Joel Spring on the Education Monopoly: An LR Interview

When President Carter signed the bill which created the new Cabinet-level Department of Education this past October, you could hear the groans and the snorts of derision from coast to coast. The New York Times editorialized that “the supporters of a separate department speak vaguely of the need for a Federal policy on education. We believe that they misunderstand the nature of American education, which is characterized by diversity.” Congressman John Erlenborn (R-IL) of the House Committee on Government Operations, which has jurisdiction over such government reorganization, commented in the same newspaper that “a Department of Education, by its nature, would not be likely to give power to make decisions back to the local areas. It is far more likely to attempt to increase categorical aid programs with all their attendant rules, regulations and paperwork that would make local school boards little more than entities to certify Federal forms.” And Stanford University President Richard Lyman dismissed the new Department as badly out of sync with the real educational values of most Americans: “The 200-year absence of a department of education,” he said, “is not the result of simple failure to notice that virtually every other nation has one. It derives from the conviction that we do not want the kind of educational systems that such arrangements produce.”

About the only place you could find anyone saying anything good about the new Department was in the inner recesses of the National Education Association, the teachers’ lobby which had paid the President in advance for the new Cabinet post with an endorsement and several million members’ votes in the 1976 election. The NEA, needless to say, was delighted. “We’re the only union with our own Cabinet department,” an NEA official was quoted as boasting to a Newsweek reporter in November. But almost everyone else was dubious—even other members of the federal bureaucracy. Of course, the bureaucrats who opposed the new Department were concerned more with losing programs than with losing freedoms. As Newsweek reported, “agencies outside the Office of Education that run school-related programs—the Department of Agriculture’s school-lunch operation, for instance—recoiled at surrender-ing their programs.”

Ultimately, they didn’t have to. The Department of Agriculture kept its school-lunch program. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services) kept its Head Start program. Yet even without these large, money-guzzling programs under its umbrella, the new Department of Education is a $14-billion, 18,000-employee behemoth, larger than the State Department, the Departments of Justice, Commerce, and the Interior, and even that mammoth albatross among federal agencies, the Department of Energy. And while much of the outcry which has greeted the creation of this new bureaucratic monster has been in the name of economy in government and the intrinsic beauty of decentralization, very little attention has been paid to the history which lies behind the monster—the mistakes in American education policy over the past century which have made this newest boondoggle virtually inevitable.

In the belief that a little time spent reviewing those mistakes—and the mistaken doctrines which lay behind them—might help us to refrain from committing them again in the future, LR dispatched contributing editor Milton Mueller to discuss the subject with one of today’s leading authorities on educational history, Joel Spring.

At 40, Spring is the author of no less than two of the major texts produced thus far by the movement of historical revisionism which first became influential in educational circles during the 1960s: Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (1972), which traces the remaking of America’s public schools into sorting institutions designed to supply the military-industrial complex with the obedient workers it needs, and The Sorting Machine (1976), which describes the continuation of this process into our own era. He is also the author of a third, lesser known, volume, A Primer of Libertarian Education (1975), which traces the development of an entirely different, liberating tradition in educational theory. He has taught at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University and is currently a Professor of Education at the University of Cincinnati. Spring seemed not only the ideal interviewee to fill in the background behind the new Department of Education (and to explain the grimly funny appropriateness of the Carter administration’s decision to house the new Department in an obsolete military building), but also the ideal interviewee to press beyond the usual libertarian case against tax-funded schools and assess the role played by schools—whether public or private—in the life of our society. Accordingly, we began our conversation with a question about this larger picture of the social role of schooling.

LR: You’ve said that most libertarians don’t really understand the importance of education. Why?

Spring: Most libertarians keep their discussions of education pretty superficial. They’re mainly concerned with the advantages of private vs. public schooling—which is an important issue. What’s superficial about it is the lack of importance given the educational system of which both public and private schools are a part. You see, if libertarians consider choice the key to being free, and if we look at the methods of coercion in a society, then education is coercive not only because it forces you to send your child to public school, but also because public schooling—and much private schooling too—is designed to control ideology or ideas—the very basis upon which people make choices. Now, when you talk about control of ideology, it’s important to understand that public schooling did not result from the demands of a strong popular movement. The historical apologists for public schooling like to give the impression that workers and common people wanted state schooling, but in reality people weren’t too happy with the idea. For one thing, there were significant religious differences among people in the early nineteenth century. Presbyterians couldn’t imagine going to school with Baptists; there was a fundamental conflict over what should be taught in school. In fact, the rise of the public school, not only in the U.S. but also in other Western societies, was characterized in all cases by a desire on the part of a ruling elite to shape particular kinds of citizens.

