I spent a few days with students at Amherst College last week discussing education policy. In general those students were very impressive and had excellent questions and insights to offer. One smart student raised an issue that I’ve heard numerous times and would like to address here: Can one really make claims about education policy without having some experience as a teacher or administrator?
The argument goes something like this — Teaching is a complicated and challenging task with many nuances. People who make proposals for education without having experienced those complications and challenges of teaching run a serious risk of missing important nuances. Without the benefit of direct experience their proposals may well fail or backfire. So, we need to be sure to consult educators when making policy proposals.
This argument amounts to giving educators intellectual veto power over policy proposals. But arguing “you just don’t understand the issues because you haven’t been a teacher” isn’t very compelling.
First, direct experience has limited usefulness for policy-making. Policies apply to broad populations, but experience is necessarily limited to particular places, times, and circumstances. You almost certainly cannot generalize from particular experiences to general policies.
Second, direct experience is almost universal. Just about everyone has spent a large portion of their life in schools and/or sending children through schools. The problem isn’t that people are unfamiliar with schools. The problem is that everyone is so familiar with schools that they wrongly think they know everything about them from their direct experiences, even though those experiences have necessarily been limited by time, place, and circumstance.
Third, our direct experience creates interests that may well distort our policy views. People who work for schools obviously have interests as employees that may be distinct from the interests of children, parents, or taxpayers. But parents also have direct experiences that can distort their interests. For example, if they have a child in GT, they may push for more emphasis on gifted and talented programs.
The antidote to these distortions of direct experience is consideration of systematic data. We may never be able to fully check the biases that result from our direct experiences, but systematic data extends our knowledge beyond the limited and distorted information derived from those experiences. And systematic knowledge can be shared among people of different experiences so that they can reference a common set of information to consider desirable policies. To know things about education policy we should put the focus on systematic data and try to de-emphasize our experiences.
To help the student consider the limitations of experience, I asked her if we should let soldiers have an effective veto over military policy. Why do we normally have a civilian secretary of defense? Why have 4 of the last 5 presidents lacked any serious military experience and nevertheless been viewed as legitimate commanders-in-chief? I know some people think we ought to defer to military personnel on military policy, but I think that view is as mistaken as deferring to educators on education policy.
And should we defer to doctors in the making of health policy? How about deferring to construction workers in the making of transportation policy? Or how about deferring to bankers in the development of financial regulations? The people who do something aren’t necessarily the people who know what should be done. Doing isn’t the same as knowing.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Expertise is important, but it’s important that experts not choose the experts. I would ask that Amherst student: “Why stop at ‘Education’?’Remember your intro Mictobiology lab, using the fine focus adjustment and the oil-immersion lems to bring different parts of a cell into focus? Social policy works something like that. At what level does expertise apply? Why not give to experts in Elementary Math Education the power to determine the K-6 Math curriculum, to experts in 17th Century French History the power to determine the scope and position of their subject in the total K-12 History sequence, to experts in Industrial Arts (Auto Shop)…etc?
See the problem? At every level of detail, someone (some many, really) will claim expertise. There is no reasion to suppose that their individual plans will fit together and no neutral way to decide between experts.
Not quite “no way”. In a market economy, experts offer their expertise for sale, and customers integrate the services on offer, to compile a package which suits their individual tastes.
I have taught in five urban school districts ranging from the best to the worst.
It is pretty obvious to me that those who have never spent a day inside a “war zone” school don’t have a clue when it comes to handing out advice about teaching strategies in these jungles. Guerilla warfare survival training would be more appropriate.
On more than one occasion, I have seen brand new teachers with the ink still wet on their degrees break down and cry….”They never told me it was going to be like this.”
I finally left after being MF’d for the thousandth time. Where in academia do professors tell you to get a tetnus booster before you start teaching in a “war zone” school because you’re going to get bit breaking up a fight.
Policy making is nice. Pushing data around is nice. Both without experience in the field is sterile.
I agree with you, Cody PT, that it is very hard to be an effective teacher without having some experience in the classroom. That’s why teacher preparation should have a significant apprenticeship component.
But the benefits of experience for becoming an effective teacher are different from the benefits for designing effective education policies.
I similarly would expect that veteran soldiers are more effective in combat than a green soldier. But do you want to defer to soldiers in developing defense policy?
All I am saying is this.
One can be a policy maker in any area they choose. If their policies are based on everything they’ve read and heard, they will not be as wise a policy maker as one who bases their policies on everything they’ve read, heard and directly experienced first hand. When you rise to the level of policy maker, the more experience you’ve had in your policy-making field, the higher the probability you will make wiser policy….all other things being equal, e.g. intellect, management style, personality, communication skills, etc.
This is the case of our senior military commanders who set military policy. Every one of them rose through the ranks. You don’t go from soldier to five-star general without serving at a variety of lower ranks. So your question….do you want to defer to soldiers in developing defense policy? …. is really off-point.
I think the analogy would be that principals and superintendents tend to be better if they have had direct experience as teachers. But there is a difference between managing operations and setting policy. Being a soldier may help one be a better general but it doesn’t necessarily make one a better president (commander in chief).
And, as I’ve suggested, direct experience can create distorted interests, which may harm one’s ability to develop effective policies.
In addition to the point that practitioners in every field necessarily have their own distinct interests that will inevitably run against the general interest of the public in at least some ways, there is also the point that any particular group of people will have its own viewpoint on things, and public policy in a democracy needs to reflect the values of the whole public. Even if you happen to think that teachers’ values are better than the public’s values when it comes to education, in a democracy the public’s values need to govern public policy except where matters of essential individual rights are concerned. Otherwise the system doesn’t work. To give any group of people a de facto veto power over an area of policy (as has been suggested in the case of teachers and education policy by, for example, Berliner and Biddle in The Manufactured Crisis) is necessarily to set up a de facto aristocratic ruling class.
To extend the metaphor, we have civilian control of the military in part because we want Pentagon spending to be used in ways that serve the public good and not in ways that feather the nests of the people who work at the Pentagon, but we also have it because we want to make sure that military policy obeys the values of the whole nation (which of course includes the values of all the citizens who are in the military, but also includes everybody else) rather than having military policy set by a distinct group of people whose values may differ from those of the rest of the nation. This was, in fact, an issue that the founding fathers were very anxious about – they didn’t create a standing military precisely because they were afraid of a military/civilian cultural divide where the two groups have different values and end up struggling with each other for control of military policy. I don’t share their distrust of standing militaries, but I’m glad we have civilian control of the military – indeed, one reason we shouldn’t distrust our standing military is precisely because our soldiers themselves are strong supporters of civilian control of the military.
We need to cultivate an equally strong sense of the importance of “civilian control” when it comes to education.
I don’t think that you are suggesting that education policy proscribe the impossible, at least in theory 🙂 If you brought up a specific policy, then we might have something to discuss. And that’s our saving grace, we can communicate and ask for advice!