Education Week - January 14, 2015 - 24

COMMENTARY
Exit, Voice, Loyalty-and the Common Core
By Williamson M. Evers
O
ne of the most influential
books in
social science in
the last 50 years is
economist Albert O.
Hirschman's Exit,
Voice, and Loyalty.
In this pivotal
1970 book, Hirschman discusses how
individuals react when services they
rely on deteriorate. The basic responses
available to us are "exit" and "voice,"
Hirschman points out, where exit means
turning to a different provider or leaving
the area, and voice means political participation.
We
tend to think of these responses
as stark alternatives. Hirschman, as
a social scientist, wanted us to consider
the interplay between them.
Exit usually has lower costs than voice
for the individual. With exit, you can
avoid the long slog of politics and simply
turn to someone else or move somewhere
else.
But there is a limiting case: Exit can
have high costs when individuals are
loyal to institutions-thus the third component
in Hirschman's trio of exit, voice,
and loyalty.
In the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville
visited the United States, he
found Americans intensely loyal to their
local schools. Americans saw schools as
extensions of their families and neighborhoods.
They viewed public schools
as akin to voluntarily supported charities
and as part of what social scientists
today call civil society.
Tocqueville described township school
committees that were deeply rooted in
their local communities. State control of
local public education took the form of an
annual report sent by the township committee
to the state capital. There was no
national control.
Today, Americans retain much of the
sentiment about local schools they had
in Tocqueville's day. But, increasingly,
parents and taxpayers view the public
schools as an unresponsive bureaucracy
carrying out edicts from distant
capitals. Today, we are dealing with a
deteriorating situation in a declining institution,
namely widespread ineffective
instruction in the public schools.
The Common Core State Standards
have come to the fore precisely at a time
when civically active individuals care
much more than they usually do about
exit, voice, and loyalty. But the common
core has denied voice and tried to block
exit.
The common core's designers have
taken the existing bureaucracy and increased
its centralization and uniformity.
By creating the common-core content
why economist Milton Friedman called
for opportunity scholarships (also known
as vouchers) to create a powerful exit option.
But even in the absence of opportunity
scholarships and charter schools, we
had some exit options in the past because
of competitive federalism, meaning horizontal
competition among jurisdictions.
Economist Caroline Hoxby studied
metropolitan areas with many school
standards behind closed doors, the authors
increased the alienation of the public
from schools as institutions worthy of
loyalty. The general public had no voice
in creating or adopting the common core.
The other approach in times of a deteriorating
public service is offering better
exit options. But the common core's proponents
have created an almost inescapable
national cartel.
There has long been a monopoly problem
in public education, which was
districts (like Boston) and metropolitan
areas contained within one large district
(like Miami or Los Angeles). She found
that student performance is better in
areas with competing multiple districts,
where parents at the same income level
can move to another locality, in search
of a better education.
We have also seen competitive federalism
work in education at the
interstate level. Back in the 1950s,
education in Mississippi and North
ing rules of a cartel. The common core's
promoters and their federal facilitators
wanted a cartel that would override competitive
federalism and shut down the
curriculum alternatives that federalism
would allow.
The new common-core-aligned tests,
whose development was supported with
federal funds, function to police the cartel.
All long-lasting cartels must have
a mechanism for policing and punishing
those seen as shirkers and chiselers,
or, in other words, those who want
to escape the cartel's strictures or who
want increased flexibility so they can
succeed.
The new leadership of the College
Board by David Coleman,
one of the common core's chief
architects, is being used to corral
Catholic schools, other private schools,
and home-schooling parents into the
"
Increasingly, parents and taxpayers
view the public schools as an
unresponsive bureaucracy carrying
out edicts from distant capitals."
Nip Rogers for Education Week
Carolina performed at the same low
level. North Carolina tried a number
of educational experiments and moved
ahead of Mississippi. Likewise, Massachusetts
moved up over the years from
mediocre to stellar.
The common core's promoters are endeavoring
to suppress competitive federalism.
The common core's rules and
its curriculum guidance are the governcartel.
The proponents of the common
core have now established a clearinghouse
for authorized teaching materials
to try to close off any remaining possible
avenue of escaping the cartel.
What was the rationale for the common
core? The name given to the
Obama administration's signature
school reform effort, the Race to the
Top program, promotes the idea that
the federal government needs to step in
and lead a race. Central to this rhetoric
is the idea that state performance standards
were already on a downward slide
and that, without nationalization, standards
would inexorably continue on a
"race to the bottom."
I would disagree. While providers
of public education certainly face the
temptation to do what might look like
taking the easy way out by letting academic
standards decline, there is also
countervailing pressure in the direction
of higher standards.
If state policymakers and education
officials let content standards slip, low
PAGE 21 >
WILLIAMSON M. EVERS is a research fellow at
Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He was an
assistant U.S. secretary of education for planning,
evaluation, and policy development from 2007 to
2009, during the George W. Bush administration.
| INSIDE |
18 THE 2015 EDUSCHOLAR
RANKINGS
19 HOW DOES AN EDU-SCHOLAR
INFLUENCE K-12 POLICY?
20 LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR
l ENGAGE IN THE K-12 PUBLIC DEBATE
l ADDRESS PROBLEMS OF PRACTICE
l MAKE RESEARCH ACCESSIBLE
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