LR: Certainly we used to see very blatant indoctrination in the schools, for example the Pledge of Allegiance. But aren’t schools pretty bland in their content today? How do they “shape citizens” now?

Spring: There is a big difference between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century you can see the emphasis on political indoctrination—flag waving, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, marching around, and reading patriotic stories in textbooks. That tradition continued into the twentieth century and you still find it in the schools. But patriotism is no longer emphasized. The emphasis now is on producing students who have a low level of economic and political consciousness. What is taught in the schools is reflective of a corporate-liberal ideology which teaches individuals to accept an economic position in society and to serve society rather than be active, self-sustaining citizens.

LR: Can you give some specific examples of how the schools do that?

Spring: It’s done in several ways. There’s the content of what students learn, the textbooks. There is the social life of the school, the way it’s organized. And there are the general purposes and goals given to the school. For instance, the purpose which has been given to schools in the twentieth century is to turn out people who will serve particular economic roles in society. And this is done in the school through a system of tracking, ability grouping, and the use of standardized tests which are specifically designed to sort students out for the labor market. Competition for economic opportunity takes place within the school, rather than in the market, and afterwards the students are sorted out for their particular slots in society. Sorting the student within the school is done under the control of experts and professionals within the educational bureaucracy. Obviously, the school itself is primarily controlled by that group of professionals, and the ideology that they naturally teach within the school is one which they feel is supportive of their position. Their position is supported financially by the government, and is supported ideologically by the belief that somehow they are helping the poor by spreading social welfare programs through the school. So professional school people tend to be wedded to the corporate-liberal ideology of the twentieth century, which they then reproduce through the school system. The school system itself is reflective of that corporate ideology; it is a social institution which attempts to act in a positive fashion to direct people’s careers and lives. Beginning in the early 1970s with career education, for example, it has been federal policy to decrease the amount of general education received and re-orient most education toward finding some future job. That means that knowledge is structured for the individual not in terms of political power, not in terms of protection or getting of political rights, but in terms of getting a job.

LR: You’ve mentioned the experts and professionals who make most of the decisions in the school system. Who are these experts? Where do they come from?

Spring: I don’t want to give the picture of a monolithic structure of professionals, because there is a lot of internal conflict, and there are a lot of layers. Where do they come from? The best way to answer that is to give a brief history of the school bureaucracy. In the early part of the twentieth century, if you were to identify the closest thing to a set of national educational policy makers—in the sense of issuing statements about what curriculum should be—it was the National Educational Association. The NEA, controlled mainly by college professors and local and state superintendents of education, was very important in the early part of the twentieth century. Its influence began in the 1890s, when progressive reformers began to speak of the ideology of democratic elitism —the idea that the average person really didn’t know what was in the best interest of his child. Only the most successful and best educated members of society should be on school boards, therefore, because they knew what was best for children. School board elections were deliberately restruc-tured so that only certain successful members of the community would get on the school boards. This was done by centralizing school elections, by making the elections nonpartisan, and by consolidating the schools in rural areas. There was a shift in the social class of the school board official, moving from local Ward politicians and other community figures to successful businessmen and upper class reformers. “The best” were thus going to control the schools; but they were really going to limit themselves to general policy statements and leave the real power in the hands of the experts and professionals who would be trained in the rapidly expanding colleges of education. So in the twentieth century you see a rapid increase in the Educational Administration courses. Thus while the school boards represent the business and professional class, they really shift more and more of the functions of running schools over to the professionals who surround the Superintendent, and the Superintendent becomes an extremely powerful figure. Previously, elected school board members visited individual schools and even gave examinations to students and teachers; they had very personal contact. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the school board no longer did that; the administrative staff did it and therefore controlled the gathering of such information.

