An earlier version of this article appeared in educational Horizons 82,4 (Summer 2004) pp. 246 - 251

Of Professors, Politicians, Practitioners, And Pawns:
Why Research Makes So Little Difference on Educational Policy and Practice

BOOK REVIEW by Wade A. Carpenter, Ph. D.
Berry College

RETURN
edited 2/13/18

Timothy A. Hacsi
Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002)

With all due respect to Robert Fulgham, one of the greatest lessons of my life occurred at a rather advanced age, at a barbershop: Beware of people who love their jobs. As in hair cutting, so too in educational reform: an overzealous practitioner can be a real pain in the neck.

That is exactly what can happen to teachers -- or anyone else -- who start out so very, very idealistically, but end up involved in the intricacies of education reform -- perhaps as players, more likely as victims. So from time to time one yearns for a perceptive, analytical, convincing look at just how change happens in this field, and so I read Timothy A. Hacsi’s Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform.Well, two out of three is not bad: perceptive and analytical, yes; convincing, no.

Hacsi, an instructor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, is a good historian, able to guide the reader through an astonishing amount of subtle, convoluted, often contradictory meta-analyses of large-sample, multiple-setting, longitudinal studies. Mathphobics like me will not find the book intimidating. And while laying out an enormous amount of detail is often an excellent way to obscure inconvenient results,this book’s frequent,incisive recapitulations allow it to avoid that most damning of all academic descriptions -- “encyclopedic.” Children as Pawns is worth reading.

The book tackles five of the “big,” perennial topics in educational reform -- Head Start; bilingual education; class size; social promotion; and the question of the relationship of spending and achievement -- while taking into consideration economics and finance, ideology, law, pedagogy,politics,sociology,and research methodology. Overall,it is thoughtful and fair, depressing, and infuriating.

Hacsi’s analysis begins with a detailed look at Head Start, one of the most controversial of federal education initiatives. He describes a well-intended, intelligently designed, politically oversold, chronically underfunded, and brutally criticized program that has never approached its potential. The accounts here of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s misstatement of its purpose and bungling of its implementation vividly illustrate how an extraordinarily gifted politician can misrepresent an instruction-ally meritorious program.To paraphrase Hacsi: Sorry, Mr. President, Head Start was not intended to “raise children’s IQs” (p. 28), and that misrepresentation cost the program dearly. Sorry, kids, the program was never piloted, and that cost the taxpayers dearly. And sorry, taxpayers, its evaluations were usually ideologically driven -- not that the critiques were all poorly done, but nearly all came to conclusions consistent with the premises the researchers brought with them. Nothing new about that.

Despite such flaws, the author forthrightly advocates governmental solutions such as Head Start to social problems. Even so, I believe nongovernmental options and perspectives may deserve a fairer hearing than Hacsi provides in this chapter and throughout, given that many of the more articulate critics of government programs favor private providers. (Speaking of which, on a personal note: the author identifies as one of Head Start’s leading critics and privatization’s leading advocates John M. Hood, a young man I taught for three years in high school and now research director of the neoconservative John Locke Foundation. I was pleased to see John’s analyses were portrayed as discerning and coherent, even when both Hacsi and I disagree with his specifics. I have many fond memories of splendid arguments John and I enjoyed so many years ago.And I am proud of him.) At any rate,s logging through the tangled history of the continually besieged Head Start program brings to mind the World War II airborne officer’s response to a friendly warning he received on the way to Bastogne: “We’re paratroopers. . . . We’re supposed to be surrounded.” So too, evidently, are educators. But the lameness of the chapter summation is troubling:

Whether or not Head Start is making a significant difference for its children now, it probably will make a difference if we focus on improving its quality. Until we find better ways of helping poor children do well in school, this seems a reasonable thing to do. If we are truly concerned with educating disadvantaged children, one significant step would be to make sure there are places for all in high-quality preschool programs (61).

Sure. And if pigs had wings, they could fly. There are just too many “ifs” in this argumentum ad ignorantiam -- even if Hacsi’s right. (Yet let’s remember another gutsy comment from Bastogne: “They’ve got us surrounded, the poor bastards.”)

Next, Children as Pawns looks at bilingual education. Here too, Hacsi’s thumbnail description is worthwhile:

People on both sides of the issue often talk past each other;they have so little trust in their opponents’ good intentions that they cannot even hear the other side’s arguments. Both sides believe they are right; worse, they think their opponents are ignorant, or even evil. (p. 63)

The research on both sides is awfully weak, as Hacsi is quick to point out. He charitably attributes the quality of the research not to incompetence or self-interest, but to the wide variety of approaches to teaching English Language Learners (ELLs) being debated, the complexity of each of the approaches,the types of evidence allowable,how that evidence is interpreted, and the extreme diversity of locales and contexts under study. Nonetheless, one must plow through a tedious litany of seriously flawed studies followed by infuriating accounts of dubious initiatives, and above all the spectacle of California as the trendsetter. (The unsuitability of that turbulent state as an educational pacesetter is one flaw here and elsewhere in the book.) Hacsi sagaciously sums up, “What we know is that submersion classes where only English is spoken do not work;beyond that, the evidence is vague” (p. 100).

