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Who Controls American Education?

James Koerner was a well-known national figure in the 1960s when he headed a presidential commission looking into the causes of civil unrest after Detroit’s black riots. A former president of the Council for Basic Education, he had more than enough information and experience to write a public guide for laymen in which the players, policies, and processes of the system are laid bare.

His book Who Controls American Education? was published in 1968. The area even Koerner, with his gilt-edged résumé and contacts, hesitated to tread hard in was that region of philosophy, history, principles, and goals which might uncover the belief system that really drives mass schooling. While noting accurately the "missionary zeal" of those who sell ideas in the educational marketplace and deploring what he termed the "hideous coinages" of political palaver like "key influentials," "change agents," and "demand articulators," and while even noting that experts at the Educational Testing Service "tell us that schools should seek to build a new social order and that they, the experts, know what the new order should be," Koerner carefully avoided that sensitive zone of ultimate motives—except to caution laymen to "regard with great skepticism the solutions to educational problems that may be offered with great certitude by experts."

"It is not at all clear," continued the cautious Mr. Koerner, "that fundamental decisions are better made by people with postgraduate degrees than by those with undergraduate degrees, or with no degrees at all." Toward the end of his book, Koerner defined the upper echelons of school policy as "progressive, modern, life-adjustment" folk, but ducked away from explaining how people with these attitudes gained the driver’s seat in a democracy from a body politic which largely rejects those perspectives.

Nor did he explain what keeps them there in the face of withering criticism. Koerner was impressed, however, with what he called "the staying power of the ancien regime" and challenged his readers to resign themselves to a long wait before they might expect the modern school establishment "to give all students a sound basic education":

Anyone who thinks there [will be] a new establishment in charge of the vast industry of training and licensing teachers and administrators in this country has his head in the sand.

What we miss in Koerner’s otherwise excellent manual on school politics is any speculation about its purpose. We are left to assume that a misguided affection for the underclasses—an excess of democracy, perhaps—caused this mess. That conclusion would be dead wrong. Such a madcap course could not have been pursued so long and hard without a clear purpose giving coherence to the melee, if only for the simple reason it costs so much. What Jaime Escalante, whose teaching career was commemorated in the film"Stand and Deliver" and Marva Collins (see her book, Marva Collins Way)—and a host of teachers like them—understand is that almost anyone can learn almost anything if a few fundamental preconditions are met, not expensive to arrange. Such teachers explode the myth of the bell curve—without ever intending to be revolutionaries, they are.

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