Then after World War II, professional control on both the local and national level came under attack because of an argument that the schools were the weak link in our chain of defense against the Soviet Union—that the professional educators had ruined the schools by making them anti-intellectual. The federal government, under pressure from the scientific-military-industrial complex which had grown up during the war, began to assert that if we were going to win the arms race with the Soviet Union we were going to have to produce more mathematicians and scientists. And to do that we were going to have to break the hold of the professional educators on the public schools—the government said that very specifically.

LR: Why were professional educators less intellectually oriented? One might think they would be the most intellectually oriented.

Spring: Well, what happened was that during the 1920s and ’30s, colleges of education began placing more and more emphasis on shaping the personality. In fact, when they came up with the idea of the comprehensive high school, the two most important reasons offered for it were training students for economic efficiency, as it was called, and for “social efficiency.” Training for “social efficiency” meant shaping the personality of the student within the school so he would “fit in.” Extracurricular activities took on a great deal of importance during the 1920s because they were viewed as a way of shaping the individual for service to society. This was the first great era of school spirit, football, and so on. Then, after the Depression began, there wasn’t much stress on finding people jobs, because there weren’t any; so the socializing programs which had been initiated in the 1920s began to be emphasized more and more during the ’30s. By the 1940s, “life adjustment” education had become very popular. And it was this trend in education that then came under attack. It was a real trend in education by then, and it stemmed from the actions of professional educators.

LR: So even the little things people take for granted about the high school—football teams, school spirit, the little films on how to brush your teeth—were all the results of conscious policies made by a particular group at a particular time.

Spring: If anyone were to sit back and think about it, it would seem logical that that’s what happened. So the military argued that the federal government should step in and take a lot of the power away from the professional educators, and this was done in the latter part of the 1950s with the new science and math curriculums developed by

The federal government and with the passage of the National Defense Education Act, a major federal bill, in the latter part of the 1950s. Eisenhower even went around the country talking about how we had to prepare students for the missile age.

Now, during the 1960s, federal involvement in the schools expanded again, due to the War on Poverty programs. This time, local professional educators came under attack not so much for making the schools non-academic as for being racist and against the poor. Again the federal government was going to step in and turn the schools around. In response to charges that the feds were doing away with local control, they passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which provided money for the expansion of state Departments of Education. This created a level of bureaucracy at the state level which hadn’t existed before. What’s interesting is that it was not a product of state governments wanting to expand their education departments; it was a product of the federal government making the money available. The state Departments of Education were then used as conduits for federally conceived and funded programs.

And then in the 1970s, this long-lived antagonism between the federal government and professional educators ceased to exist. The professional organizations and the feds began working together very, very closely—leading to even greater centralization and national control over education.

LR: The 1968-69 crisis in the New York City schools seems to have been a real watershed in this centralization process. The battle over community control in the black Ocean Hill-Brownsville Junior High Schools brought together all the various power elites and interest groups in one big conflict: the teachers’ union, the federal government, and the local New York City School Board, not to mention the parents and children using the schools. Racial conflict, too, figured prominently in this battle. Can you discuss Ocean Hill-Brownsville?

Spring: In order to understand Ocean Hill-Brownsville, you have to back up a little bit to one of the most interesting parts of the 1960s War on Poverty programs. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 mandated that all programs had to have “maximum feasible participation.” In the early ‘60s sociologists were arguing that the reason we had poor people in this country was that the opportunities that had existed in previous generations no longer existed; the opportunity structure wasn’t there. If you had “maximum feasible participation” in the War on Poverty programs, it was thought, that would be an opportunity structure by which people could train themselves to move up the social ladder. Of course, the idea that the poor would really control this political structure was unthinkable; one of its purposes was social manipulation. But by the latter part of the 1960s, the poor had come upon the idea of controlling their communities and schools. With the concept of maximum feasible participation, it was natural under federal programs to have parent advisory groups, particularly in minority areas. To the poor, the logical next step after parent advisory groups was community control of education.

