(On the train to Worcester, MA) I am going to Clark University to join Jeffrey Henig on a panel about his new book, Spin Cycle: How Research is Used in Policy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools. I found this great book in the section of the library devoted to charter schools and vouchers. It does include a helpful and nuanced summary of the current research on charter schools. But it had much broader implications. It’s really about the ways that social science, the mass media, advocacy groups, and democratic institutions interrelate in our era.

Charter schools provide a fascinating case, because the debate about them has been passionate and ideologically polarized. It has played out in think tanks, Congress, and the front pages of national newspapers. But it did not have to develop that way. Charter schools could have been seen as a modest way of tweaking management systems in public education. There are many old public schools (Boston Latin, Stuyvesant) that essentially operate with their own charters or special exemptions. There has always been a continuum between centralized control and autonomy within public school systems. Several European social democracies–usually, and rightly, seen as left of the United States–manage schools in ways that resemble our charters more than our unified systems. So chartering could have been introduced without a lot of fanfare, without especially high expectations, and not as a test of larger social theories.

Instead, charters were promoted as experiments with several grand political theories. Conservative foundations and intellectuals favored them as tests of the market-choice hypothesis. If conservatives were right that government monopolies guarantees poor results, then charters (which increased choice) should perform better than regular schools. A successful experiment with charters would open the door to competition and deregulation across education and other sectors, including postal services and national parks.

But conservatives were not the only proponents of charter schools. One of their intellectual parents was the union leader Alebert Shanker, whose vision could be described as professionalism for teachers. His idea was that teachers should form their own charter schools, thus becoming more like white-collar professionals and less like bureaucratic pawns. There were also moderate Democrats who saw charters as a way of fending off vouchers. They hoped that success with charters would blunt demands for real privatization.

Under these circumstances, everybody seemed to want and expect the “killer study” that would vindicate or repudiate the charter model. Certain preliminary studies did get massive attention, especially a study by the American Federation of Teachers that appeared on page 1 of the New York Times. Each significant study was scrutinized for ideological bias and denounced by opponents. The coverage of each study was also subjected to intense scrutiny for bias. Some observers threw up their hands, concluding that education research was just a food fight that offered no illumination.

The model that Jeff Henig offers as an alternative is research as cumulative, incremental, and pragmatic. While unions and conservative think tanks exchanged studies and accusations, a much subtler and more nuanced literature was developing that found–as one might expect–a range of effects by different charters on various outcomes for various student populations. That range was itself a refutation of the very simple libertarian theory that any extra degree of parential choice will cause huge improvements in all outcomes. But no one should have expected a simple and universal causal theory in such a complex area as education. The emerging research is policy-relevant. It doesn’t support either a massive expansion or a termination of the charter experiment, but various tweaks and reforms to improve quality.

Henig recommends, among other points, that the federal government should concentrate on collecting excellent public data for scholars to dissect, and that scholars should be rewarded for painstaking, cumulative research and not pressed to be overly “timely” or “relevant.” I am a proponent of the Engaged University idea, but I actually admire careful, low-profile engagement in communities much more than participation in the “Spin Cycle.” So I can endorse Henig’s recommendations. I also support his call to push the charter debate back down to the local level, where it is typically less ideological and more pragmatic.

I will, however, put in a word for ideology. We citizens cannot assess the pros and cons of each policy tweak. Yet we should be involved in setting policy. One powerful shortcut is to think in ideological terms, as long as one is alert to complications and exceptions and open to serious reevaluation. I, for instance, know very little about environmental issues. But I must vote and make consumer choices. I could try to master all the science and social science on the issue, but that’s quite unrealistic. Instead, I go through life with some ideological presumptions–generally friendly to science and to regulation when it seems to be informed by science; generally skeptical of big business. But I pride myself on being alert to contradictions.

If that’s how most people should think about education, then it seems fairly natural and maybe even desirable for ideological groups to promote their views in public debate. They will and probably should seize on examples like charter schools to make their points. There are definitely costs: simplification and polarization. But there are also advantages. It’s possible that when the dust finally settles on the charter-school debate, we will have learned something.

It would be possible to create a valid and reliable test of the 10 greatest virtues of Saddam Hussein. Those virtues could even be facts about him: for example, that he was unafraid to die. Such a test would be morally worse–really worse, not just worse in my opinion–than a test of students’ understanding of the First Amendment.

