Last week Andy and I offered some ideas on the best way to characterize the theoretical and ideological divisions in education policy. Justin Cohen followed up:

I like Andy’s “Choice/Accountability” matrix, it’s far superior to the dichotomy that both of their posts reject. I worry, though, that it conflates “choice” and school-based “autonomy.” Right now, most state laws are structured such that charter schools – which are almost always schools of choice – have more autonomy than other actors in the public system. This doesn’t have to be the case. There’s no theoretical fiat preventing all other public schools from having higher levels of school-based autonomy, it’s just that the bureaucratic, policy, and collectively-bargained constraints of most traditional systems create (surmountable!) obstacles to school-based autonomy…Kevin’s point – that KIPP’s existence is a more powerful reason for chartering than any pure market teleology – illustrates a pretty important, yet nascent, debate: is choice in public education a means or an end? If choice is an end, the pure market version of ed reform settles for a reality wherein there are winners and losers when scarce resources are allocated – that’s literally what markets do. If choice is a means, it is one part of a substantial toolkit for ensuring a higher quality education for all children. It’s a really important distinction that doesn’t get talked about enough.

I think that’s right. For example, I know a woman who founded a charter school here in DC. She has a graduate degree in management from an Ivy League university, which she could have used for all manner of self-enriching purposes. Instead, she decided to devote every waking hour to education. But going to work for the DC Public Schools wasn’t a viable option. Educating disadvantaged urban schoolchildren is difficult in the best of circumstances and DC’s circumstances were, at the time, among the worst: dysfunctional and fractured governance, crumbling facilities, a broken special education system, a bloated and unresponsive central bureaucracy, a local teachers union run by criminals and thieves, etc. So she founded a charter elementary school and was able to avoid all of that. The school didn’t offer a unique or even unusual educational philosophy. It had grades and classrooms and bright student paintings on the well. It distinguished itself mainly by being focused, results-oriented, and well-run by a group of hard-working educators. If you’d walked in the door and didn’t know otherwise, you’d have had no reason to think it was a “charter” school, until you remembered that you were in the District of Columbia and thus arrived at that conclusion via deductive reasoning based on the absence of various pathologies associated with crumbling facilities, fractured governance, bloated bureaucracies, thieving union leaders, etc.

There was no reason, beyond self-imposed laws and political customs, that DC couldn’t have handed her the keys to a regular school building and said “Teach as you want, hire who you want, and as long as parents want to enroll their children and the children learn, we’ll leave you alone.” Autonomy, not any particular market-based arrangement, was the key.

And it worked! Things went well, test scores were solid, and so many parents wanted to enroll that the school had to hold a lottery every year. Rather than let their children graduate back into still-dysfunctional DCPS, the charter school added a newer older grade every year. Before long they had outgrown their temporary rented facilities. So they cobbled together financing for a brand-new building. And when they had to choose a site, they moved north and west. Why? Because that’s where the low-income and minority children were. Their rented space was in a gentrifying neighborhood and the whole point of all those long hours was to help students who needed help the most. This has been common practice among DC charters. KIPP DC began in a building not far from the Capitol, in a neighborhood that’s seen a lot of development in recent years, particularly with the opening of the new baseball stadium. So when the time came to buy land and build, they chose a site across the river in high-poverty Anacostia. The SEED school is not far away, directly across the street from a housing project. Nobody’s breaking ground in Cleveland Park, because charter schooling granted two kinds of autonomy: How to educate (creatively, non-incompetently) but also (by way of location) who to educate. Overwhelming, charters have chosen to educate students who have been desperately underserved.

For this, Gary Orfield of the “UCLA Civil Rights Project” has branded charters as “apartheid schools” and “civil rights failures,” because their students are disproportionately–in many cases, overwhelmingly–non-white. If you’re waiting for the punch line, there isn’t one. Charters have created schools to which low-income and minority parents want to send their children, so much so that the annual lottery at my friend’s school is an emotional, high stakes affair. For this, Orfield denounces them by association with the murderous apartheid regime and America’s shameful history of institutionalized racism. If nothing else, this illustrates how powerful and totally bullet-proof  major research university brand names have become: pair one of them with a righteous moniker like “Civil Rights Project” (it used to be at Harvard) and major national newspapers will cover even the most bewilderingly narrow-minded reports. As Ross Wiener (a former litigator for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division) notes at the National Journal:

The report’s blithe embrace of integration as the paramount concern is oblivious to serious inequities often found in integrated schools. And it’s dismissive of the priorities of black parents – 80% of whom told Public Agenda that raising academic achievement is their top priority for schools, compared with 8% of whom list integration and 11% who want to prioritize both.

