Jal Mehta has written a sweeping review of American educational history that explains the genesis of contemporary polices and critically examines their consequences. The Allure of Order is detailed and carefully researched, but its central thesis is derived from a skewed interpretation of the politics that shaped important events and subsequent developments. Mehta sees this history as a recurring effort to rationalize schooling through the bureaucratic imposition of order from higher levels of centralized authority. He looks back fondly at the mythical one-room schoolhouse, where teachers exercised independent judgment and were not burdened by an intrusive regulatory structure.
Mehta’s argument rests on his reading of three distinct periods of school reform: Progressive era demands for scientific management at the turn of the twentieth century (1890–1912), the “forgotten standards movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s” marked by the publication of the Coleman Report in 1965 (p. 3), and the later drive for standards and accountability launched in 1983 when the U.S. Department of Education released A Nation at Risk. Each of these movements, according to the author, was propelled by a standardized, data-bound, “one best system” vision of improvement that prevailed over a more humanistic approach to instruction.
Mehta, a sociologist by training, finds common social science frameworks—interest-group politics, partisanship, rational choice, and institutionalism—inadequate tools for explaining historical patterns. Instead, he favors two other literatures. First, he examines the role that ideas play in the policy process, especially with regard to identifying crises and their solutions. Secondly, he explores the literature on professions, arguing that the failure of teaching to define itself as a prestigious self-regulating profession left school personnel powerless to resist external demands for accountability.
Political scientists reading Mehta’s account might suggest that the “usual explanations” can go a long way in determining the utility of the concepts he applies. Furthermore, we might compose a more complete chronicle of historical trends by engaging topics like federalism, localism, equity, legislative processes, judicial review, and executive leadership. According to Mehta’s account, the constant identification of crises in education roused social action so strongly that teachers were unable to resist the incursions of actors who had more credibility. That's not an unreasonable synopsis, especially for someone who underestimates the influence of teachers unions as Mehta does. Nevertheless, the crises that informed public sentiment were real. Different players assumed authority at different times: Professional school superintendents, mayors, community activists, judges, legislators, and various branches of the federal government all had a hand. These differences matter in a democratic system that seeks to balance power and accountability; but Mehta focuses on how reform affected school autonomy as if it were most significant, without fully explaining why.
History is an elephantine corpus from which to draw lessons. There is so much to consider if one is to present an accurate portrait. Mehta gives the reader a snapshot of the entire body, but he discovers historical patterns by focusing on an ever-wagging tail of activity. This “wagging tail” approach to historical analysis is problematic.
The foundation for Mehta’s central historic observation is found in the Progressive era, when muckrakers, businessmen, and university professors wrestled control of schools, and cities for that matter, from ward-based politicians who used schools and municipalities as sources of patronage. It is in their preoccupation with science, organization, and measurement that Mehta finds the seeds of a rationalization that shaped subsequent attempts at reform. While one can discern common elements in all three periods studied, there were significant differences among the forces that shaped policy in each that are at least as relevant to an understanding of their purposes and outcomes.
The analogy breaks down especially in Mehta’s treatment of the 1960s and 1970s. True, there was a fascination with systems analysis in Robert McNamara’s Defense Department, but that operational approach did not define education policy during the Great Society or its aftermath. Yes, as Mehta finds, 73 state laws were passed between 1963 and 1974 to attain accountability (p.73); but 73 legislative items in 50 state jurisdictions over 11 years is hardly a defining consensus. Education policy then was primarily motivated by demands for racial equality, with the support of nascent teacher organizations. The Coleman Report, which found family background to be a better predictor of academic performance than school resources, was commissioned by the federal government to identify and mitigate the causes of educational inequality, as its title suggests (Equality of Educational Opportunity).
Equality had been part of the dialogue in American education from as far back as Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann, but it became central after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and has remained relevant ever since. (See Viteritti, “Whose Equality,” Perspectives on Politics 9 [September 2011]: 585–96). Brown was also a turning point for federal intervention in education, initially through judicial attempts to desegregate and integrate public schools, then through congressional action. The purpose of Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was to channel more resources into poor communities, which again had teacher support. While these policies had a federalizing/centralizing effect, simultaneous demands for community control and citizen participation led to attempts to decentralize decision making at the local level. The author acknowledges these developments, but his main argument is based on the claim that some form of scientific management guided the overall agenda.
Mehta’s central thesis holds up better when he gets to the third period of reform. As he recalls, A Nation at Risk warned Americans that they needed to upgrade the general quality of education to remain economically competitive in a global market. He accurately explains that by the time President George W. Bush proposed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to Congress, testing and accountability had already been installed by most states. Mehta’s analysis breaks down, however, in an attempt to make history look more neat and tidy than it ever was in order to sustain his central argument.
Rationality is rarely an end in itself but a means to larger social objectives. Those objectives changed over time. The Progressive movement was a campaign against urban corruption. The battle to seize control from immigrant-run machines was also a class war of sorts. Efficiency and effectiveness were not key components of federal or state policies during the 1960s and 1970s. A Nation at Risk and the standards movement were in fact a reaction to widespread concerns that large amounts of government money were being spent without tangible results.
While he acknowledges them, Mehta understates the importance of equity concerns behind the passage of NCLB, and insists that the law was passed primarily to address the global economic issues originally articulated in A Nation at Risk. President Bush’s denunciation of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” was not just political rhetoric. The focus on low achievers brought congressional Democrats like Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and California Representative George Miller to the table. Civil Rights advocates emphasized the need to identify and document failure through testing and measurement. (See Jesse Hessler Rhodes, “Progressive Policy Making in a Conservative Age,” Perspectives on Politics 9 [September 2011]: 519–44).
Moreover, as NCLB was being crafted in Washington, charter school and choice movements, rampant in the states, devolved discretion down to the parental level and granted schools more autonomy. Again, Mehta acknowledges these state developments, but he does not sufficiently account for them in explaining the contours of emerging policies. Nor does he give much attention to changes that transpired under the Obama administration, in which state consortia took the lead in crafting standards and tests. While the teachers' unions sought to slow the hurried implementation of the Common Core curricula and assessments, labor leaders never uniformly disagreed with their adoption.
Mehta has ably demonstrated how education reforms of the past 150 years have made schools more accountable to institutional actors at all levels of government—a point disputed by few scholars. But he fails to recognize that the one-room schoolhouses of yesteryear were legally segregated, or that their funding and performance could be easily correlated with the race and wealth of the children who attended them. One might say that these isolating and unfair circumstances still persist. What differs is that demands for accountability, standards, transparency, and equity have set the sights of policymakers on a more just system.
At the end of the book, Mehta presents a clearer picture of his vision of twenty-first-century schooling. He wants teachers and administrators at the school level to have opportunities to experiment. He is a supporter of community schools that engage a range of social agencies in education. There is nothing under the present regime of education governance that prevents either. To thrive, these innovations ought to be intelligently organized right down to the classroom. The allure of order, after all, is that it is usually better than the alternative.
