products in domestic markets". And in a remarkable display of economic illiteracy, he claims that

the major factors that have caused America to lose its competitive edge have been high interest rates (which led to a deemphasis of long-term productive investment), low energy prices (which forestalled American investment in efficiency improvements), leasing of high-technology licenses at low rates, high levels of offshore investment at the expense of domestic investment, structural factors related to nations' different stages of industrial development, and the arrogance of American corporate managers (which blinded them to the importance of continuous innovation through quality control).

Gratuitous passages such as these completely undermine Cobb's otherwise stirring defense of school choice. But even more so it is the communitarian rhetoric that ultimately limits the value of Responsive Schools, Renewed Communities. The irreducible unit of analysis here is not the individual but rather some vague collective entity--the "community"--whose identity is based not on shared respect for personal freedom and private property, but is instead defined by some shared trait like skin color, religion, or ethnicity. Cobb never tells us how exactly the community chooses, leaving the impression that he expects consensus to emerge from warm, fuzzy feelings and "a sense of ownership." He constantly denigrates competition at the level of the individual, while extolling its virtues at the level of the group. He correctly warns of the dangers of vouchers and a national testing program being used by the public school bureaucracy to gain more control over non-government schools only to have Amitai Etzioni in his foreword assert that for a school choice program to work, extra-market forces (i.e., public officials) must guarantee its integrity. In short, I am not at all sure that the advocates of school choice want the communitarians on their side.

William F. Shughart II University of Mississippi