Politics is how groups with differing or competing ideas, values and/or agendas reconcile those differences and direct group action. This can happen in small groups at work or on the national state. Perhaps in the worst case, the political answer is massive repression of the will of some minority groups, or even of a majority. More ideally, though political processes we come to some compromise, or at least an agreed upon mechanism to choose between differing preferences.
While there are technical questions in policy and eduction policy, there are an awful lot of values questions. For example, allocation of scare resources is almost always a values question. The appropriate balance between desires for excellence (i.e., fostering even greater accomplishments of those we expect to be the most accomplished) and desires for equity is clearly a values question, and one that has been central to my own education and always present in my mind as I work.
This year, we are seeing some of the top selective-admissions public schools in the country rethinking their admissions processes. The nation’s oldest public school (in Boston, MA), and my own high school (in Fairfax County, VA) have announced they are are shifting away from their old exam-based models. These announcements come after decades of complaints that those old processes yielded student bodies that were wildly non-representative of the large student populations in those school systems.
Those who have pressed for change have known that they are arguing from values, yet somehow those who have defended the old status quo have claimed that they were not. They claims some technical reasons why these schools had to admit only the top students, and that they had some appropriate means to identify those students. But those tests were build on values about what should be included and how to balance reliability and validity in assessment. And insisting that that admission should be limited to those who are best at whatever folks think the test measure is also a value.
Senator Mike Lee recently tweeted, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” The problem with his thinking is that even if we accept that those are the proper objectives, how we understand or define liberty and how we distribute prosperity are questions of values. And we need some political mechanism to come to answers.
In this country, as in most of the world, we accept that we should have democratic systems to address the issues in the political arena. That is, we should use democratic mechanisms to translate a diverse array of views into direction for our governments and governmental policy — including public schooling. We have democratic oversight of our schools, either through elected school boards or through school board overseen by elected officials. Our various departments of education are given direction and overseen by our elected officials.
These exam schools get undue attention, for various reasons. I pay them too much attention because I attended one of them. At times, their admissions criteria can be one of the most widely covered issue in public education, and we appear to be in one of those times.
So, I feel the need to say again, nearly everything about admissions criteria and processes at these special schools is based on values. Everyone offering a thought or opinion about what their criteria should recognize that they are speaking from their values, and consider deeply why their values should be taken more seriously than those of others — particularly if they are counseling against the popular will of the communities which they schools are to serve.