Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts – By Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer
School's in: Federalism and the National Education Agenda – By Paul Manna

Abstract

Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts . Berkman, Michael and Plutzer, Eric . Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press , 2005 . 226 pp. $26.95 (paper) . School's in: Federalism and the National Education Agenda . Manna, Paul . Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press , 2006 . 222 pp. $26.95 (paper) . Federalism remains one of the most distinguishing characteristics of American governance, and nowhere does the principle exert greater influence than on the way in which we regulate our public schools. While a unitary national education policy is the norm in most countries around the world, educational authority in the United States has always been extremely fragmented as it is divided among local, state, and national institutions. Given the country's strong tradition of local control of schools, in practice the federal government played little role in education until the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. And it was not until the recent passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that the national government became forcefully involved in school improvement efforts. NCLB has brought increased attention to the costs and benefits created by our multilayered governance approach in education and the ways in which it complicates school reform efforts. NCLB has generated enormous controversy because it challenges long-held visions of school reform and historically embedded patterns of school governance in the United States. On the reform side, NCLB emphasizes school outputs—through a focus on standards, testing, accountability, and choice—rather than the traditional emphasis of states and courts on school inputs and the equalization of school resources. Two outstanding recent books by political scientists—Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts by Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer and School's in: Federalism and the National Education Agenda by Paul Manna—illuminate the dynamics of local democratic control of schools and provide insights into the origins of the newly expanded federal role. Berkman and Plutzer present a theoretically driven and methodologically rigorous study of public opinion and policy responsiveness in school financing. The project is ambitious in scope as they analyze 10 years of public opinion data and use “small polity inference” to estimate and compare preferences for school spending with actual spending in nearly all of the 10,000 school districts in the United States. One of the most impressive features of the book is how the authors explain complex methodological procedures in clear and accessible terms and how they link their empirical investigations to broader normative issues in democratic theory. They also do an excellent job of situating their research in the existing public opinion, policymaking, and education literatures. Their goal is to contribute to the important debate about policy responsiveness in political science. They note that despite considerable efforts by state and federal courts and policymakers to develop alternative financing mechanisms and reduce spending gaps in education, “within districts, the property tax continues to be the dominant source of education funds” (32) and considerable spending variance remains. By controlling for a variety of economic variables, they are able to determine whether citizen preferences for school spending are reflected in school board budgets and to explain why school spending is higher or lower in some districts with comparable resources than others. They conclude that “most Americans think that educational spending is too low and are willing to endure higher increases if the revenue benefits the public schools” (60). After disaggregating the data, they found that the most important political cleavages were age, race, home ownership, and level of educational attainment, with young voters, African Americans, parents, and the well educated most supportive of increased spending on education. The book then assesses in detail the impact on education spending and policy responsiveness made by arguably the two most powerful groups in education: teachers' unions and the elderly. They confirm the widely held belief that strong unions are able to increase school spending but note that this does not lead to unresponsive policy because a majority of the general public favors increased spending as well. However, they contest the monolithic view of union influence by noting that union “strength is variable across states, and . . . is shaped by the contours of the state funding regimes that determine the venue where this interest in most effective” (126). Berkman and Plutzer next challenge the conventional wisdom that the elderly are likely to oppose education spending by noting that “the grey peril is grossly overstated” (142). Seniors are more reluctant to increase spending on schools, but Berkman and Plutzer's analysis reveals that this is due to a generational effect—younger Americans value education more—rather than an aging effect—people becoming more conservative about education spending as they age. The distinction is important because it disputes the claim that as the American population grays with the aging of the baby boomers, public school funding will come under attack. In fact, the authors report, new generations of the elderly are likely to be more supportive of school funding. Interestingly, however, newly arrived elderly with weaker ties to the community do appear to be less supportive of education spending. Berkman and Plutzer then go on to consider the effect of different kinds of decision making and electoral processes on policy responsiveness. In another one of their counterintuitive findings, they conclude that annual budget referenda and New England town meetings—which emphasize direct democracy—produce very unresponsive (and higher) educational spending, while school districts that are less directly connected to citizens produce budgets that are more responsive to public preferences. After examining the changes in school board election procedures due to the Voting Rights Act and related court rulings, the authors found that increased descriptive representation