While I personally believe there are unique benefits that can be gained from diverse schools, integration is not a panacea. As a trial attorney responsible for desegregation cases, I saw first-hand that integration and equity in education are not the same thing. Far too often, I observed diverse schools that did not ameliorate gaps but exacerbated them. Indeed, many of the burdens of integration have been borne by students of color who disproportionately saw their schools close and their travel times to school increase – only to be tracked into lower-level courses once they arrived in newly diverse schools.

The report is openly disdainful of families’ rights to make choices about education unless those choices foster greater racial balancing in schools. Without apparent irony, the report refers multiple times to nearly all-black charter schools as “apartheid” schools, despite the fact that these are schools created by parents’ demands and not any forced assignment. Students at Amistad Academy in New Haven (named for a slave ship revolt) and North Star Academy in Newark (named for the Underground Railroad) could be forgiven if they thought they were attending anti-apartheid schools. Maybe the Civil Rights Project should organize these students to overthrow their oppressors (who happen to be providing a great education where the traditional public system had failed to do so).

Cohen then brings the argument full circle, referencing Matt Yglesias’ assertion that “the education reform debate actually has almost no ideological content whatsoever.”

A smart friend of mine remarked that debates tend to become ideological when “Means” are privileged over “Ends.” I think that is what’s happening here. I argue that “student achievement” is the most important end when discussing education reform strategies. Here, “integration” – rather than student achievement – is being held up as the desirable end. This also happens when folks privilege “choice” as an end in the education debates. I would argue that both are means, not ends, and it’s not a good idea to conflate the two. Are choice and integration important? Absolutely. But more important than student achievement?

I think this is also right. In fact, education policy is filled with examples of people who have been tripped up by over-allegiance to nominally worthwhile means. Define equity exclusively in terms of integration and you wind up making a fool out of yourself. Focus all your attention on ensuring that teachers have due process protections and you end up defending indefensible “rubber rooms.” Get too attached to the particular version of accountability embodied in NCLB and you find yourself clinging to the unworkable and unrealistic “100 percent proficiency by 2014″ deadline. Steadfast belief in the curative power of vouchers leads to wasting a lot of time debating and defending DC’s worthy but ultimately marginal voucher program. (Which is a good example of truth accidentally told through attempted euphemism; it’s just a scholarship program, nothing more.) I worry that pay-for-performance advocates may be headed down the same road.

This is also why I don’t entirely buy into Andy’s representation of education reform debates as falling along perpendicular “accountability” and “choice” axes. Again, the strong mayor/chancellor model of school reform has little do, conceptually, with either new federal regulatory regimes or choice and market-based reforms. Sure, people like Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and Joel Klein tend to be sympathetic to charters and accountability and have, to varying degrees, incorporated them into their strategies. But those strategies don’t depend on either reform; if there were no charters in DC Rhee would just be taking on an even bigger and more difficult job in essentially the same way. If NCLB weren’t mandating that she shut down low-performing schools, she’d be shutting them down another reason. Perhaps even simply because they’re low-performing! The crucial element of the mayor/chancellor model is neither accountability nor choice, but rather managerial authority wedded to political support.

In other words, it’s not that there’s no ideological content in education debates. We’d just be better of with less of it, including the miniature ideologies of the means-defenders. Education is as close to a universally valued good as they come. The only thing that really unites “reformers” is the conviction that (A) education matters, even for the disadvantaged, and (B) a single system of locally-governed schools is inadequate and cannot improve itself to a sufficient degree. Progress from there isn’t–or shouldn’t be–dictated by a particular ideological impulse or means-allegiance, but rather a disciplined empiricism and a strong awareness of how educational failures hurt vulnerable children.