He seems to be on solid ground when he concludes that no one-size-fits-all solution seems appropriate. However, he retreats from recommending local control. Providing plenty of evidence that localities are not always sufficiently responsive to language diversity, he endorses a centrally mandated and funded diversity of approaches. Certainly that has a common-sense appeal. But here is another curious lapse in this book: ignoring the massive and expensive bureaucracy required to administer such a centrally mandated and funded diversity of approaches to such a large population. In fact, there is only one dollar sign in the whole chapter, and that is describing a relatively minor point. “Foller the dollar” is usually a useful principle in investigation; perhaps Hacsi could have paid more attention to the often-counterproductive role of people with vested interests in “a vast bureaucracy that is far more interested in its own power and prestige than with children’s education” -- to quote his words earlier in the book (p. 63). Finally, given our nation’s history of racism, the author might also have devoted more attention to the concept of assimilation.

The third chapter is a fine examination of the class-size controversy, and here the research seems much more sound, as does Hacsi’s evaluation of it. A nuanced history of the Glass-Smith meta-analysis of 1982, Tommy Tomlinson’s rejoinder in 1988, Tennessee’s first-rate Project STAR in the late ’80s to the present, and a number of related studies, this chapter comes to the clearest conclusion of any: yes, class size does make a difference, potentially a big difference. Yet still, problems abound. For instance, when and with whom does class size make a difference? For what purposes and in what ways does it make a difference? And is it worth the cost? These latter questions, obviously, are loaded. As Hacsi remarks,

Evaluations seek to provide objective knowledge; but that knowledge rarely leads to anything resembling clear-cut policy decisions. The “value” of providing children with an education of this or that quality is highly subjective, and outside the range of evaluation. (pp. 141–2)

Then, of course, come questions of implementation: should small classes be provided for everyone, or should we give priority to the poor who most need and benefit from them? The reader comes away from even this most positive of chapters with this disquieting thought:

Careless, widespread implementation may actually increase the gap in what our schools provide for children from different backgrounds. That would be a shameful legacy for an idea with so much promise. (p. 143)

Next comes a less-satisfactory chapter on social promotion. Even accepting Hacsi’s assessment that “social promotion may not be a good thing, but at least so far as student achievement and the likelihood of dropping out were concerned, retention is even worse” (p. 156) -- and I do -- Hacsi seems to underestimate the importance of the public credibility of public education, which he treated with such sophistication in the chapter on Head Start. And he takes an uncharacteristic cheap shot at then-governor George W. Bush’s actions in Texas’ social-promotion war of the 1990s:

One advantage of Bush’s intended gradual phasing-in of his program was that parents would know far in advance what was expected of their children. . . . Another advantage, as it turned out, at least from a political perspective, was that it was being implemented so slowly that Bush would be long gone from the governor’s office before any negative consequences showed up, such as increased dropout rates. (p. 166)

Hacsi’s allegation may be true, but the statement is sufficiently jarring after his more magnanimous treatment of LBJ and others to be worth noting. Nonetheless, the chapter provides a fairly sophisticated treatment of social promotion and the various assessment systems that feed it, especially tests. Hacsi goes far to restoring the reader’s confidence by pointing out that the whole retention-versus-social-promotion debate is really a false dichotomy. We ought to be looking for how to avoid resorting to either!

Finally, the book takes on the thorny challenge to “throwing money at education.” Here, the author finally gets tough -- I think appropriately -- but in doing so reveals what I consider the oddest lacunae of the book, and the toughest dilemmas for those of us in the trenches.

It’s obvious that although Hacsi’s primary audience is “individuals concerned with the state of public education” (p. 4), throughout the book he is curiously silent about good guys. There are few if any heroes to be found here, which is disappointing to an individual reader looking for ways to make a difference. But in the chapter on value-for-money he identifies a clear villain: the conservative economist Eric Hanushek, whom he portrays bluntly as a B.S. artist (B.S., as we all know, standing for “Bad Statistics”). Money certainly can make a difference, and Hacsi scorns Hanushek’s unwillingness to acknowledge the ways it can. Hanushek is right: money doesn’t necessarily improve education. Yet Hanushek is wrong:it can,when spent in the right ways and on the right things -- well-prepared and experienced teachers for one thing, and efficient operations for another. Hacsi himself seems equally unwilling to delve into how to make operations more efficient. (Paring down non-instructional staff and reducing time-consuming “accountability” requirements occur to this beleaguered old-timer!)

More troubling is the near-total pessimism of the book. Hacsi studies only extraordinarily complex educational problems that have thus far proved intractable, and it is easy for the reader to forget that every day millions of other problems are addressed effectively, and from time to time some big ones are actually solved. As I read Children as Pawns, and then looked at my desk piled high with accreditation B.S. (we also know what else B.S. stands for!), it became very easy to rage against “the system.” Overwhelmed by the political complexities Hacsi describes, I dejectedly obsessed for a while over “If one is trying to plug a sieve, but only has ten fingers, maybe it’s time to use one finger appropriately, and walk away.” But then I looked up on my wall at the photos of some of my most memorable students from the past thirty years. I saw a bunch of people who had overcome serious and even catastrophic disadvantages to go on and live well, a number of whom I help to do so. Yes, teachers can make a difference.

Hacsi is a good guy -- that much is obvious. He loves research even as I love teaching. My hunch is that he is as big a pain in the neck as my (former) barber and I, but there is nothing wrong with a passion for truth and kindness. From his disclaimers in the introduction through his claims at the conclusion, intelligence and decency shine through. He is a friend to teachers and kids -- that too is obvious. His book is a powerful source of insight for those who wonder why it is that there are many reasons educational policy is enacted,and that instructional merit is only one of them -- and so often the least. It demonstrates convincingly that research and publication by professors and programs and evaluations by politicians are unlikely to make much difference when children are merely pawns. But it doesn’t convince me that knowledge,care,and skill by practitioners won’t. I’d like to see a companion book to this excellent volume, one that analyzes successful individuals and campaigns and teaches us equally well about them.

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