At the same time, a related development was taking place. The original 1954 school desegregation decision by the Supreme Court rested on the idea that segregated schools were inherently unequal. In the minds of some black leaders, this implied that blacks had to go to school with whites if they were ever to receive equal education. But by the end of the ‘60s, black community groups had begun to argue, “Hey, we’re not getting anywhere with school integration; what we were really concerned about in the South and even the North was that segregated schooling meant inferior schooling—black schools were overcrowded and didn’t have as much money. We didn’t necessarily want our children to go to school with whites, we just wanted good schools. So give us the money and we’ll run our own schools.” The whole movement for community control grew partly out of that.

This community control concept began in New York in Brownsville, which became an experimental school in a black community. Immediately, the experiment ran up against the major defenders of maximizing the extent of public schooling: the teachers’ union. In New York, the teachers’ union was controlled by Albert Shanker, now head of the American Federation of Teachers.

Community control threatens the existing power structure in several ways. First, when black communities control their own schools they want to get rid of racist teachers. In these New York schools we were dealing with 90 percent white teachers and 90 percent black students. And many of the teachers were identifiable as out and out racists. Consequently, the community groups wanted to get rid of certain teachers. The teachers’ union became very upset about that. But there was an even more important element. The way unions are organized, it’s easier for them to bargain with one large, monopolistic unit than with small, individual units, and in New York City if the schools had become decentralized it would have broken Shanker’s power. He would have been reduced to the head of a little local district. Also, the unions recoiled from the idea of having to bargain with parents.

The community control people also wanted to control the way the money was spent. And this brought up the whole issue of unions within the city, many of which were all white. The neighborhood black people wanted to hire from black unions, or else hire non-union people. So the local trade unions in New York started backing Shanker in his attempt to defeat community control. It was a threat not only to Shanker, but also to the other unions in the city, and to any idea of maintaining a centralized administration over city schools.

LR: Oddly enough, in this instance the federal government —and even more bizarre, the Ford Foundation—favored decentralization. How do you explain that?

Spring: At that time, there was still this long-standing conflict between the federal government and local professional educators, dating back to the ‘40s and ‘50s. The antagonism still existed. And the people in the federal War on Poverty programs were much the same as those in the large foundations like Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie. The foundation people moved in and out of the federal government. It was believed, and probably rightly, that the local schools were responsible for maintaining poverty and institutionalized racism, so the federal and foundation people saw their jobs as changing those schools. They were working in conflict with local policies. You had several levels of bureaucracy hitting each other. power.

And there have been several outgrowths of that greater centralization. In the last election Jimmy Carter agreed to do two things. One was to create Teacher Centers, as desired by the AFT; the other was to create a new Department of Education, separate from HEW, as desired by the NEA. Well, Teachers Centers have come into existence, and the AFT has been given government money to distribute information on teaching methods, and research and knowledge about education. And the Department of Education has been created by Congress, bringing the final touch to the centralization of educational control in this country.

Now a lot of people will say you don’t really have to worry about the federal government. The federal government doesn’t come into San Francisco and tell the teacher what to do day by day. The federal government doesn’t go into Des Moines and regiment the classroom. And in fact the federal government provides only 8 percent of the budget at the local school level. But that sort of analysis is a little bit too superficial.

What the federal government does with its 8 percent is provide aid in support of only certain types of programs. And by way of this carrot, the money, it can get the schools to rush into whatever it wants. The result ultimately is that federal government is not only in a position to control the information being distributed in the schools, but also in a position to control how information will be produced in our society.

LR: So what was the final shakedown in Brownsville and the whole New York City decentralization fight?

Spring: What eventually happened was the big teachers’ strike in New York City. And Shanker won. Shanker’s victory has had great importance to the future of education in the United States. Shanker became a national power in the teachers’ union at a time when there were more and more strikes occurring throughout the country. This was a great victory for Shanker. It also meant the death of any experiment in community control. People within the federal government and the foundations no longer believe that they can fight back—nor do they want to. The teachers’ unions say, “Look, if you do anything like that again, we’re going to work against you politically when you run for office.” And Shanker’s power was demonstrated when the tuition tax credit was proposed; he moved his lobbying machine into Washington and defeated it. As a result, the final shakedown was the destruction of community control, the rise of Albert Shanker, a decrease in any federal policy that might be antagonistic to Shanker and other powerful unions —and a closer working relationship between the professional education organizations and the federal government. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. A greater centralization of educational control in this country.