increased policy responsiveness. Interestingly, however, they conclude that “descriptive representation is best achieved by avoiding elections altogether” (97) and utilizing appointed boards instead. Berkman and Plutzer's sophisticated analysis of public opinion data provides a much more layered and nuanced view of the local politics of education finance than has existed previously. They note that their “statistical models have allowed us to go beyond economic determinism and show how political choices, institutional structures, interest groups, and public opinion also shape these decisions” (146). Their central conclusion is that “school districts are indeed democratic . . . there is a high correspondence between what citizens want and what they get. What they want generally is to spend more on their schools” (156). This is an important and somewhat surprising finding, and one that is consistent with my own work on federal education policy in which I (McGuinn 2006, 209–210) concluded that: The evolution of federal education policy thus offers some encouragement for those who long for greater public deliberation and influence over the policymaking process. The political science literature . . . [has] cast considerable doubt about whether public preferences receive serious consideration in the policymaking process and whether it is even rational for politicians to weigh them heavily . . . this study, however, revealed that politicians and political strategists place tremendous importance on public opinion and monitor polls closely, and that prospective and retrospective issue evaluations by voters weigh heavily in the formulation of party and candidate issue positions and policy agendas. In the case of education, this enabled the public to exert extensive influence over the broad direction of national school reform efforts. The much-discussed demise of citizen influence over government therefore appears to be greatly overstated and due for some serious reconsideration. The broad and long-standing public support for higher school spending identified by Berkman and Plutzer also presents a challenge for policymakers in an era in which many reformers believe that outputs, rather than inputs, should be the focus of government efforts. While Berkman and Plutzer's study concentrates on the local level of education policy, Manna's book shifts our attention to the state and national levels. Both books, however, share a central theme—that the structure of governing institutions has a major influence on political attitudes and behavior and creates incentives for political actors to shift the venue for policy debates. Manna notes that his goal in the book “is to describe and explain the increasing status of education on the nation's agenda and, in the process, to show how federalism influences agenda setting in the United States” (4). He succeeds admirably on both counts and, in so doing, has created a book that should be required reading not only for scholars of education, but also those in federalism and public policy more broadly. Several recent books have sought to explain the evolution of federal education policy and the passage of NCLB. Manna's book is distinctive and invaluable, however, because while others focus largely on the national level, he emphasizes how political developments in the states influenced the direction of federal policy. Manna rightly points out that the growth of national authority in education was preceded by—and in some ways made possible by—the expansion of state authority in education. In this sense, the past few decades have witnessed not one revolution in educational governance, but two. In the wake of school finance lawsuits in the 1970s and the 1983 A Nation at Risk report, states greatly increased the size of their education agencies and the intensity of their school reform efforts. While the increased state role might seem to preclude greater federal involvement, it in fact made a stronger federal role more likely for two reasons. First, as Manna reminds us, it is through state educational institutions that federal influence must be channeled and so federal capacity is largely dependent on state capacity. Recognizing this, an important and explicit goal of federal policy beginning with the ESEA in 1965 was the expansion of state education agencies. A potential source of opposition to federal programs and mandates became instead one of their biggest advocates. Second, as education rose on state agendas and governors and legislatures became more involved, they circumvented their own limited capacity by pushing for federal policies (such as standards, testing, accountability, and choice) that would further their own educational goals. Manna skillfully uses the concepts of capacity and license to examine the constraints and opportunities that face state and federal policymakers in education. One of the book's most interesting insights is to dispel the conventional notion that federalism exerts only a restraining influence on federal policymaking. Instead, Manna argues, the existence of a federal system creates both positive and negative feedback, which can reduce or increase the ability of national political actors to initiate new policy. Most studies, he notes, “characterize federal–state interactions in education as top-down or bottom-up, but neither of these approaches fully captures the complexity that has enabled the federal system to influence education agendas in Washington and the states. Relationships between federal and state officials are much more pragmatic and fluid than either of these approaches, considered alone or together, would suggest” (7). One of the fascinating puzzles of NCLB is why state leaders pushed for an expanded federal role in school reform that would appear to limit their own authority and flexibility. Manna demonstrates that part of the answer lies in the fact that the relationship between federal and state governments is not zero-sum as is often presumed. Through a process that Manna calls “borrowing strength,” it is possible for policy entrepreneurs at both levels to advance their goals and expand their authority simultaneously. And “because education is both developmental and redistributive, it offers creative policy entrepreneurs opportunities to license to act regardless of formal authority or constitutional provisions that, on their face, appear to demarcate authority over the nation's schools” (31). In