Terry Moe: The Future Of Education Reform And Its Politics | Hoover Virtual Policy Briefing

Recorded June 23, 2020, 11AM PST

Terry Moe Discusses The Future Of Education Reform And Its Politics

The Hoover Institution presents an online virtual briefing series on pressing policy issues, including health care, the economy, democratic governance, and national security. Briefings will include thoughtful and informed analysis from our top scholars.

ABOUT THE FELLOW
Terry M. Moe is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University. Moe has written extensively on the politics and reform of American education, including his most recent book: The Politics of Institutional Reform: Katrina, Education, and the Second Face of Power. In 2005, Moe received the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Prize for Excellence in Education.

[elizabethdavis]

I am a fan of the Swedish model: vouchers for every student, schools chosen by the parents. Vouchers can be used in the public, private, charter, cyber/online, parochial/religious school or homeschooling curriculum of their choice.
I do have a question: given that educational outcomes across all subjects were better prior to the founding of the Dept of Education, how do you justify nationwide standards?

[dandan]

you have to wonder why education doesnt go through reforms more often

[sbearly]

So because the state and local governments did a poor job up until 1983, that's when the federal government had to get involved? And Mr. Moe, after detailing all the current problems with the schools now and all the resistance to change by teachers, administration and unions, thinks federal control and guidelines has proved to be better than local control? Ridiculous.

[jenniferalexander]

I have been a classroom teacher in NYC public schools for 30 years. I agree with Mr. Moe that the school system is a mess. There is no accountability anywhere. In fact, I doubt highly that people know what accountability means. In NYC, it means that schools should provide the statistics necessary so the politicians can get re-elected or keep their party in office. The ineptitude and corruption stems from the Mayor on down to the schools. The teacher's union is inept and corrupt, too. The quality of the educators and administrators has steadily declined to a point, that I believe, many of the teachers and administrators would not be able to find jobs anywhere outside of the public sector. The budget for the NYC schools is somewhere around $34 billion a year and the failure is immense. Throwing money at a corrupt system is not a solution. Charter schools don't have a magic potion. One of the reasons they tend to be successful is because they can focus on what works in education, and not follow the latest mandates and educational fads instituted by the politicians and education experts. The further away politicians stay from education, the better.

[ainslieberrafella]

It's all very well to aim for elevating standards across the country but the elephant in the room is Race. What do you think would happen when a politician decides to close down a poorly performing school... with black majority students? A thousand fingers are going to point at that politician and accuse them of racism, meaning politicians simply won't do it. In an environment where academics are calling education 'white supremacy' the notion of attempting to hold everyone to the same standards has little chance of success. As obstacles to education reform go, it's hard to think of a bigger one.

[ouihenacho]

Great discussion and enlightening, however, I sense a hint of regrettable progressivism in his tone. He placed a lot of blame on Republicans and made a lot of excuses for Democrats, although he wanted to be seen as being neutral as he takes about these issues.

[lordnubbins]

He lost me when he claimed Republicans have moved farther right that Democrats have moved left 😂

[peaceonearth]

Shall I laugh or cry? I think the current manifestations in society help to reveal what has been going on in the field of education. With that said, as the guest speaker was describing what past presidents (Bushes! esp.) have done for educational reform. And, as he went along on his merry path of further discussion on the topic. Does no one realize that the topic those presidents had at hand, and the template the speaker is talking about are not actually about educational reform? (imho). Instead under the label of ed. reform, what has really been on the table is the squishing and the squashing of an educational deep state or society of bureaucrats and busy-body activists. As if the whole blob of this was like a modeling clay. (Create your own better analogy if you prefer, I don't claim to be perfectly accurate.)
Anyway, the speaker doesn't seem to grasp that all of this political and theoretical made up reality that we talk about like this, isn't actually about education.

Perhaps the whole system needs to be started over, stripped of all of its established players. But if so, it would seem to me that a vacuum must not remain, as it has. Where the principles of a civilization are undefended and supplanted by columns of army ants bent on toppling that civilization. Pardon the rant.

[ainslieberrafella]

If you want to understand who controls education, ask who's policies are taught in schools. If Republicans controlled education then civics would be back on the menu and personal and political responsibility would be a major discussion topic in schools. As it is, schools teach kids to be 'agents of change' and encourage them to abrogate responsibility for their own feelings and expectations onto the state. By no measure is this Republican thinking. It's clear that when it comes to education Democrats have all but won the culture war. That Moe thinks the Democrats are 'moderate' with regard to education shows his thinking is embarrassingly out of date.

[josebocanegra]

The combination of his long-held concerns about selfish special interests controlling state and local politics, his distrust of state and local capabilities, and his belief in the negative externalities produced by state and local government failure to produce good education policies leads Terry Moe to contend (incorrectly) that accountability systems and reforms in grade-school education are best designed and managed top-down by the national government rather than devolved to the states and localities, yet he fails to provide examples of successful or superior top-down, uniform or standardized, national education policies, and he fails to mention problems (e.g. incentives limitations at the national level, power of national vested interests, limited funding mechanisms and capacities of the national government, and the regressive redistributive effects of dealing with negative externalities at the national level versus subnational levels) that beset to varying degrees national education policymaking. Moreover, Moe's discussion of the New Orleans experience proves that outside (national-in-reach) special interests help "reformers" become the new vested interests in education. The arbitrary boundary between reform and vested interest seems capriciously drawn by Moe.

[monicacapra]

This dude is just another traditional education guy...poor science... show us the data