I write this to try to shake people’s confidence in a prevalent theory about research, evaluation, assessment, testing, and accountability. This theory holds that measurement should be scientific. Everyone knows that evaluators always hold opinions and make value-judgments. But their values are often treated as problematic, as evidence of bias or subjectivity or political agendas. Values should be disclosed, investigated, and minimized: the hold of that positivist theory is strong even decades after it was rejected in philosophy.

The alternative, of course, is to say that when we evaluate, we make value judgments. Some judgments are better than others. Our most important responsibility is to hold good values. Since our value-judgments differ, we’d better discuss them–not just to disclose them and acknowledge our differences, but to reason together about what is right.

I currently serve on a federal test committee. We receive “items” (test questions) written by consultants. We reject some proposed questions on scientific grounds. For instance, when tested in a lab, some items prove to be confusing for reasons unexpected by the writers. That is an empirical finding that should matter. We also rely on scientific expertise to tell us how many questions we need to obtain a reliable measure, how many kids need to be tested to make estimates about populations, and so on.

But ultimately the item-writers choose questions because of their beliefs about what kids should know. They are guided by written standards, which are themselves statements of moral value, albeit rather vague ones. When we on the committee reject questions, it is usually because of our values. For instance, we may say that a topic is trivial. We have expertise, but that really means that we have clawed our way into jobs that allow us to express opinions about what is important. We also decide how difficult each question is. That depends somewhat on empirical evidence about what average kids actually know. But it also essentially depends on what we think they should know.

I don’t believe that the irreducibly moral nature of testing and evaluation is a problem. It reflects the irreducibly moral nature of everything that matters in life. Nor is it necessarily a mistake to hire experts and consultants to write tests. We need reasonably independent, experienced, committed referees who can focus intensely on the task of evaluating kids. What is a mistake is to interpret the results of a test as “scientific” or to regard the intrusion of values as “bias” or as “politics.” The only alternatives to “politics” are boring homogeneity, spurious objectivity, utter thoughtlessness, or a dictatorship.

Charles Murray, notorious for The Bell Curve and other provocations, has a new book entitled Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. I haven’t read the book, so I shouldn’t criticize it. But I have read the promotional materials and the op-ed version of Murray’s argument, which I can criticize as independent texts.

Murray emphasizes that “Half of the children are below average. Many children cannot learn more than rudimentary reading and math.” It supposedly follows that “too many people are going to college,” and our schools are diverting too many resources to the impossible task of preparing everyone for higher education. “America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. An elite already runs the country, whether we like it or not. … It is time to start thinking about the kind of education needed by the young people who will run the country. The task is not to give them more advanced technical training, but to give them an education that will make them into wiser adults; not to pamper them, but to hold their feet to the fire.”

The op-ed version of this argument makes a very simple error. True, half the kids are below average, and it’s impossible to “Leave No Child Behind” if that means leaving no one below the median. But it is very possible to raise the actual skills and knowledge of the whole student population so that the median student in 2010 knows more than the median student knew in 1990. Certainly, the median student of today knows a whole bunch of things that nobody knew a century ago (even as he or she has lost some knowledge that used to be more common, such as some grasp of Latin). If the goal of education reform is to remove variation in student outcomes, it is–as Murray argues–doomed. But if the goal is to teach all students more, that can be achieved.

I do, by the way, agree that education is partly a positional good–there are always people who obtain more of it than others do, and they always have social and economic advantages. Thus raising the quantity and quality of an educational system will not necessarily reduce inequality. I also agree that some kind of elite is inevitable and that it’s important to teach them to connect their self-interest to the public interest. But neither of these doses of realism should discourage us from educating all kids better.

I believe that communities educate children, not just schools; and it is a false hope that we can achieve dramatically better results by tinkering with the structure of schools: their governance, funding, incentives, and regulations. Most experiments that focus narrowly on schools, from Reading First to privatization in Philadelphia, seem to fail. PEN, the Public Education Network, is a great leader in promoting this idea:

While there is a broad public understanding about the important role that schools play—teaching, learning, curriculum development, assessment, discipline, student development—few individuals in communities understand their civic role, whether they be parents, or adults without children in school, in contributing to quality public education for all students.

Communities provide the social, financial, and political capital that is crucial to school and student success. Citizens vote for elected leaders, pay taxes that fund schools, and also participate in powerful social networks that shape how schools and communities address the educational and developmental needs of young people. There is an inextricable link between high achieving schools and the community actions that support these schools. Without public action, there can be no quality public schools.

With a small assist from CIRCLE, PEN recently unveiled its “Civic Index for Quality Public Education,” which is a survey that any community can conduct, compare its local results to national data, and develop strategies for improving civic engagement.