Someone with some knowledge of the dispute over the proposed NYC parent councils read what I wrote about it and protested that I had misread a reasonably objective report by the New York Times as a partisan political statement. My (somewhat edited) response:
Thanks for the note! It’s a useful reality check to get comments from someone involved in something I’ve written about.
Our perspectives on the piece obviously differ a great deal. I see it as something the NY Times is saying, and I see the NYT as standing for a particular understanding of politics, society, justice and so on. It would be hard to describe and discuss the world coherently without reference to some such understanding.
Different understandings are possible, though, and I’m out of sympathy with the one prevailing at the NYT. You evidently accept it, so that basic aspects of that view of things seem to you the natural and obvious fundamental categories for sorting out the world around you.
The natural consequence of that difference between us is what seems to you a straightforward and nonpartisan discussion of a particular situation seems to me quite clearly to function as a political statement—a statement that picks out and focuses exclusively on an issue the importance of which depends on the view that top-down bureaucratized equality is a non-negotiable moral necessity.
All of which is quite general and theoretical. To be more specific, I live in an area that until recently was mostly black, and I’ve put a lot of time and effort into mostly black organizations. What I’ve seen is that there are fewer blacks than whites who join organizations and work in them effectively. When there are a few whites and many blacks involved, my experience is that whites are very disproportionately involved in getting the organizational work done. That’s not because they’re hungry for power or like to form cliques. The work that has to be done to keep local groups running is not the sort of thing anyone has much of an appetite for. It’s because otherwise things won’t happen. Doing the organizational stuff is even expected of them.
What that means is that if you have a mixed black/white community any local community involvement in self-government will be “biased” in exactly the sense the proposed parent councils will be biased. Whites will disproportionately occupy positions of influence and responsibility. So if you think it’s a non-negotiable demand of political justice that blacks must in fact have roughly equal influence and responsibility you won’t be able to allow local self-government.
The point can be extended. Most people don’t get involved in local self-government. It follows that if you allow popular involvement at all then it’s a minority of the people who will participate and the system will be biased because it gives extra influence and responsibility to that minority.
One response to the situation is to respect the overriding demand for equality, shut out popular participation altogether, and have everything administered by professionals. The professionals might set up some sort of Potemkin Village community involvement, but nothing will happen that the professionals don’t want to happen because everything has to be closely controlled to keep it equal.
Another response is to look to see whether there are genuine barriers to broader participation, and if there aren’t—chances are there won’t be—decide that participation in education by actual concerned parents is a good thing, and be willing to rely on the people who actually show up and are willing to put in the work to provide that participation. If there are other parents who think they’re not being heard or don’t like what’s going on then they can show up too, say something, and volunteer to do things. If it’s blacks who aren’t getting involved, and some blacks have an issue with that, then they too can join in and persuade other blacks to get involved. If the door is open, because there are local institutions of self-government and low involvement, then there’s lots of opportunity.
On the face of it, the proposed system seems as good an answer as any to the problem of promoting civic participation in public education. You start with parents who are actually concerned and involved, and leave it open for others to get involved too if they’re interested. I think it’s wrong to let a demand for up-front guarantees that everything will be equal hold the system hostage.