Educational Policy: How to Get Nationwide

That gentle and thoughtful critic of schools, James B. Conant, this week illuminates another problem that the U.S. didn't quite realize it had. In a new book, he says that the way the country shapes educational policy—on teaching reforms in grade schools, for example, or standards for advanced placement, or teacher recruiting—is chaotic and costly. After a wistful salute to the policymaking ministries of education in Europe, Conant acknowledges that the U.S. Constitution prevents the Federal Government from taking on such an overriding job. So, with a touch of defensiveness ("I am well aware that there is no novelty in suggesting . . ."), he suggests a committee, responsible to state legislatures, to make "nationwide" educational policy.

The Establishment. At present, says Conant in Shaping Educational Policy (McGraw-Hill; $3.95), decisions are made by a "jumble" of forces that include 4,000 decentralized school boards, state education departments often run by political hacks, the hydra-headed "establishment" of education professors and accrediting agencies, and fiercely competing public and private colleges. "The politics of education," he warns, "is rapidly becoming the politics of frustration."

Members of the Texas legislature, for example, told Conant that they were under heavy pressure from local constituents to allow junior colleges to become four-year schools. "Every institution is out for itself," confessed a lawmaker, "and when this happens education becomes a pork barrel." Only two states, California and New York, follow master plans for higher education. Planning for public and secondary schools is equally incoherent. A "classic example" is Indiana, where the state superintendent of schools is elected on a partisan political ballot and staffs the agency on the spoils system.

Trusty Trustees. Conant's cure for such shortsightedness is the creation of an "Interstate Commission for Planning a Nationwide Educational Policy." The commission, as Conant envisions it, ought to be a formal compact approved by Congress and composed of representatives chosen by the states—not educators but rather distinguished citizens such as those that serve as trustees of topnotch universities.

The spadework would be performed by perhaps 30 "working parties" of experts exploring problems state-by-state. Then, with the power of the states behind its specific recommendations, the group would have a good chance of getting congressional funds to meet the itemized demands. With such a plan, says Conant, the U.S. could devise a nationwide educational policy "adequate to meet the challenges of the new and awesome age in which we live."