Book Time #17: Schools
The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools, Diane Ravitch
The Great School Wars is a modest work with broad implications, less about New York City and schools as much as why our institutions sputter and stall.
Ravitch wrote this book in 1974 on the heels of one of the most disruptive eras in New York City schools for generations. That era was dominated by a bitter, complicated fight about desegregation in a city rapidly becoming majority black and Puerto Rican. Amidst deep distrust in the establishment, centralized board of education, the fad at the time was to give neighborhoods “local control” over their schools.
Those of you who have followed my reporting on the New York City subway and American infrastructure may recognize these debates. This movement was part of a broader backlash against central planning and control of any kind, including highway construction and large scale urban planning. People no longer trusted the establishment that, by the mid-to-late 1960s, had ushered in widespread urban failure, a disastrous war in a faraway land, and seemingly intractable racial strife. The idea that Big Government could no longer be trusted, should no longer be trusted, and ordinary people could hardly do any worse, was in vogue. It all sounded pretty good, a return to traditional American values of local rule and town hall government. Throw the bums out, we’ll run this damn place ourselves.
Ravitch argues that debates around the structure of public schools, and who controls what, distracted from the basic fact that massive urban poverty, aging infrastructure, and underfunding resulted in schools that didn’t function. The book fails to go into enough detail on those problems. Ravitch seems to assume anyone reading the book is already familiar with them.
But what I took away from this book was something much broader than that. The “starve the beast” theory of failing bureaucracies, in which the best thing to do for important institutions that aren’t functioning well is to cut them down at the knees, is both naive and counterproductive. This is also my experience from covering the MTA. Many important institutions have profound problems, but those problems pale in comparison to, and are often exacerbated by, chronic underfunding, or money going to the wrong things for complicated reasons. Endless bickering over who gets to run the place serves to pass the blame but fixes nothing.
This connection between the schools and my experience with the MTA is, perhaps, no coincidence. At the time of the book’s writing, the author was married to Richard Ravitch, who was to later be the head of the MTA, the agency that runs the New York City subway. Richard is widely credited for saving the subway from the doldrums of the 1980s. He was so successful at the MTA in large part because he got a regional tax passed to properly fund the agency, in which commuters and employers from outside the city paid taxes for the transit systems they benefit from. This allowed the MTA to finally afford major repairs and system upgrades for the first time. Without that money, Richard Ravitch would have been the transportation equivalent of all the school board presidents who pass through The Great School Wars, just another person in a long line of people lost to the dustbin of history because they didn’t have the money to invest in solutions.
When an institution is both failing and prone to waste, such as New York City schools in the 60s or the MTA, it is tempting to see the two problems as linked. If only the money wasn’t being wasted, it could be spent on better things. But this presumes there is such a thing as a non-wasteful bureaucracy, or that money can easily be moved around.
Yes, bureaucracies are wasteful, inefficient, and difficult to change, some more so than others, and reducing waste within reason is always laudable. But the source of this waste is often the political process itself. Bureaucracies are vulnerable to political winds—either external or internal—that often force them to execute half-measures towards vague goals with no hope of accomplishing anything tangible. This happens time and again in The Great School Wars, examples far too numerous to be recounted here.
For the modern MTA, the problem of astronomical construction costs at the MTA is illustrative. It is one of the purest public examples of inefficiency in the country. I occasionally hear politicians or commentators argue we should starve the beast to snap the MTA out of it. Yet, one of the best things politicians could do for the MTA would be to invest hundreds of millions of dollars moving project planning in-house so they can stop relying on wasteful consultant firms. The other best thing the MTA could do would be negotiate modern work rules with its unions. But both of these have massive political implications, since the governor of New York both runs the MTA and also needs its workers’ votes and the construction industry’s donations to win elections.
Meanwhile, a “starve the beast” approach wouldn’t cut construction costs on a per project basis. Contracts are locked in, commitments are made, the pool of willing contractors too small and too knowledgable about how to use the system to their gain. It would far more likely result in slashed service and maintenance, the only short-term levers the MTA easily controls. For more on this very thorny issue, I will direct interested readers on the transit construction cost problem to the Transit Costs Project at NYU for details.
Given the thorny nature of the big bureaucracy problem, it is natural for people to explore the opposite, that of local control. But experience repeatedly proves local control just as problematic. Only once “local control” takes over do we realize that, in fact, within these bureaucracies are large numbers of dedicated public servants with underappreciated expertise. Corruption is not limited to big bureaucracies, and in fact can be more insidious when done in a local organization with fewer resources and less oversight. And most Americans have little tolerance for participating in hyper-local institutions, a prerequisite for success. As a result, a small—and usually radical—number of people pretend to speak for an entire community. The smallest amount of power can often go to the biggest of heads. Local control breeds selfishness and parochialism, prevents cooperation at scale, and reduces our great cities to little more than small fiefdoms.
Is one better than the other? That’s the question that is usually asked. The Great School Wars argues that is the wrong question.
The right question is always: How do we solve the actual problem? The problem with New York City schools in the postwar era was the problem with New York City in general. It was the problem of arithmetic. White people moved to the suburbs because of cheap, federally-subsidized home loans that didn’t apply to cities. They commuted on highways built with federal dollars while abandoning mass transit that got little to no federal funding. The city’s manufacturing base got wiped out as company after company moved south where worker protections barely existed. These migrations eradicated the city’s middle class tax base. At the same time, a federally engineered program to induce mass immigration from Puerto Rico, combined with epochal changes to farm labor in the south, resulted in an influx of millions of mostly poor people. Crudely put, a million middle class white people moved out and a million poor black and Puerto Rican people moved in, earning much less—and therefore paying much less in taxes—than their white predecessors. The math didn’t work.
New York City didn’t ask for or orchestrate any of this. It was dealt a bad hand. If you worked high up for the school system or the transit agency, tasked with running a competent agency as the money evaporated, you may well have wondered why anyone was blaming you for all this. The paradox of American public institutions is they are often tasked with fixing problems they didn’t create. And then, generation after generation, someone comes up with the bright idea that if only someone else held the stacked deck of cards they could play a better hand.