LR: How exactly does government control the production of knowledge?

Spring: One of the ways you control knowledge is by controlling the economic incentives to do certain types of work. For instance, following the establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1950, the federal government announced that it was primarily interested in expanding the area of science and mathematics, as a way of pursuing research in military weaponry. Now scholars—like other people—are interested in money. And the way the university system works is that if you don’t get tenure in five years or six years, you lose your job—and the way you get tenure in a university is by doing research. It’s very helpful if you can do your research while getting paid for it. So if the federal government comes along and announces that it is offering grants for weapons research and your local scholar has never heard of weapons research before, for obvious reasons he finds out about weapons research.

It’s done in the universities all the time. At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where I used to teach, they had teams that would fly to Washington each year to find out what the federal government would be financing that year. They would fly to Washington and they would meet with staff members of the bureaucracy who would tell them what they were funding that year, and they would bring that information back with them. The universities publish bulletins about what will be funded, and provide information on whom to contact. At Case they met with the faculty at faculty meetings to tell what to apply for. At a university when you go to write a research grant you usually call up a friend or someone in Washington to find out how it should be written so you can be sure of funding.

Actually it’s even more insidious than it sounds. A book called Research for Tomorrow, a publication of the American Academy of Education, describes the entire process, and it’s a very interesting one. When money becomes available, say through the Defense Department, for a particular area of research, maybe a particular area of weaponry, there may be no scholars in that area, or anyone doing work on it. But word gets out fast that the federal government is looking for people. Let’s say a few people start applying for the grants— four or five people who had never heard of the area before. They start doing research in that area, and a series of things begins to happen. One is that the federal agency itself needs people to read and evaluate those grant proposals, and future proposals. So if you apply for a grant and get one, the agency will start sending you grant proposals to evaluate. They turn to the original people to whom they gave grants, and they use this group to decide who will be doing research in an area they created in the first place. And what develops is, in some ways, a government-privileged old-boy network.

But not only does government create whole bodies of knowledge, it also develops interest groups that will start lobbying for further funding from the federal government. Because they are receiving money for what they are doing, they are often able to attract graduate students to study under them. Once they have graduate students, they can have them do research in the area, or something related to it. And all of a sudden we begin to see these areas of knowledge expanding and multiplying, first in terms of papers given at conventions, then in terms of attracting students who become specialists and take jobs in other universities, writing articles and publishing books.

LR: Obviously government exerts a major influence over the production of knowledge in our society. And you say government also controls its distribution?

Spring: The federal government is very conscious of the whole problem of the distribution of knowledge; it is not being done in a naive fashion. The bureaucrats call it dissemination. Since the 1960s, dissemination has been a major concern of federal education policy. One of the outgrowths of their dissemination program is a completely computerized national library system for educational materials. Another is a set of techniques for influencing how and what teachers teach.

The National Institute of Education is the federal agency responsible for basic research in education—and a great deal of its budget is devoted to the dissemination of knowledge. NIE uses a number of techniques, one of which is grants. People may not have heard of career education, but if the federal government announces that it’s going to give grants for career education, people will rush and find out about it. Also, if you look through educational journals, you can identify many journal articles as a direct product of government-sponsored research, or maybe the next stage of that research, so there is a dispersal process throughout the professional world. Teacher Centers are also a way of dis-seminating knowledge, and right now the federal government is establishing these centers around the country to bring teachers together to share information and knowledge about how to teach.

The textbook industry is relatively free from direct government control—but there is an awful lot of indirect control. At one end, as I’ve shown, the government controls what knowledge is going to be there when the textbook industry hires people to write their books. And when the textbook publishers turn around to sell their books to the public schools, they face a monopoly situation. Instead of choices being made by individuals, or by individual schools, we have almost a national set of textbook purchasing laws. These laws are the result of the graft that existed in the textbook industry in the 1920s, when textbook companies actually selected Superintendents of schools and jumped into school board politics so they could get their textbooks adopted. Today, most states have a law that they will not pay a price for a textbook that is any higher than the lowest price paid for that textbook by any other state in the country. Many states, Texas and California for instance, have statewide adoption of textbooks, and all states have a uniform selection list for texts. This centralized selection strongly affects what’s going to be in the textbooks. The publisher, in order to be able to dump his product into a politically guaranteed, statewide market will make the books as inoffensive as possible, particularly if the subject is social studies. This is why social studies texts all have that special kind of blandness. Random House once picked up a book on the history of Mississippi which portrayed minority groups in a very positive way, but the State of Mississippi wouldn’t approve the book. So Random House sits with a whole warehouse full of these books, even though many local districts and parents might choose it if they could.