this way, policy entrepreneurs at the national level were able to advance their call for new standards, testing, accountability, and choice reforms by building on the momentum created by the introduction of these policies in the states. State policy entrepreneurs, particularly governors, meanwhile, were willing to support federal mandates in these areas in order to overcome local resistance to these reforms. This emphasis on the interaction of federal and state policy agendas is very interesting and provides for a new and more nuanced understanding of key moments such as the Charlottesville Education Summit in 1989. As with Ten Thousand Democracies, one of the great strengths of School's in is its frequent and effective use of data to support and illustrate graphically the study's central contentions. Manna draws on a wide variety of data sources—including presidential speeches, congressional hearings, public laws, public opinion polls, elite interviews, party platforms, and presidential ads and media coverage—to trace how and why education rose on the national agenda. He observes that “two words best describe federal involvement in education from 1965 through the early 1990s: programmatic and peripheral” (99) and that federal policy did not take on a more substantive character with a new focus on achievement and reform until the 1990s. Manna reminds us, however, that “states are not simply passive agents, and in reality command much power over the substance and implementation of federal education policy” (114). As a result, federal policymakers must be careful not to exceed their license and capacity for action and national mandates are often significantly softened during the implementation stage. In the case of NCLB, this has meant that considerable concessions have been made to placate the states; more generally, “federal officials are still fundamentally quite weak when it comes to leveraging changes in the nation's schools” (135). While Manna's theory illuminates one of the factors influencing education's rise to the top of the federal agenda, it is less useful in understanding the particular policy outcomes that emerged once the issue pierced the federal agenda. While states have always welcomed federal education funding, they have fought vigorously to protect their policy-making autonomy over schools. Yet NCLB forces states to change their education policies in a number of major ways. For example, while 48 states had standards and tests in place in 2000, only 13 states were testing students every year in reading and math between the third and eighth grades as NCLB now requires, and even fewer had strong accountability systems of the sort mandated by the new law. Thus, prior to NCLB, even in the states that had standards and tests in place, there were few consequences for schools that failed to perform well. NCLB's significance is in mandating that all states adopt a standards and testing regime, that they conform to federal timetables for achieving student proficiency, and that they suffer real consequences for failing to do so. A focus on state education politics and reform efforts can lead to the mistaken impression that it will be state policymakers alone who ultimately determine the fate of NCLB. It is important to recognize, however, that the law's future rests in equal measure on political developments at the national level and that these developments are only partly related to state preferences and pressures. In a 1994 analysis of Goals 2000, Michael Mintrom and Sandra Vergari (1997, 14) concluded that “state and local education interests have the political capacity to shape federal programs to their liking.” While that may have been true in the mid-1990s when the national Republican Party was engaged in a vigorous defense of state rights and decentralization in education, it seems much less true today given changes in the politics of educational federalism. As a result, state implementation challenges and protestations about NCLB, while important, will not by themselves be determinative in debates over the future of the federal role in education. The “bottom-up agenda setting” process described by Manna clearly played an important role in pushing education reform onto the federal agenda. But the issue has now developed its own independent momentum and constituencies at the national level. As a result, states may have a harder time pulling issues off of the federal agenda than pushing issues onto it, and strength “borrowed” from the states may not be returned to them. Manna seems to argue that the federal government's willingness and ability to initiate policy is fundamentally limited and largely dependent on state support. This conclusion, however, is normatively disturbing. On the one hand, Manna's theory explains why this may lead state officials to push for federal solutions and funds for problems that the states cannot or will not solve (the 1996 welfare reform bill comes to mind here). But it seems to underestimate the potential for federal action that is independent of, and even opposed to, state preferences. Manna notes that his project “focuses primarily on the attitudes and actions of policy entrepreneurs, not the general public” and that “the public agenda will play a supporting rather than a leading role” in his discussion (21). This focus on elite interactions, however, seems to underestimate the importance of electoral politics and the decisive impact of public opinion on policymaking in the contemporary era. Political and ideological imperatives may occasionally drive national policymakers to act beyond their license and capacity in a particular policy area. And given the high degree of policy responsiveness identified by Berkman and Plutzer at the local level, it would be interesting to explore to what extent policymakers at the state and national levels are leading or following public preferences. In sum, Ten Thousand Democracies and School's in offer empirically sophisticated and theoretically grounded studies that enhance our understanding of education policymaking while contributing significantly to broader debates about the dynamics of American politics. Both are excellent models of empirical political science that can illuminate important contemporary debates about policy and governance and should be of great interest not only to scholars of education but also those in public policy and American politics more generally.