I had a graduate student in Cleveland who did a study of the rise of the public school and its relationship to the textbook industry in Ohio. Cincinnati in the nineteenth century was the home of the McGuffey Readers, and one of the major publishing centers in the country. She found that no one in the state of Ohio really supported the idea of a comprehensive public school system—except for one group: the textbook publishers, who distributed free journals all over the state strongly advocating a common school system. She went through the correspondence of these publishers, and found that they viewed the establishment of a uniform, comprehensive school system as a way of getting a guaranteed market for a graded series of textbooks.

LR: As you noted before, the trend toward centralization of control in education has finally culminated in a national Department of Education. Wasn’t something like this proposed right after the founding of this nation—and rejected?

Spring: Yes. There were a number of proposals made right after the American Revolution calling for national boards of education with even greater powers than today’s Department of Education. They would have established a uniform set of textbooks, a uniform curriculum, and would even have selected scholars and artists to be supported with government money. It was part of a nationalistic desire to shape a “national culture” and sort of an American aristocracy. But they were never seriously considered. Such ideas were considered to be outlandish—and rightly so, considering that Americans had just fought a revolution for freedom of thought and freedom of speech. At that time, Americans understood the contradiction between freedom of thought and state control of education—although they seem to have totally lost that insight in the years since.

LR: Many people would probably agree that it’s pretty hideous to have the federal government and the military controlling our education system. But some say getting the state out of education would simply mean putting it in the hands of the big corporations. Since corporations control large amounts of money, wouldn’t they control the production and distribution of knowledge, and shape it according to their own ends, the same way the government does now?

Spring: In a free society, the most important choice that people can make is which type of ideas they want themselves and their children to be exposed to. If you believe that the progress of society is dependent upon the free interplay of ideas, if you believe that the best ideas can only be determined by free choice and not by an elite sitting in government, then you have to sharply separate education from the state and open it up completely.

Right now, the state forces you to go to a public school. And that coercive power stems from the fact that it taxes you and then returns that tax through the school system, a massive system of bureaucracy and control which you have to use unless you have enough money left after taxes to go somewhere else.

Now, could the corporations come to control ideas? Certainly major corporations would be interested in promoting their ideas about society. You see advertising all the time from companies like Mobil Oil promoting certain political and economic concepts. But that is very, very different from controlling a huge, coercive political structure with the right to put you in jail and take your child away if you aren’t obedient to it. No corporation can do that; if one tried, it would immediately be recognized as criminal. No corporation, no matter how big, could get away with taxing people, either. I’m not forced to read Mobil ads, but if I’m in a public school and the teacher assigns me one to write an essay on, I am forced.

In a society that is completely free, everyone is going to try to influence everyone else, but the determination of which ideas are most valued should be in the hands of the individual. That way, the ideas serve the individual rather than a political structure or a ruling elite.

LR: What do you think of the argument that the problem with just getting the state out of education and opening it up to free choice is that under that kind of a system, poor people and oppressed minorities would get the short end of the education stick? They’d be in no position to really choose the kind of education they need, would they?

Spring: That’s the argument of democratic elitism, that the people don’t know what is in their best interest. And that kind of apology for power is directly responsible for the mess we are in now. What have the public schools done for poor minorities in this country? They’ve promoted institutional racism and stifled social mobility. Without question, if the power of choice over their education had been in the hands of the poor and minorities, they would be receiving a far superior education than they have in the past.

It’s true that if we went immediately to a system without any government involvement in education, many people— not all of them poor—would not know what to do at first. A lot of self-education would have to take place. People aren’t used to making choices in that area yet, although people make choices every day about more complicated things, like buying food. I’m sure that given some time to think about it, people would make intelligent choices. They could hardly do worse than the government.